Unlocking the Memory Vault

I’ve noticed a big difference between memorizing and recalling music (tunes, chords, structure, etc.), and memorizing and recalling lyrics to songs. I have no problem playing a tune I’ve memorized – the recall is quick as long as I have the initial few notes. But with lyrics, it’s a whole different ball game.

The problem is that memorizing is one thing, and then recalling is another. When you memorize, it goes into a mental vault that needs a kind of a key to unlock it so that you can access the memorized bits. In music, that key might be the first few notes of the tune, along with a template of the possible notes that are within the key (musical key, such as “key of C”). And you may find a folk song easier to recall than a complex jazz piece.

This I think is due to the number of possible notes in a tune. A folk tune rarely has more than 6 or 7 different pitches, whereas in jazz, several of the non-diatonic notes are also possible. And yes, I find singing a jazz standard easy enough if I’ve done it a lot, but with the ones I don’t regularly sing or play, I find myself going astray more often. When you compare the possible 12 notes of the chromatic scale to the 7 diatonic notes in folk music, it makes sense that it will be easier to recall what the next note will be in a folk tune.

Locking into the chord progression can help with the non-diatonic notes, since they are often tied to the chords. But that’s another level of complexity in jazz that we don’t have in folk. For jazz, you can modulate through several keys, with potentially all 12 major chords, all 12 minor chords, all 12 diminished chords, and so on, whereas in folk, you are usually working with 3 to 6 chords. So there’s a difference due to the number of possible correct notes and chords that make memory recall more difficult with more complex pieces.

Now let’s look at lyrics… Language is so vast that there are many ways, possibly hundreds of ways, to say any individual thought or concept. To memorize and recall the exact lyrics of a song, what is the key that opens the vault? It has to be more than just the start of the first verse. When a song has several verses, they may be in a logical enough order that you can think “What comes next?” and come up with the next verse. But some songs have verses that can be interchanged, as well as lines within verses that can be interchanged. So for those songs, we would need to unlock each and every line in each and every verse!

There are a few websites out there that deal with ways to memorize lyrics, and I do many of these already. But I find that I still have that hiccup from time to time where I sing a different word in the middle of a phrase, and then that one wrong word makes the rest of the line mean something else. Or not make any sense. Or throw me off track enough that I can’t recall the next line. So in addition to listening over and over, writing it out over and over, picturing the scenes like a movie, making an emotional connection with the song --  all of which appear on these online lists, I’ve come up with a few of my own:

1. “Taste each word.” Hmm… I guess I mean how does it feel in my mouth to pronounce each word. Roll it around and “taste” it. The muscle memory of tongue, lips, and jaw…
2. “Lecture the song.” This means I’m going to put on my teacher hat and explain the nuances of each verse the way an English professor might dissect a poem – the sound, the rhymes, the structure, and the meaning.
3. “Back-story each phrase.” This is something I learned in a theater class at SJSU. The back-story will give you a personal connection to the lyrics complete with characters that have provoked or spoken each phrase. 

I guess this last one is similar to both the “scenes from a movie” and the “emotional connection,” but with a more specific analytical approach. Ask yourself “Why does this happen? What could have happened to cause this? Who is to blame, or credit?”

These are new ones for me, but I’m working on applying this so that I don’t need to rely on having a music stand just for the lyrics. The music stand creates such a barrier, and I’m happiest when I can connect with my listening audience while I sing and play music!

I’m hoping to perform my live-stream concert on January 28^th with all lyrics firmly memorized and easily recalled!

If you are interested in attending and have not yet reserved your seat (free to attend!) here is a link:

https://tinyurl.com/LifeStagesConcert