Schneider, like many other singers - all of them men, now that I think about it - doesn’t exactly sing the words, but speaks them melodically.
Other examples are Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady.
What is this style called? What exactly is the difference between it and regular singing? Is there a continuum between the two or are they distinct variations on tunes? Does this style have to stick to pitch and key as exactly as regular singing? And lots of other questions I can’t think of off the top of my head.
:eek: Oy. Please explain how someone thought that was a good idea. It’s not as though he was known as the romantic, leading man type (was he?) and his speaking voice is very distinct, and very much the opposite of romantic. That is just embarrassing.
With Rex Harrison, critics called it “patter,” although it really didn’t fit the definition of the word.
For a comparison with “real singing” listen to just about anything sung by Willie Nelson. Willie has a terrible singing voice, close to a monotone, but his phrasing is that of a singer, not a talk singer.
Flash and the Pan used it, too, but I think that was mostly for effect.
Rex Harrison seems to have pioneered the technique in My Fair Lady. Previously, lead actors with limited range were only given songs that fit that range.
In Guys and Dolls, for instance, the song “Sue Me” was written to overcome Sam Levine’s bad singing. Indeed, the phrasing of the first line of each of his choruses was designed to that Levine could get up to the note. (It’s ironic that in the movie, it was sung by Frank Sinatra, who certainly had no trouble singing.)
Gilbert and Sullivan had their patter songs, but they were clearly sung.
BTW, my wife always thought Webb’s “Try a Little Tenderness” was very sweet and charming, an awkward guy trying to be romantic.
He was great in The Band and all, but wow Robbie Robertson’s jungle intoning in Somewhere Down That Crazy River skeeves me out a tad.
Great snogging at the end of the video, though.
While common with probably most bands of their ilk (god I hate that word), David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait, Bastro) and Steve Albini (BigBlack, Rapeman, Shellac) immediately come to mind.
Lee Hazelwood was probably planet earth’s greatest talk-singer ever.
This exists in classical music, too. It’s called sprechstimme (as Skywatcher points out above), and I’ve heard it in the work of Alban Berg (bits of Wozzeck) and Arnold Schoenberg (Moses und Aron).
