When it comes to working on a rock/pop song, especially for auditions, there's some common questions we hear all the time. How do I act this song? Should I move and groove or just stand there and sing? And how much style should I sing with? And then it usually ends with comments like, I just don't know where to start, and I just feel so awkward! Don't worry, we've got you. Today is part one in a two-part series where we are giving you some tangible tools that you can use to help you act your pop rock song with confidence.
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Connect with us on instagram, @bwayvocalcoach , and @bvcaspire for college prep content.
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Join our free, Wednesday newsletter email lis...
When it comes to working on a rock/pop song, especially for auditions, there's some common questions we hear all the time. How do I act this song? Should I move and groove or just stand there and sing? And how much style should I sing with? And then it usually ends with comments like, I just don't know where to start, and I just feel so awkward! Don't worry, we've got you. Today is part one in a two-part series where we are giving you some tangible tools that you can use to help you act your pop rock song with confidence.
Register for our free College Audition Q&A on March 6th!
https://www.bwayvocalcoach.com/college
Here's 4 ways you can work with us here at Broadway Vocal Coach:
Use the code PODCAST15 to save 15% on BVC Academy and BVC Masterclass at any time.
College MT Auditions? Watch our recent live Q&A masterclass! Get the replay and free college audition guide here.
Want to work with us? Take the Quiz & Book a Consult!
Connect with us on instagram, @bwayvocalcoach , and @bvcaspire for college prep content.
Find us at www.bwayvocalcoach.com
Join our free, Wednesday newsletter email lis...
BVC Podcast 2-20-23 Acting Pop
Chelsea: [00:00:00] Hey, this is Broadway Vocal Coach co-founder Chelsea Wilson, and here at BVC we know that being a young artist or the parent one is hard, especially looking towards the college audition process. College musical theater auditions and pre-screens feel so overwhelming you don't even know where to start, which is why I wanna ask you the question, what if you could apply to college musical theater programs without the overwhelm and be done by September 30th?
Well, that's exactly what we offer inside our college prep program, BVC Aspire. Everything you need, all in one place with expert support and guidance all along the way. If you listen to our show each week, you know that we help musical theater performers take their next step. And so for our listeners, we've put together a college musical theater audition live q and a webinar, so you can immediately feel more peace of mind and get your questions answered from experts who know. If what I'm saying is striking a cord, then get the relief that you need and take that first step.
Register for our free q and a webinar at [00:01:00] bwayvocalcoach.com/college. And when you do, you'll immediately get our Getting Started guide as a PDF to download right away. You deserve to have the information and support to go through the college audition process without the overwhelm. Just go to bwayvocalcoach.com/college.
Cynthia: When it comes to working on a rock pop song, especially for auditions, there's some common questions we hear all the time. How do I act this song? Should I move and groove or just stand there and sing? And how much style should I sing with? And then it usually ends with comments like, I just don't know where to start, and I just feel so awkward.
Don't worry, we've got you. And today is part one in a two-part series where we are giving you some tangible tools that you can use to help you act your pop rock song with confidence. 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: And I'm Chelsea Wilson, a performer turned voice teacher to Broadway stars and [00:02:00] vocal coach on Broadway productions like The Phantom of the Opera, School of Rock, and more.
Cynthia: 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 theater performers get unstuck and take the next steps in their careers.
Chelsea: I'm very excited to have this conversation with you today, Cynthia. Our listeners who listened to, I think it was episode two, about how to get started singing pop rock music, will have heard the story that I was in your inaugural pop rock class at U of M, the very first pop rock class you taught inside the musical theater program. And even at that time we were all like, what are we supposed to be doing? We were all so, so lost.
Cynthia: Including me.
Chelsea: Oh no. You provided [00:03:00] some much needed guidance at that time.
And since then, the industry has just only continued to move more towards pop rock music and having to bring in legitimate pop rock songs for auditions. And this is where a lot of people get hung up and like you said, really insecure. What am I supposed to be doing with myself and my hands and my body and my voice?
Cynthia: Yeah. Do I step touch? What do I do?
Chelsea: Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of information out there. There's some teachers and coaches who have really strong opinions about this. And it's a hard and fast rule. You gotta do it this way every time. And I think your approach is a bit more nuanced, which I love and appreciate. And we're gonna get into that today.
Cynthia: Yeah, I, uh, if you know me by now, you know that I don't have a lot of hard and fast rules, but I have lots of suggestions and opinions that you can take or leave depending on whether it works for you. So let's talk a little bit about just the key differences to start out with.
What are the differences between a rock pop song versus a [00:04:00] musical theater song? Because I think that's kind of the first thing to acknowledge, number one being that there's no show context. It's not tied to some greater plot or storyline. There's no character, so you get to make up your own. There's more room for improvisation and more room to make it personal, and sometimes it's more emotionally driven or sort of vibe or personality driven than it is lyrically driven, all of which, all four of those things make these songs very different than a musical theater song.
Chelsea: And that can be liberating or terrifying. So, let's move into, let, our goal for today's episode is for you to be able to step into a place where it feels liberating to be able to infuse more creativity into how you perform and act these pop songs instead of like decision overload, being kind of debilitated by the, I don't know what to do. Let's give you some practical things to do. [00:05:00] So where should we, we start, Cynthia?
Cynthia: Great. Number one, I think people sometimes forget this one. So here's number one. Go to the original source material. And by that I mean not only have the piece of music that you're learning, but go to the music video of the original artist or the artist who made it famous, or possibly there'll be multiple videos that you can look at.
And the other thing you can do is Google the artist and the song to see if there's something you can find out about why they wrote it or what the greater context of the song is. So for example, a song Wake Me Up when September Ends, which was written by Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day. It might seem like just sort of a general sad song. If you look at the, the context though, it was written by him about the death of his father when he was 10 years old, and his dad died in September. So it's sort of this [00:06:00] feeling of September every year when September rolls around. That's such a hard month for him. It reminds him of when his father died, and that's what the, the title of the song means.
The music video though, is about a couple who is broken apart by the Iraq War. So you can see how even that particular artist had one story that he used in terms of writing it, but he had a different story for the music video, both of which can give you really good ideas.
It can give you specific stories that you might also use in your own storytelling, or at least get your imagination working to think about what would be a really high stakes, super powerful story that I can create around the song. Original source material is always a great place to start.
So I, I will warn you, there are some music videos that are just gonna make you laugh. We get back into the eighties, some of the seventies, they're sort of silly. However, they're often still really high stake stories. They might make you laugh, but they might still give you some really good ideas.[00:07:00]
Chelsea: Great. What's the next step when looking at a pop rock song? What are some ideas for how to act the piece?
Cynthia: Step two. So if you've already kind of got a story that you're thinking about a greater context, the next step to me is to look at your lyrics. And lyrics in pop rock songs can really run the gamut between being really literal. Here's what I mean by literal, literal lyrics meaning you could say those lyrics to your other, to your scene partner, and they would sound fairly natural. They would sound natural in a scene. You could almost monologue them and it would sound like you're having an actual conversation with someone.
Poetic to me is basically anything else, any lyrics that are not gonna sound natural in a conversation. And I include in poetic things that are super repetitive. So like, baby, baby, baby, baby. Oh baby, I'm gonna put that in the poetic land because I can't say that to someone and [00:08:00] sound sort of natural.
So just a couple examples. Something like You've Got a Friend, Carole King and James Taylor both made very famous renditions of this. You just call out my name and you know wherever I am, I'll come running to see you again. Winter, spring, summer, fall, all you've gotta do is call and I'll be there. You've got a friend. That's pretty literal to me, there's a little poetry in there, but, pretty literal. You could say that to your scene partner.
So that, is gonna inform you when we get to step three in these tips. A couple other examples. Ed Sheeran, I think his song Perfect has some literal sections. I think he's got some that in that song that's a little more poetic. But the chorus, cuz we were just kids when we fell in love, not knowing what it was. I will not give you up this time. I think feel to me, fairly literal.
Here's some examples of poetic, Sara Bareilles. Gosh, is she just such a lovely poet? Here's an example from Gravity. Set me free. Leave me be, I don't [00:09:00] wanna fall another moment into your gravity. Here I am and I stand so tall just the way I'm supposed to be, but you're onto me and all over me. There's, there's glimmers of literal there, but really it's just beautiful poetry.
Here's another example of poetry that I think people forget. This is Funky Town. This is one of my favorite ones. I talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. Then we've got the repetition of Gotta move on, gotta move on, gotta move on. Won't you take me to Funky Town? And as we all know, If you said literally to somebody, won't you, won't you take me to Funkytown? Won't you take me to Funkytown? It's just gonna come off weird and a little creepy. And like, you really don't understand the vibe of that song, so I'm gonna put that into the poetic category. Even for a song like this that either has a lot of repetition, some double entendre might even have some humor in it. It's still poetic because to me, poetic means [00:10:00] anything that isn't li I'm, I'm sort of lumping anything that isn't something you could have a natural conversation with your other and your scene partner, I call that poetry. Poetry is gonna lead us down a different path of interpretation for these songs.
So you can see how these different lyrics, different styles of lyrics, are going to need a different approach. So literal can lean a little more towards musical theater storytelling, and you can do a lyric analysis just like you might with your regular musical theater songs, which, you know, those general things are what just happened? Who are you talking to? What do you want? What is standing in the way of what you want? What are you willing to do to get what you want, et cetera. All those things that you would normally think through when you're looking at a musical theater song.
Whereas, a rock pop song that has more of a poetic lyric is gonna need a different type of storytelling. It's gonna probably have something more emotionally based. It might be more physically engaged. There might be more movement, you might have more [00:11:00] opportunity for embellishment, some riffing, some off-roading in terms of your vocal stylization, things like that.
Chelsea: So when it comes to performing more poetic material, how might we interpret a variety of poetic songs differently? Gravity and Funky Town?
The two examples you just gave us are two very different poetic songs. So how might those be different when you go to perform them?
Cynthia: Yeah, they are very different. You're correct. So I have a couple different scales I think of like an audience applause meter. So if you have, on a scale of one to 10, I think of it as, I have a number of these scales. We're just gonna talk about a couple right now.
One is intimate versus performative. Is your song really intimate? Let's say that's a one. Or is it very performative? Let's say that's a 10. It can be anywhere in between. Intimate to me might mean your song has less movement. It [00:12:00] might have a more simple delivery. It might have real small and tasty riffs versus a whole lot of vocal gymnastics. You can also think about. Is it intimate to one person? Are you speaking just to one person? Are you speaking just to yourself? Are you alone in your room working something out, or are you in a crowd of a thousand, but making each of them feel like you're singing directly to them?
If you've ever been at a Taylor Swift concert or like a James Taylor concert, when they're singing a ballad, you swear they are singing it directly to your soul and only to you. So there is a way to make it feel very intimate, even if you have a context of a larger group of people.
Performative on the other hand generally means a lot more movement. You're taking up a lot more space on the stage. You're really purposefully engaging your audience. And again, it could be really performative to one person. It could be really performative [00:13:00] to a crowd of 10,000. It tends to, that style also tends to have a lot more options vocally. You can have a lot more fun kind of off, off-roading from the melody, having a little more fun with improvisation, with riffs, with vocal stylization and things like that.
So if you can intentionally think whether you want your song to be a little more intimate or whether you want it to be more performative, that can give you a really good sense of, am I gonna be moving during this song or am I gonna just stand there and sing? Am I gonna put a whole ton of vocal styling on this song?
Or again, am I gonna keep it really simple? And making those choices is gonna be really important towards you feeling comfortable in your song. If you think of this analysis similarly to the way you might have analyzed a musical theater song, I think it'll start to make a little bit more sense. You're gonna feel a little bit more in control of your song and your performance.
Chelsea: Would you say that some songs [00:14:00] might incorporate a little bit of both? I can think of plenty of songs where the verse might be more intimate and then the chorus swells. And musically, it really demands a more performative interpretation. What do you think about that?
Cynthia: A hundred percent. And that's another great way to analyze it and to be really purposeful about it. And sometimes you can even flip flop that maybe the way it's generally done feels like a really intimate, soft verse, and then you have a big performative loud chorus sometimes, in musical theater flip flopping or tweaking those can be really interesting and put your unique spin on it so that it doesn't feel so much like a cover of the song, but it feels more like your interpretation of the song and something really unique to you. So playing around with that. Yeah, one song does not have to be all of one or all of the other. You can have a lot of fun playing with different sections of your song.
Chelsea: I really love that. [00:15:00] One other thing I wanna mention here that I learned from you is that nothing is very interesting when it lives right in the middle. So I love that you do say that these, this concept, intimate to performative is a spectrum, and it can live anywhere in there.
But if you're living at 50% for the whole song, it's general again, you've made a general choice. Yeah, and so I love the idea of picking and choosing, just making choices, to go one way or the other throughout the song so that you can make some bold choices and feel what that feels like. Bring a fresh perspective, a new energy to the song. Something that feels like your own choice as opposed to, oh, this is, well, it could kind of be either, so I'll just play it right in the middle. That's less interesting, right, ?
Cynthia: That's exactly right. Yeah. Nothing is interesting when it's in the middle. That's so true. And extremes, you know, when you think of musical theater songs too, most of them tend to be something extreme is happening and that's the reason we're [00:16:00] singing about it. And pop and rock songs might be a little different in that way, but I think it's your job than as a musical theater performer to find a way to fit it a little bit more into the world of musical theater versus only in rock pop.
So if in the rock pop world there might be a fun bop that's sort of the radio version or the Spotify version, but the , the radio version might be just like a really fun bop that kind of skates at a mezzo forte the whole time. And, and it's just sort of like a club song that just like the repetition is what's cool about it. That's what's fun on the dance floor.
In musical theater, that's not gonna serve you so well. So then it's your job to see how can I create a character within this, or a situation within this. That allows me to find a little bit more of an extreme, or I should say a lot more of an extreme, so that my softs are soft. My louds are louds. When I choose to be intimate, it's really intimate, and when I choose to be performative, it is really fun, really big, really [00:17:00] taking up a lot of space, lots of movement. Just making some strong, bold choices goes a long way in the style of music for musical theater.
Chelsea: We love a bold choice.
Cynthia: We do love a bold choice.
Chelsea: You have one more tool for us, Cynthia, that you call mapping your emotional arc. And you, you've said that this is really helpful when it comes to working on poetic songs. So tell us a little bit about that.
Cynthia: Yeah, so this kind of coming out of this idea of an intimate versus performative, one way that you might sort of organize that is what I call an emotional arc. So rather than having a plot line like you might in musical theater where you know your character starts here and you know the journey they have to take in order to get here by the end of the song, which propels us to the next part of the story, you have to sort of create that yourself in a lot of these songs.
So one way I like to do that, especially if your song is poetic and you can't use sort of traditional [00:18:00] musical theater storytelling tools is: Break your song into sections. Assign an emotion to each section, and one of the key things to this is to make your beginning emotion and your ending emotion as far apart as you can, as different as you can, so that then through the rest of the song, you can think of what emotions do I need to now journey through in order to get from point A to point B.
So for example, if you're gonna start a song in despair, what would be something almost opposite or very, very different than despair that you might end with. That's where I might start in my analyzation. I might not worry about the middle quite yet. If I'm gonna end in despair, I might think, okay, something really opposite of that might be hopeful.
So if I know I'm gonna start in despair, but I wanna end feeling hopeful, what journey do I have to go through to get there? And as I look through the lyrics. I'm gonna start to map out the [00:19:00] sections, what lyrics kind of pair together, what lyrics lead to the next section and I, and so for example, I might end up doing something like start in despair, and then I'm gonna kind of journey through some feelings of confusion. Then maybe I'm gonna journey through a period of rage, and then I'm finally gonna come to a place of hopefulness.
So you can kind of map out a story in terms of your emotions, which you can also pair. You know, going back to that, Wake Me Up When September Ends example. Let's say you do use the story of a couple being broken apart by war. Let's, let's say your partner has been killed in a war. That's, that's where you start in despair. Then maybe through the next lyrics, it's gonna be confusion. How did this happen? How did we come to this? How did any of this get started in the first place? Then maybe you move on to rage. How angry and out of control this makes you feel that this has happened, and then maybe [00:20:00] eventually you come to a place of, you know what, I think they would want me to be, they would want me to move on. They would want me to find love in my life again. And you move into a place of hopefulness. So you're gonna take your story, but you're gonna kind of go through it as an emotional arc rather than lyric by lyric by lyric.
Cuz if you're dealing with lyrics that are poetic, again, you're not gonna be able to do them as literally as you would a musical theater song.
Chelsea: It's tapping into the subtext. It's tapping into, I think, the other things that can help you as you do this, mapping the emotional arc exercise is to think of and listen to the orchestration, the band, the, mm-hmm, production underneath this, what's happening in the music, what's brewing and stirring underneath the vocal line, because the lyrics can only give you so much in a poetic pop song. They can give you a lot that it's up for a lot of interpretation, but the music is really gonna tell you and inform, or certainly can inform a lot of that subtext, emotional [00:21:00] subtext and information there.
Cynthia: Yeah. And it, that's exactly right. And if we're talking about, we were just talking about a ballad here, which lends itself to that emotional arc. But you can do this with up tempo songs as well and really fun bops. I mean, you could take Funky Town and start in despair and end in hopefulness, that the beginning of the song, you are really down in the dumps. Your friends take you to a dance club and by the end of the night you're feeling great. So you can use these emotional arcs even in really uptempo, fun silly songs as well. Hopefully this also helps you figure out what songs need that movement and what songs you can just stand there and go through that emotional journey. So depending on whether you have the ballad, whether you have something uptempo, whether you want it to feel intimate, whether you want it to feel performative.
The other fun thing about all of these is you can often take the same song and just bend it in different directions. [00:22:00] So if you're going in for a show like Waitress, maybe you wanna tilt it a little more towards an intimate performance. If you're going in for something like Rock of Ages, you just up the up the dial on the performative quality by a whole lot, maybe add in some more movement, things like that. And instantly it's a little bit more of the world of Rock of Ages.
Chelsea: And that's another way that you can efficiently use the pop and rock songs that are in your audition book and not have to go searching for a new song every time you've got another audition coming up. You can just create very specific different interpretations of the songs that you've already got. Even you can go as far as when you're in the audition room to ask the pianist to play it at a faster tempo or a slightly slower tempo. Or if you're making a self-tape of this, get your accompanist to make you a track that's at a slightly faster tempo, slightly slower tempo, so you've got tapes of the same song but [00:23:00] interpreted completely differently. Yeah, that's a really great way to save on some time and some energy, and even some money on like music preparation and purchasing music and all of that so that you can get more bang for your buck with one piece.
Cynthia: Yep. I love just tweaking and twisting existing songs into a different interpretation, and again, it instantly turns it from a cover to something really unique to you and really interesting to you. And the beauty of these songs is most of most pianists aren't really playing what's on the page anyway. So it's not like for most, most of these songs, you won't need to have a whole arrangement written out in the new feel. You can literally just say to your pianist, I'm doing this uptempo song a little bit more like an eighties power ballad. And they're gonna be fine because we're not playing what's on the page anyway. So I love, I love tweaking songs in that way, and just making them more unique and more interesting to you, [00:24:00] more unexpected. It's really fun when someone brings in a song with a whole different feel than what we're used to hearing it. It just sounds, it's just really creative and, and unique and, and can make it sound really special.
Chelsea: So it sounds to me, Cynthia, that a great place to start is for folks to make some specific choices about the subtext of the story, diving into the lyrics, whether they're literal or poetic, deciding whether they're going to make the song intimate or performative. This is a great starting place for all of this and, and that process is making specific choices. Surprise, surprise, actors, making specific choices is the process.
When it comes to actually performing, how much is too much? Like when you say performative, what can a person really get away with in the audition room? What have you seen work well and what have you maybe seen not work well? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Cynthia: I do. I do have many thoughts on [00:25:00] that. Again, I think it depends so heavily on the show that you're auditioning for, you know, so for example, you worked on Rock of Ages. For shows like that, when I've seen people come in the room, I've seen everything from starting with your back to the people at the table with a big whip of the head so your eighties hair goes flying with, Vogue hands, bringing the drama in a way that would be appropriate for Rock of Ages. If you did that for Beautiful or for Waitress or for Hadestown that's gonna come off not quite the right vibe I think, for the show.
So I think it just really depends, and that's why I like thinking of it in terms of these scales, because you can also analyze the show that you're about to go in for in the same way. So if I'm going in for Rock of Ages, is that a more intimate show or a more performative show? Is the [00:26:00] character I'm going in for more intimate or more performative? Same thing with any other, you know, you can do that with any show. You can kind of analyze it in that way, and that helps you know what to do with your song, which is why it's so great if you have a couple of songs that work well for you in many different ways. Use the same song, but simply tilt it in the direction of the vibe of the show that you're about to go in for.
Chelsea: I'd add to that. I think folks are really nervous to do too much in a self tape because they're like, oh, it's a tape, it's small. I'm on film. I've gotta give a film performance. We had Rachel Hoffman as one of our special guests last year to come in and work with our clients inside the BVC membership. And something that she worked on with, with everyone in that class was you can be bigger. You need to actually do the thing on tape. Don't give me a suggestion of the thing. Actually do it. Because again, if you know this is what the show is like on Broadway, [00:27:00] this is the level of performance that they're giving, you've gotta, you've gotta do that in the tape. You know, you, you're not giving a film performance for a musical theater production. You need to give the musical theater performance for a musical theater production, and knowing that there's levels of that, like you said, from Rock of Ages to Waitress, the spectrum is so very wide in terms of what people are doing on Broadway and what characters are demanding of actors to be doing on Broadway.
So that's your homework is, is matching that level of the character that you're going in for and having a song that can bend in that direction as well.
Cynthia: I think that's exactly right. Let's say you do do a self tape that you are doing the thing. It is a performative show and a performative character that you're going in for, so you've used lots of big movement, you have taken up space. You have done the thing that we just were talking about. Let's say then they ask to see something [00:28:00] more. They either call you back, they say, Hey, would you take, would you do that tape one more time? And this time will you just stand there and sing?
I think sometimes people think that that means the first way they did it was wrong. And what it usually means in my experience is that was great. We loved that and we want to now see what else you can do. So we know you can be big. We know you can be bold. We know you can make those big choices. Can you also get really small, really intimate, and and hold attention that way. So just know that oftentimes if you're given a note or you're given a piece of direction in an audition that is opposite from what you just did, it doesn't mean necessarily that what you did the first way wasn't right. It just means oftentimes that what you did was fantastic, and it has made us want to see what else you can do. So we're gonna give you an opposite direction in order to see another completely [00:29:00] different side of you.
Chelsea: That is such a great point. There's so many choices to be made. The only mistake, in my opinion is not making one.
Cynthia: That's right. Being in the middle, living in the middle.
Chelsea: Being, living in the middle is not, living at the four or the five. No one wants a four, five. Not musical theater is about We are. That's right. We're one thing or the other. I think, I hope that gives everyone permission to make some creative choices and start to look at their material from this perspective.
Cynthia: We really hope this helps you get started on how to think about acting your pop rock song. We've got lots more tips and tools for you, which we will explore further in part two of the series. So stay tuned. Lots more to come.
Chelsea: Can't wait.
Cynthia: If you enjoyed today's episode, take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram @bwayvocalcoach, share it with a friend, and consider leaving us a review.
Chelsea: And if you are ready to take your next step, but you're not entirely sure what that should [00:30:00] be, then take our quiz. We'll help guide you to the resource or program or your next step, the thing that's right for you. Don't forget, we've got our college audition webinar free webinar coming up on March 6th. We can't wait to see you there.
And don't forget, if you are a young artist or the parent of one looking towards the college musical theater audition process, we've got our free live q and a webinar happening on Monday, March 6th. You can register for that at bwayvocalcoach.com/college. Thanks for listening.