A student brought in some Mika this week – and I hadn’t heard this song in ages! So I bookmarked it for sharing this week… and as I was mulling it over, the following thought dropped out onto the blog post.
So, do you hate the sound of your own voice?
This is a really catchy song but certainly not in vogue with current trends and preferences in popular music. It reminds me of certain Queen songs with the melodies, slight aggression, more pristine vocal quality… while also reminding me of some Take That in terms of the emotive feel and production on the track, and still also reminds me of the Scissor Sisters in terms of the slightly eclectic song writing.
Mika’s Vocal Styling
What I find really interesting about Mika’s vocal styling is his use of a much lighter higher range where most singers then and now go for “RAH! MORE POWER EVERYWHERE” (to quote the Eagles song Life in the Fast Lane ‘everything, all the time’).
It sounds a little quirky (note how I avoided the word ‘funny’ there!), but it definitely works.
So Mika clearly does not sound like many other artists out there, and clearly isn’t copied by many others, and yet he had (has?) a successful career doing his own material – yet I know 99% of singers would feel rubbish about themselves if they sounded that way or as different as Mika does, simply because they don’t sound like singer X, Y or Z.
The Lesson to be Learned
A lesson to be learned here is that even if you don’t quite sound like singer X, Y or Z, you should NEVER dismiss what you are doing as artistically unuseable. You may not have found exactly your niche or style just yet, but if you keep developing and trialling what you’ve got going on, you’ll start to develop something all your own.
This lesson is a really useful one even for me. As someone who hears a LOT of singers every day of every week, I encounter singers with voices that I am tonally envious of. Seriously. It’s the ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome. And it’s 100% normal to feel like this from time to time. The challenge is to not be discouraged by this, but to harness that into pure motivation to keep working on our voices, developing strengths AND weaknesses to create something wholly your own… much like Mika has done – unique and standing apart from many other singers, where others may well have given up.
So, are you going to give up? Or are you going to keep going?