Singing with emotion and intention is often harder than it should be, but there are some really simple tips and tricks to get you singing with emotion in no time!
In my case, and in the case of many singers I work with, the culprit of this problem is prioritizing singing well (AKA, focusing on pitch, vocal technique, breathing, vowel shape, etc.) over truly feeling the song’s emotions, and expressing them while you sing.
You hear it all the time on singing competition shows like The Voice: coaches will often tell the contestants that they would rather hear an imperfect performance that touched them emotionally, versus a technically perfect performance that felt cold and empty. I mean, think about it: if you listen to a performance that has some voice cracks and some off-pitches, but that singer felt that song, almost enough to bring you to tears, even…
Wouldn’t you consider that so much more valuable than if the singer had just focused on singing the notes and lyrics of the song well?
When we focus too much on vocal technique, the songs we sing come off dull, dry, empty, and boring. Even the most incredible riff or the highest whistle note mean nothing more than a party trick if you can’t draw people in with emotion.
The only way to sing with emotion is by feeling emotion when you sing.
If you don’t feel anything during your performance, your listeners won’t feel anything either. They might appreciate your performance, but if you want to touch their hearts, then your performance has to come from yours.
1. Sing Every Song Like It’s the First Time (or the Last Time)
The singer Jason Paige has this advice for singers to sing songs with emotion and intention: “Sing every song like it’s the first time you’re performing it.”
Imagine that the song you’re performing, whether it's a cover or an original song, is the first time you’re ever performing it for someone. That first performance is special. It’s not the fifteenth time, it’s not the five hundredth. It’s the first. You’re going to pay more attention to the song because it’s new and fresh. You can also imagine it’s the last time you’ll ever sing that song. (But if this makes you sad, don’t do that! Haha.) Just imagine that this performance is special.
Or, imagine that this performance, whether it’s in your bedroom or on a stage, is in front of someone you want to sing this song to. Perhaps it’s a breakup song, and you’re imagining your ex. Or it’s a love song, and you imagine your crush or your significant other. Say it has more meaning than that, and you sing it to someone with sentimentality. Imagine in that moment, in that performance, something about this situation makes it really special.
2. Strive to Express, not Impress
Our goal with singing with emotion is to express the song. Express its emotions, and express your emotions through it. This song is merely a vehicle for your feelings, and it’s intended to make the listeners feel something.
Think about it—what do you want them to feel from this performance?
What do you want them to think about the song? About themselves? About their lives?
Try your best to make your performance about the listener, and not about you.
Singing with emotion is so much easier when you care solely about what you are making the listener feel with your performance, rather than caring what the listener thinks about you.
If you perform the song wondering what they think of you, of your voice, of your song, and you want them to be impressed with you, you’re going to focus so much on your technique, and not screwing up.
But if you think about singing a song that you hope will make someone in the crowd feel a sense of calm, you now have a mission. It’s also not about you. And if you’re trying to make someone feel calm, you will have to be calm to invoke that in them. If you are trying to calm someone, but you’re only focused on hoping that they think you’re great, that emotion won’t translate.
Try your best to focus on expressing the emotions of the song, or whichever of your emotions that you want to share through the song, rather than impress the crowd with your voice or song.
Believe me; if you achieve your mission, and you are able to make those listeners feel what you were hoping they’d feel, they’ll be incredibly impressed.
3. Learn Vocal Technique
The first step in learning to sing with emotion is to learn proper vocal technique. Learn how to breathe from your diaphragm, form singing vowel mouth shapes, and free your vocal range by learning vocal placement. Learn vocal technique and practice it enough that it is second nature.
This may seem contradictory to what I just said above, but hear me out: if you learn vocal technique to the point it is second nature to you, then you won’t need to think very much about the actual technical performance. At that point, it is mostly muscle memory.
This allows you to focus 90% or more of your attention on emotion while performing.
When I was in singing lessons myself many years ago, my voice teacher kept trying to get me to sing with emotion while I was in the middle of learning vocal technique. This may work for some people, however it felt like adding emotion into the pot was just too many things to focus on at once. It made my vocal technique suffer because it wasn’t set into my muscle memory yet, and I was using my attention for emotion rather than the technique.
I decided to leave singing with emotion for after I had my technique down pat, and I’m so glad I did. Not only did it speed up my learning process for vocal technique, but now that I do have vocal technique down second nature, I can focus most of my attention on emotion.
I really suggest truly learning to sing and practicing to the point of not needing to focus on vocal technique in order to sing the way you want to before focusing on singing with emotion. Obviously this doesn’t mean you can’t sing with emotion at all (I’m a songwriter, so even before I learned vocal technique, I was singing with emotion). It’s just something that will help allow you to focus more of your attention on emotion, without the need to constantly think about how to breathe or how to place your voice in a different register.
That said, this is not a requirement at all; learning vocal technique just makes singing with emotion a heck of a lot easier.
4. Lip Sync - Sing With Emotion... Without Singing
This is a great trick to use either while learning vocal technique, or if even after learning vocal technique, you are still too focused on technique.
I discovered this trick when I was in the middle of my journey learning vocal technique. I was getting frustrated that when I was trying to sing with emotion, thinking about vocal technique kept getting in the way. Even after I was getting my technique more and more into my muscle memory, I was still focusing more on getting it “perfect” than actually expressing myself through the song.
So… how did I stop thinking about vocal technique?
I just put on a song, and I lip synced it.
All of a sudden, I was a different singer. I was no longer prisoner to needing to get my voice to cooperate with me or trying to make it sound “perfect”. Now, it was just me and the emotions.
Just lip syncing to the song allowed me to really feel the song, and it was crazy how much more I felt, how much more I connected to the song, and how much more I expressed even in my facial expressions. It finally felt like what singing was supposed to be.
This was especially helpful when I was still in the middle of my vocal technique journey, and my voice wasn’t quite cooperating with me yet. I was able to ‘sing’ the song the way I wanted to by lip syncing, and didn’t need to worry about technique at all.
However, I became quite the perfectionist while learning vocal technique, which caused me to overthink all of my performances, whether they were live, recorded, or even just singing in my car by myself. I would find that I spent my whole car ride practicing and trying to do a good job, rather than actually enjoying it.
When I started to lip sync the song, I noticed how much emotion I was adding in, that I wasn’t when I was physically singing. Lip syncing a song and then restarting it while actually singing helped me to find the emotion first, without thinking about the technique at all.
5. Pretend You Were the Songwriter
This is something that I learned from being a songwriter.
I’ve been writing songs since I was twelve. And if you’ve been following me here or on YouTube, you know that I had quite a terrible singing voice back then.
If you want to know just how bad, here’s a video:
I had the interesting opportunity to experience the difference between singing covers of other peoples’ songs, and singing my own.
When I sang covers, it was always about how well I could sing it. It was about the vocals, and trying to sing just as well as the original singer, or trying to make it better somehow. If I recorded it or performed it, I was singing a song that people knew; they would know if I messed up, and I believed they were just hoping to hear a good vocal performance.
Often, I would worry more about covers, and my voice would strain or crack or be off-key.
But when I sang my own original songs, I was far less concerned. Partially because no one knew the songs I was playing, therefore a few mistakes I made might slip their radar.
But the main reason was because when I sang my own original songs, I wasn’t focused on a good vocal performance.
In a cover, I assume that the impressive thing is singing well.
But in an original song, I assume that the impressive thing is my melody and my lyrics.
When I perform original songs, I know that people know I wrote them. I sang them, yes, but my goal was showing them my song. The song was the impressive part; not my voice. My voice was just a vehicle for the song to take them through the journey of the story I was trying to tell. It was my song’s story, its melody, its poetry that I was proud of and wanting to express. As long as I was able to perform my song, I wasn’t half as worried about a bad vocal performance.
To this day, I still prefer playing original songs, because when I do, I’m singing with emotion as my first priority. When I sing covers, I have this instinct to be “great”, so I’ll sing with more effort than I need to, and I’ll feel the pull to overdo some things, like riffs and runs to make it more interesting.
But with my own songs, if I sing through a whole one of my songs with minimal effort, I still would find it to be a good performance because, again, I’m just showing the crowd my song. I want them to feel what I felt when I wrote it, and to maybe even relate to it.
It was mind blowing to me when I realized how different my singing approaches to covers and original songs were. What I have gleaned from this realization is that if I wanted to sing covers with the same confidence, enjoyment, and emotion as I do when I sing the songs I wrote, then I have to pretend I wrote the song that I’m covering.
Pretend these are your words.
Find a way to relate to the song, and imagine it as your story. If its a breakup song, and you’ve never experienced a breakup, have you experienced a falling out with a friend? A job? If you’re covering a song about love, it doesn’t have to be about romantic love. It can be love for a friend, a parent, a sibling, or even (especially) yourself.
I think that if we are going to cover other peoples’ songs, we must find a way to do it with our own flavor. Otherwise, what’s the point of singing a song that everyone’s heard before? If it isn’t to share a part of yourself through that song, then why are you covering it? A “great” vocal performance is great, but an emotionally connected performance is the one that stays with your listeners. I can still remember performances I’ve seen that have touched me, years later, and it was because I felt them. If you ask any performer what they were thinking about when they gave that emotional performance, it’s never just “I wanted to sound good.”
Spend some time with the lyrics of the song, and really think about what you’re saying.
Make it yours.
However if you try, but still can’t relate to it…
6. Play a Part
We may be singers, but we are also performers.
If you’re having trouble relating a song to yourself and your own life, then don’t relate it to your life.
Act as if you’re the main character of the song, and get into character!
This is truly apparent for musical theatre performers and, say, Disney movie singers.
It is always best if you can find a way to relate to the song yourself, but if you can even just relate to a character who may be singing this song, then you will be so much more likely to sing the lyrics with intention.
Don’t be afraid to be a little dramatic!
Think about the song’s mood, the emotions it invokes in you, and try to embody it as you sing.
Play the part.
Conclusion
There are the 7 tips I have for singing with emotion!
But if nothing else…
Before you sing next, ask yourself this question: Why do you sing?
Dive a little deeper if the first answer is “Because I want to be good at it/want people to think I’m good.”
Why do you sing, alone in your car or your room, with no audience and no recordings?
The answer is probably somewhere along the lines of because I love to sing.
Try to remember that next time you’re singing, and enjoy it!
Because then, when you feel that joy, you’re singing with emotion already.
As always, I hope this post helped you! Comment with any questions or with your successes, and if you need any extra help, you can grab an online lesson with me over here!
Happy Singing!
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