On this website, you’ll find five blog entries that I’ve called ‘Singing as storytelling’. I wrote them originally for singers to read. But the lessons apply equally to actors who have to sing for the purposes of a dramatic role they are playing. This is because the job of the singer or the singing-actor is the same: make the character and the stories real.
If you do the dramatic work that good singing requires, people will talk about the stories you tell, and the characters you bring to life, and how your performances change the listener. Whether we think of ourselves as a singer, or as an actor who sings, we become artists only when we truly understand lyrics and become (depending on the content of the lyric) either a storyteller or a character. These blog posts introduce what I think are some outstanding examples of this.
Read these blog posts in the order listed. Each one takes some time, because they each include at least four YouTube clips of performances of the songs. So, if you read the post, and listen to the performances, each post could take 20-30 minutes to get through.