Bill Callahan & Frank Sinatra

RSS | 03.14.2011 | 2 Comments

Our Anniversary (Live)
Bill Calahan

No One Ever Tells You
Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra was the first singer that made me want to listen to the lyrics. I was struck by his diction. Every word is so clear and carefully placed on his recordings. Listening more, I realized that it was impossible to be so deliberate about the words without being very careful with the melody. I would venture to say that every great vocalist has a close relationship with melody. But, when a singer goes the extra step to make sure every word comes through loud and clear, to me, the melody gains a new level of nuance.

Focusing on the words to a song automatically creates a logical hierarchy of importance for the melody pitches. I think every note should have a specific level of importance. When instrumentalists play the melody they often use the harmony to help them decide which notes are most important to their performance. The lyrics offer explicit emotional and rhetorical cues. Whatever the justification may be, musicians decide what notes matter most every time they perform a song. I think of these decisions as structural improvisation. Shaping the song as you go, creating a solid frame to drape the melody over. Frank Sinatra is one of my favorite improvisers. Sinatra rarely changes the melody notes and is always very true to the lyrics, but he is constantly improvising new rhythmic, and textural framings of the notes and words. His vibrato is constantly changing and he shapes the dynamics of the line very deliberately. The sound of a melody is about so much more than the melody.

Beyond the fact that I really like his conceptual approach to music, Sinatra has the sound and range of a baritone. This has allowed me to really get into his music in a way that is often difficult to achieve with other singers. Maybe it is a result of the roles that have evolved in music, but I feel that most instrumentalists aren’t as occupied with having a wide arsenal of ways to play a melody as their vocal counterparts. Instrumentalists get to focus on which notes to play without worrying about how it affects the lyrics. By trying to really get inside of Sinatra’s performances, I have learned a lot about performing the melodies of songs.

I really enjoy a lot of acoustic folk influenced music. In a lot of cases this music is literally telling a story with the lyrics. If you take the words away, the story is lost. This has been a consistent source of difficulty for me. How do I capture the essence of the song without the words. Bill Callahan is an interpretive genius. The color of his voice, the rhythm of his performance, and the shape of his melody lines, all communicate the essence of his lyrics. Sometimes it feels like the song would tell the same story if he were singing nonsense words. In this way, he is like Frank Sinatra. The structure he builds to place his lyrics over tells the same story as the words. His melodies are simple and sparse, sometimes barely sung, but the tone and the placement is so strong that everything he does is incredibly illustrative. Both Sinatra, and Callahan could perform a song and tell the story with or without words.

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  1. Eli Sundelson Says:
    March 16th, 2011 at 2:24 pm

    yes!! thank you, I was gonna ask you to send me this. It’s funny, I never would have thought to compare the two, but it totally makes sense! awesome piece.

  2. Rebecca Says:
    March 18th, 2011 at 7:01 am

    What a great comparison – it seems like a stretch at first, but works so well. Thinking of melody and lyric, I can’t help but mention Joanna Newsom. Oftentimes, her melodies and her lyrics seem almost to combat, with musical phrases ending before lyrical ones. Perhaps, though, this unusual mismatching draws more attention to the individual words, since they don’t blend cohesively together.