Lullaby Voice

I don’t remember my mother ever singing me a lullaby. She had many voices, just not one for lullabies. She had a squawking Jewish mother voice for storytelling, an icy almost-British accent for when she was having fights, an exaggerated Miss Piggy yell to get our attention in the basement (this was the voice she was best known for among my friends)… but she didn’t have a soothing voice in her repertoire. She was never natural, always performing. So, no lullabies for me.

And anyway, a lullaby isn’t a performance. It’s basically folk music; it serves a social purpose. The lullaby already existed before the conscious pretense of artistic musical expression. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but folk music (communal storytelling through music) always seemed less selfish as compared to pop music (Lionel Richie dancing upside down). At least, my pop music felt selfish: I started making music to get attention, to live out a fantasy. I made sure that my virtuosity was proof of my talent and the worst insult I could imagine was someone telling me it reminded them of a lullaby. My motivation was so ego-driven, how was my music supposed to bind people together? I always envied musicians who made music for a social purpose: gospel musicians for God, DJs for dancing, folk musicians for community, and lullabies for soothing children.

Contra pop music, a lullaby has no backing band or beat. Usually zero accompaniment. It has to work by itself a cappella. You can’t rely on a strange, unexpected harmonic twist to provide drama in the musical storytelling, like the “nothing really matters” chord in the opening of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” You can’t count on a sonic surprise like the awkward stutter of muted guitar strings before the chorus of Radiohead’s “Creep.” No saxophone solos, no filter sweep, no autotune. A lullaby, in fact, is pure melody, the voice itself.

I’ve always been old-fashioned when it comes to respecting melody. Melody is the surface of a song, the facade of the building. So, when someone asks you if you’ve heard a new song, they’ll just sing the melody. You know the one that goes “groove is in the hea-ar-ar-ar-art?” For most people, the melody is the whole song.

Harmony—the chords that support the melody—is the invisible foundation of the building. These chords have the unglamorous power to maximize emotions in a song, but chords aren’t enough to be a song by themselves, and you definitely can’t hum a chord. Imagine “With or Without You” if Bono never started singing. Harmony is melody’s bitch, with no life of its own.

Hearing a melody a cappella, divorced from its harmony and expelled from its sound-world, is a kind of test. Does it still sound like music, when it’s sung, just like that, by a civilian (an amateur)? The ultimate test: How does it sound when sung by your mother?

If it passes this test, the melody indeed becomes the whole song—music’s synecdoche. All lullabies have passed this test; they’ve survived for centuries. They’re still there after capitalism, sleeping pills, and the invention of recording, never outgrowing their original purpose.

That’s probably why we don’t listen to recordings of lullabies. They don’t exist as recordings the way pop songs do. A pop song is a specific moment in time captured by a specific artist; it belongs to that artist and we acknowledge their ownership, it will always sound the same. Hearing it live, or hearing a cover version of it, will still always refer us back to the original.

There is only one “Take On Me” and it is by a-ha, and if we hear some eighties tribute band performing it, we are comparing it to the 1981 studio performance of “Take On Me.” There is no imagining the song without the precise combination of cheesy drum sounds and the voice of Morten Harket (I just Googled his name). A pop song is alive only at the moment that it is born—from then on it is frozen like a caveman in ice. It’s near-impossible to get people to hear a cover of an iconic pop song with fresh ears, as if for the first time. I know; I’ve tried.

When I first switched to piano-only concerts in 2004, one of my best/worst ideas was to re-arrange eighties pop songs using jazz and classical gestures. One of the songs I devised was a faux-Baroque arrangement of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” (the “sail away” song). But my cover didn’t really have a chance to be heard objectively. It could only remind people of the original version, still living rent-free in everyone’s collective nostalgia-mind.

Folk music doesn’t have this baggage: there’s no original recording of a lullaby. It’s not even something we can evaluate on the basis of musical taste. It either works at its function or it fails. The baby sleeps or it doesn’t (as in comedy, the crowd laughs or it doesn’t). We don’t know or care who composed it. It only matters who is singing it.

So, what kind of voice works when it comes to the lullaby? A soothing voice, a reassuring voice, something that takes away pain, doubt, something that makes the listener feel safe, something gentle and patient—a voice you can trust as natural. An unnatural voice may fool some of the people, but authenticity is something that we just know when we hear it.

Some years ago, a friend got so excited to play me something new he had discovered. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard it yet, everyone was talking about it, I was going to love it so much, he said. I hate being told I’ll love something before I’ve had the chance to decide for myself. He pressed play. Guitar music, not my cup of tea. But it had enough harmonic flair, the feel of the drums was a relatively disciplined combination of modern sounds with just enough surprising moments to give it humanity, there were sonic references I recognized and some I even appreciated… and then the singer came in. This singer thought he could fool me by hiding inside this respectable backing track. But his insecurity was audible to me, he was faking it. He had figured out a way to imitate the sound of “letting go” without letting go. An unmusical person’s idea of unrestrained artistry. Barf.

An untrustworthy voice does not please the gods of music. “An untrustworthy voice” is a phrase that reminds me too much of my mother. Music is too important a place for me, it can’t be tainted by a voice that pretends.

Imagine a lullaby sung by this kind of pretender. There’s something traumatizing about the intrusion of fakery into the child’s room at such a fragile moment as bedtime. A singer’s voice has to be believable, even though singing itself is performative. There’s a contradiction here. Of course, we understand that a singer goes to a studio, steps into a vocal booth, sings their part hundreds of times, receives input from producers, chooses the best moments, and massages them into a Frankenstein’s monster called a “comp” (compilation? composition?). But if it works, this monster appears to us as a cohesive performance. Sure, we like to imagine it was a single transcendent moment of emotional truth. As with our favourite actors, we demand naturalism despite knowing that we are watching something staged, something that probably took weeks to shoot with dozens of crew members standing around just out of the frame of the camera.

A lullaby doesn’t need to be Frankenstein-ed into existence. As a child I didn’t realize any of this. I just accepted that my bedtime was lullaby-less. And somewhere buried inside me there was a longing for a soothing voice.

As a young teenager, when the other boys were smoking weed or discovering their sexuality, I sat at the piano binging on late eighties jazz fusion, the more virtuosic and macho the better, trying to decipher the complexities—the worst offenders being Chick Corea Elektric Band (yes, that is how it’s spelled, with a K). This kind of musical masturbation kept my brain occupied as my emotions hummed along in the background.

I started getting good at showing off. I could play the iconic drum fill from Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” I could play piano for a really popular cool kid from my school as he sang “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats at a party. I was so musically sensitive I could even modulate the chords of the song if the cool kid accidentally went off-key (I knew how to make him look better than he was). I became that musical genius kid who could play anything. This meant I could corral some friends into starting a band with me. One of these first bands was called Decoy (jazz-rock in the style of Sting but named after a Miles Davis fusion album), and we won a battle of the bands when I was fourteen years old. Winning felt really good. The prize was two days of studio time.

Though I was technically the drummer, I was actually a little musical dictator, micromanaging my poor buddies who just wanted to be in a band for the laughs. We covered “Purple Haze” even though I didn’t even like the Jimi Hendrix original, and I butchered the song by adding complicated chords, trying to make it sound like Chick Corea. The professional engineer at the studio could see some talent in me, but also realized my hyperactive controlling personality wasn’t doing the music any favours. He gave me the nickname Mr. Bennies. I was too in awe of musicianship to understand the value of the lullaby voice.

A couple of years later, after the gateway drug of Chick Corea and fusion, I found my way to actual jazz. But the jazz I liked was still tending towards the virtuosic. As the emperor tells Mozart in the movie Amadeus: “Too many notes.” I became obsessed with the muscular, ecstatic, and frankly coked-up albums of John Coltrane. It was less embarrassing than being into jazz fusion because Coltrane was a legitimate icon.

But one of my jazz piano teachers took pity on me and recommended a John Coltrane collaboration album with the crooner Johnny Hartman. It was from the same time period as the wanky stuff, but this was a whole different Coltrane. Here he wasn’t the star, he was merely an accompanist to an old-fashioned torch singer. He was commenting on the story, part of a dialogue rather than a stream-of-consciousness monologue. Where was my beloved saxophone stud? This album didn’t seem to want to impress me, so I wasn’t impressed. What was this underwhelming crap? It was slow, soporific—almost lullaby-like (yawn!).

At the next piano lesson, the teacher shook his head when I reported back. He told me to listen for the space in the Coltrane/Hartman songs. I admired my teacher so much at first, I just pretended to know what he meant. But I kept listening, and slowly I started to hear it. After each saxophone phrase there was space that I could fill with my own emotional reactions. It was the beginning of a long and painful goodbye to my worship of show-offs. Why had I spent so much time venerating these fast-fingered con artists? Looking back, I see them for the fakers and charlatans they were.

I was one of those fakers. I’d been (mis)using music to impress people, instead of connecting with them. Like Prince sang in “When Doves Cry,” “maybe I’m just like my mother,” she who performed for people instead of being natural with them. I had unknowingly replicated her life strategy in my approach to music, but not for much longer. Thanks to my jazz piano teacher, I was drawn to a new musical space where connection mattered more than technical skill. A space without ego, a space without Mr. Bennies or my mother. And that space came to be filled with lullaby voices—Johnny Hartman, not Chick Corea, Beach House not Björk, Roberta Flack not Aretha Franklin. And most of all, Enya.