Vocal Emotion Quotes

Those old Appalachian singers use a falsetto sometimes. They can change their voices to sound high or low or really scratchy. When you're singing, usually you're trying to express some kind of pain or joy. I think that voice allows me to do a lot more of that.

I'm trying to enlarge what I do with my voice, not through technique but just through the sounds. I think we all make noises, and particularly when we get involved or emotional about something, the colors and the tones of those noises change.

The best vocalists I can think of are female. There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she's merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness - even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.

If I had my choice, I'd pick a song that tells a story every time. There is a great deal of pleasure in doing the vocal on a number that you can put feeling into.

I think the more emotional you are, the better. I'm sort of writing [songs] as I go and I can never tell how it's going to be or how it's going to feel until I get into the studio. But I definitely think it will. I probably can't help but have the emotions in my voice.

Auto-tune is good to keep your notes intact, but it doesn't do much for the feel of your voice.

I've always been very emotional when I sing.

The thing about Auto-Tune is it can't fix everyone. It only fixes pitch. Everything else - the emotion and the attack and the energy? That's what a singer is.

When I sing, my face changes shape. It feels like my skull changes shape... the bones bend.

It's a wonderful acting challenge to tell a story and convey emotion with only your voice.

I've been training myself and listening to other artists and seeing where their emotion comes from, singing a heartbreak song when they're in a happy relationship.

The Auto-Tune makes everybody sound the same and takes away all of the emotion because you're singing through this machine, and of course your taking all of this emotion out of your voice for the most part.

I've struggled with self-esteem and depression, like most singer-songwriters. I listen to my EPs on Bandcamp, and I can just hear the pain and the self-esteem struggle in my voice.

I know I express myself best singing love songs, and Jim Steinman gave me my rock style, which I have always wanted. I can express myself best putting a lot of emotion into singing rock songs.

It's amazing to hear, as a voice matures and then starts to decline, what kind of emotion is still conveyed by a really good vocalist.

I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.

Patsy Cline? Larger than life! She taught me emotion: raw, sincere, unashamed.

I love movie musicals because I think there is an amount of emotional honesty that's needed to portray someone who feels so deeply that all they can do is break into song.

When I'm on stage, I turn into this rock person. I give everything I have. I sing with emotion, I'm loving it up there, and I think there's a lot of energy. In the same way that I'm open when I speak, I'm that open on stage. I feed off the energy of the audience too, so they're feeling what I'm feeling. And the set up is great - I have two drummers and a bass guy so it's just us four.

Hank Williams seemed, like, so total to me, so committed to the lyric. He would actually rip the ends of the words off at the, you know - the end of the sentence. It sounded like he'd bite into the word and rip it off.

The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal. For me, the human voice is the vessel on which all emotions travel - except perhaps jealousy. And the breath, the breath is the captain of that vessel.

I've seen people that get onstage and sing while they have tears running down their face - I can't do that. When I cry, it starts like in my throat, so when I have something that's really emotional, sometimes if I access that too much, I can't finish the song.

I like passion in voices. I like passion in music. And I find that, sometimes with today's music, it's just so perfect - it's that high fidelity and all of the auto-tuning and all that stuff. It's too perfect for my ears.

When I'm performing, sometimes a lyric will touch on my personal life, and it can be difficult to sing. For instance, when I sing 'How I Love You,' I'll choke up.

The first time we did it [voice-over], I was trying to use my face and my eyes more so and really portray that emotion, and that didn't matter. I realized you have to bring that emotion into the way you sound, and all those different layers have to be in your voice instead of the way you are wrinkling your eyebrows or whatever. I had to learn how to do that.