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I once went along to a weekend stage performance workshop with Rhonda Carlson, performance coach to a host of performers across Vegas, Broadway, and more. I wanted to share some of her pearls of wisdom with you regarding how to perform better, and engage more powerfully with the song, and (in turn) your audience.
PROBLEM: You’re meant to sing a song in front of an audience. It can be whatever song you like.
What do you do with your hands?
How do you move on stage to convince them you mean what you’re singing?
How do you show emotion?
Which emotion do you show?
Uh-oh. That’s tricky!
And this is where Rhonda’s system comes into play. The whole system she has created is logical and very simple to follow. The starting point in this article, is on the critical importance of having a specific backstory for each of your songs.
We’ve all been in this position as singers. Whether the audience is large and in front of a stage dedicated to you, or it’s your friends/family, or the local pub, or even just being aware of yourself at home as you sing. While we all want to be more engaging and convincing as a singer and a performer, how on earth do we begin to do this in a systematic way?
Asking the wrong questions
Many singers are advised to ask themselves “what is the song about?” and go from there. That’s the wrong question for two reasons. Firstly, the lyrics will already tell the listener what the song is about – that part is already taken care of. Secondly, this approach still doesn’t tell you what to do, nor even how to do it.
Merely identifying that the song is “about” a love-struck couple, or “about” someone just wanting to party, or a million other things, does absolutely nothing to help us transport the listener into the world of the story. Even singing the song badly will tell us what the song is about, but the performer is meant to show us the meaning behind the song.
You can’t act a condition without a context
Simply identifying that you should convey sadness, or happiness, etc in a song will not help you to do so convincingly or with any meaning. Put bluntly, we can’t just will emotion up inside of ourselves without a context to put the song in. This means we need to invent a specific backstory that provides such context for you as the singer.
Let’s take an example:
Song: “Someone like you” / Adele
I’ve picked this song because most people know it, and many have tried to sing it. What might a vague “about” description of this song look like?
Vague meaning/backstory: “The singer is meant to be sad because she’s been left behind by someone”
This isn’t factually incorrect, but it’s far from complete or even useful to us as singers. The key problem this vagueness creates is it is very hard as a singer to be genuinely sad about someone else’s problems, at least not to the same magnitude that we feel such pangs of pain about our own problems. The backstory needs to involve us. We need to have some emotional investment, some ‘skin in the game’, for whatever the backstory is. Vague doesn’t cut it. And of course, the audience won’t be invested in the performance if they sense the person singing the song doesn’t seem invested in the narrative they are telling themselves.
Remember, even if we want to act sad, we can’t act a condition without a context. That’s why just saying “I’ve got to be more emotional on-stage” – whilst true – doesn’t really work. Let’s find some context for our example song, ‘Someone Like You’. We could generate the following backstory:
Specific backstory for the singer:
“We dated for years, we were even engaged… but that seems like so long ago… and just now they didn’t even recognise me when we passed each other in the street…”
Almost all of us can immediately put ourselves in a very VERY specific emotive place from this story. With just this one sentence, we’ve now got a potent and highly specific backstory to work from. I trust that you can feel the tangible difference between this backstory and the vague statement of “being sad” we had before. A good backstory should instantly provide context for the lyrics, and an instant emotional fuelling of the song is a natural by-product. Perhaps your imagination has even run off and placed it somewhere, such is the emotional evocation that this context brings about.
What does this evoke for you?
For me, it brings about this image of two friends outside a coffee shop on a winter’s morning, and the ex walks out of the coffee shop as the two friends are about to go in. The protagonist is stunned into silence, and the friend with them asks “what’s wrong”, which leads to the above backstory spilling out, and the lyrics of the song filling in the rest of the blanks. We can feel the emotional turmoil of a serious relationship that ended, the hopelessness it creates, perhaps even a sense of longing for what once was. What emotions and images does it evoke for you?
Do you feel the difference?
A personal backstory that plants you as the singer within a greater narrative makes a convincing and emotional performance practically fall out of you, taking your performance from good to great. Go and visit your favourite songs you like to sing and create a specific backstory for them. From there, work through that song to figure out how that backstory will affect your telling of the song through the lyrics.
Learn More: Related Articles
If you want to learn more about performing and improving your own performances you may enjoy these related articles:
Performance Anxiety: What is it, where does it come from, what can we do about it
Performance Workshop with Rhonda Carlson: Part 2
Performance Workshop with Rhonda Carlson: Part 3
Ease, Strain, Time to think: Improve your performances easily
5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Performances
Pacing yourself: Micro- and macro- rests in songs and sets