Believable Emotions
It’s 100% important to sound great. It’s also 100% important to be believable. The emotional way that you tell the story of a song is just as important as the technically proficient way that you sing it.
In my work with performers, as their vocal technique starts to solidify, we begin to additionally focus on singing with authentic and conveyable feeling. This starts with analyzing the text to figure out the perspective of the song, the narrative told, and the main emotion of the piece. We then go through again, breaking the song into segments while identifying the different emotions that present in each one.
Songs — like people — can go through a MYRIAD of emotions in 3 minutes. A particularly good “happy” song, for example, will often have moments of reflection and melancholy in addition to the longer moments of excitement or elation. Singing “the rollercoaster,” as I call it, reflects the authenticity of the human experience and makes your song really present and accessible for your audience members.
The Emotions Wheel (originally by Robert Plutchik in 1980, expanded on by Moran & Ming in 2023) is one of the tools I use daily in the studio when working through the emotional performance aspects of a song. It breaks the larger emotional categories down into their different specificities.
It is important to be specific with your emotions. The macro-emotion of “anger” feels (and looks) very different depending on the micro-version: “annoyed” feels (and looks) very different than “furious” — and you want to make sure the audience gets that difference.
Next time you are about to perform, try analyzing the song — break it up into verses/choruses, and the bridge, and then identify the emotions in each. Then call those emotions up to you while you are performing and experience the magic of authentically sharing those feelings with the crowd. As a performer, you always want the audience to FEEL WITH you because — to quote a Matchbox 20 song — “In the end, we will only just remember how it feels.”
