Sarah Brand

Ok this all makes more sense to me now. The song sounds just enough like a real pop song that I almost thought she had songwriting skills, but there was something "off" about it. So she ripped it from that song and other songs, and the offness is just the filter of her problem ear. She legit can't sing, as evidenced by the other videos. And the goal was more to show off her video skills, which is believable since those seem perfectly competent. Everything else about her just reads way too normie and sincere for this to be a really elaborate pisstake.

I don't understand the rationale: "I'm going to record a terribly-performed song so that everyone focusses on my video direction?" Instead of directing a video for a competent performer?

Because she's probably blissfully unaware of how bad her singing really is and thought it was good enough?

sometimes a person who can't sing is just a person who can't sing.

I don't really think her songwriting skills are less 'competent' than her video skills.

She definitely demonstrates basic compositional principles of chord progressions, melodic form, phrase structure, and text setting. There's a quote, intentional or otherwise, of "Wildest Dreams" and/or "Shotgun", but it goes somewhere else with it.

I finally realized this morning that her singing reminds me of Odenkirk's. Except that he has very consciously employed his tone-deafness for laffs.

it always comes back to "Mouthful of Sores"

She should have taken a little bit more care with hiding her previous videos if she wanted to keep up the idea she can't sing.

Her YT channel has a video of her doing cheerleading practice a few years back with no obvious vocal detriment.

lol come on. she has two people yelling the melody next to her that she can match, and judging by the dissonance I hear at least one person is off key but two of them aren't, and they're in a comfortable register in chest voice, whereas her songs are in head voice, which is what she seems to have trouble with. the cheer melody oscillates between two to three notes and is barked more than sung.

knowing absolutely nothing about singing i'm going to take this post from the /r/crappymusic subreddit as the truth:

So, I’m a trained singer. Degree in voice, did recitals, etc. Listening to her reminds me of my vocal pedagogy teacher’s mantra: the number one cause of pitch problems is people not knowing how to listen to themselves and other pitches at the same time.

Brand is clearly just untrained. You can hear it in her lack of air support, causing her to consistently go flat on higher notes. She has practiced, but with zero training, she has practiced her wrong things, ingraining them into her style. She’s confident with the guitar, but her right hand style and lack of a pick suggests that she’s entirely self taught.

I’ve taught many singers. This sounds like many of my students who just don’t listen to anything while they sing - they just kinda guess what the pitch is. The overall shape is correct, but it doesn’t match anything else - kind of like watching a 3 year old do a “trace it” drawing of an elephant on the local restaurant’s kid’s menu.

I don’t think it’s a social experiment- she is singing honestly and in a way that I’ve seen dozens of times before - just not listening and matching while she sings. It can be corrected, with a teacher.

this whole thing is really just about increased access to decent cameras right? or the collapsing space between low-end and high-end cameras/filmmaking tools or whatever. this would've been a wehole video if it looked like it was filmed on an iphone 4.

You guys

I finally realized this morning that her singing reminds me of Odenkirk's. Except that he has very consciously employed his tone-deafness for laffs.

― Marty J. Bilge (Old Lunch), Friday, July 30, 2021 8:45 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

sarah brand cover of “i’m the hated milk machine” when

lack of a pick suggests that she’s entirely self taught

...

The line in Wildest Dreams where TS sings "standing in a nice dress" became the seed of this song

I was thinking "You Belong To Me."

whatever is going on here it’s triggered a RAED relapse on my part

Brand is clearly just untrained. You can hear it in her lack of air support, causing her to consistently go flat on higher notes. She has practiced, but with zero training, she has practiced her wrong things, ingraining them into her style.

pffft "wrong" is doing a lotta work in that sentence.

How to play Guitar
by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.

it's like some of you fucking people have never listened to John Cage or Merzbow or Marissa Marchant or Patty Waters, this snobbery is absurd

it seems more like "people are insisting that is what Brand is going for when there's really a more simplistic explanation for it"

like my thought all along was "she's someone who wrote a catchy song but isn't a singer"

i think assuming she's trying to be the next merzbow is probably as unkind as assuming she isn't hitting the notes she wants to

nothing against merzbow or sarah brand for that matter

other than the clumsy, dumb "stay in your lane" statements about her guitar playing, singer guy was pretty much OTM

It's like some of you fucking people have never listened to John Cage or Merzbow or Marissa Marchant or Patty Waters,

It's ok. Neither has Sarah!

like my thought all along was "she's someone who wrote a catchy song but isn't a singer"

And didn't let it stop her - in a song about self-acceptance in defiance of institutionalized tradition and convention. It's kind of beautiful.

Sarah Brand gives her first radio interview, and handles it perfectly. I legit love her now.

https://www.kiss925.com/audio/sarah-brand-in-an-exclusive-first-interview-about-her-viral-song-red-dress-is-it-an-experiment/

Jeez, these interviewers are assholes.

Their style of banter sounds borrowed from the 90s.

They were persistent with their questioning, though, and not in an overtly rude way.

It could be worse but, despite their insistence, she was answering the questions they asked, just not in the terms of the assumptions they were bringing to it. "What's the deal with you? Are you actually this bad?" was basically the line of questioning they were persistent about, and it's pretty condescending and hard to answer. Every time she did try to explain her artistic goals (which seem p consistent w my reading, I think: the dissonance of the voice with the musical setting reflects the alienation of the protagonist in the church setting), they cut her off and insisted she wasn't answering them - they never came back to the lyrical message, like they said they would. They then jumped to the theory that this is some large-scale sociology experiment, not really backed up by what she was saying, which she mostly giggled in response to.

Tbf, though, I was halfway through when I said they were assholes. It got better, esp when they discussed some of the Youtube comments.

I imagine she would have given them what they consider a direct answer if they phrased the question as something like "are you trained as a singer?" or "were you trying to sing like a regular country singer?" but they seem unable to think outside their own standards of "good singing".

I think they were right to present her with the "large-scale sociology experiment" theory, as it's been mooted so often in her YT comments. I just liked the way that she deftly parried their attempts to get her to say that she was a bad singer, and I also liked it when they acknowledged her skill in outsmarting them ("you're GOOD!"), concluding that the mystery was best left unsolved. And since she responded with such good grace throughout, I ultimately got a friendly vibe from the whole conversation.

Maybe it's Canadian assholery. :P Agree that she handled it well.

But yeah, they got a lot nicer in the second half.

It still felt like an impromptu change of strategy because they didn't expect her to fend off their questions so deftly.

we love sarah brand now, basically

*points gun* always have done

SARAH IS TEARING US APART

looks like quite a few more time bombs await on the full album

Album Tracks (...coming soon...)

Red Dress (single & music video: July 7th)
Fantasy (single & music video: June 15th)
How Do I Explain
American Gap Rap
Breaking Down
Cliches
Movie Screen
Cr@zy
The Critics Lie
Anyplace
The Fig Tree
(Rainbow)
EyEs

I can see the storms brewing in your eyes, forks.

American Gap Rap

welp it was fun while it lasted

oh come on, that is by far the most exciting track on that list
milkshakes for everyone

"The Critics Lie (like kites)"

Imagine being the person that has to mix those tracks. Hand on the mouse, hovering over the Melodyne Plug-In as you silently weep.

ok, after listening to the interview I am also now On Team Sarah, however not to the extent of actually wanting to listen to her music.

ILM precovers surely

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-58047513.amp

Basically, they've found her and she answers the question.....

wow what a head-fake!