NAKED SELF

A singer cannot be a liar.  Mistresses of deception and misdirection, yes, but not liars.  Emotions are not the slaves of thoughts.  They are not manufactured with manipulation in mind, and singers who try to sing manufactured feeling to manipulate their audience will soon find themselves without a career.

Here is a fact: humans feel, and feelings are always genuine.  No matter what rationalizations our thinking selves generate, the feelings are what they are.  We may name our anger: frustration, displeasure, exasperation, rage.  We may name our joy: delight, pleasure, jubilation.  We may assign past experiences and people to the reasons the feelings are generated, but when we feel radiant, we do not feel drab.

Good singers sing their feelings, not their thoughts.  They neither sing the feel of the lyric nor the message of the words.  Instead, they sing what they are feeling, and communicate the feel of the lyric and the message of the words.  The feeling is the power behind the song.

Good singers can get out of their own way enough to sing what they feel.  They don't worry about whether their current tranquility fits the idea of love in the song they have to perform.  They trust the power of their emotions and the proficiency of the music to convey its own purpose.  In this way they deceive and misdirect: they project an image and an emotion which are not necessarily congruent.

Great singers take it a step further. They decide to know their feelings and to wade into the hard work of learning their naked selves, so that they aren't afraid to bare all before an audience.  They not only trust their feelings, they recognize them the way most of us recognize our own faces.  Singing from real emotion, uncluttered by filters and fear, bad days and good days are the same in terms of the power to sing.

The singer who knows every curve and texture of her subjective mindscape won't mistake the communication for the reality, and she won't depress or repress.  Instead, she will wield her true emotions with all the skill and delicacy of a surgeon operating a scalpel to sing songs. In this way, even the most trivial doggerel can become music which teaches, moves or transforms us.  The music communicates something real-a paradoxical mixture of emotion, speech and action that is both inconsistent and still true.