Whisper to a Roar

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I wrote about DeAnna's range in terms of the musical scale. That covers the notes from low to high. Another kind of range is described in terms of dynamics -- can a singer project in quieter passages just as easily as they can at the louder end?

If there is one thing DeAnna is known for, it is mixing up the quiet with the loud, and of course doing it with the greatest impact within the same song, going from the tender to the strong (right coach Christina?) and then back. Those are the dynamics that create the element of drama and surprise within a performance. Singers from Kate Bush to Adele -- obviously with her hit song Hello -- thrive off of that mix.

To start, let's figure out what makes her quiet moments so effective. DeAnna has a nice trick up her sleeve, in that she can control her vibrato in a variety of ways at the low end. She can use it to build drama as in her cover of "Oceans", or as a folksy moving tribute in "Some Gave All".

The key is that her voice can project at the low end, even with a loud music backing. And of course, DeAnna never loses her tone over her volume range, and arguably it becomes even more interesting when she sings quietly.

Consider her dynamically interesting cover of Kristofferson's "Help Me Make it Through the Night". In the song she starts quietly and then gradually turns it in to a Patsy Cline yodel wail. Yet at the end DeAnna descends to a quiet moment until it ends with a quiet almost colonial phrasing of the word "night". That was only a minute and a half rendition but she packed the whole range into it, making it a memorable rendition IMO

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As an experiment, I mashed up a quiet piece of DeAnna singing a capella to her puppy, with an instrumental backing.

"Sweet, sweet baby -- sweetest baby in the world"

The instrumental is an early Boz Scaggs song called "Can I Make it Last (or will it just be over)", which in the tradition of mash-ups I renamed to "Can I Make this Sweetness Last". Fittingly, that was the closing tune to a Boz Scaggs album called Moments -- it reminds me that music is often all about capturing a moment of time, the equivalent to bottling the emotion of cuddling a puppy or wandering the seashore at sunset with your dog.

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That's DeAnna's quiet side. Her louder side is exemplified by her full-bore cover of Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" or in her duet of Boz's former band-mate Steve Miller song "The Joker". That's to come, stay tuned ...

Added a SoundCloud version of the mashup