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Lyrics vs gender

avvie

avvie

Oct 12, 2010
2,371
1,073
Maui, HI
#1
Aloha kakou
I'm in a new band and the set list is being put together. We have a female singer who is apprehensive about Bruno Mars' "Locked Out Of Heaven" because she feels the lyric is male-dominant and she can't get the emotion right. My last band played it with a female vocalist and I don't think anyone cared. Maybe she changed it to suit; I dunno because she was the type of singer who was utterly incomprehensible.

Are lyric genders an issue with your projects? I get that dudes can't really pull off Pussycat Dolls' "Doncha", but are legitimate setlist contenders being passed over because of gender pronouns?
 
#4
It seems to me that, for whatever reason, a female vocalist can pull off a song written for a man and no one bats an eye, but for a man to pull off a song written for a woman is tricky. My pet hypothesis is that it's the "slumber party karaoke" thing; it's a social thing among girls to sing together and to each other, in a sense taking on the persona of the (male) singer crooning away. Young boys (in America, anyway) don't have parties like that. So when a female singer in a cover band gets up to do a love song to a woman, it's just taking the same thing on stage and everyone gets it, while if a man does it can feel weird.

In my band we cover "Exes and Ohs," and I'm the singer. I rewrite the lyrics with different pronouns (and the song takes on a different meaning). But if I have any female singer friends in the house, I always invite them up to take it.
 
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#6
Something to consider. Big Mama Thornton recorded the song Hound Dog before Elvis made it famous. Aretha Franklin made the song Respect a female anthem of empowerment but Otis Redding sang it before she did. Part of playing and especially singing a cover song is often making it your own in some way so challenge her to find an angle that makes her connect to the song.



 
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#7
Normally I leave this up to the singer and pretty much ignore it, but I was playing "Good Times" by the EasyBeats and heard our young female singer sing "Larry" instead of "Mary". I asked her about this and she said she couldn't get into the song without making the swap. I just laughed - first time I had head "Larry" in a rock and roll rave up.

A counter example - The Wygals were a rock band out of NYC in the 80's fronted at the time by a very beautiful blond woman who used to sing Neil Diamond's Solitary Man without inverting the genders. I remembered noticing that she didn't swap the perspective but pretty much forgot about it. Perhaps it was intentional and intended to convey gender ambiguity (it seemed like a popular thing then), who knows, that stuff kinda flies right by me.
 
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#11
RoadRanger said:
On Saturday night our female lead singer was doing "Pink Cadillac" including chatting up the audience about it - asking if anyone brought theirs :wideyed: :roflmao:. Should we tell her what the song is actually about :D ?
Click to expand...
Which Urban Legend are you referring to? The term has quite a history as well as being the sweet looking auto, that Hollywood stars at one time, used to like to roll up to venue in. Go ahead say it, then laugh.
 
#18
hrodbert696 said:
It seems to me that, for whatever reason, a female vocalist can pull off a song written for a man and no one bats an eye, but for a man to pull off a song written for a woman is tricky. My pet hypothesis is that it's the "slumber party karaoke" thing; it's a social thing among girls to sing together and to each other, in a sense taking on the persona of the (male) singer crooning away. Young boys (in America, anyway) don't have parties like that. So when a female singer in a cover band gets up to do a love song to a woman, it's just taking the same thing on stage and everyone gets it, while if a man does it can feel weird.

In my band we cover "Exes and Ohs," and I'm the singer. I rewrite the lyrics with different pronouns (and the song takes on a different meaning). But if I have any female singer friends in the house, I always invite them up to take it.
Click to expand...

Yep. The only one that works for me is “Stand By Your Man” as performed by the Blues Brothers!
 
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#19
With the female singer in our band, it isn't simply an issue of pronouns. If we are doing a song that is generally known as sung by a guy, she will swap them or not, depending upon what works in the particular song.

That said, there are some songs that she just can't own or embody. And, if she can't own the song, she doesn't want to do it. She wants to use her instrument to communicate authentically, and so the songs she can feel always work better than songs she doesn't. For instance, songs that are grounded in anger, aggression, greed, or resentment don't work well for her. Not big on desperation songs, either. So, for instance, she can't get into the space of My Sharona, Don't You (Forget about Me), and Forget You.

She doesn't do it in a dictatorial or "prima donna" way, demanding we shape the sets to her preferences. She's always willing to do songs she doesn't love, so long as she can enter into them and find her angle (as Roy Royerson noted well). But there are just some songs that don't work for her. (For that matter, the same thing happens with instrumentalists at times--some things just don't work. The band is a group thing, so we give each other the space for some vetos.)

In our view, fair enough. There are tons of great songs in the world, so we'd rather move on to something that will work for all of us than have her than try to deliver something inauthentic. But she's so good on the songs she can connect with, it's worth it for us to move on.

(Your mileage may vary. This is not a claim of what you should do in your band. Etc, etc, etc.)
 
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