Singer VS Lead Singer

Who is a great singer? Pavarotti, Susan Boyle, vintage Whitney Houston, and probably most of the students majoring in Commercial Voice at Belmont.

Who is a great lead singer? Beyonce, Mick Jagger, Chris Martin, Cheryl Crow, Bono, Steven Tyler, Paul McCartney, Freddie, Ben Folds, Haley Williams

Our mind fires up a different set of expectations for each one of these questions.  When you think of singer, you think of notes, pitch, clarity, tone, vibrato.  Those are all things that are worth taking time to become better at.

When you think of lead singer, the word “lead” really shapes who we put into that category. 

Great lead singers…

miss more notes that singers, but they tell a better story.

have bad posture during lots of moments of the show, but their adrenaline makes up for it.

don’t always have a wide range of notes, like singers do, but working with what they have is endearing to the audience.

know how to keep the show going and get paid even when their voice is completely worn out.

speak to all of the senses.

can make the crowd react by merely raising an eye brow.

at the end of the day are more concerned with connection than perfection.

Great leadership while being a great singer.  

That is the concept that makes us levitate, changes our hearts and our minds, makes people turn it up instead of off, makes money, makes a career, and makes people feel THAT feeling.

If you front a band (or are a solo artist), you’re going to have to grow both aspects if you really want to make a go of it.

And honestly, if you have to be 51% on one side and 49% on the other…

People are much more likely to follow a leader than a singer.

Nashville Ice Storm

I was up in Minnesota last week. The first night it rained for a while, froze and then snowed on top of that.  By 9am the next day when it was time to get out and get going, the driveway was a pure sheet of ice…the roads weren’t. They were completely safe.

Minnesota is prepared to this type of thing.  They know if they didn’t follow a certain procedure of salting, scraping and plowing (even on the nice days), there would be countless days each winter that people couldn’t go to work or school or wherever.

Nashville, not so much. At this very moment in time, there is freezing rain happening, everything will freeze later, and then it will snow.  And ain’t no one goin anywhere for a while.

Nashville chooses not to prepare for this type thing. It doesn’t happen super often, maybe once every handful of years.  And the city shuts down “unexpectedly” for a few days.

Minnesota prepares well and life goes on as usual. Nashville doesn’t prepare well and everything gets messed up.

It’s all about preparing, planning and choices. 

Your road manager booked nasty hotels last tour…how much extra time are you going to spend hiring the right road manager for the next tour? If you are ok with the consequences of a bad road manager, don’t take any extra time. Devote time preparing for things that you’re concerned with the outcomes of.

When your drummer can’t stay with the click, is it important he get better or you find a new drummer? If you don’t mind your music being loose or sloppy, don’t bother with this type of preparation.

Do you save money in a company/band account for when things go wrong? (Notice I said “when” not “if”) If you’re ok being stranded in Idaho for a couple extra days while the bass player tries to convince his mom to pay for the van getting fixed, don’t save extra money.

You’ve been dying to work with that certain producer.  So you finally work really hard and get in a room with him.  But did you remember to write a great song?

If all your gear gets stolen, will that paralyze your organization, or did you buy gear insurance beforehand?  

You can’t prepare for everything, and it’s ok to be ok (for a while) with some mild consequences for not being prepared.

But having the vision, the ability to forecast the ice storm before it comes, preparing the streets, owning snow plows, turns the ferocious ice storm into barely a blip on everyones radar.

Meanwhile in Nashville, we are all stranded at home.

Send food.

I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough and...

Doggone it, people like me.

I’m watching the SNL 40 special and there’s one thing I keep thinking.  People like these people.  

Nice matters. 

Successful people are nice.  You don’t make it far being a jerk.  The nice ones sniff them out and get rid of the jerks.

Sure, there’s a few jerks, and they’re the ones that the media loves talking about, they make good TV headlines.  But most successful people I’ve met are nice.  That’s part of the equation. That’s a vital tool in the march to the top.

Being nice won’t make you successful (so don’t waste your time faking it. It will tire you out and it will tire everyone else out), but if you’re successful you’re probably nice.  

Just a Sunday reminder. Now you choose.

You might be sitting there thinking, how do I do this?

You know that person you recognized at the show, mall, grocery store, and maybe you’ve even met before, or hung out with a bazillion times?

Well, they saw you too.

Say hello. Be the first to say hello. 

I’m guilty. You’re guilty. Let’s get better at being nice.

The Way It Is

It used to be that getting on TV, or having a song in a commercial meant you sold out.

Now, TV is accepted and signing with a giant record label is viewed more as selling out.

It used to be that mandolin was only on country radio

Now it’s on Top 40, and barely on country

Mainstream music (or whatever stream is left) was all R&B and hip hop ten years ago

Now it’s Sam Smith, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Hozier, Mumford & Sons, Pitbul and Fall Out Boy

There’s a pull on all of us to use “the way it is” as an excuse for why our project won’t work.  An excuse that’s out of our hands, therefore our hands are tied. We can’t do anything. Just cry in our soup.

Keep making it better, keep being excited about it.  All of the above examples represent a hurdle that at one point made an artist fall apart and quit.  

“The way it is” is what the future always moves on from. That’s how it works. 

Everybody loves the future.

Expect To Win

I wrote a post a week or two ago about the confusion at awards shows when the winners are finished with their speech and they don’t know which way to exit the stage.

Now for the actual speech itself. 

When someone wins a Grammy, or a Golden Globe or whatever, it floors me when they get up to the mic and talk at length about how they don’t have any words prepared because they didn’t think they would win.

How did this happen?  Was there not a reminder on your iPhone that the awards show was tonight and there’s a 20% chance you might have to speak in front of millions of people? Or maybe you didn’t set a reminder, but walking the red carpet with tons of fans and photographers shouting your name should have clued you in that something was going on.

And most people, when declaring their unpreparedness into the microphone, think it’s some badge of modesty or endearment that they didn’t think they would win so they didn’t think of what to say.

False. (said like Dwight K. Schrute)

Butterflys might get the best of you, you might completely forget what you prepared (which should trigger simple “thank you” as the back up plan), but for goodness sake, and for the sake of decent TV, have something to say. 

It doesn’t even have to be memorable, just professional.

You got the nomination. You got that far in the beauty contest. You might win. You should plan on winning. If you don’t, you wasted all of about five minutes preparing. If you do, that five minutes just became very important. 

You choose. We’ll be listening.

You Should, Like, Kinda Check This Out

I heard a story on the radio yesterday about the use of the word “like” in our modern culture. Like, this is like, the best blog that like I’ve ever like read before. The story was about how not just America has embraced this, but countries everywhere that use the English language.

Like, Kinda, Sorta, are preface words that you use without thinking in order to soften whatever you say or think, in order to let you off the hook for saying something meaningful.  

You don’t have to take full responsibility for what comes after like/kinda/sorta, because you don’t mean THOSE (harsh, over the top, not well thought out, watered down) words, you’re only sorta responsible for an idea in the like ballpark of THOSE words…you used a cheap preface to get you off the hook.

I get it. We all preface with like, kinda, sorta.

But removing those words from your attitude (and maybe even your speech) will set you apart as someone who is willing to say what they mean and mean what they say. Lots of cliches are true.

It’s easy to kinda say something. It’s hard to say something.

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