(03-23-2013, 02:25 PM)alpha7388 Wrote: So did he recant and end this heresy?
(03-23-2013, 02:25 PM)alpha7388 Wrote: So did he recant and end this heresy?
Nope. I still can't listen to the one she did on the show
You're sucking me into trying a "why"
Here she rips(LOL):
Sheryl crow mentions that she is interpreting it differently than she's heard anyone else doing it. ("interpretation" means she isn't singing it with the a more traditional meaning no matter how good she's doing it). Sheryl also advised "letting it sit a little bit" and I don't think Haley really got that or encompassed that part. Sure she did do it acapella.. but the lines and key words didn't "sit" to me - acapella was only part of that idea.
I couldn't bear listening to a single thing Joshua Ledet sung. So close in many ways, but a complete miss on every song for me. It Irritated the hell out of me with him hitting power notes for no reason more than I’m bothered by a bad singer out of tune on a ditsy song (which were easier to ignore entirely)
(IMHO at least) Singing isn't only about the voice, or the notes but what words you punch and where you wait, a hair off the beat to create anticipation etc. that isn't only beautiful but vital to the emotions and conceptions of things in the world that a singer is trying to convey.
Here’s an example that applies to HOTRS for me.
Think about a narrator starting a story reading aloud "once upon a time"
It’s tough to say how someone read “Once upon a time” well and who reads it like it’s a toss off . Even among a narrator that trys there is room to read those words, great instead of pretty-well . I don’t think you could ever explain it exactly.. Ronald Reagan sure would have read the words differently than Meryl Streep but I’d guess they’d both engage us in the tale from the start.
How "once upon a time" is read sets a tone. If you've done a lot of Shakespeare, or even further back, Greek theatre... the first line in HOTRS part is a "calling in of the muses" and a bit of a transcendence from the world of reality to that of a place somewhere off in the nether. Usually god(s) are invoked as they are here in HOTR
I’ll try to share a few specific of types of things that put me in a bad way about Haley's Idol HOTR performance: The "is" "in" "been" "call" were punched in a way in her original versions that made me think like ok .. she's making this into something about the present? Where it goes in no-where for me. She keeps on hitting the words that might have a precise meaning more emphatically and doesn't really radiate contemplatively on the words with more mystery to them.
I’ll go even a step further. Some of the degree to which she ripped out certain words seemed entirely gratuitous. Gritty it was, but where in the world did “mother” need to be ripped out like that in that early part of the song, before painting any picture and without really any reason why it needed to be within any context Haley later painted. Shocked me, then left me hanging. To use a Simon-ism. It felt “gratuitous” .. which really turns me off. (and the greater meaning of the word mother got smashed by the way she sung it too)
The words to HOTR are poetic if they’re anything at all.
I'm not saying that anyone needs to think the same about abstract lyrics, but if there is going to be meaning it’s got to be about the interaction of the abstract images.
The lyrics to "God bless the child" are amorphous like that too and that never stood in Haley’s numerous great interpretations of it…. I just didn’t feel the “wonder” in the earlier HOTRS versions.
Haley DOES ! brings it all together to me by her Celebration Concert version.
To point out a few important specifics that I appreciated:
"Do" and "Know" and "Sun" are words she emphasizes far more in her tour version --- 'know" as in some broad pursuit of truth... its not a "do this" specific but a "do" as like a "do well in life" ... I'll let you decide what the song is eluding to with "sun"... I don't know specifically but I know that somehow we've got to contemplate it in a number of ways and Haley caresses it so much more on stage.
At the point of the celebration concert , she’d been worked like a slave for 6 months on tour. I’m sure by then she had experienced (starting with Randy the next weeks ) more of the Duplicitous human attributes than she had in her generally happy upbringing. That life experience probably helped her bring more to the particular song. After visiting “New Orleans” , she’d have known New Orleans refers as much to a way of life, not merely a pin on a map. She embraced that word far differently and proportionately in the lead in which painted a different mystery from the start.
Whatever many specifics that changed, it all worked for me by the Celebration show
And that only matters in this one guys opinion. But yes, I stand by my original opinion.