Voices
How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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" 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.
