11

Standing Out in a World Shaped by American Idol

NOTHING CHANGED the singing world, and our idea of the power of the voice, more than three now-iconic television shows: American Idol, Glee, and The Voice. There had always been singing competitions and star-making talent shows. But these shows mapped a route to stardom that made winning the prize as much about the work (and drama) that went on behind the scenes as the polished performance.

Once we saw people like us line up for those American Idol auditions in cities across the country and got pulled into the story lines, real or fictional, of “nobodies,” or even misfits and social outcasts, who stepped into the spotlight and proved themselves to be potential stars, it seemed possible to make the leap from couch karaoke to a real career in music—and thousands of people went for it. That trajectory, along with the conventions of the reality competition, is part of our cultural DNA now. It’s behind a million YouTube videos by a million kids working to be discovered, and it will no doubt power the next incarnation of the viral singing competition, whatever form it takes.

When you decide to jump into the pool and compete, or when fate knocks on your door and offers you an opportunity to participate in the hardest, most exciting vocal work of your life—a part in a demanding production, a reality competition, a singing gig that puts you onstage night after night—I want you to be ready. So in this chapter I’d like to show you what my work with reality competitions, and the phenomenon that was Glee, taught me about how you can thrive in front of the TV cameras, on the road, and every time you need to step into life with confidence.

This I know: The scripts and formats will change, but the demands of working on high-pressure productions won’t. You can walk in ready to shine, and triumph, if you pay attention to what I’m about to share with you. All the daily work you’ve done with the exercises to strengthen your voice is giving you a strong instrument, and with the basic stagecraft I’ve taught you, you can hold your own with a compelling physical presence. The strategies in this chapter will help you keep rising, and making the cut.

Acing the Audition

Many people think that getting attention in an audition is about proving that you can sing like the star of the moment, or the people who are winning on other shows. But in reality competitions—and in every other audition, to tell you the truth—the goal is to find the song that showcases what’s unique about you. Say you’re a woman and you’ve got a low voice like Toni Braxton, but you’re watching shows or contests on which the people who are winning are full of gospel style, strong and high and overflowing with the vocal acrobatics you’d hear from Jessie J or Jennifer Hudson.

Your job is not to join the rush to be the next Jessie J. It’s to find a song that goes really low, so people will say, “Wow. I haven’t heard that today. I love it when she sings down there.”

Try to become aware of the parts of your voice that are rare and different. You may think of those parts as imperfections, but they’re your secret strengths. I recently worked with a woman who shone at the bottom of the range. She spoke with a husky voice that was clearly strongest on the low notes. But when she started singing me a new song she’d written, it was airy, pretty, and light.

“What happened to that husky voice?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t want to sing down there,” she said. “That’s ugly.”

“But that’s how your speaking voice sounds, which is great,” I told her. So we worked on emphasizing the huskiness of her singing voice to match exactly what was going on when she spoke. I had her say the lyrics to parts of the songs, and then sing them. We would flip back and forth between saying them without pitch and then singing them the same way on the right notes. Within a few minutes she realized that she could easily add the huskiness of her speaking voice to her singing.

Fact is, she just had never thought about doing that before. She and a lot of other aspiring singers get locked up in the idea of a style that they think is working for them but that is actually holding them back from showcasing their originality. I often mention that everyone’s speaking voice is different. That’s why if your best friend calls you later today, he or she doesn’t have to start by saying, “Hi, this is Roger Love, your best friend.” You recognize the voice because everyone sounds different to some degree. Your speaking voice is a great place to start looking for sounds that are special to you. Once you’ve found those distinctive sounds, then think about adding them into your singing. The results can be wonderful and surprising.

When you have a sound that makes you a little different, you’ll find that you’re recognizable above all the other voices in the crowd. Audiences, and contest judges, will remember you. This is a good thing, not a reason to be embarrassed.

Homing In on What’s Original about You

It’s not easy to be objective about your own voice without a lot of practice, so as you’re trying to figure out where you shine, ask other people, and pay attention to their responses when you perform. When you’re singing to friends, what do they like? Where do they start smiling, or even breaking into applause? Ask people you trust for feedback—“Hey, Dad/boyfriend/work colleague, what part of the song made my voice sound the best? Was there something you particularly liked?” As you begin to do this, don’t ask strangers. Start with people who are positive, people who can be both honest and supportive.

Next, identify a style that suits you. Again, pay attention to people’s genuine responses. When you sing a rock song, how many people offer to buy you a soda? When you try out your new EDM number, do people look up from their pizza and pay attention? Ask your trusted friends: “I’m singing a rock song and a country song, guys. Which do you like better?”

When you’ve zeroed in on what’s unique about your voice and have decided that jazz, say, is what gets the room interested when you sing, look for the right song. Maybe you need a jazz standard that showcases your beautiful low range. Great.

Choosing the Song That’s Perfect for You

Now get more specific: It has to be a song you can sing. That sounds painfully obvious, but every day I see people who choose songs that are too hard for them; it’s happened in every competition I’ve been involved with. Singers come in with audition pieces that are all over the range, songs that they struggle to get through. And their strains and stumbles blow them out of the water. Your audition pieces aren’t rated on their degree of difficulty like balance beam routines. You don’t pick the hardest song to get extra points. Just choose something that emphasizes the part of your voice that sounds the best and the style of music that makes your sound shine. The ideal song will smoothly fall into your range, stylistically and in all other ways.

It will also call attention to you, and not to itself. You don’t want to pick a song that is so new and unfamiliar that the people judging are going, “Wow! What’s that from? I’ve never heard it before and it’s great.” At that point, they are not thinking about you and your singing. They are thinking about the song you picked. That’s why you don’t always want to be the hippest person in the room. You’re not showcasing the talents of the songwriter. You want all the attention to be on your voice and how you’re making people feel when you sing.

One exception: If you’re a singer-songwriter and you only want to sing original songs, that’s fine. But once more, choose songs that fit the part of your voice where you like to sing and sound best, pieces with words that feel comfortable in your mouth and are tailored to your style and special sound.

The magic, “just right” audition song is not so current that people don’t know it or have someone else’s voice in their ear when they hear the tune. Ariana Grande has had a couple of songs on the top of the charts, and obviously her interpretations have killed it. You don’t want to show up with one of those unless you know you can do it better, or pull it off in a significantly different way than she can.

There’s a reason you see so many of the same songs popping up on the reality singing competitions—songs from the ’90s and early 2000s. They’re pop hits people know but have forgotten enough that they can appreciate new interpretations.

Choose a song like that, then put your spin on it. Rearrange it. Make it your own. If you’re a great rapper, add some rap. If the song originally had riffs and runs but that’s not your thing, go in the opposite direction and sustain the notes in a way that suits your voice.

In the end, judges and the public are looking for singers who remind them of someone they love, with the new twist you offer that they haven’t experienced before. Bruno Mars reminds his audiences of Michael Jackson and James Brown. He’s easy for people to like, because we have a frame of reference for him.

Standing out is not about reinventing the musical wheel. It’s more about making current and classic styles of music sound original because of what you bring to the music.

Let Me Say It Again: There’s Gold in Those “Flaws”

Some people strive forever to find that new element that will make people notice them, and I see again and again that often it’s right there in their speaking voice, or something they think is a flaw.

Bruno Mars has a voice that’s husky, not clean. And if he’d cleaned it up to sound like an angel because he thought he needed to “perfect” it, he might not have become so popular. Tipping his hat to James Brown, he went for a sound that was scratchy, edgy, and even a little hoarse-seeming. It’s full of passion, and it plays to his strengths and the image he’s building.

If you’re always trying to downplay your “imperfections,” think about Nicki Minaj. Her nasal voice and New York accent could seem like a liability, but they’re an essential part of the way she sings and speaks, and she wouldn’t be Nicki without them. She’s one of many rockers and pop stars who have interesting voices that some people might consider flawed. When I coach them, I’m not set on changing what’s unique to them, but on providing them with the technique to showcase their own tonal qualities—as well as to access the whole range of other sounds. It’s like giving them more keys on the piano.

That’s what I want you to do. Embrace your imperfections—and never stop working on your technique. Really listen to the qualities of your voice, including those quirky sounds in your speaking voice, and get good at listening to other successful artists and pinpointing the imperfections and stylistic abnormalities in their voices. There are always sounds to hear, learn, and perhaps borrow.

If you’re a guy who sounds airy and high, Chris Martin of Coldplay is a model of someone who’s parlayed those attributes into hits. One of his songs might suit you perfectly. Whenever you identify people who’ve got voices similar to yours, work up songs from their catalog. If you sound great, you may have landed not just on a “mentor” to emulate but also on an audition song. And if their songs don’t work for you, pick singers who sound nothing like you and see how well you can imitate them. You can never have too many sounds in the grab bag of sonic choices you fill by imitating other artists.

A Reality Show Will Hand You an Identity, But You’ll Also Need Your Own

Competition contestants often have to make temporary decisions about their image, and about who they want to be. When a singer comes on who sounds like Carrie Underwood, the producer and musical director may coach her in a particular direction. They may listen past the country and hear the pop sounds in her voice, or push her to go more jazzy, more gospel. And if she’s smart, the contestant will follow their advice. When you’re in that environment and make it to the next round of a competition with a particular kind of song, you add more songs like it to your repertoire. The audience likes it, the pros like it—you’re on your way. Maybe our Carrie Underwood sound-alike gets encouraged to go toward rock, so now she’s a rocker, simply by virtue of trying to survive in that medium.

Will that make her a better artist, or the artist she wants to be? Not really. In truth, these shows are not about turning people into artists, they’re more like elevated karaoke competitions. A reality contest doesn’t always end with the winner realizing what she or he is best at. The winning sound only reflects what happened during the process of the show. If you fit easily into a particular model and the viewers like that model at the moment, you can be swept up in the tide of being a rock singer or a dance artist or an R&B vocalist. Young singers get pigeonholed easily into one category or another in competition shows. It’s not good or bad, it’s just a normal occurrence. Later on, after you win the show, you’ll have the rest of your life to become a varied artist, free to change, adapt, grow, and mature into many different areas of song, music, emotion, and image. Until then, you’ll have to master the balancing act of the reality TV process: to be in the moment, helping to deliver familiarity to the viewers, while keeping a part of your heart looking toward the time when you can have more stylistic and creative freedom.

Judges are looking for original artists, not copycats. If you’re not working hard to develop your own style in the way I’ve been describing, and if you’re not writing your own songs (see chapter 13), winning a contest might be fun, but it won’t allow you to take advantage of all the public exposure you received by being on television. The dream goal is to make it through the competition showcasing that you have unbelievable promise, win, and go about designing a long-lasting career that brings happiness to you and your fans.

You Can Be Your Own Best Judge and Teacher

If you’re going to put yourself out there, maybe even on camera, to compete and be judged, you have to spend a lot of time recording yourself. Because before you can sell your sound to someone else, you have to like it first.

There’s an enormous difference between singing a song and liking it, and recording a song and liking it. As you know by now, music sounds very different from the inside than from the outside. When you’re listening to a recording, the sound is coming toward you, rather than moving away from you. When you are the sound-making chamber, your body is vibrating, you’re feeling tension and relaxation, and you might be swept up in the emotion of the song. You’re so far inside it you can’t always judge or separate the feelings from what you hear. It’s difficult to distinguish your experience and memory of singing from the sound itself—unless you record.

Recording lets you step out of your body and ask: How does the sound make you feel as you listen? If I heard this song, would it make me want to kiss the singer on the mouth (or whatever the song suggested)?

To be good at judging your sound when it’s coming out, you first have to be good at judging it afterward. When you can really hear yourself, you can get much better and faster at self-correcting. You can sing version after version of a song and, listening back, you can pinpoint what’s not working and shift it. Surprisingly, most singers never really record and listen back to themselves enough to figure out what changes they need to make. Even many of the pros I’ve worked with listen back only when they are recording vocals for an upcoming album, and don’t bother to record and listen much when they’re not in the studio, or getting ready to go in. But I think all singers, no matter how good, benefit when they take the time to analyze what they’re doing and make changes until they love the sound.

I recommend doing this not as your harshest critic but as a curious, interested listener. In the end, it doesn’t matter what other people say, or how much applause you get. Ultimately, you’re singing for yourself and hoping other people enjoy it. Singing is supposed to make you feel good, and that’s going to happen only if you like the sounds, and the feelings you get, when you hear your own voice coming through the air into your listening ears.

Do You Want It Enough to Do the Work?

Making it to the top of a reality competition has a lot to do with being smart enough to follow the lead of the producer and other people who are there to help you—the coaches, mentors, and judges who want to root for you. When I worked on a show called Rock Star: INXS, the winner of which would tour as the lead singer of the Australian band INXS, I was a vocal coach for the contestants and helped decide who would stay and who would go in each round.

I’d listen to the voices each week, of course, but I’d also pay close attention to each singer’s attitude. Was he following my advice? Taking my suggestions and those of the musical director? Some people come in with attitude and resist the input of the people who are there to give them support. If you’re putting up a fight, and you’re difficult to work with in a business that involves a lot of collaboration, you’re throwing roadblocks in your own way.

In the first round of the show, there was a singer we thought would be perfect. He was the right age, had the right look, and radiated charisma. He came in singing Elvis songs, and I knew that with the right material, he could be the one. I told him, “If you follow our instructions, you’ll have a much better chance of going from living in your car to having a recording contract, touring with a huge band, and being a celebrity.”

You’d think at that point a person would do anything for the opportunity. But our guy didn’t practice and would arrive at show tapings without having memorized the lyrics. His poor attitude and work habits eventually led him to throw his big chance away.

It’s easy to get distracted by the interviews, photo shoots, and other assignments that go with the star-making machinery, but no one wins without being able to demonstrate that she’ll work her butt off to do great work.

That’s because once you make it and the opportunities start flowing, the challenges grow exponentially, and the work is constant. You don’t get the fame without the work, and the pressure to keep being your best persists. So you have to have the right reason for wanting to become a singer. The right reason, which audition judges and producers and fans are always looking for, isn’t “I want to be famous” or “I’m tired of living in my car” or “I thought this would be a nice change.” Every major singer with a career that has lasted more than a minute has had just one reason for trying to make it in the music business: They do it because they have to. “I didn’t have a backup plan,” they’ll tell you. “If I had another choice, I would’ve taken it, but this is what I do. I just had to keep moving forward.”

The devotion that builds as you follow the only path that calls to you is powerful. I’ve made a little study. Anytime I work with a superstar singer, I ask, “What’s the main reason you succeeded?” And it’s always the same: “I practiced. I stayed in my room and practiced and practiced, and I kept writing. I practiced until I was as good as everybody else, then better, and I kept practicing.” Sure, good genes help, or coming from a musical family, but even if Mother Nature gave someone attributes that make him sound better than the next person, he will die in obscurity if he doesn’t nurture them. The big thing that separates superstars from other singers isn’t their gifts. It’s what they make of their gifts with their deep, unstoppable work ethic.

The Real-Life Race to Create

When an artist’s star is rising, or a show’s popularity takes it into the stratosphere, the demands can be intense. Anyone who ever hopes to take that ride needs to be prepared for the hardest, most exhilarating work of his life. It’s difficult to imagine the pace and pressure when you’re sitting on the outside, enjoying the show. So I’d like to offer a glimpse of what it was like to ride the juggernaut that was Glee to show you what to expect if—or when—you wind up on the hard-chugging train to fame.

From day one, Glee was an insanely demanding concept, each week filled with production numbers. For the singer/actors, long days bled into long nights. There were so many songs per episode that it could’ve been a full-time job just to master them, except that there were also all the spoken lines to memorize, as well as choreography. All the singing was recorded in advance, so Glee’s stars had to find time to be in the recording studio when they weren’t filming. Typically, the actors would show up and add their vocals to prerecorded musical tracks. If they were lucky, they’d receive the track the night before. But it was common to get a song in the middle of the night, or to have to learn it on the spot in the studio. Then the actors would go home and try to learn whatever they needed to ace the next day.

I got involved with the cast when Cory Monteith, who played the role of the football-quarterback-turned-singer Finn Hudson, asked me to help him work on his singing. He was just a young actor who liked to play the drums, and he was no lead singer. But now he was performing opposite Lea Michele, the greatest new singer on TV, a Broadway star. Cory’s goal was simply to sing well enough to keep from embarrassing himself on the show, so we set to work practicing technique.

When Cory’s voice changed dramatically for the better, the producers asked me to work with the whole cast, and to prepare them for a summer concert series that would give avid fans around the world a taste of the show live.

I set up shop in a trailer on the Paramount lot with a keyboard and a CD recorder, and whenever the Glee cast members had a break, they’d drop by for a lesson, moving from breathing through chest, middle, and head voice and on to the songs they’d sing that week for the show and the songs they might have to sing on the summer tour.

The tour would take the cast to huge venues—Radio City Music Hall in New York, the Staples Center in Los Angeles—and needed to be impressive. But the stars filmed night and day and didn’t have time to hunker down in a rehearsal space to get the show ready. So the production company had to rehearse the show and get it ready before the cast arrived. Dancers learned every move the performers would do onstage, and worked out their numbers wearing T-shirts that had the dancer’s name on one side and the character’s name on the other.

For a show that would play to thousands of people on a Saturday night, the cast flew in on a Wednesday night or Thursday morning, after long weeks of filming in Los Angeles, and got their first look at the show they would be performing. After watching the lip-synching dancers go through the numbers, they stood behind them and followed along. The entire floor of the huge venue was divided into spaces where the stars paired up with the dancers to learn each bit.

By Thursday night, the stars were by themselves, running through the show. They were at it again early Friday morning, rehearsing into the night. By early Saturday, they were timing their acts to the elaborate lights and effects. And at the end of that day, it was showtime.

The cast was exhausted, and though the stars were clearly enjoying every minute of the work, it was a grueling pace. As they tried to remember moves and the lyrics to songs they might’ve sung months earlier in the season, they were playing catch-up, and beat the clock, every day. The show ended up being fantastic, and I could not have been prouder of each of the cast members.

How did they do it?

A step at a time. And if you’re ever faced with this kind of monumental challenge, that’s what you’ll do too.

Winning the Race for Time

Your job in a situation like the Glee summer tour is, first, not to get sick. So you’re eating well. Drinking lots of water. Resting your voice whenever you can. Washing your hands.

Then you simply stay focused on the very next task in front of you. Mere mortals would be falling asleep or collapsing, but you have to stay focused, asking, Okay, what’s next? What can I do right now?

The Glee cast couldn’t think of the sixteen hours in front of them. They had to keep asking: What do I have to do now? Learn dance moves. Learn lines. Practice my song and scene. The only thing to do is go from task to task to task, giving it your all.

Without fail, you need to build a foundation through practice, always warming up your voice. Do whatever exercise you need to be in good physical shape, which will keep you in good mental shape. Practice until it’s a given that when you speak and sing you’ll sound good, then take your polished craft into the art you need to make today.

There’s always a race for time. I’ve never been hired to work on a movie when I thought I had enough time to make a singer as good as I wanted, and I’ve never been brought into a project with a singer where there was enough time to heal a voice before a singer with a cold or laryngitis had to go back on the road.

Yet we always manage to do good work, because we’re pros, which just might be another word for practice addicts. We pull out our tools and use them in the time allotted. And just like those phenomenal singers in Glee, we turn our exhausted, time-crunched efforts into shows the audience will never forget.

That’s what you’re signing up for if you’re aiming for the top: the hardest, best, most impossibly beautiful work of your life. Is it worth it? If this is your passion, there’s only one answer: Of course.