datamusicata

The other night I was at another open mic, listening to two different songwriters and the first one up gave me the inspiration for today’s post. This fellow had a wonderful voice, good guitar technique and good songs, but try as I may I could not understand the lyrics. When he spoke his intelligence was obvious so I suspect he had something to say and it was just him and his guitar, so it shouldn’t have been that hard.

Here’s the thing about lyrics. If you write good ones you probably want them heard and understood and perhaps to even have some genuine impact on the audience. If they don’t understand them, then all that time and energy and inspiration you devoted to creating them are gone. Candidly, if your lyrics are about bitches and ho’s, the size and effectiveness of your unit or your ability to rob and kill, I don’t care if I ever get the lyrics, but if you actually have something to say, I want to hear it.

My nascent songwriting occurred at a time when we all believed that music could actually change the world and in more than one way, I still believe that. It only takes one match to start a fire. Your song could be that match, whether the song is about love or war or peace or just being here, the lyrics matter.

I have read that lyrics are the last thing that a listener hears, but that is only true if they are listening to a recording that is produced. If the recording is guitar and voice or piano and voice, they are listening to the lyrics. And if you are playing live, then the audience is definitely listening and responding to the lyrics.

When you are performing, you are reaching out, trying to communicate your ideas, your experience, your creation with another, so you have to give it the best chance you can. And I’m not talking about “the rayne in spayne lie maynely on the playne” kind of diction. I just mean that if you want to communicate, then give it your best shot.

You know, there was one other thing I watched happen the other night that was sort of amusing to me and slightly vexing to the performer. As he was singing, he kept trying to adjust his volume on the top of the guitar. He felt that the guitar was too loud and was overpowering the voice. Given that I couldn’t understand the words anyhow, this amused me. But the point here is…he was playing an acoustic guitar. One of the easiest ways to adjust the volume on an acoustic guitar is to play softer. And when you play softer, the string buzzing stops and the bell like quality of the guitar tone begins to emerge.

Now sometimes you want that hard, buzzing thing, but if you are having a volume problem and there’s no sound man to adjust it for you from the booth, then you can adjust it yourself just by playing softer. And this also causes you to listen to what you are playing. No matter how great you get, it’s good to listen to what you are doing.

Let me know how you adjust things on stage and how well you are reaching the audience that you want to connect to. It’s a tricky business. In the beginning, I could never understand Michael Stipe of REM either, but I think that was a volume of voice to track issue. And we all understand him now.