Singing Voice, Speaking Voice

Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com.

Sadie:                          This episode contains some swear words and one or two mild references to drug use. Which might strike you as odd for a linguistics podcast but personally I think it only adds to the scientific merit of this research output.

This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity. This is Episode 3: Singing Voice Speaking Voice. In this episode I’ll be asking why do so many of Scotland’s most famous singers perform with accents that don’t sound particularly Scottish? How’s this changed over the past 30 years? And what is the connection between your speaking voice and your singing voice anyway?

                                    Do you want to just introduce yourself?

Justin:                         Yes, I’m Justin Currie. I sometimes play in a group called Del Amitri and I write songs and make solo records.  

Sadie:                          When Justin started playing gigs in the early 80s, he didn’t feel like singing in a Scottish accent was an option at all. 

Justin:                         No music I liked was sung in a Scots accent at all. The only things sung in a Scots accent would be if you turn on some desperate tartan, shortbread, music show on the telly, like Thingummyjig or something, and it would all be that sort of very exaggerated kind of Scottish, Donald Where’s Your Troosers sort of nonsense, and that was just complete naff to people like us.

 Sadie:                          At that point, most Scottish pop, rock, indie, alternative, and punk singers sang in accents which were very different from their speaking voices. The accents singers tended to use were somewhere between southern British-English and American, often referred to as Transatlantic accents. Justin was also really influenced by punk music with its roots in London.

Justin:                         So, yes, I never figured out -- because when I first started singing in a band I sang in a really crisp, clear English, very English accent and I don’t know whether I got that from the punk records I was listening to -- the post-punk records I was listening to. Because punk -- a lot of early punk was very, quite -- almost Cockney -- it was very broad sort of London. It’s kind of embarrassing to listen to now, for me, cause it’s like what am I doing? What the fuck am I doing?

Sadie:                          To some it might seem like an odd decision to manufacture a singing accent different from your speaking accent, but to Justin it made musical sense. 

Justin:                         In an English accent it’s shirt or skirt, on the whole, that’s a sort of broad southern kind of pronunciation. Whereas in Scotland it’s skirt and shirt. So you’d find yourself singing the consonant rather than the vowel. You’re going “skrrrt”, rather than “skiiiirt”, which has got more note in it, the vowel’s got all the note. The other thing, a purely technical thing, is that you’re trying to hold the note. The note’s as important as the word in a song. Lyrics are not poetry. They’re nowhere near poetry. The note is terribly important to the meaning of the word on the nuance within the lyric. A lot of the time you’re seeking the mouth shape just to get the note out and obviously because I wrote the words -- I was terribly -- I thought I was -- I was a teenage poet and all that waffly Oscar Wilde nonsense. So it was very important that people understood what I was saying. 

Sadie:                          There were practical elements to Justin’s choice not to sing in a Scottish accent but there was also another element.

Justin:                         It’s a difficult thing to sing in a Scots accent and not sound cheesy because of its associations with tourism and just rubbish tartan nonsense. And I certainly would, if I heard a track back in the studio, where I felt that too much of my own voice was coming through, I would try and sing it differently.

Sadie:                          Talking to Justin about his singing voice is really interesting because it’s obviously something he’s thought about and worked on a lot over a number of years. For him, Scottish accents just aren’t any good for the type of music he wants to make. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, a lot of Scottish musicians felt the same way. Scottish accents were alive and well on the folk scene and in the late ‘80s The Proclaimers hit the charts with their songs 500 Miles and Sunshine on Leith, sung in recognisably Scottish accents. Although they made it into the pop charts, many people still thought of The Proclaimers as a folk or folk-crossover band. It caused a bit of a stir in 1996 when a new band emerged, performing in distinctly Scottish accents but releasing tracks that were decidedly not folk songs.

Aidan:                         Hello, my name’s Aidan. Hello, hello. One, two, Aidan Moffat coming at ya.

Sadie:                          Aidan Moffat, along with his friend Malcolm Middleton, formed the band Arab Strap when they were in their early 20s. Their first album, The Week Never Starts Round Here, was a collection of songs and stories centring around their hometown of Falkirk. The first single to be released was The First Big Weekend.

Aidan:                         Well, what happened was, we’d already finished the album and we had a tune that we had no words for, and I just thought, I’m just going to write about what happened at the weekend. I cannae really be bothered thinking anything about this. It was just a really natural thing to do. It was a wee throw away track, a wee -- it was going to be a B-side and it just turned out a bit better than we thought it would.  

You know it would be mad to write a song about Falkirk and sing it in an American accent, certainly. That would be very, very, it would be creepy if anything. 

Sadie:                          Was it something you talked about or...?

Aidan:                         It was never really talked about, no. I think -- I mean when we first started, we went to a mate’s house, did a couple of wee tracks on a 4-track, and I just did what came naturally.

I think it was never -- there was never a manifesto or anything like that. We never really thought about it but it’s only later on when you look back on it and you kind of understand what you were trying to do.

Sadie:                          What would you say now that you were trying to do at that point?

Aidan:                         Well definitely, what I was saying earlier, it was just about having a voice that was, in a sense, more authentic and more about the place that I came from. I wanted to write about the world that I knew, and I wanted to write in the language that I used, which was very important. Swearing and all. There’s a lot of swearing on those records but that’s just a natural Scottish thing. We do like a good f-word, but I think -- it was just all about trying to be as honest as I could.

Sadie:                          Most musicians start out modelling themselves on their predecessors, but Aidan entered the music scene knowing that he wanted to do something a little bit differently.

Aidan:                         Aye, there wasn’t a lot of Scottish stuff on my radar and a lot of it -- to be honest, a lot of that was to do with -- I think I felt there was a certain unbelievability about it. Like I’ve never -- Primal Scream for instance. I’ve never been a big fan of Primal Scream. I mean I like Screamadelica, everybody likes Screamadelica, but all that sort of country, soul stuff they did afterwards – it just seemed a wee bit, I don’t know, unbelievable to me. I mean I know who Bobby Gillespie is, I know where he’s from, and there was just something about that – it just seemed like someone playing with someone else’s music and I didn’t really -- I couldn’t really relate to that. Most of the stuff I listened to at that age, the informative years, just before I started to make my own music would have been American records, aye. 

Sadie:                          Like Justin, he was aware that Scottish accents weren’t really thought of as being suitable for music outside of the folk scene but unlike Justin, he couldn’t see why not. 

Aidan:                         None of them, none of these Scottish bands in that scene at that time, were really doing anything that I felt sounded especially Scottish and it was quite a conscious decision to stick with the voice that I use and be as natural as I could be.

Sadie:                          For Aidan, singing in a Scottish accent seemed like the most honest and authentic thing to do but that didn’t necessarily mean it was the easiest thing to do.

Aidan:                         I mean, obviously it’s different now, but back then it just wasn’t a thing that you would hear very often: a Scottish accent anywhere on music, or on the radio singing. It was just -- you just become used to that -- you and I think -- as you say, it seemed a bit odd. I mean, even The Proclaimers seemed like a very strange thing to hear on the radio back then too. I know, aye, definitely. You don’t expect it so you kind of feel a bit strange when you hear it, I think, aye. 

Sadie:                          I found this so interesting. The authenticity and naturalness might not always be the same.

If we’re not used to hearing people singing in Scottish accents, then singing in a Scottish accent is probably going to be hard to do and feel a bit strange. That leaves us with two choices: to model our singing voices on accents really different from those that we speak in or to push through the strange feeling to a place where our singing and speaking voices line up more.

In linguistics, audience design theory is the idea that when we speak, we model our speech in relation to our listeners; either the people that we’re really talking to, the people standing in front of us, or our imagined audiences, the people that we’re talking to in our heads. When it comes to performing music, the idea of who we’re talking to, who our imagined audience is, is complicated by a lot of extra factors.

Do you think that ever played into the decision? Who you were singing to when you started singing?

Aidan:                         No, because if I’d thought – if I’d had any business sense before I started I would have put on an American accent.

Sadie:                          Arab Strap did tour all over the world, and Aidan never modified the way that he performed the songs, but Justin from Del Amitri made some very different decisions when it came to breaking America.

Justin:                         My singing accent became more American. I think that was possibly a -- to do with commercial ambition. I wouldn’t have -- I didn’t make a -- I didn’t make a deliberate, conscious decision but I think it wasn’t completely a natural morphing into something else. I think it was “this’ll play in America”.

I mean, that changed my voice just because it just had a huge influence on the way I sang. I just became less puritanical about what I could or couldn’t -- or how I could or couldn’t sing. Yeah, who cares if you sound American? You like American music. It doesn’t matter.

 Sadie:                          It sounds like it was a business decision that Justin made but it seems to me that there’s also something about his relationship with his accent that made it possible for him to make that decision.

Justin:                         If I go to America now, I speak in an American accent to people, especially white people that don’t fucking listen to other accents. I speak in an American accent just so I can get by. I mean some people think that’s sort of selling out but to me that’s just quite sensible communication. It’s like if I get in the back of a taxi or if I’m going to order some water in a restaurant I’m not -- in America I’m not going to say, “and could I have some water?” because they won't know what I'm talking about. If I say, “can I have some water?” then they know what I’m talking about. It just seems quite practical to me and other people find that utterly loathsome and contemptible. I don’t know why. I mean if you’re going to speak Italian in Italy, you’re probably going to put an Italian accent on. If you’re speaking English to people who don’t understand your accent just change your accent. 

Sadie:                          After Arab Strap, a new generation of Scottish bands emerged to deliver their music in Scottish accents. This is something that Justin doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with.

Justin:                         There was just a wave of bands in the -- god about maybe 10/15 years ago in maybe the early ‘00s, maybe mid ‘00s I’m not sure, who had really made that decision to sing in a Scottish accent. It sort of became a bit of a trend which worried me slightly but then again, I probably sang in an English accent in the early ‘80s, because I felt it was fashionable or something. I can’t really blame them. I worry sometimes about some contemporary artists, not all contemporary artists, some sing in Scottish acc -- I’m talking about Scottish, contemporary artists -- some sing in Scottish accents naturally and it’s great but some do -- I kind of -- it’s artifice. They’re doing it for cultural reasons and intellectual reasons rather than it’s just the way it comes out and I’m very suspicious of that actually. 

Sadie:                          But Aidan sees it as more than a trend and something more than an artifice.

Aidan:                         It’s carrying over and people are more accepting, it’s -- have more acceptance of different voices in music then they used to. I think it’s important to sing -- I think it’s important to sing the way you want to sing and if you want to sing in an accent that makes it easier for you and appeals to more people, then do it but also, I think that we’re in a place now where it’s acceptable to do whatever you want. We have a fairly vibrant rap scene in Scotland now as well. There’s no rules anymore which is great. We seem to -- like you were saying earlier, it does seem to be -- now that we’ve become -- everyone has access to all this music globally and every sort of music you can possibly imagine, musically there’s such a great, I don’t want to say melting pot cause that’s a terrible term, isn’t it? But it’s the only thing that’s coming to mind.

Sadie:                          Uh-huh, I know what you mean.

Scottish indie bands who perform in Scottish accents are known all over the world now. Bands like Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad gained success on the world stage in the past couple of decades. Scotland’s hip hop scene is perhaps a little less widely known but is also thriving.

Dave Hook raps under the name Solareye and with the band Stanley Odd. 

Scottish hip hop has existed almost as long as hip hop has, first taking route in the cities in the 1980s. But Dave started doing hip hop before he knew that the scene existed.

Dave:                          Probably everybody that started rapping in Scotland, certainly of my generation, maybe it’s becoming less the case, would have started rapping in an American accent because it was all we’d heard. And so, pre-internet, I wasn’t aware that there were other people in Scotland that had rapped before me. You were in this little micro -- I grew up in Airdrie and, as far as I knew, nobody else, certainly in Airdrie and Coatbridge, rapped, so you didn’t have a group of other people that you could kind of vibe off or people you could find that had done it before. There was a group called Back and Beyond actually who’d released a rap track, I think they were from Cumbernauld, in their own accents. It was a gradual process of mimicking -- the same as what you were saying, on a wider scale -- mimicking the voices and accents that you’d heard.

Sadie:                          So, initially, Dave was kind of going it alone. His hip hop heroes were American and used language very different from his. Learning to rap in his own voice, he didn’t really have anyone to model himself on. He had to find his own way.

Dave:                          First of all, I guess you started to learn about the social referencing and the storytelling bit of it and how that was quite -- that was a core element of it. For me, I started writing my own stories, but I still had a false accent, and then finally there was this sort of awakening moment where you realise there’s no way I can tell these stories. I can’t tell stories about potholes and bottles of Merrydown and roughcast, wee central Scotland stories, and make them -- and have a false accent. It wouldn’t ring true to an American and wouldn’t ring true to someone in Scotland.

Sadie:                          Dave suggests, that while singing in an American, or English, or Transatlantic accent is still a choice that some Scottish musicians can take, in hip hop it’s pretty essential to use the language of your local area.

Dave:                          I remember doing it and the guys that I was working with at the time like not being impressed, because we were all young guys, and going “you’re ruining that by doing it in a Scottish accent.” And trying to go “naw I’ve thought about this and you can’t not do it in your own voice”. And then the thing you were saying about being comfortable with hearing your own voice, it takes a long time to find a way of presenting yourself. That is -- like you say -- is authentic and is true to yourself and is true to the culture that you’re representing but you’re also comfortable hearing and happy with how you’re delivering it. So takes a long time to do that. And we, in Scotland, are at a slight disadvantage there because it is only in the last 20 odd years, 20/30 years, that we’ve started to hear our own accents in popular music.

Sadie:                          Because of the linguistic differences and cultural differences, Dave reckons that hip hop works a little bit differently in Scotland than it does elsewhere, but he loves the way that the spirit of hip hop culture has found a new context in Scotland.

Dave:                          Any language just has an alternative range of shapes and sounds to use to make interesting patterns with and, for me, what I love about writing in my own language and my own dialect is that it gives you unique phrases and shapes to put together that you couldn’t say in other ways. So what rhymes in one accent doesn’t rhyme in another accent and that’s a brilliant thing because it means it does give you new ways of saying things and new ways of expressing universal feelings. That to me is what’s beautiful about playing with your own language. And then it’s about mediating between different dialects and sort of if we have it like a universal dialect, more broadly speaking like a transatlantic way of expressing things in music, and then we have more local ways of expressing it, then often I’m trying within lyrics to mediate between the two because I want to be part of global hip hop culture, I want to represent that on a UK level, and I want to represent what’s going on locally at the same time.

I think what’s different about hip hop is that there’s no option other than to have you speaking your own accent. In most sung art forms, it’s still a choice, depending on the style that you’re working in or whatever. Whereas in rap, the things that you’re talking about -- about authenticity and realness, truth in your performance -- are rooted in really representing yourself locally. So local accent is -- has to be at the front of that.

No matter how much using your own voice is part of what you do for a living, I think the cri -- that cringe, which was infinitely worse, I think decades ago, is still a real thing. I also think it’s interesting as a result how Scottish people play with language and words.

And it’s probably been -- potentially been a barrier to Scottish rap reaching a wider audience but I think that authenticity within the Scottish rap community has resulted in -- and perhaps that just kind of not becoming a commercial entity in any way, shape, or form has allowed it to become a really diverse and really high-quality output across Scottish hip hop.

Sadie:                          Speaking to these three Scottish performers, I got really different perspectives which probably isn’t surprising given that they started performing at different times and they all play very different genres of music. Maybe where they differed the most in their perspectives was when I asked them “the voice that you use in your music. Is that you or is it an instrument separate from you?”

For you, do you think of your singing voice as being like a separate instrument?

Justin:                         No. No, not so much no. I think, I mean, I actually find myself toning down my attempts at singing in the studio. If I just -- if I change my accent very slightly, I can sing much better but then I start to sound like someone else that really annoys me. I mean even now it’s taken me a while to get to a point where I’m happy with the voice that I have and still retain the character. I would be very embarrassed if I listened to my singing voice and it sounded like the way I speak. I would find that embarrassing for some reason. The singing voice is for public consumption and the speaking voice is -- that’s -- your personality’s invested in your speaking voice. Not really in your singing voice. And obviously it must be in your singing voice and maybe the ide-, -- the audience identify with “oh that’s that personality.” You’re projecting a song which is nothing to do with your personality. Not even if the song’s autobiographical. It’s a story that’s out there in the world for public consumption.

Sadie:                          That’s really interesting. Do you think your speaking voice has more to do with you than your singing voice?

Justin:                         Yeah, I mean, if I’m going to say I love you to my girlfriend I’m not going to sing it to her because it’s not going to be sincere. “I love you. Shut up.” It seems to me that that’s the authentic me, with all the flaws and complexities and bad sides and all that sort of stuff, is in the speaking voice. And that’s -- and the singing voice is definitely a -- it’s a construction to express creative ideas or to tell stories or something.

Sadie:                          Do you think of it as being a character when you’re performing? Is it different from you?

Dave:                         I think that we’re always performing characters so in that respect it’s not different from me, it’s different elements of me. Every part of your life is a performance to a certain degree, in terms of the identity that you choose to present and the parts of yourself you choose people not to see. I don’t see it as a character that I’ve created. It doesn’t represent me, but I see it as different -- putting different parts of yourself forward in the same way that you don’t share everything about yourself with every person that you meet.

Sadie:                          This huge change has occurred in Scottish music during my lifetime. When I was born, in 1989, it was pretty much only folk musicians who used Scottish language in their music. When non-folk musicians started, a lot of people initially found it jarring but in recent years it’s been the done thing, with big international bands like Chvrches, Frightened Rabbit, Twin Atlantic, Glasvegas, and the Twilight Sad taking Scots on tour with them across the world. There’s been another big change in my lifetime; the internet. When I was a little kid, internet access was a far-off dream for families like mine. As a teenager, I fought with my family for 20-minute shots on the internet which came through the phone line. During those 20 minutes, I could access all of the music in the world and that access grew as my access to the internet did.

Both Aidan and Dave connected the change in Scottish music with the rise of the internet. It’s a paradox but it kind of makes sense to me. As our musical outlook has become more global, our language in music has become more local. As the dynamics of music making and music consumption have changed, musicians have begun to think differently about who they’re speaking to and who they’re speaking for. The language used in music is diversified.

I know that this change isn’t particular to Scotland, and I’d love to hear about whether you’ve noticed similar changes in other places, and what these have looked like. Get in touch on social media. It’s @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. You can also visit the website accentricity-podcast.com.

 The most obvious people to thank for this episode are the three singers I spoke to: Justin Currie, Aidan Moffat and Dave Hook. Thanks so much for taking the time to meet up with me. Thanks to John McDiarmid for production support and to Seb Philp for the music. Thanks to the newest patrons of the podcast: Nathaniel Dziura and Jennifer Smith, via Patreon, and Faye ‘the hedgehog’ Baxter via the donate button on the website.

Patreon subscribers get each episode a week early and this week they’ll also be getting a couple of special bonus episodes, in the form of the full-length interviews with the contributors to this episode. Subscribe via patreon.com/accentricitypod to hear my attempts to play it cool and not let on that I’ve basically been listening to Arab Strap’s first album on repeat since I was 16.

Thanks for listening.