kyraneko:fierceawakening:ms-demeanor:robinmichelleblake:yoncevevo:LEGENDARYSo? A lot of performers d
kyraneko:fierceawakening:ms-demeanor:robinmichelleblake:yoncevevo:LEGENDARYSo? A lot of performers do it. Bruce Springsteen uses one. Tom Petty did. Paul McCartney does. As does Elton John. All of ‘em use teleprompters. It’s called being prepared.Here’s Aerosmith using one.It’s not that they didn’t take time to learn the lyrics. Sometimes you can’t remember them all, especially when you have a large catalogue of music like some of those I mentioned.I once watched Billy Joel live and he flubbed a lyric near the start of a song. He stopped, laughed it off, and restarted the song laying emphasis on the lyric he messed up.Memorizing lyrics for a song you’ve written and need to perform in front of people and keep separate from other lyrics you’ve written is the sort of difficult thing that seems pretty simple right up until you actually try to do it.I wish I knew what exactly it’s from, but there’s a recording of Tori Amos live where the line she’s trying to sing is“There’s Colonel Dirtyfishydishcloth, he’ll distract her. Good. Don’t worry so.”(don’t ask, Tori is weird)And she’s performing it and goes “There’s Colonel Dirtyfish… fishydishy… … …”It’s hilarious. I recall reading someone say once that authors have a tendency to be less good at remembering the details of they wrote than their fans because the fans only get the finished product but the authors know all the things they came up with, developed, and discarded on the road to the things they ended up going with, from major story arcs to the spelling of that one character’s name and for them it’s not just memorizing the correct information but sorting it out from all the formerly-correct information.And I’d imagine it’s much the same for songwriters. If you put three verses and a chorus in your song but two of those verses had a combined eleven drafts that you kept writing and rewriting and changing until you came up with the final product, and in the process you also wrote twenty-one half-verses trying to find a rhyme and/or good imagery for those verses, and changed the name of the person you’re singing about twice and then decided to remove the name and make it about a generic person instead for better versatility and then you can bring back some of the lyrics you liked but couldn’t make work because you had to rhyme with the name instead … well.Knowing a song is very different from knowing the creation of a song, which is often as much an act of paring down to get to the finished product as it is building up, and part of knowing a song, for its creator, is knowing what parts not to sing; the audience has it easy, because they know nothing about it beyond the parts that they’re meant to sing. -- source link