Why great singers learn to interpret songs like actors.
Let Your Light Shine
Singing lessons can be quite complex due to the number of elements that must be mastered in order to become a high-level performer in your own right.
Expert singing teachers not only train your physiology and work out your voice’s musculature, but they help you select your repertoire and lead you through the process of interpreting the songs you choose to the highest degree.
It’s all about delivering the goods — and those goods are the emotional essence of the lyric and the story behind the song, its subtext.
And that’s what singing lessons with a master teacher are all about.
Singing Is the Art of Interpretation
Most singers — whether they be pop, rock, folk, musical theatre, or fill-in-the-blank style performers — are not the songwriters for the songs they perform.
Therefore, they are in the interpretation business.
What does the writer mean by what he or she wrote?
What does the song communicate?
What moods are expressed through the singing of the song?
And even deeper:
What about who I am makes this song resonate with me?
What connection can I make with the writer, the subject, the awakened feelings, and my own inner vision of what the song is about in order to make the hearing of the song meaningful for all my listeners?
This goes for both live performances and recordings.
What Singers Can Learn from Actors
The type of questions we’re asking here are very much like the questions an actor must ask:
- What is their character’s motivation and emotional complexity?
• How can they best polish the window so that viewers are in touch with what the writer intended?
Actors are well schooled in a variety of introspective exercises that help them access an expansive emotional palette.
It’s the results of those exercises — combined with the actor’s innate talent and giftedness — that render a character believable and moving, with the power to transport us.
The very best voice teachers have backgrounds in all those same elements of acting — if not actual acting classes themselves — and know how to fold those exercises into their singing lessons.
This allows them to coach and train the emotional, interpretive part of their singing student in such a way that the student becomes skilled at bringing out everything the song has to offer.
Blending Emotion with Vocal Technique
Since the delivery of a spoken phrase has such a different signature characteristic from a sung phrase, there is profound work to do — on the part of both the master voice teacher and the willing student.
All of the emotional qualities that an actor might express while reciting the lyric need to be folded into the rich tonal presentation of pitches — with their accompanying resonance — that the singer has learned how to deliver.
It is that marriage of:
Producing the breathtaking sound of a human voice sustaining a musical note
with
The provocative emotional context of language and all the meaning contained within it
…that moves us all and has caused cultures of all types to value their storytelling through great singers.
When you pick the voice teacher you intend to study with, make sure they understand not only what this level of mastery is all about, but also that they can help you achieve it.
Simple Ways to Apply Acting Skills to Singing
Many singers begin developing interpretive depth by asking themselves a few key questions before performing a song:
- Who is speaking in the song?
• Who are they speaking to?
• What emotion or message is being communicated?
• What moment in life does this lyric represent?
• What emotional journey happens between the beginning and the end of the song?
By exploring these questions, singers begin to connect their voice, body language, and emotional intention into a unified performance.
That connection is what allows an audience to feel that the singer truly means every word they sing.