I once worked with a cabaret singer who had terrible separation anxiety and guilt about not gaining custody of his children during a rather nasty divorce. He insisted on singing Carole King’s “Too Far Away” in his act and persistently broke down into tears thinking about his children. It was totally self-indulgent and destroyed his audience’s trust in him as a performer. All of us were made uncomfortable by his pain and after a while, the audience began to resent paying $25 each to be a collective therapist for this troubled man.

The goal of a great interpretation of a song is not for you to have an emotional catharsis and deeply feel the music. The goal is for your audience to have an emotional catharsis and deeply feel the music. To do this, you need to identify the emotional truth of the song, phrase the lyrics so that truth is apparent in the singing, and add the artifice (and I don’t use that word carelessly) of acting to support the subtext of the lyrics.

Once you’ve mastered your skill at representing emotion, you can let that technique carry you through the performance and you will be freed to experience the song in the moment without losing control. This allows you to turn your emotion outward to the audience, not inward towards yourself. Instead of self indulgent personal feeling, you will have intelligent expression of universal truth.

And let me thank Sally for her kind words and Michael for his great work as an interviewer and blogster.

James Fitzpatrick