I just love the sound of a black woman's voice.
In the modern operas that 'Miss Saigon' and 'Les Miz' are, nobody breaks out into song from conventional book dialogue. Everything is sung from beginning to end, including the recitative.
English is like music. The English language is really fit for singing. The notes match the feelings, and it makes sense.
If I play anything that sounds like a solo, it's gonna sound like a lyric.
Apart from a period of crisis during my adolescence, when my voice was changing and I could not tame it - it was like a kicking foal that does not listen to reason - I have always been told I have a pleasant and recognizable voice.
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
When you hear someone from the very north of Scotland speaking, I think its nice, very musical and harmonious.
Intonation is important, especially when it is cold.
I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.
If you listen to people talk, when people actually talk, they talk in melodies. If they get angry, their voice rises, and it's more of a staccato thing. When they ask for something, they're real sweet. It's all music.
