by Serguey Shinder
I wrote most of the songs we still play between 2009 and 2012, in my late twenties, when my voice sat higher than it does now. The chorus of our best known song peaks on a high A, held for two bars, and for years that note was the moment people in the room waited for.
By 2022 I was in my forties and I was no longer reaching that note so much as negotiating with it. On a good night it arrived. On a bad night, late in a set, in a cold room, it arrived thin and a fraction late, and I had started easing back from the microphone on that bar so the audience would hear less of it. I had also started dreading the song, which is strange to feel about your own best tune.
The remedy was obvious and I resisted it for about two years. Drop the song a tone, from A to G. Our bass player suggested it first, then our guitarist. My objection, as I put it at the time, was that the song was in A. The riff sat on open strings in A and rang in a way a lower version would not. The record was in A. People knew it in A.
That last point was the weakest and I held on to it hardest. Almost nobody in a room can tell you what key a song is in. What anybody can hear, instantly, is a singer straining. I had been protecting a fact about the record that the audience could not perceive, and paying for it with a sound they could not miss.
We tried it in G at rehearsal one Tuesday. The riff did change, and our guitarist spent a fortnight reworking it with a capo until it rang again, not the same way but well. The chorus stopped being an event I had to survive. I could put something into the line instead of merely getting to the top of it. The first night we played it in the new key, a friend who had seen us perhaps twenty times said it was the best she had ever heard it sung. She had not noticed it was lower. She had noticed I was singing it.
Since then we have moved five more songs, two of them by a tone and a half. I no longer think of a key as part of a song's identity. It was a decision made for the voice I had on the day I wrote it, by somebody who had never had to sing it in his forties, and I let that younger man keep making the decision for more than a decade after his voice had gone.
A song written for a singer ought to be pitched for the singer who turns up.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply