I didn’t stick this in CS because, well it’s really just mundane and pointless and not about any song or musical discipline at all, just about me being an idiot.
But countless times, I’ll catch myself “singing” along to a song, only to realize, I’m not singing anything at all. Oh sure, I know the chorus just fine, but once it comes down to the nitty-gritty I’m a slurmbling (yes, I made that up) fool.
"And we’ll come together fine
All we need is just a little patience
Patience…
Ohh yeah…
Sometimes shlrum bur tarmle dum…
Elldu wualt strum…"
Just tell me I’m not the only who does this. What bugs me most is, I’ll get halfway through a song before actually hearing myself, and realizing I have no clue what I’m singing.
This happens to me all the time, but I usually notice it pretty quickly. The worst is when you go into a completely different melody (e.g. you jump into the bridge, without realizing there’s still one more verse), because it’s invariably the high part that you thought was in your range, but turns out not to be.
This is a very odd phenomenon that I have wondered about for years now. I have been a professional musician for over ten years. From place to place and show to show there are two things that I notice regularly:
People lip syncing along with a new original song that has never been performed or published.
Afterwards, people telling me how they have always loved that song.
I just smile and say that I have always loved that song too.
I get a little further. My version goes, “Come on Eileen, oh I swear…” Then I realize I have no idea what the lyrics are, and at some point my brain has permapasted the words “I’m James Dean” into that song, at which point I start thinking about Government Issue’s hyper-punk take on “I’m James Dean.” Well, suh, about the time I get to “I’m an American dream,” I realize that Dexy’s Midnight Runners have left me far behind, and I begin wondering why the heck I’m listening to awful 80’s synthpop rather than some punk.
I once caught myself with the flipped version of that:
I was slurmbling (great word) along with the radio while drivign, mainly because I was just in a good mood and wanted to sing but the radio wasn’t cooperating, and kept playing songs I don’t know the words to.
Then “99 Luftballoons” came on (the German version of “99 Red Balloons”). I continued slurmbling, and at one point came to realize that I was apparently getting the words right despite not knowing a word of german. Well, ok, I know “nein”, so to be completely truthful I know very very few words of german.
I had a truly odd experience last month – a local personality whom I never knew was also a musician was performing four original compositions as part of a concert – and on two of his songs, which I am certain I’d never heard before, I realized I knew the melody and about a third of the words. – Kind of a deja cantata (as opposed to deja vu) experience.
(You aren’t really also a morning newsman as well as musician, are you? :eek: )
One of my oldest friends “sings along” with any song she hears, whether she’s ever heard it before (or knows the words) or not. Drives me right up the wall.
An old fake-the-lyrics trick is that if you know a song pretty well but don’t know what the words really are, you can sing the vowels and kind of fake the consonants and a lot of the time no one can tell that you have no idea what you’re singing. You can even fake yourself out sometimes. Maybe that’s what happened to you with that song.
Or, maybe you just memorized the words when you weren’t paying attention. That has happened to me with a few songs that have Spanish lyrics: I can sing along with La Bamba even though I don’t know any Spanish, because I was told the words a couple of times and wound up memorizing them after hearing the song so many times.
This, I think, is the only possible way to sing Radiohead songs with any degree of accuracy. For example, in “Where I End and You Begin”, there is the line:
X will mark the place, like the parting of the waves, like a house falling in the sea.
If you sing this line, you will notice that it has nothing to do with what Thom Yorke is actually saying. For one thing, it has about three too many syllables, and for another, it contains multiple consonants per word. What you must sing for this line is:
Similarly, take the song “Like Spinning Plates”. To sing this song, Thom memorized what the lyrics sounded like when he played them backwards, then tried to sing that, and reversed it back again. The line that goes:
While you make pretty speeches, I’m being cut to shreds
must be sung as
Waar yeeew may frittee sffeechwez, aah beee ih cahtah shweh
I can sing almost every Radiohead song in existence. I know all the words to approximately 30% of them. It’s loads of fun.
LOL! I know that there are several songs where I do the “sing the vowels, fake the consonants” thing, but I can’t think of entire artists of which it is true.
I collect cast albums in other-than-English languages, and if I listen to them enough, I can sing the lyrics. The best version of the song or show tends to come to my mind: Whenever I heard instrumental versions of Stalight Express, the German words run in my mind. Or when I hear “New York, New York,” Dudu Fisher’s Hebrew version plays in my mind, and I can’t speak or red Hebrew. It’s more or less a phonetic thing.
That has happened to me with a few songs that have Spanish lyrics: I can sing along with La Bamba even though I don’t know any Spanish, because I was told the words a couple of times and wound up memorizing them after hearing the song so many times.