Saturday, September 4, 2010

I Wish

I wish a lot of things.  Mostly I wish I had more time, or more money, or more sleep, or less need for sleep. Judging by my consistently absurd, unrealistic to-do lists, though, I'd just fill up the extra time with more crap to stress me out.  I scheduled this song for today when it was supposed to be a day off... would love to have had more time, because I suck extra at Stevie Wonder rep, and because I want extra not to suck at it.

So... "I Wish"... I think I learned it to a degree I would have been proud of a few months ago.  So it's kind of cool to be aware that what would have been an acceptable imperfection then is not satisfying anymore.  Baby steps.

Geekery:
Musical theater, pop, opera.  Et cetera.  It's all vocal music, really.  Different priorities in performance.  In musical theater, it's all about the story.  You can have any type of voice, an awful voice, and succeed in musical theater if you are a superb actor.  This makes opera lovers cringe; in opera, the drama is still important, but higher premium is placed on the quality of the voice.  There's so much crossover in these forms nowadays, and anyway, we're talking about Stevie Wonder, in whose music it's the rhythm that's all-important.  Funk, R&B, pop styles - the delivery of the lyrics is more about the groove than about delivering a sentence.  That's why Alicia Keys can breathe in the middle of the word and make it sound right.  Stevie Wonder does it here: "why did those days e (wait)- ver have to go"...

I'm falling asleep writing this, so I'm going finish by linking to another music nerd's blog that talks about jamming on the 1 - "I Wish" is a good example of that. 

No comments:

Post a Comment