[this is a version of a post which first appeared on my blog From the Front of the Choir]
I used to lead a women’s singing group. We tried a Bob Marley song once. One of the singers used to say: “If it sounds like the Women’s Institute sing The Rolling Stones, then we shouldn’t perform it!”. We didn’t.
I often get asked by choir members why we don’t do more pop songs. After all, they’re in English, popular and easily recognisable.
Here’s why we don’t do them.
Most people remember pop songs because of the guitar riff, or the drum break, or the keyboard solo. Personally I’m allergic to voices impersonating instruments. Why not just use a guitar? I get bored with ‘dum dum’ bass riffs. Why not use a double bass?
When you strip away the instrumentation, you’re often left with a very simple, banal melody.
Pop songs are usually sung by a single lead voice. That lead voice usually has some pretty special qualities that we remember – even if they can’t ‘sing’! If one person is singing the lead, then they can play with the timing to their heart’s content, or they can sing really difficult rhythmic jazz lines.
Now you try and get 20 altos to sing that melody line precisely in time with each other – and with swing and syncopation.
Forget the banal “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl falls in love with someone else” lyrics. Many pop songs tell stories or create fantastic wordscapes. We need to hear the lyrics clearly.
In the same way that trying to arrange ballads for choirs is a bad idea, lyric-based songs can easily fall flat.
There are too many words, they need to be clear but not over-enunciated, and the choir has to sing them in exact time for them to be heard properly. You can’t put too many harmonies in or the words will get lost. In short: why bother?
Because there are lots of instruments in pop songs, and because pop melodies are tricky, and because we often need to hear the words because they’re important, many pop song arrangements resort to one person (or a small group) singing the lead whilst the rest of the choir sing lame ‘oos’ as backing chords.
Not very exciting or interesting to the majority of choir members.
Even British pop bands sing like Americans. And if they’re not doing that, they’re singing in strong regional accents.
Most choirs are made up of people from all over who have been trained to blend their vowels. Imagine a big choir with their posh voices trying to articulate, but singing a funky pop song. Doesn’t work, does it?
I’ve tried to ask the choir to sing a bit more ‘American’, but it always ends up sounding Cornish!
You’re trying to create a fantastic SATB arrangement of a rock song when you realise that there are no harmonies on the original. Yes, it may be The Supremes, or Girls Aloud, but often the singers take turns at singing the lead, or have separate melody lines that they sing over the top. They don’t tend to harmonise with each other.
After you’ve added all these gorgeous harmonies you realise that you’ve destroyed the delicate melody! In the original, the harmonies live in the instrumental production so don’t interfere with the vocals.
Of course, you could make sure you only do Westlife songs with the choir, but that’s a bit limiting.
Yes, yes, I know: I run pop song workshops. But only because people demand them! And afterwards they usually agree with much of what I’ve written here.
My workshops only succeed because I assume that people are already familiar with the songs I’m teaching. It would take forever to teach a pop song from scratch.
But this brings a big problem with it: if you know the main melody really, really well, it can be a nightmare trying to learn a harmony to it. You will always want to revert to the part you know. And if you sing the melody all weekend, it’s not much fun as you’ve not really learnt anything new.
I’ve written about this elsewhere: It’s hard to teach songs that people already know.
Many of the cheesy, throw-away pop songs we sing along to in the car are actually examples of highly complex, beautifully crafted song writing. Just because we’re familiar with them and can sing along doesn’t mean they’re easy.
So when an open-access choir tackle, say, an ABBA song, they often find that it’s a real struggle because the chord structure and melodic shapes are very hard to master. They thought pop songs were easy, but are now being put off singing because they think they can’t do it.
But there are some fantastic arrangements of pop songs out there. Although I must say that the majority stink!
The secret (I believe) is to not try to duplicate the original but to turn it into something different and special (but you have to be careful, see How close should a vocal arrangement be to the original song?). Also, you need to choose your songs carefully. Most don’t work.
If you saw Wes Anderson’s movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, you will have heard Seu Jorge performing David Bowie songs in Portuguese on the acoustic guitar. It was like he’d written them himself because he made them uniquely his own. That’s the secret but it’s HARD! Make it sound like it was a choir song all along. Make people forget the original version.
OK, OK, I’m wrong and you have countless examples of fantastic pop songs being sung by choirs. So let me know about them. I don’t guarantee to like them because ultimately it’s down to personal taste, but I’d be interested to hear some fine examples.
But ... they have to be purely acappella (no instruments), not just a lead line with choral backing, not too many ‘dum dums’ (or other vocal instrument impersonations) and recognisably based on the original song. Let’s hear ’em!!
