{"id":226,"date":"2016-05-25T15:19:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T15:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nette.ca\/jeannette\/?p=226"},"modified":"2020-08-23T01:10:40","modified_gmt":"2020-08-23T01:10:40","slug":"why-i-sing-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nette.ca\/jeannette\/2016\/05\/25\/why-i-sing-in-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I sing in English"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeannette<\/a>
Performing with Reg in the Netherlands in the year of the VW van<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a very young singer, travelling with my family in southern Spain, I developed a habit of listening to and singing along with flamenco music. To this day I still warm up my voice and practice by singing flamenco in Spanish or fado in Portugese very loudly. I am pretty sure I wouldn\u2019t ever try performing these in public but as vocal exercises they are ideal for me as they combine strong emotion with acrobatic vocal techniques, beautiful melodies. And it gives me some privacy while practicing as everyone runs away.<\/p>\n

I live in Montr\u00e9al and believe me, there is a lot of social and economic pressure here to sing in French. And I can do it, as I speak French pretty well and am raising a couple of bilingual boys. Oh the French I\u2019ve learned in school meetings! And even as I tick off “English mother tongue” on forms, my mother’s tongue was always Dutch. Despite all these languages in my life, my preference is to sing in English, even if that means singing great classics in translation. English is the language in which I\u2019ve devoured big, complex novels. And when I choose to write endless scribbled notes, lyrics, poems and blog posts, I write in English.<\/p>\n

That choice has to do with how I want to convey my energy and where I want to place my attention when I sing. While singing, I tend to let my mind travel to a place of imagination and rich imagery. I don\u2019t want the music I\u2019m creating to be about how I am enunciating or worrying about how to pronounce the next phrase. Can we hear that in a song? I think so and for that reason, I don’t want to be confined there, in that place of thinking first, expressing second. I want to be free to travel around within a song. And hopefully, this added focus will somehow get entangled with the sound and the music and carry the song\u2019s story in a cinematic way in the listener. I once asked Michel and Reg if they do this too, try to send imagery while performing and they both looked at me very blankly. Perhaps this melding of the psychic and the musical in this particular way is my own thang or something from the lost languages of my ancestry. I don\u2019t really know – I just know it is very important to me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried singing the Jacques Brel classic Ne me quitte pas in French and also sang along with the Flemish version which is excellent, btw, and worth seeking out. I love the poetry of the song and am not sure it is can be perfectly translated. But I found this translation which I enjoy a lot and so recorded it\u00a0for my album Born to Be Blue.<\/p>\n


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