Voices: How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life

by nick Coleman

Overview

"Voices isn't just illuminating and thought–provoking and clever; it is exciting." —Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments

A personal exploration of what singing means and how it works, Voices is a book about our deepest, most telling relationships with music. Nick Coleman examines the act of singing not as a performance, but as a close, difficult moment of hopeful connection. What does it do to us, emotionally and psychologically, to listen hard and habitually to somebody else’s singing? Why is human song so essential to our lives? The book asks many other questions, too: Why did Jagger and Lennon sing like that (and not like this)? Billie, Janis, Amy: must the voices of anguish always dissolve into spectacle? What makes us turn again and again to a singing human voice?

The history of postwar popular music is often told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices offers a different, intimate perspective. In ten discrete but cohering essays, Coleman tackles the arc of that history as an emotional experience with real psychological consequences. He writes about the voices that have affected the ways he feels about and understands the world—from Aretha Franklin to Amy Winehouse, Marvin Gaye to David Bowie. Ultimately, Voices is the story of what it is to listen and be moved—what it is to feel emotion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640091153
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid–1980s, Nick Coleman was music editor of Time Out for seven years, then arts and features editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. He has also written on music for The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, New Statesman, Intelligent Life, GQ, and The Wire. He is the author of The Train in the Night, which was short–listed for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize.

Read an Excerpt

Preface


Patti Smith is crammed on to a balcony in a stately ballroom in Stockholm with a small orchestra.

She's up there on behalf of Bob Dylan to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature, and she is going to sing his famous song 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' to the accompaniment of small guitar, lap steel and strings. She is dressed in a black tuxedo and planted like an Easter Island statue.

The audience is composed of the great and the good of Swedish culture and the Swedish royal family, who are all done up in formal fig, bibs and tuckers, gowns and jewellery, stoles and tiaras. And medals. They are arrayed formally, as for a state portrait. Smith has no medals though her white shirt beneath the oversized tuxedo is nicely ironed. Her steel-coloured hair is long and heavy and parted severely in the middle. She is like Albrecht Dürer, who did not do state portraiture. She is also faintly reminiscent of Buster Keaton.

The introduction is strummed artlessly on two chords. Smith sings. The sound she and the guitarist make is as severe as her hairstyle and so is the intent of the words she sings. Yet she is singing beautifully with total involvement, her rich, twangy contralto, with its flattened vowels and its inclination to yodel, driving hard and straight into the language, as if the song had been written this year, the year of all hateful years, 2016.

All is suspense.

But then, after a couple of minutes, Smith appears for a moment to be overwhelmed. She stops singing. She gulps. 'I'm so sorry,' she says, blanching. She tries to carry on… 'Unh…' But it won't come. She apologises again and looks up in appeal to the conductor standing above her left shoulder. 'I'm sorry. Could we start that section . . . ? I apologise.' She looks out into the audience. They are frozen in their places. 'I'm so nervous.' She forces an agonised smile.

There is sustained, kindly applause from the audience. You can almost hear the jewellery rattling. And soon enough she goes again with renewed resolve until, a minute or two later, she dries once more, and again looks up at the conductor with the mute appeal of a frightened child. The conductor, out of shot, presumably makes encouraging faces because Smith, suddenly somehow heartened, hooks quickly back into the song and then seems to grow, to expand in her place and to move her hands a little and then her shoulders and then to pace, striding on the spot, no longer an Easter Island statue but a living, breathing, marching embodiment of the hipster-symbolist song lyric she is singing, all about the doom of the world and the love that may save it. She reaches the end of the song in a sea of strings.

It is impossible to watch without tears.

It is also as great a passage of singing as you are ever likely to hear, if singing is to you not about the observance of musical correctitude and extravagant display and signalled passion and technical virtuosity, but about the inhabitation of the moment up to and including the moment when the moment bursts.

Table of Contents

Preface


Introduction: Hearing voices


The horsemen in the box: Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley with Led Zeppelin, Suzi Quatro, Patti Smith


Boys and girls and girl groups: The Ronettes, The Marvelettes and the Shangri Las with The Four Pennies, Bananarama, TLC


Vulnerable: Marvin Gaye and Roy Orbison with Aretha Franklin, the Ramones and Mary Margaret O'Hara


Class acts: John Lennon and Mick Jagger with The Kinks, David Bowie, Robert Wyatt, Richard & Linda Thompson, Kirsty MacColl, The Smiths


The urge for going: Joni Mitchell with Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Rickie Lee Jones, Steely Dan


What is soul?: Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, Joe Cocker, Paul Rodgers, Elkie Brooks, Terry Reid, Jess Roden, Frankie Miller and Rod Stewart with Dexy's Midnight Runners, Kiki Dee, Bonnie Raitt, Tedeschi Trucks Band


Croon: Iggy Pop, Gregory Isaacs, Kate Bush, Luther Vandross and Frank Sinatra with George Jones, The Carpenters, Prince


So, what?: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Hank Mobley with Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin, John Surman


The spectacle of anguish: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Ian Curtis with Chris Bell, Amy Winehouse


Psalms and raptures: Van Morrison, Burning Spear, Alex Harvey and John Lydon with Bob Dylan


Epilogue: Harvest

Acknowledgements

Index

Editorial Reviews

11/05/2018
British music journalist Coleman (The Train in the Night) examines the importance of the human voice on his life and in popular music in this intriguing study. Coleman treasures the voice (“Before words are distinguishable, voices make some sort of case for our close attention,” he writes), which comforted and helped him socialize as an awkward teenager. He arranges his book by categories of his own classification—for example, “Vulnerable” (Marvin Gaye and Roy Orbison) and “Class Acts” (John Lennon and Mick Jagger)—and his all-star lineup of American popular music heroes includes Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. Coleman eloquently describes the music of Motown singer Marvin Gaye as a mix of “beauty and self-delusion” and notes the “otherworldly intensity of the Pentecostal church” in Aretha Franklin’s soaring sound. He explains how the sounds of American R&B, blues, and soul music emerged in the voices of Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the shape-shifting David Bowie. As Coleman contemplates the sound of soul, he reaches beyond the voice to discover the lyricism in the instrumental jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Coleman beautifully reveals the sheer pleasure of listening to music. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Voices

"What makes a singer brilliant? Nick Coleman beautifully articulates the criteria in Voices . . . He’s a ravishing and witty stylist. He also has a poignant story of his own to tell: Coleman is totally deaf in one ear and suffers from in–and–out loss in the other. If anything, however, those challenges seem to have only amplified his awareness of humanity’s purest means of expression.” —Jim Farber, Billboard

“Deafness is a particularly horrible condition for a music critic. But just as Beethoven didn’t need his hearing to compose some of his greatest music, Mr. Coleman doesn’t need it to write beautifully about music: He hears, listens, better with a quarter of an ear than most of us do with both. He has the knack of summing up a singer with an epigram that makes the listener thrill in agreement . . . Every reader and listener is rewarded.” —Wesley Stace, The Wall Street Journal

“Covers pop vocal standouts including the laryngeal grind of Suzi Quatro, the timbral acrobatics of Margaret O'Hara, the purgatorial wail of Patti Smith and the gentle quaver of the Kinks' Ray Davies . . . A personal survey of a varied corpus . . . The celebration of grain, roughness, imperfection, lo–fi and, really, any sound at all.” —Jonathan Leal, Los Angeles Times

“One singer can transport a listener, while another might leave the same listener cold. It’s a mystery, one that British arts and music journalist Coleman explores by way of examining the power of the voice itself and how it defines the work of singular performers including Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Mick Jagger, Roy Orbison, and Patti Smith.” —Publishers Weekly

“Coleman has endured severe hearing loss since 2007, but that hasn't dampened his appreciation of popular music. Here, he takes readers on his personal journey through the songs that have influenced him, most of them from his formative years in the 1960s and '70s . . . He makes many astute observations . . . Pleasure in music, writes Coleman, 'is arguably the most complicated pleasure there is.' This book proves the truth of that statement.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Coleman’s ambitious literary style . . . separates his writing from straightforward music criticism . . . For record–store fiends and casual listeners looking to explore aspects of music beyond today’s Top 40.” —Booklist

“Coleman beautifully reveals the sheer pleasure of listening to music.” —Publishers Weekly

“Voices isn't just illuminating and thought–provoking and clever; it is exciting.” —Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments

Praise for The Train in the Night

Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Trust Book Prize

“This is a book for anyone who grew up with pop music, listens to it still and has spent too much time thinking about it and talking about it. But it's also a book about love and loss and middle age and looming mortality, written with grace and the driest imaginable humour. I'm not sure I can recommend it highly enough.” —Spectator

“Coleman is a spirited person, who writes with an irresistible Hornby–esque skip in his style... funny and admirable.” —Andrew Motion, Guardian

“In a story told with warmth, wit, candour and dry, self–deprecating humour and without a whiff of self–pity... Coleman is insightful and convincing in his musings on music's emotional impact, funny in his recollections of the pains of growing up and sharp in his analysis of the thorny issue of musical 'taste.'“ —Time Out

“A beautiful, elegiac ballad. Coleman writes elegantly and movingly of his youth, of growing up and of his intimate relationship with an art form that has shaped his memories.” —Financial Times

“Wonderful.” —Nick Hornby, author of Funny Girl

“A deft and heartfelt exploration of music, silence, adolescence, English pop and the emotional consequences of serious illness, and above all a discussion of something modern culture has very nearly lost touch with – the idea, and the desirability, of taste.” —D. J. Taylor, author of The Prose Factory

Praise for Pillow Man

“Full of melancholy wit, it's sure to beguile fans of Nick Hornby.” —Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

“A quirky, well–written romance cum mystery tale.” —Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

“Coleman imbues his writing with a dry wit that enlivens the everyday, and with pithy character descriptions.” —Independent on Sunday

“Sharp, witty and beautifully written, it only takes moments to fall head first into the beautiful style of Pillow Man.” —We Love This Book

“A raw account of the male emotional landscape.” —Liza Hoggard, Independent

From the Publisher

2018-08-13

A music journalist surveys more than a half-century of popular music.

Coleman (The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss, 2013) has endured severe hearing loss since 2007, but that hasn't dampened his appreciation of popular music. Here, he takes readers on his personal journey through the songs that have influenced him, most of them from his formative years in the 1960s and '70s. As with any work of nonfiction based on opinion, many of the author's statements are bound to raise eyebrows. Jazz lovers will share his appreciation of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," but many may bristle at his claim that every jazz recording since then "only counts really as an afterthought or further meditation," which is a little like saying that no director has made a great film since Citizen Kane. Of Aretha Franklin, Coleman writes, "no voice in any musical style has ever cleaved as closely to the spirit of ecstasy and its close associate, rapture." Franklin's genius is beyond dispute, but opera and jazz fans might counter with Jessye Norman, Maria Callas, Billie Holiday, and other equally rapturous performers. The author begins one chapter by stating that it would have been a shame if the Cuban missile crisis had destroyed the world because that would have meant "[n]o Beatles, no Stones, no Animals or Yardbirds or Kinks or Small Faces or Led Zeppelin"—and, ultimately, no Taylor Swift. Well, yes, but one could be forgiven for thinking that other losses might have been more catastrophic. Even readers who disagree with Coleman's opinions, however, will appreciate his passion, and he makes many astute observations, as when he writes that the Rolling Stones' output "was never a music of intimate connection but an animated description of life as it is lived on the edge of its own times."

Pleasure in music, writes Coleman, "is arguably the most complicated pleasure there is." This book proves the truth of that statement.

Kirkus Reviews