Part 2

From whispers to screams, from different colours to dynamics, what are the potentials and limits of your voice? How much of your vocal performance can and do you want to control?

The idea of control within music always felt kind of counterintuitive. I like being on the edge of my abilities because I think it pushes me. Others really love the structure and control afforded them when they learn the, I guess more scientific aspects of their craft.

That said, I definitely know my voice and I know where it can go and what it can do at all times. For me, I need that because otherwise I'd be a bag of anxiety. It gives me freedom to take the melody and the song anywhere I want to.

In terms of the potential of a voice, I always believed anyone could sing, and anyone who could sing, could push themselves to sing better. I read Quincy Jones' biography when I was a kid and he said he made Michael Jackson add notes to his upper register for the Thriller album. They could have changed the keys of the songs, instead he made arguably the best male singer on the planet at the time get better. That has always stayed with me, that idea that we can push it further.

And I could see it happen for me. I would sit at the piano and in my tenor voice the highest I could get was an F above middle C. By the time I had spent a year on it I could get up to B, so in a year I added about 6 semitones to my register.

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?

So my process is pretty abstract. Lyrics are the last thing I do, and they always come from me listening back to demos of the song wherein I've sung my melody with sounds and gibberish and glimpses of words,but no real structure or theme in mind. I'll hear words in the gibberish and start writing it all down and slowly the idea emerges.

So 100% there is a connection between my voice and the text. The shape my voice makes, the vocal sounds, it all dictates the lyrics I end up with.  And yeah, I also need it all to feel right, if I have a lyric I love, but I sing it back and some of the words sound flabby or weak, then I know the shapes are wrong and i'll go back and fix it.

Singing other people's songs is all about fresh interpretation. Obviously a big part of my career early on were two big cover versions, “Wicked Game” and “Higher Love.” Both were very specific to me interpretations, based on my voice and how I heard the lyrics of the songs.



“Higher Love” is this joyous pop song but I heard it as this mournful kind of plea for love, and that's how I articulated it.

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'd go back to what I said in a previous answer. If you're singing the right way, the way your voice wants to be used, then you should be ok. Whenever I feel I'm trying to imbue too much emotion into my voice, like I'm forcing it, then I feel it gets tired so quickly and that's when it runs into trouble on tour.

Sometimes you just get tired. If you do, then I use stuff like Slippery Elm tea, throat coat, a good vocal steamer, and a lot of warm ups and warm downs  to keep it on the right side of the line.

Also just avoid singing if you're sick, you'll overcompensate and that's when real damage gets done

How has technology, such as autotune or effect processing, impacted singing? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

There are 2 types of auto tune singing to my mind: The Bon Iver Francis and the Lights approach, where they're using it as a creative studio tool to take their voices somewhere totally new. That's incredible, I'm fully down for that.

The second is autotune as the way to just bang through a performance in the studio without having to do multiple takes or really hone the performance. I'm less into that. I've never used autotune on albums, but I have used it in the studio before just to keep things moving and I always regret it.

There was a moment a few years ago where music kind of became the path of least resistance, it was so easy to not have to make an effort. I bought into it for a second but it made my songwriting worse and it made me worse as a singer. Now I'll work to nail a performance and listen if a couple notes aren't quite right but the vibe is right then i'll live with it.

You can hear it on my new album Wide, Open Horses, there's moments where I don't quite get there on big notes but the emotion was bang on. Yeah I could have melodyned it to fix it but then it wouldn't be honest and I was more intrigued by the honesty than by perfection.

For recording engineers, the human voice remains a tricky element to capture. What, from your perspective, makes voices sound great on record and in a live setting?

I think I alluded to it above, the human voice in the studio is so different to live.

Live is aggregation, making the best of a compromised situation. The studio should be about chasing perfection. Any singer going into a studio, definitely find out what mic works best for you, because they're all different and all do different things.

I think a lot of people just reckon like a U47 is a catch all mic, which makes sense to a degree, it's a brilliant mic. But sometimes you don't want a lot of frequencies in your voice to get to the computer or the tape or however you're tracking. So you need a mic that filters it out. I use a mic called an ELAM 251, it's a beautiful mic, really hard to sing into because it can be incredibly unforgiving, but it really makes me push myself and once I lock into its energy and feed off it every single time the result is exactly what I want it to be.

So yeah, try a lot of mics, they don't even have to be super expensive ones like that, a lot of the clones are incredibly faithful to the originals. Also to find a good compressor and preamp, I use Neve pres and Tubetech compression.

Motherese may have been the origin of music, and singing is possibly the earliest form of musical expression, and culture in general. How connected is the human voice to your own sense of wellbeing, your creativity, and society as a whole?

I said earlier I sing all the time, just constantly. It keeps me calm and centers me.

I see music as the most important cultural expression, it's everywhere, every country has its own, it's something that travels everywhere. The earliest versions were people writing songs to document history then traveling with those stories.

Now it's this huge industry, it's a little heartbreaking to see that it's been devalued in terms of cultural interaction with it as it's gotten more and more corporate. But I see things lately that make me feel people are coming back to just wanting to hear a singer and a song, because it can make you feel like nothing else can make you feel.