OK, it may be easier for a blind woman to talk of the importance of memorizing things. True, I don’t have the option of reading the lyrics or sight-reading charts so easily. But, memorizing for the sake of delivery is essential – no matter how many excuses you give yourself for ‘needing’ the words (or music).
Serious brain injury and psych medications can make it harder to remember words. Even so, you can still go through the process of learning a song without creating a culture of more dependence and fear.
Having the lyrics in front of you is ‘just in case’ you need them. But, in fact – you don’t need them. It isn’t the person with the greatest voice that sings at parties, it’s the person who remembers all the words. It’s the work you do once inside the song that counts. And, you can only get inside a song once you’ve memorized it.
Watching a live performer with their head in a chart or constantly glancing at a book of lyrics breaks the spell created between singer and listener. When we participate in conversation with someone, we don’t read the lines of text as if it were a script. Songs are stories and performance is like a conversation. We tell stories about our own and other people’s lives in conversation all the time. Often there are good reasons WHY you remember them: you learnt something from it (it’s important to you), you emotionally connected with it, there were great images and metaphors in it, it was clever, witty or well-crafted, or, you just ‘loved it’. It’s the same with good songs.
Listen and sing along – Don’t go straight to the Internet to print out the lyrics or chords to a song, work them out for yourself by ear. Write it down line by line (NB: the internet often gets it scarily wrong). Listen repeatedly and sing/play along. Never underestimate ‘rote learning’ (and how many times you need to go over a song to memorize it – melodically and lyrically!)
Recite the lyrics aloud so that your sung phrasing is as close to speech as possible. You’ll get a feel for the important words and sections (NB: underline accented words that fall on the first beat of the bar)
Chunk it down – Learn it line by line, verse by verse – build from the beginning. If a song has a repeated chorus, then you’ve already got a section of the song locked down. I like doing this while walking. Try not to constantly refer to your iPod. See how much you can do on your own. The process of memorizing takes a lot less time than you’d think.
Map the song – Find out the order and content of sections (Verse 1, Verse 2, Chorus etc). That way you’ll spot repetition. Memorize the first line of each section.
NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming – If you tell yourself you have a bad memory, or, believe that memorizing lyrics is difficult, this becomes ‘fact’. Think of yourself as a great memorizer and use tools to make the process easy, fast and simple. Pretty much of a much-ness: once you’ve got it under your skin, that’s actually quite hard to shake.
Trust – Memorizing is about finding and strengthening your trust muscles. Trust your muscle memory. You can begin a song and remember the second verse ‘as’ you get to it, but not before. It’s spooky! We can also trust in good singing techniques. Most of the times we have difficulty when we sing, we have simply forgotten to use good technique.
Love the song – If you really like a song, you’ll want to be able to sing it without constantly referring to lyrics. (it’s ‘hands free’, so you can even do the dishes while singing! Just imagine….)
Well written songs are easier to memorize – Different themes or locations per verse help. Use these different subjects or scenes as mnemonics. Understand the overall narrative and everything falls into place (e.g. I remember the second verse to Sting’s ‘Fields of gold’ because the protagonist wound up ‘getting it on’ so soon in the song. “So she took her love…†– you go girrrrl!)
We remember better with emotion attached – (This is why it’s so hard to forget traumatic events). If you can get inside the emotional landscape of a song, there’ll be sensory data and descriptive detail that is integral to the story – you won’t forget that.
The Relationship – Get to know the relationship from one section of the song to the next. Does it go forward or back in time? Is the last note of the last section the same as the first note of the next? Is it perhaps a third up? This all helps to demystify the song for you. Particularly useful when memorizing chords if you know what key you’re in and have a sense of what Chords 1, 4 and 5 are. Transposing the charts by hand rather than using computer software, capos or transpose buttons helps to ‘etch’ the chords in your head too.
Session vocalists know how little time you get to learn a song before a gig, or in the studio. The amazing thing about doing it a few times is – you gain trust in how little time it takes to learn a song. Memorize to get inside a song, and set yourself free.