One Shot Singalonging is an attitude, not a skill or a song-difficulty-level*
* by which I mean “it works pretty okay for songs of up-to-medium-high difficulty, see below”
When I seek out advice about making people more singalongable, there’s a cluster of advice I get from folksinger people that… seems totally “correct”, but, feels… insufficiently ambitious or something.
The advice includes things like “try to have people come in singing on the chorus, and not worry so much about the verses”. Or “teach people the song beforehand” and “hold practice singalongs before the event or send out music so people can learn it”, or “teach people music.”
This… totally makes sense as advice, and I do do it. But the way people bring it up feels a bit alien to me, like it’s clearly intervening on the wrong level. It’s optimizing a thing that has a lower overall effect size than another variable that I’ve seen accomplish way more singalongability way harder.
The other variable is:
”Actually ensure people feel in their bones that singing along is fine/great even if they’re bad at singing, even if they don’t know the tune.”
And, alas, this mostly isn’t accomplished by trying to tell people “you can sing along guys, for real! It’s fine! Don’t feel awkward!”
Instead it just sort of depends on a critical mass of people all believing it at once, and taking it for granted, in a setting that makes it feel like a straightforwardly true part of social reality. Like, you’d be the weirdo if you didn’t believe this.
In the 2012 Living Room Solstice, there were 50 people in the living room. I had invited a professional musician friend to lead a couple songs that he had wrote. Normally when he performs those songs, he carefully warms the audience up, starts the song kinda quiet but ramps up to the chorus and then signals people to sing along and the people slowly join in.
He had practiced that songleading approach beforehand for the 2012 Winter Solstice.
It got to be his turn. He started the song.
Immediately, 50 people started singing along at full volume and enthusiasm, zero hesitation, for a song they had never heard before.
I was there. It worked. It sounded okay. Obviously some people sang some stuff wrong and AFAICT nobody cared.
It’s worked fine for decades at my family’s Christmas Eve party, where new friends or neighbors will come in, and have a brief moment of “wait, but I don’t know the words!” and we’re like “yeah whatever doesn’t matter” and then they go ”...okay?” and then it works and they have a great time and end the night saying “wow, I didn’t know Christmas could be so awesome. You guys have, like, the sort of Christmas they make Hollywood movies about, I didn’t know that was real.”
It notably works significantly less well at an auditorium.
It might not work in a living room, if there isn’t some critical mass of people who believe in it, and you don’t make sure to start the evening off with songs that are silly enough that you can’t really feel self-conscious about it. (I started 2012 Solstice off with everyone singing the “Game of Thrones” theme song, a las “daaah duh da da daaah duh da da daaah duh da da daaah duh da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah”)
I think it particularly doesn’t work in an auditorium for two reasons:
One, it just feels too fancy. You aren’t in a living room. You feel like you’re at a show, there are performers, the performers are skilled, it feels more palpable that there was something to ruin.
Two, 50 people in a living are naturally going to have a very high density, and the ceiling is low, and all the sound is compressed together so it’s very obvious you’re not going in on this alone. You can all clearly hear the few people who are loudly confidently singing the correct tune, which helps a lot.
In the auditorium, you’re spread out – you’re not smushed up against your friends on a couch. And if you’re in a section of the audience where not as many people are trying to sing, it sounds a bit lame, you try singing, you sound lame, the people around you sound lame, you maybe try to push through because the Solstice Organizers are trying to be really encouraging and you want to support the intended vibe, but it’s pushing uphill.
When you’re 500 people, you do kinda need to be in an auditorium. There are degrees of freedom of how fancy an auditorium but most options for seating 500 people feel intrinsically formal.
I’m running Solstice this year, and thinking about how to deal with this. I’ll be doing the various sorts of advice the folk songleaders say, but, I think the most important question is “can we solve the Auditorium Vibe?”
Interlude: Is this real?
People don’t believe me about this. Folk singers who are used to leading crowd singalongs don’t believe me about this (they’re the ones giving me all the advice about how to make the songs easy/singable in a way that suggests this should be hard).
You probably still don’t believe me (given that the last few people I tried to tell this to didn’t).
First, to clarify my claim:
In the room of 50 people, 25 were selected for “being the NY rationality community” which is not-very-much-at-all selected for musicality at the time. Another 25 were selected for “being willing to travel hundreds of miles to be at the second Rationalist Solstice”, which probably has something to do with musicality. But, when I try to remember who they were, people I think of as “not good at singing” were roughly as common as people who I think of as “good at singing.”
I’m guessing about half the people were singing “on-tune-ish, although not great.” I wasn’t taking careful note at the time. The others were probably singing off-key in ways that was a bit cacophanous but kinda cancelled out.
Me and the professional musician were the only people who knew his song in advance.
I think you can cluster songs into five-ish categories of:
“Dead Simple, but boring”
(i.e. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”)
“Regular, easy-ish song”
(most folk songs)
“Regular, medium-ish song”
(most Beatles songs, Bob Dylan songs if they’re sung by anyone other than Bob Dylan)
“Regular, hard-ish songs”
(surprisingly a lot of modern pop songs, I think things started getting less singable in the 80s/90s?)
“Explicitly Difficult Performance Pieces”
I’d describe the song as “medium difficulty” in the schema below. (Here is the song).
I think most popular Solstice songs have ended up being medium or hard-ish, which is bad, IMO, although at the 2012 Solstice more there were more easy-ish ones)
I am partly claiming “the quality of singing was higher than people seem to expect”. I think people are just actually decent at singing along with medium-or-easier songs if there’s a solid vocal leader and a critical mass of people are also doing it. It’s, like, a thing we have evolved to do. Monkey hear, monkey do. Old school hominids didn’t worry about how good they sounded. (I’d weakly guess like half of people are kinda tone-deaf but half are okay-ish)
I’m also claiming “the attitude of ‘but was the singing good’?” is a way less fun attitude and an attitude that diminishes the total amount of “actually good” singalong music in the world.
If you set the vibe “you must be this good to sing along”, people don’t sing along as often, then they don’t get practice, then they don’t become low-key-amateur-musical, then 20 years later they think of themselves as “people who don’t sing” instead of “people who do” in a self-fulfilling cycle. There are cultures where it’s just accepted that everyone sings, period, and then people get good at it.
I’m claiming, overall, that achieve the goal “people believe in their hearts it is normal to sing, without regard for whether they know the tune” is a better goal than “people sing along well” (although you should do both).
I feel sorta grateful for never having formed an impression that this should be hard, because otherwise I might not have tried to make Solstice.
This year’s Bay Solstice
Now, having said all that, it also matters whether the songs are easy to sing. My family’s Christmas Eve singing does start off with the easy songs you almost certainly know before working up to obscure medieval carols that you’re definitely gonna stumble through.
Back in 2012-2013, I put a moderate amount of effort into making the early songs of Solstice Act I singalongable, but:
this the very beginning of my “write singalong songs” career and I wasn’t as good at it,
most Solstice organizers aren’t that into like the 3 specific songs I wrote with the particular aim to be singalongable Tutorial songs. And I think no one’s really set out to fill this void in a comprehensive way.
most Solstice organizers aren’t as into the concept of silly songs
most Solstice attendees (organizers and otherwise) are intellectual rationalists who will be kind of bored by the sort of extremely simple songs that folk music relies on.
I’m running Bay Solstice this year.
Sizing all of this up, and holding the ambition of “the longterm musicality of Solstice attendees eventually reaches a higher level than it’s currently at”, and asking myself “What’s hard about this? What can I do about that?”...
What’s hard is:
Auditoriums feel scarily solemn
At least a significant fraction of people do seem to basically prefer a non-silly Solstice.
You need a much larger critical mass of people who believe in the thing when there’s 500 people than when there’s 50.
A sizeable chunk of our musical people are “choir phenotype” as opposed to “folk phenotype”, where getting the notes right feels more intrinsically important.
Existing Solstice songs are selected for being pretty complicated.
Even if I somehow deal with all the above, it’s not that useful if next year’s organizer doesn’t actively try to solidify and build on it, and there’s not that many solstice organizers around, and insofar as they introduce new songs they prefer to use songs that they know/like that weren’t originally selected for singalongability.
The “use existing songs” trick just doesn’t work that well for Easy Solstice Singalongs, because there is a particular nuanced philosophical target Solstice is trying to hit. Very few songs hit that target while also being easy and also fitting into the vibe of Act I of the program.
“Teaching people music” feels lame and patronizing. People don’t wanna feel like an elementary school teacher is trying to get them excited about music, they just wanna sing.
What I’m currently planning to do about it:
At a high level: Figure out how to give people good quality, mostly non-silly, meaningful songs that smoothly, subliminally teach people music skills along the way without noticing.
More specifically:
Heavily prioritize Act I being “the music tutorial”, instead of that being a secondary consideration
each song has a smoothly ramping difficulty curve
each song in Act I should not just introduce a Solstice Philosophical Concept, but, also, subliminally teach a little bit of music intuition.
Write multiple new songs that try to hit the sweet spot of:
...feel philosophically meaningful and, like, just be “very good songs” that future organizers are more likely to like.
...are nonetheless very singalongable. (You can have complex words with simple rhythms/melodies, and you can choose simple words that nonetheless have some poetic, iconic heft to them)
...each convey one of the aforementioned subliminal musical intuitions, hopefully
and, subject those songs to a bunch of iteration/testing/critical-feedback as much as possible beforehand
...try to somehow make the auditorium feel more like a living room
Current plan: Get rid of all the chairs in the front section and replace it with blankets and backjacks and sell “In the Front on the Floor” tickets to people who wanna opt into that, which is aiming for higher density then usual.
this leaves like 4⁄5 of the auditorium in about the same state as usual, but, if it works, can expand it a bit in future years, and/or hope that it creates more of a critical mass where unabashed musicality lives.
Try to more actively talk through all this sort of thing with next year’s organizer, and, idk, hope that goes well. (Organizers tend to come in two types, “musical” and “not-musical”, I’m hoping musical ones can be sold on the vision and non-musical ones can be sold on acquiring a music lead who is sold on the vision)
Will that work? I dunno! But, I hope it does.
Anyways, meanwhile, please believe me that 50 people can totally sing along with complicated songs they haven’t heard before if the conditions are otherwise right. I’ve seen it, dude, it’s real.
Completely agree with your observations, and I say this as someone who (a) grew up with family singing, campfire singing (b) had pretty extensive choral training; (c) nevertheless later participated in and led community singing groups built on the idea that it’s totally, absolutely fine to sing “badly”; (d) for many years hosted a successful wassailing party at which most people were not Christian and not familiar with caroling, yet happily and credibly belted out the Christmas carols they had just learned, on the porches of surprised neighbors; (e) is now a folkie very active in the pub singing tradition (f) with an armchair interest in ethnomusicology, oral tradition, and the neurobiosociology of community singing.
SO… a few thoughts:
You are absolutely right that the most important factor is giving people permission to sing, that everyone has the right to sing, your voice doesn’t have to be good, you don’t have to be in tune, and in fact it will be fine. If there are professional musicians present it can be important to explain to them what is going on, why they should be happy to hear bad singers sing, and how they can help by singing the melody loudly, and not wincing.
You may find helpful resources at https://singout.org/communitysings/, look up Pete Seeger’s Tone Deaf Choir (historical), Matt Watroba’s Community Sings (current, I think). They were brilliant at getting big crowds of non-singers to sing (and surprise themselves with how good they sound).
I’d be happy to exchange notes on repertoire. I am not sure what themes exactly suit the Rationalist Solstice scene, but I know what worked well for my motley wassailing crew and my community singing group.
There are characteristics of songs from oral tradition that support/encourage everyone to sing, which are common in older traditional songs, religious/church songs, childrens/camp songs. Yes, they arose from contexts where the participants could not read, but this is irrelevant. You do not want people reading words off of a sheet of paper or their phone. You want them to be present to the room and just sing. You want it to be easy to sing in the pitch dark with a candle in one hand and a glass of grog in the other. So the same rules apply.
Predictability. The tune is repetitive (no modulations, bridges, etc), and the lyrics have a formulaic pattern. A good example: “Where have all the flowers gone?”. If someone has never heard the song, they have to stop singing and listen to hear the one word that is new in each verse; but then they can predict how the entire next verse will go, and can sing along to the whole verse as well as the chorus. And that song is not silly, and not a bad candidate.
Repetition. Songs with a chorus, as noted, you can sing the chorus once at the outset, and then people can sing it every time it repeats. Pro tip: sing every verse, and repeat the chorus after every verse. Stage folk performers will skip verses and only sometimes sing the chorus to avoid boring the audience; but it’s not boring when there is no audience and everyone is singing. But choruses aren’t the only form of this. Some songs have call and response where you repeat each line (or there’s a formula for the response to the called line). Some have a refrain in which the last line or two of each verse is sung again. Look for songs with these features.
Familiarity. Obvious one. If a lot of people recognize a song it helps, even if they just hum the tune. A good example of this might be Silent Night. In traditional music, including church hymnals and pub ballads, tunes are heavily re-used. The same tunes are re-used for many different sets of lyrics, so you can leverage that everyone already knows the tune. Parodies (writing new songs to well known tunes) work well for this reason.
Physicality. Clapping, stomping, snapping, whatever, lets people participate even if they don’t know the words or tune—and surprisingly lowers inhibitions for singing.
For totally novel songs I think the best you can do is have an optional pre-run for people who want to learn them, use the same ones year after year, and make it ok to just listen and enjoy the ones you don’t know. People pick up songs up with remarkable ease. They will accidentally find they are singing it next time. In this context, story songs are the easiest for people to remember; our brains are wired for stories. For example ‘Good King Wenceslas’ was the favorite most belted out at my Wassail, even though there are no choruses or refrains.
Since you are taking a long term view on this: wanna co-org a workshop on “singing for people who can’t sing” at LessOnline next year?
My guess is that the problem is if you’re getting advice from people who are in communities where it’s uncommon to get large groups of people we’re singing is not central to their identity unfamiliar songs. So they don’t have a very relevant advice! Instead I would look for material aimed at religious leaders, camp counselors, and teachers. (But I have no idea if there is good advice out there, or if this is one of the many categories where the people who are good at it have not passed on their wisdom, and in many cases don’t even realize there could add it.)
I think this doesn’t feel like quite the right classifier. I do think the people giving said advice have worked with noncentral singers, and, like, I do meanwhile think most of the advice is good, just, pointed at a less important part of the problem.
I think the folk-singer style advice has mapped roughly to what I’d expect from camp counselors.
Some advice from more of a religious-tradition have been:
Build up a repertoire of songs that people know
Have the instrumentation play the melody in an intro to the song before you get going, to get people the gist of the song
(in some cases) “Have sheet music.”
I was resistant to #2 for awhile because my association of this was catholic mass where a pipe organ plays the melody in a way that feels… kinda boring/lame to me? But, recently, while experimenting with the Suno music AI make covers of Solstice songs, I noticed it inserting melodies that felt like a good mix of “musically interesting” and “probably helpful”, and I’ve felt better about it.
I think this is just massively obsolete, and dates back to people singing along without being able to read lyrics. Either because you didn’t have printing, or people weren’t (sufficiently) literate.
(Though there are also communities that intentionally don’t involve written words in there folk singing, such as pub singers, which I do think can be a nice aesthetic. If that’s what you’re doing, then the format where someone sings the versus solo and everyone joins in on the chorus works well.)
On the 2012 Solstice, I do expect you had more people who enjoy this kind of singing. For example, @juliawise and I are both reasonably strong singers (including being comfortable picking things up on the fly) and I think a big part of why we were excited to come down from Boston was that the event involved singing. But I don’t remember what fraction of the people that would have applied to.
Yeah when I wrote the sentence you’re responding to, four people specifically came to mind, and 2 of them were you/Julia specifically, and two were some other people for whom I don’t think of singing as their strong suit (although I think they were still selected for enthusiasm).
It’s plausible to me that like 80% of the far-away-ers were pretty singy or enthusiastic, but I think <50% of the NYC people were.
“Selected for enthusiasm” is still an important selection criteria, but, it does still point towards the main goal being “enthusiasm.”
Did you consider planting strong-voiced song-leaders in evenly-spaced locations among the crowd? This comes so prominently to mind as
theone obvioussolutionremedy that I’m wondering where I’m going wrong, like it’s clearly not possible for some reason or etc. But yeah that sound of someone near me singing, in my experience is the key to granting “permission” for me to singYeah it’s definitely one of the obvious things to do. I have not tried hard to do it because it’s just kind of logistically difficult. I’ll take this moment to think through why it feels hard. Some thoughts:
I don’t really have a list of the musically competent people (who aren’t in choir, who need to all sit together for logistical reasons)
There’s some Tetris-skill inherent in how the ground organizes, where people wanna sit with their friends in clumps, those clumps aren’t going to be known in advance, people are going to fill in and make it hard to get to pre-arranged seating areas, and it’s asking people to make a fairly serious sacrifice to sit somewhere else.
It requires coordinating a large-ish number of people. It’s way harder to get 20 people to do a thing (even a simple thing) than 1 person to do a thing.
Looking at that, some ideas do come to mind for how to deal with that, but, it’s a more expensive option than a lot of other options.