Beyond the Words
October 15, 2008
A few days ago I was looking through various song titles on the Internet, trying to find something suitable for me to sing at a forthcoming “Britain’s Got Talent” audition. My voice has a particular range that is more operatic in delivery but I didn’t want to narrow my choice of song so I was looking in the popular section.
Suddenly I was drawn to listen to Leona Lewis sing ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. That did it – tears started to stream down my face! She was delivering the intensity and passion of the song, and it reverberated in me. Later, when I tried singing it, I knew that I was also in that place of enchantment. Such exquisite emotion that I could barely sing the words.
I looked at the lyrics and my instant impression was that I was reading poetry. This wasn’t just a love song this was a description of overwhelming beauty. So I looked a little deeper into how the song came to be written. Ewan MacColl wrote in it 1956 for his lover Peggy Seeger, at a time when he was already married. Ah … lovers and passionate affairs! It is said that she phoned him and requested a song for a play that she was performing in, and he wrote it for her on the spot, and then taught it to her over the phone.
Now the words are impactful but to really give emphasis to their flowering you need to have a connection to what brings the words together, essentially to what brings the lovers together in the first place. The secret seems to be in the rhythm. For me Leona has the right delivery. The lyrics are drawn out in a long wavelength motion that carries you deep into the heart of the music: a vibrational frequency that both expands and fills you. Listen and get your own experience of it.
Of course, you will create your own memory of it, your own connection to it, and your own remaking of what the song is for you – for what we really touch is the beauty and purity of what we value most.