Recently, someone brought in the song ‘Seasons’ by Chris Cornell. Now I’ve written before about how much my younger self loved the sound of Cornell’s voice. While discussing the range of Cornell’s voice, his tone, etc, we got to discussing how achievable it would be to sing his songs.
And that’s how we got onto the idea of some songs being ‘unsingable’.
But what do I mean by unsingable?
It’s easier to think of it as a spectrum from ‘more accessible’ to ‘less accessible’. How accessible (or inaccessible) a song is to sing is down to a few different factors:
1) Are we talking about the range of the song being excessive? Well, certainly if a song requires more range than a singer presently has (trained or otherwise), then this would make it unsingable by that singer. But then some other singer may well have enough range for the song in question, and we can also develop our range to conquer songs.
2) Are we talking about the unique characteristics of the song as originally sung and recorded? It is certainly true that certain songs have acquired a cult status, where if you cannot sound like the original singer, the aesthetic of the performance will not work. Yet, there are few songs that cannot be reinterpreted successfully, or transferred to an alternate style. It’s rare that we need to be able to sound identical to cop particular songs, especially in pop.
3) Is it a question of the vocal intensity/technicality required by a song? If we are talking about a lighter voiced singer ala Joni Mitchell trying to sing heavy metal, or vice versa, then of course we’ll see a mismatch. Or perhaps the material involves a lot of riffs and runs? Perhaps, but very few songs are judged solely on whether all the riffs came out perfectly.
So what makes a song unsingable?
Personally, I think songs are unsingable, when you not only need
a. the range of the original singer, per point 1;
b. the tonal characteristics of the original singer, per point 2;
c. the intensity and technicality of the original singer, per point 3;… but you also need
d. an instrument that operates like the original singer’s voice.
This last bit is a little abstract to easily grasp, but let me try to explain it.
This aspect is not down to range, but down to the relative strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies of voices. It’s more or less about how a song feels in your voice when you try to put it in your voice. You may have all the notes available, but no matter what you do, the melody just doesn’t seem to fit well.
Have you ever noticed?
… how some songs seem to click with your voice much quicker than others? Often in a way that makes it feel like this song belongs in your voice, even before you’ve ever really put any time into it. In contrast, other songs tend to feel like they aren’t too bad, just with some bits that don’t work so well and that need work to smooth out. That’s more normal for most songs.
But with songs that just seem to slot into place with no work, it can feel like there was already a spot in your voice just waiting for a song like THAT. In a way, it’s an indicator that the original artist’s voice likes to move in the same way as yours likes to move, and that it likes to jump through the same hoops as your voice likes to jump through.
With more singable songs, it tends not to matter that you don’t have an identical range to the original singer, or intensity, or tone, etc. The more of these traits in common we have, the easier the song comes, but it can all be worked on.
Unsingable songs are at the opposite end of this spectrum. The more of these traits we lack, the more work is cut out for us. The final straw is when the range, tone and intensity/technicality for a song is already at the top-most end of the bell curve (such that few already have it), but then even if you do have those strengths, your voice just isn’t the same kind of instrument as the original singer.
Try some examples
Many of my clients sing Cornell’s song, like ‘You Know My Name’ from Casino Royale.
But this isn’t unsingable. There are some moments that are tricky, like the bridge or the outro where he sings higher and more intensely, but it’s ‘merely’ difficult rather than unsingable.
In contrast, there are songs like Show Me How To Live, sung by Cornell in the band Audioslave. Warning: if you’ve not listened to Audioslave before, it is very heavy and very aggressive, and is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Now I can run through this song vocally, in the sense I can hit all the notes in the right order, heck, I can even do a decent version of it… but I would go so far as to classify this song as unsingable. I won’t be singing this song again anytime soon.
It’s not the notes, or the range, or the aggression, or even the uniqueness of Cornell’s sound that makes it unsingable by others. It’s not even all of the above combined. It’s that the melody requires you to have a voice that likes to work and move the way Cornell’s did. So unless you are the vocal doppelganger of Chris Cornell, you are going to struggle to get through it, let alone do it any justice.
NOTE: Cornell would regularly be wildly out of tune when singing this song live. Put another way, this song was so unsingable even HE couldn’t consistently manage his own song.
Queen of the Night
This classical piece is considered one of the hardest ever written. I even heard a rumour it was written primarily to showcase the vocal talent of Mozart’s sister-in-law when performing this. I can’t find a source to corroborate this, but it is uniquely hard. I have clients that can hit such notes, but the power and stamina it would take to deliver them well places this well out of reach for 99.999% of the population.
Take-home message
Don’t worry about. Just sing what you like, and worry about figuring out how to refine the song as you go. I’ve parked some songs simply because they did not slot into my voice very well, even after much practice. It doesn’t mean those songs were truly unsingable, but there were better options out there for me. The same will be true for you.
Truthfully, very few songs are truly unsingable. Even fewer if you are open to changing the key and fiddling with the arrangement.
But, when a song needs a brutal combination of big range, specific tone, demanding intensity/technicality AND need for a similar instrument to sing a song well – per the above examples – that’s when we get songs that are unsingable for most of us.