Lyric delivery: essential for a convincing vocal performance

Experiencing and conveying the lyrics is essential for a strong vocal performance. The basic principles are fairly quick to explain, but in practice it can be very labour-intensive. You can also look at lyric delivery in a broader context—think performance and the way you, as a singer, position yourself in ‘artistic life’. Singer Ellen Evers has a very clear vision on that.

Lalalala

Not every music lover listens closely to a song’s lyrics. Plenty of accompanying musicians are guilty of it too. Many musicians might know the chord progression of a song, but haven’t got the faintest idea what it’s actually about. For singer Ellen Evers, that’s obviously a real irritation. “If lyrics weren’t important to a song, you might as well sing ‘lalalala’. But lyrics are important. As a singer, you have to think about communicating those lyrics with every song. If you only treat a song as music, that goes at the expense of lyric delivery—and often intelligibility as well.” Ellen Evers is a singer and actress. She performs in theatre and has appeared in well-known musicals including Turks Fruit, Cabaret, Miss Saigon and The Three Musketeers, for which she won a Dutch Musical Award. She’s perhaps best known for the musical Mamma Mia. On top of that, Ellen performs themed song programmes and does many other things in the music world.

Telling a story

Singing is telling a story, Ellen explains, while being tied to the melody and rhythm. “Sometimes the lyrics fit the music really well. Lyrics, melody and rhythm work together so smoothly that the accents automatically fall on the important words and syllables. In that case you barely have to do any lyric interpretation.” But that’s far from always the case. “In the worst case, you get lyrics that are almost impossible to sing—no matter how good or beautiful they are. The moment you sing them, nothing is left of them: they become unclear, hard to understand, and they definitely don’t land with the audience. With lyrics like that, you can almost be sure they were written by someone who doesn’t sing themselves.” But usually it’s less extreme: “A lot of lyrics are perfectly singable, but don’t automatically sit right with the melody and rhythm in every place. Then, as a singer, you need to do something about it. And that starts with lyric interpretation.”

Lyric interpretation

The basic principles of lyric interpretation and lyric delivery are quick enough to explain, says Ellen. “One important principle is that a song should be sung in a way that gives the important words an accent. Sometimes that accent follows automatically from the rhythm and melody, but not always. As a singer, first really dig into the lyrics. Try to understand what the song is about and try to feel something with it. And see whether you can bring that feeling up from within yourself.” With that as your starting point, you then go looking for the key words. “Check whether those words automatically get an accent or not. If not, try to sing it so that they do. You can play with volume, but also with timing. So maybe you need to hold that note just a bit longer than written. Or come in a touch earlier. As a singer, you’ve got a lot of options. Sometimes it’s a huge search and you can spend an hour on three lines.” Ellen sees that regularly as a teacher. “If we can’t quite crack it, I’ll sometimes have the student speak the lyrics instead of sing them. It can be surprising to see what happens then. Often a student gets lost in a text. Without melody and rhythm they’re completely at sea. Another thing that happens quite often is that the text starts to sound stiff and like it’s ‘trying to rhyme’. But you have to push past that. What matters is whether the meaning is right. And that you become aware of that meaning—of the individual words and their role within that meaning. Then you start looking at what you can do with it musically.”

Making compromises

Ellen considers Jenny Arean (Dutch singer, cabaret performer and actress) one of the best vocalists when it comes to lyric interpretation and lyric delivery. “She can communicate a song’s lyrics to the audience like no one else. When she sings, as a listener you automatically see the images. I learned a lot from her. I still remember her saying to me once: ‘Ellen, we know you can sing beautifully, but that’s not so interesting—go for the content.’ That always stuck with me and I really took it on board. To get the lyrics across properly, sometimes you have to make compromises musically and technically. And then you simply have to make them.” Ellen took that step long ago: “I used to be mainly focused on producing beautiful notes. I could spend the whole evening in a bad mood about one note I’d sung slightly flat. But now I care much less about that. A song is about feeling—you have to be moved.”

Head and heart

Ellen already mentioned Jenny Arean as a great example of a vocalist who can communicate lyrics well. Which pop singers does she think are strong in this area? She names a few: “Freddie Mercury, Beyoncé, Prince, Barbra Streisand (not really pop) and, closer to home, Dutch artists Anouk and Ilse DeLange. These people knew—and know—exactly what they’re singing, and you can hear it. When Barbra Streisand sings ‘fresh’, you actually experience ‘fresh’. And the same with the word ‘love’.” Big examples or not, Ellen advises you to stay true to yourself. “With lyric interpretation and lyric delivery, there are no absolute truths. It’s partly taste. And it’s always your interpretation. Make sure you’ve thought about the lyrics—not only with your head, but also with your heart. And of course there’s always room for chance and spontaneity.” Ellen continues: “What I sometimes see is a student gradually singing louder towards the end of a song. Sometimes right up to shouting. When I ask why, the answer is always: ‘I think it’s nice to sing the ending loudly.’ And it can be nice, but not always. Besides being predictable, the question is whether it suits the song in question. If the text towards the end is about something small or intimate, it doesn’t fit to sing loudly. There’s such a thing as ‘small sorrow’, for instance.”

Hand movements

“What I sometimes do with singer-songwriters is ask them not to play along on guitar or piano for a moment. So someone else accompanies them, or they even sing a cappella—without accompaniment. That can be very confronting for someone who normally accompanies themselves.” It gets even worse if they’re also not allowed to hold the microphone, Ellen says from experience. “A singer still wants to do something with their hands, and what you often see is lots of noticeable hand movements. Generally, most hand movements add nothing and have no relationship with what they’re singing.” Of course, it’s not forbidden to use hand movements. “Make the hand movements you would make if you were telling the lyrics rather than singing them. Then it stays natural. Keep it subtle, too. And last but not least: if your lyric delivery is right, the right movements will follow naturally.”

Instrumentalists

There are quite a few accompanying musicians who haven’t got the faintest idea what the song is about. “But I also know plenty of great exceptions,” Ellen notes. “Recently I played with bassist Xander Buvelot. We were rehearsing and halfway through a song he said: ‘I think this song is far too beautiful to play this much.’ He sensed it exactly, because there needed to be a kind of emptiness as well.” Still, Ellen finds it strange that many instrumentalists don’t dig into the lyrics at all. “Sometimes they even say they don’t need to hear the vocals properly on their monitor. I don’t understand that, because isn’t it about making music together and enjoying each other? Then you want to hear each other, don’t you? It’s a shame that some musicians see vocals and musical accompaniment as completely separate. I try to involve everyone as much as possible with the lyrics.” What Ellen would love to see changed is the stage layout. “During a show, as a singer you’re always standing with your back to the band. Whereas in the rehearsal room you do turn towards the band. Ideally I’d perform like that too, but of course you can’t—you’d be facing away from the audience all evening. I’d prefer a half-circle, with the vocals at the back and the rest around it. I also think an orchestra pit is awful: you have no contact at all. And I imagine that’s not much fun for a musician either.”

Vocal technique

Alongside lyric delivery, vocal technique is obviously important too, Ellen points out. “There’s a technical side to singing. And it’s absolutely fine to let that be heard. But I don’t like acrobatic singing where you want to show off all your tricks. A high note isn’t a splits. Unless it’s done with a wink, of course. I have endless admiration for musicians who have extreme mastery of their instrument. But when it becomes ‘look at me’, I’m out. The best thing is to have the technique in your back pocket so you can speak the language of music. Technique isn’t a goal in itself—for me, it’s much more about the feeling.” A degree of modesty also has its place, Ellen argues. “My starting point is: the audience isn’t there for me, I’m there for the audience. You’re not on stage first and foremost to be admired, but to give something. I also like a flat floor more than a high stage. It makes you more vulnerable, but it also makes it more intimate. In that sense, I find an amphitheatre even more beautiful: you’re not looking down on people, but looking up at the people you want to move and entertain.”

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