Part 2
What are the things you hear in a voice when listening to a vocalist? What moves you in the voices of other singers?
Honesty, vulnerability, pain, the joy of exploration. But I’m always searching for those traits in all music I hear, it’s not just in a voice.
How would you describe the physical sensation of singing? [Where do you feel the voice, do you have a visual sensation/representation, is there a sense of release or tension etc …]
Singing on stage to a live audience can be a really strange sensation. When you feel you’re not connecting, it can feel awful. You want to run away but you’re trapped there onstage with nowhere to hide.
When you do feel like you’re connecting, the energy of the room shifts and you start to open up, it’s an exhilarating feeling that I can’t compare to anything else in the world. It feels like there’s an electric blue volt coming from underneath your feet, shooting through your body up towards the sky. I know that may sound a little pretentious, but I’m serious. That’s how it feels for me.
But that only happens when I surrender and just give up on any expectations I have.
What kind of musical settings and situations do you think are ideal for your own voice?
I’m more of a morning person these days but my best vocal takes are often recorded first thing in the morning or late at night when I know I’m going to be left alone or I’m coming down from the day. When I’m relaxed and not consciously thinking about what I’m doing.
It was funny, for the cover I recently released of The Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned,” we had just returned from opening a string of shows for The War On Drugs, so I was feeling confident about recording my vocals for that song after performing it every night.
[Read our Joseph Shabason interview about working as a session musician for The War on Drugs]
But when we went to record the vocals, all the takes were inferior to the initial scratch takes I recorded prior to the tour for us to use to map out the arrangement of the song. The scratch takes were vulnerable, lacked self-awareness and just felt much more honest.
So we ended up using those scratch takes instead even though they were full of microphone pops and music bleeding in through the mic because we tracked them without headphones.
But going back to what I said before, it’s all about the feeling for me. I’ll trade fidelity for feeling any day.
We have a speaking voice and a singing voice. Do these feel like they are natural extensions of each other, ends on a spectrum or different in kind?
They are steps on the same ladder. It always alarms me when someone’s singing voice differs drastically from their speaking voice, or when they sing with an accent or inflection that feels inauthentic to their background. To me it’s a sign that someone is uncomfortable with who they are.
And I only say that from experience because I spent a lot of time in my life trying different approaches to my vocals that never felt right because I was uncomfortable with who I was.
When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?
There’s always a connection. For me the emotion of the lyric must match with the emotion of the melody, and vice versa.
When I write lyrics, it usually begins with the sound first. I’ll hit record and just freestyle a bunch of sounds and words, and phrases start dropping in from somewhere outside of me. Eventually those morph into something I hopefully find exciting and worth sharing, but it can be a long process.
I also love writing lyrics. It may not always come across that way to the casual listener, but for every song I’ve ever released solo or with Chromatics, I’ve spent hours upon hours picking apart my lyrics, refining them, rewriting them, throwing them away and then rewriting them yet again, trying to get them to feel just right.
I once read that Iggy Pop would approach his lyrics in the same way, trying to get them “perfectly dumb.” I can totally relate to that. I mean, go and listen to the lyrics for “Funtime.” I couldn’t think of a more perfectly dumb song. It’s genius.
Strain is a particularly serious issue for many vocalists. How do you take care of your voice? Are the recipes or techniques to get a damaged voice back in shape?
I just have to make sure that I don’t talk too much after a show, which is really hard for me because I love meeting and talking to people after a performance and hearing about their own lives and experiences. I’m always interested in chatting with everyone from the janitor at the club to the people buying t-shirts and records. It’s endlessly fascinating for me to hear people’s personal stories.
If I’m not careful though, my voice will pay the price for my curiosity so sometimes I have to lay low and avoid people after a performance, otherwise I’ll lose my voice.
How has technology, such as autotune or effect processing, impacted singing? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?
I am heavily influenced by the way r&b and hip-hop artists have used autotune in the past 15-20 years. If the effect feels appropriate for the song, then it can bring out an extra element of emotion.
The thing that really bothers me is that I think sometimes people have this idea that when they hear a track overtly autotuned with the Cher effect, that somehow it means the singer cannot sing. It angered me how lots of people refused to take an artist like T-Pain seriously as a singer until he performed his NPR Tiny Desk concert without the autotune.
[In our VAN TASTIK interview, the artists references the same performance]
People were surprised that he could really sing. Of course the man can sing, he has a beautiful voice with or without the autotune! The hardtune Cher effect on his voice is just a production technique that to me builds off the foundation of vocoder and Roger Troutman’s talkbox.
When used in subtler, less overt ways, yes, autotune can make pitch issues for singers sound a little less harsh to the ear. But for me, it’s not going to make or break a singer.
I’m listening to where a singer or any artist is coming from on a spiritual level more than on a technical level. The technique is only exciting to me when it merges with the spiritual.
