Broadway Vocal Coach

15. 11 Creative Ways to Find New Audition Songs

February 06, 2023 Broadway Vocal Coach Season 1 Episode 15
Broadway Vocal Coach
15. 11 Creative Ways to Find New Audition Songs
Show Notes Transcript

One of the biggest fears for actors is singing overdone audition material. Second to that is having a book full of repertoire that simply doesn't suit them, and we get it. Your song choices say a lot about you. What if performing your audition material felt as good as slipping into your favorite outfit? It all starts with finding the right material for you. Today we're giving you 11 creative ways to look for new repertoire and what to keep in mind when choosing the perfect song.

Resources mentioned:
www.theatretrip.com
@themusicaldealer on TikTok
www.musicnotes.com/audition
Singers Musical Theatre Anthology published by Hal Leonard

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Jo...

Chelsea:

One of the biggest fears for actors is singing overdone audition material. Second to that is having a book full of repertoire that simply doesn't suit them, and we get it. Your song choices say a lot about you. What if performing your audition material felt as good as slipping into your favorite outfit? It all starts with finding the right material for you. Today we're talking about creative ways to look for new repertoire and what to keep in mind when choosing the perfect songs. I am Chelsea Wilson, a performer turned voice teacher to Broadway stars and vocal coach on Broadway productions like the Phantom of the Opera, School of Rock and more.

Cynthia:

And I'm Cynthia Kortman Westphal, a Broadway music director, conductor, voice coach, and tenured faculty member at one of the top musical theater programs in the country.

Chelsea:

Here on the Broadway Vocal Coach Podcast, you can expect real talk about the business, practical advice, and constant encouragement. We believe there's space for every artist in this industry. All you need is the right support. So consider us your two woman hype team. Welcome to the Broadway Vocal Coach Podcast, where we help musical theatre performers get unstuck and take the next step in their career. Cynthia, if there's a question that we, as voice teachers and vocal coaches always get asked, it's, what should I sing? Please tell me what I should sing. Yes. And maybe the second question is, what should I not sing?

Cynthia:

What should I not sing? Exactly.

Chelsea:

folks are worried. Yes, people are concerned and well, maybe I'll give you just a little hint right now. There's just no black and white right or wrong answer, my friends. Nope. It's about finding the right material for you and how your audition material suits you, says the most about you, right? Like if it's a great fit for you, wow, that speaks volumes about who you are as an artist and as a person. If it's not a great fit, but a cool song, but it's not a great fit for you, that also speaks to your preparation or, or your song choice as well. So it's just about finding what fits you, which is what our conversation is about today. People might be looking for song material for multiple reasons. A lot of folks come to us because they're looking for new audition material. But as a voice teacher, I'm also giving people tons of suggestions all the time just to work on for their vocal development things that might not be the perfect fit for an audition or totally age appropriate necessarily, but that is going to really help them work on their voice or explore a different color or style. So there's a lot of reasons why you might be looking for material, and we're gonna be talking about creative ways to look for new songs that suits whatever need you've got. And we'll also go into musical theater pieces as well as pop music. Cynthia, I have one thing I would love to hear from you about, because I know you have some strong feelings and some great advice when it comes to obscure material, especially in, in an audition room. So singers who are maybe really worried that everything in their book's overdone and so they go on this hunt for the most creative, the most unknown, the most obscure, never heard before, you know what I mean? Like what, what do you have to say about bringing really obscure material into the audition room? Specif.

Cynthia:

Yeah, I have thoughts. I have thoughts. First of all, I think when people get caught up in this idea that they have to bring in something unknown or obscure so that no one else is doing it, I think you've already fallen into the trap of trying to play the game. and there's no game. You cannot second guess what anyone behind that table is thinking. You simply can't. And so already, just by trying to do that, I, I think you've already done yourself a disservice and, and probably not chosen a song that fits you really, really well and is a really good piece of material. Instead, you've sort of fallen in the trap of just trying to find a song that nobody knows and that nobody else is doing. but past that, I put the obscure material can kind of be in two categories and one you might find something very obscure that nobody knows, but that has some kind of ring of familiarity about it. so that if I'm hearing it for the very first time as a first impression, I already kind of can make sense of it. I can latch onto the story really easy. Maybe there's a melodic hook that's really easy to to grasp onto. That's gonna be a pretty successful song because you have to think of it as it's a very first impression and you only get one chance. So if you're gonna bring this into an audition, the people behind the table need to be able to quickly get past the song and pay attention to you. And if the song is either not readily accessible to the ear on a first listen, or if it's, I hate to say this, but facts or facts, if it's maybe not a really well crafted song, if it's not a really skillfully written song, that can also make it so that it's just really tough to digest on a first hearing, in which case the people behind the table are gonna be sitting there going. What is the song and like, what is the song about? And oh, that's a weird hook hook and I can't quite make sense of it. And by that time, your 32 bar, one minute slot is over. All we've thought about is this song. We never got to the point where we really paid attention to you as an artist. So that's my, that's my word of caution about obscure material. Make sure it's a really well-crafted, excellent song with good storytelling and a good melody and a good hook and that it fits you really, really well. Don't choose it just because it's obscure.

Chelsea:

I think that's a great advice and a fantastic thing to keep in mind as you go on your journey to find great audition material. Let's dive on in. We've, 11 creative ways to find new songs, and several of these I'm very excited about to share with you all. Let's get right to it. One of my favorite ways to suggest folks to, to find new material is if you like,"I could have danced all night," try"show me." So for example, if you know I am an Eliza Doolittle, this is totally my vibe, this is my vocal range. I like,"I could have danced all night," but I am looking for something slightly different than that. Or maybe I've used that for a long time and I'm ready for something a little bit fresher. What other songs does that character sing in the very same musical? There's a wealth of material. My Fair Lady, and it is not just,"I could have danced all night," which is of course the song we all know. There's a lot more out there. Leading on that idea. Number two is if you like my Fair Lady, try Gigi. Try looking at other material written by the same composers. So Lerner and Loewe, the composing team behind the Golden Age classic My Fair lady starring julie Andrews back in the day wrote plenty of other fantastic shows, and some of them, which are lesser well known, Gigi being one of them, paint Your Wagon being one of them. And their other two big hits are Brigadoon and Camelot. But there's music in there that fits the vibe and fits the the energy and kind of a lot of the same vocal colors. As, let's say,"I could have danced all night," right? It's the same composing team. It's the same era. And you can apply this to contemporary music as well. Look at what this, if you find yourself drawn to a lot of this composer's music, what else have they written? Go into their back catalog and find other shows and other music that they've composed.

Cynthia:

I love that. And believe it or not, even with some of the most famous golden age composers, there are songs. Most people don't know. Even, even the famous writers had some shows that were not well known that were, you know, not big hits back in the day. So even they have some quote unquote obscure material, but that fits in the good category of, it's gonna be really skillfully written. It's gonna be really well crafted. It might just not have been in a hit musical back in the day, but the song is still a really, really great song. I love that one. How about Chelsea? How about there's a lot of well-known Broadway stars right now that are putting out albums.

Chelsea:

Yes. My third point here is: if you love Audra McDonald, check out her solo albums, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you find yourself drawn to a certain artist or a certain actor, especially some of our, our very well known singers and actors in the business, they've put out solo albums. Many of them have different themes or might be even be featuring the music of a certain composer where we as listeners get to become familiar with a whole bunch of new material by a composer that this artist loves. We've, we never heard all this other material before, or maybe some of these songs were written for them for this album. So I love doing this, especially when I find myself aligned vocally or, you know, again, like an energy match with a certain actor or performer I love to go dive into- what, what are their solo albums full of? There's just a wealth of material there. Number four is very closely related to this, so if you think you are the next Leslie Odom Jr. Then go on, check out their resume or their I B D B profile and. All the shows they've been in back from before, they were famous, back from before we knew them. What were the early shows that they were doing? And you might be inspired into looking into those shows for material for yourself if you find yourself aligned with that actor and their career path.

Cynthia:

I love that one. That one's really fun. I've seen some resumes actually that you can not with everybody, but sometimes you can even find old resumes that dip into their college years and their high school years. And you can, you know, so if you're a brand new actor starting out, maybe you're in your teens or your early twenties and you really resonate with an actor who's maybe in their forties, so you're not gonna be playing those roles right now, but it's still, like you were saying, an energy match or there's something, something similar about your voice quality, that it's sometimes really fun to dip back and find, what was that person doing when they were starting out in the business? And you can find some really great, great material that way.

Chelsea:

absolutely. Let's get to a couple tangible resources for all of y'all. So one of my favorite discoveries of this past year is a website called theatre trip.com, theater spelled t r e at the end theatre trip.com, which I almost feel like a little sad to divulge this to all of you because I truly think that this website has helped me look a whole lot smarter than I actually am when it comes to giving people recommendations, material recommendations. Theater trip.com is created by this woman named Stacy Karen, and wow, what a brilliant mind. My friends, she has put together this incredible website. With lists of 32 songs, musical theater songs about new beginnings or 50 bass baritone songs that are comedic, et cetera. I mean, there's just lists upon lists upon lists. But the coolest feature of the website is she has these musical song lists for nearly any musical you can imagine, and they're all titled similarly, the best audition songs for Next to Normal by character. She goes through and suggests five songs for each individual character in that show. So songs that are not from that show but that would be a good fit for that character, for that musical style, et cetera. She even goes so far as to suggest songs for the ensemble. If you're auditioning for the ensemble of this show, here's some song ideas. It is a fantastic resource. I really can't recommend it enough. I think you could spend hours upon hours getting lost in this website, getting tons of ideas. Get your notebook out, there's a lot of information waiting for you on theatre trip.com.

Cynthia:

I'll be checking that out immediately. Great. And how about songbook resources and publications?

Chelsea:

Yes. One of my favorite songbook resources, this is our sixth idea for all of you, is the Singers Musical theater anthology series published by Hal Leonard. If you were taking voice lessons in the two thousands, your voice teacher probably suggested you go out and buy the physical copies of these anthologies, which is of course, My experience, I have plenty of hard, hard copies of these anthologies. They're truly incredible. It's an amazing resource to be able to see songs categorized by voice type. And again, things that are of course, very popular, well known and others that you might never have heard of before. In fact, tangent, it's a goal of mine. Maybe I'll see if I can make this happen in 2023 to, for me and my husband to like, I wanna make this a TikTok series going through each of the singer's musical theater anthology albums, and like sing through every song in the book. Because truly there's so much material in there I don't know. Oh, nice. But I know it has to be good. But like, I don't know it, you know? Anyways, it's fantastic. And here's the deal. You don't even need to purchase a copy of this to get some of the benefit out of these lists. I would go onto the website where it's listed on Amazon or on the Hal Leonard website, and just look at the, the index of songs. Look at the, the table of contents for each of the volumes, again, divided by voice type. And that is just a great jumping off point. Well, here's what Hal Leonard has compiled as great songs for Sopranos volumes one through, I don't know, seven. We're up to so many volumes at this point. Yeah. Just start to go through and create a playlist for yourself of songs that you, that you don't know and you'd like to learn better. It's a great resource.

Cynthia:

And I would just add when, when you were talking earlier about sometimes you need songs for auditions, but sometimes you want practice material. And sometimes, let's be honest, it's nice to have just songs, new songs to sing just for fun. Like you were saying, me and my husband, just getting together and singing through these songs can be really fun. Yes. And if you think about the amount of money that it might cost you, if you're gonna order three or four songs off music notes, Dot com versus if you're gonna buy an anthology that has say, 20 songs in it, you can sometimes get a lot bigger bang for your buck and then actually end up with a nice little library of material. So if there's any gift giving opportunity coming up for you, either holiday or birthday, or Valentine's Day or whatnot, encourage someone to give you one of these books.

Chelsea:

A Yes. That's a great gift. That's a great idea. It's

Cynthia:

a great gift. And like, and there's so many Mm, so it's the gift that can keep on giving.

Chelsea:

Exactly. Another fantastic digital resource for you all is this phenomenal account on TikTok. It's@themusicaldealer and essentially he is on there recommending new cast albums that he loves, that you should be listening to. Great, unknown songs from the Australian production of this new musical that most of us here in America haven't heard of yet. There's fantastic recommendations on this TikTok account. Again, that's at the musical dealer on TikTok. Also go in, click his link tree. There are links to detailed spreadsheets of musicals and his rankings and categorizations and shows for children and shows with L G B T Q representation and all of these fantastic resources that can really expand your mind into all the things that you could be listening to and exploring and discovering in terms of new material. I love that account. Again, that's at the musical dealer on TikTok. Which brings us to points eight and nine two of our resources, our Broadway Vocal Coach resources that we have totally for free on our Instagram account. We've been from the very beginning, featuring creator spotlights on our Instagram page. If you go to our Instagram feed, it's blue. Image with people's pictures on them. They're the blue squares in our feed. If you go and you look and you find the blue squares in our feed, we've been featuring creators that we love, we admire, who are creating interesting new works in the Broadway and musical theater world, and who you might not have heard of. For the most part, we, we were featuring folks who we, who we think might be new to our audience. And also recommendations in those posts of a handful of songs to listen to by these composers, by these creators. It's a fantastic resource. And point nine, another one of our BVC Instagram resources for you is our,"if you like this, then try that" series, which is a red image in our feed. Go in and find all of our red repertoire carousels. There is also a highlight reel. On our profile, and you can go in and click through for all of those"if you like this then that" series, this is where Cynthia and I have handpicked songs, for example, if you like astonishing, try. Such and such from such and such. Nothing is coming from off the top of my head in this moment, but we give handfuls of other song recommendations for more popular, more well known audition songs. So if you do find yourself gravitating to the"Astonishings" of the world, then we've also given you a songs that we think would be a great fit for you, if that's something that you like. So check that out. That's on our Broadway Vocal Coach Instagram account@bwayvocalcoach. Now points 10 and 11 to round this out when it comes to pop music, because pop music folks feel stumped sometimes when trying to find pop repertoire that suits them and is usable for the kinds of auditions and the shows that they wanna be going in for. So a couple of suggestions for you here. Number 10, our creative idea, eh, it's not that creative. I can't give myself that much. Credit Music notes.com is a fantastic resource, and if you don't know this recently, over the past couple years, there are now audition cut versions of pop songs on the Music Notes website. In fact, if you go to music notes.com/audition, you will find precut prem. 16 and 32 bar, or I think they might be referred to as shortcuts and long cuts of. I mean hundreds at this point of pop songs that make for really great audition songs. They've been selected because they are good in an audition room and they've actually, the arrangements have been redone. If you've ever bought a pop song off music notes and been disappointed by the piano arrangements, you are not alone. That is usually how pop songs get transferred to the page is in rather disappointing arrangements. Yep. But these arrangements these audition cut specific arrangements have been rearranged to sound good on the piano when it's just you and the piano in an audition room. So that's a fantastic resource. You can sort by genre, you can sort by eras and decades. It's a fantastic resource for finding pop song audition cuts. My final idea for finding pop music is, again, it's a simple one, but a lot of folks don't think to do it. Make Spotify radio playlists or if you're an Apple music person. Whatever the equivalent is on Apple Music. If there's songs that you love to sing by artists that you love, but you have a feeling they might be on the more overdone side, or they're already existing in a musical, like let's say Uninvited by Alanis Morissette, that song is already in a musical, jagged little pill, and you're not gonna wanna use that song to audition for jagged little pill with, again, it's already in the musical. Unless you're being given that audition material, it's maybe not like your best choice for something to bring in for that show. But say you love the, the vibe of that song, you love the range, go in, create a Spotify radio station from that song and let the Spotify algorithm give you, 20, 30 plus other ideas of songs that live in a similar vein, in a similar vibe, in a similar era, and start to do some listening. I would then just start to curate new Spotify playlists, or again, whatever music service you listen to that you use. Playlist of stuff that you want to listen to down the line or stuff that are absolute yes. This is totally great. I'm gonna bring this into my next studio class. I'm gonna bring this into my next voice lesson and start to curate a new collection of music that way. You can also find folks public playlists on Spotify, like if you can search like mean girls audition songs, and I have a feeling you'll find some playlists of songs that folks have already put together on, again, Spotify or Apple Music. Of their existing ideas. So, go ahead. Don't reinvent the wheel here. There's plenty of ways to use the algorithm and to use the science behind what we're listening to already, to come up with some new and creative ideas for material in terms of pop songs and, and musical theater song. Same things applies there.

Cynthia:

One last thing. I also keep a note in my little notes app of my phone that if I hear a song that. is really catchy. Or a song that I haven't thought of in a long time that I re, that I'm like, oh, that's such a great song. I'd forgotten about that one. And I generally hear these songs in a grocery store. Grocery stores are one of my prime places to find rock pop music, believe it or not, because those playlists in grocery stores are designed to be little earworms and to be catchy and to kind of make you a little bit mindless so that you start buying more groceries. There's all sorts of reasons why you hear certain songs in public places, so sometimes I won't always know the title, but if I can catch a bit of the lyric, I write that lyric down in my notes and then I just google that line later and it pulls. whatever song that is. So maybe consider that too, so that if you're ever at a concert or in a grocery store or at a restaurant or the gas station or any of these random places where you might hear a really great song, pop it in your notes. Find it when you get home, listen to it. And that I, I believe it or not, I have found some really great pop Rock songs in the weirdest of places.

Chelsea:

That happened to me quite literally two days ago. I was in the car listening to the radio and I mean like the radio, radio, the radio the radio that comes through over the sound waves through my town, and that, that song from the like late nineties. You say you talk so all the time, and I was like, God, I haven't heard that song so long. Someone needs to sing that for an audition. Same exact thing. I keep this note as well. Or I keep playlists full of these songs. Yeah. To give out to our students, to our clients. I love that suggestion. That's a great one. That's a bonus. 12th, 12th idea. Just be listening in the grocery store folks. Yeah. That's a creative way to find new song material.

Cynthia:

And then the bonus 13th idea is if you don't want to be that person, there are people like me and Chelsea who do this you can ask for help,

Chelsea:

Exactly right. Wow. Thank you for wrapping it up cuz you're exactly right. This is exactly the kind of work that we do with our clients within the BVC membership is, going through, working with people, work, shopping, their existing repertoire, giving them our ideas for new material, helping them whittle it down to stuff that really suits them and brings out the best in them for their vocal development, and of course for auditions as well. We love to do this. This is, this is a fun- it's a fun activity for the two of us, that's for sure. It is. Well, excellent. I hope you've enjoyed our list of 11, which turned into 12, and then 13 bonus items of creative ways to find new song material, whether you're looking for stuff to bring into your next voice lesson or into your next audition. If you enjoyed today's episode, take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram@bwayvocalcoach. Share this episode with a friend and please consider it leaving us a review. It helps more folks find our show. If something resonated with you from today's episode, or if you've had a song that you know, you're like, listen, you gotta add this to to your Spotify playlist of possible recommendations. We wanna hear about it. DM us on Instagram or send us an email. Hello bway vocal coach.com. And if you are ready to get expert mentorship and ongoing training, then you're invited to join us inside the B VBC membership book, a free consult with us. We can't wait to hear your story and help you take the next step in your career. Thanks for listening.