Don’t Be Remembered for the Wrong Reasons

I’ve probably blogged and I know I’ve definitely mentioned on “Now Hear This Entertainment” before that, say, 17-year olds shouldn’t be singing songs about life experiences that they couldn’t have had yet.  But what about going the other way, when a, say, 55-year old is singing songs that are very popular by the Ed Sheerans and the Maroon 5s of the world?  Unfortunately, there’s a strong chance of it just not being believable.

This was the case when I was out to dinner last week and there was an entertainer performing at the place I’d gone to eat.  Just like a songwriter can’t turn off being inspired one way or another to turn something into a song (even when they’re trying to go on hiatus), a routine weeknight meal at a restaurant that has someone singing is going to draw a curious ear from yours truly as it relates to an evaluation that could end up as a teaching moment for readers of this blog, listeners of NHTE, and others that I come in contact with as part of my various dealings at the helm of Now Hear This, Inc.

The takeaways for those of you who are performers were as follows.

The individual I saw/heard was singing to accompaniment tracks for songs by the likes of those mentioned above.  People know the songs so well that they’re expecting you to sing it a certain way.  So, when you go low where the original artist went high, you’re going to leave people disappointed.

I want to specify that I’m differentiating here between when someone is singing to tracks versus someone who’s going to make it their own and can do it that way, but that’s somebody who’s accompanying themselves (not singing to tracks).  So, they can go low instead of going high if they’re putting a completely different treatment on it.  But, when you’re singing to tracks, you can’t get away with it.

On a related note, just because you have a saxophone doesn’t mean you have to add it to every song.  Find tunes that you can perform that already had a sax in them so that it’s natural.

And then on top of that, control your volume.  The individual being talked about above had very imbalanced sound because the singing and the backing tracks were at one level, but then the sax was considerably louder.  The dining experience – the ambience that you are trying to contribute to at a place like this – was right where it should be, but then the horn was turning heads for all the wrong reasons.

When you’re told you are going to be background music, you want to blend in and not become a distraction.  Think of it this way – if you make it into someone’s Yelp review of a restaurant, you don’t want it to be for the wrong reason.

Do you agree with the above?  If you don’t, why not?  Have you witnessed the above somewhere?  Talk about it all in our Facebook group!