A tip from ‘The Happiness Project’
By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - 11 Comments
All sorts of people are finding that singing, alone or in a group, can be life-changing
Looking for happiness? Try singing. That’s the advice in a new self-help book that’s striking a chord with thousands of readers. Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project has become an instant bestseller with simple prescriptions such as “Sing in the morning.” “You know, I’m a terrible singer,” Rubin told Maclean’s this week. “Everybody laughs at my singing. But one of my main focuses of my happiness project was to create a more lighthearted, calm atmosphere in my household.”
Mornings are the most hectic, says the mother of two young girls. “Everyone’s racing around and there’s a lot of whining and nagging. It can be a very unpleasant part of the day and yet it’s the beginning of the day, so it’s important to set the tone. It’s very hard to be crabby when you’re singing.”
In the book, Rubin describes a morning when one of her daughters didn’t want to go to tae kwon do class: “I wanted to snap back, ‘You always say you don’t want to go, but then you have fun.’ Instead, even though it wasn’t easy, I sang out, ‘I don’t want to go to tae kwon do—you’re a poet and didn’t know it!’ After a minute, I added, ‘I don’t give a snap about going to tap.’ ” Rubin’s daughter joined in, rhyming, “I’d rather pass gas than go to science class.” “We laughed until our stomachs hurt, and she didn’t mention tae kwon do again. This technique worked better than telling her to buck up, and it was certainly more fun.”
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Nikki Yanofsky fuh-lipped out!
By Mike Doherty - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 16 Comments
The 15-year-old singer couldn’t believe she’d been chosen to sing for the Olympics
Nikki Yanofsky has a habit of astonishing people. Usually this is how it happens: first, she bounds onstage in a club or a theatre, a petite teenage gamine in front of a greying, paunchy all-male jazz combo. She then snaps her fingers and counts off the introduction to a jazz standard. The moment her voice rings out, the venue echoes with the sound of dropping jaws.The jazz world has celebrated many a prodigy, but none has been met with this much unanimous adulation or hope since Wynton Marsalis drew his first raves in the early ’80s. With her multi-octave range, impeccable pitch, increasingly rich tone, and unexpectedly soulful power, Yanofsky, who turns 16 on Feb. 8, has been wowing crowds in her hometown of Montreal since she was 11, playing guest spots at clubs with her father’s weekend-warrior cover band. As word spread, high-profile gig offers with professionals followed; she has headlined shows at jazz festivals from Montreal to Sapporo. Pop audiences are catching on, too, and this month, her star is set to surge: she sings the theme song for CTV’s Olympic coverage (a Céline Dion-meets-Chariots of Fire power ballad called I Believe), and the video will premiere during the Super Bowl.
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Mark Steyn is the new Bing Crosby
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 8:00 AM - 15 Comments
Just in time for Christmas, the famous pundit sings (unironically) ‘It’s a Marshmallow World’
“I’m singing Marshmallow World for real,” says Mark Steyn. “I’m not part of the great swamp of irony into which pop culture is sinking.” Making fun of corny, happy Christmas songs is a cottage industry, as Stephen Colbert will prove on Nov. 23 when he does his musical Christmas-special parody A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All. But Steyn, during his recent brush with the Canadian Islamic Congress, took his mind off his troubles by teaming with British musical-comedy actress Jessica Martin (who has starred in such West End hits as Me And My Girl) for a self-produced recording of It’s a Marshmallow World, available in MP3 and CD from his website steynonline.com. Along with a self-published book called A Song For the Season, a survey of holiday-related songs, it’s his attempt to strike a blow for a proudly unironic approach to Christmas pop. If, as Steyn has argued in these pages, the future belongs to Islam, then the past belongs to songs with lyrics like, “it’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts.”
Marshmallow World, a cover of a 1949 song that Steyn calls “a second-tier, second-rank standard,” is accompanied by all the orchestral sounds that signify a merry musical Christmas: glockenspiels, sleigh bells, triangles, and inoffensive brass fanfares. The Anglo-Canadian-American Steyn sounds surprisingly Australian when he sings, but otherwise it’s a good approximation of the spirit of the holiday recordings of such anti-ironists as Bing Crosby. It’s the type of recording that’s still popular with audiences, but not so much with critics. “When I was at the Daily Telegraph in London,” Steyn notes, “they’d round up all the Christmas songs and give them to some miserable misanthropic rock critic to review.” One can imagine what those critics would have said about a single that not only takes Marshmallow World at face value, but even throws in some comedy banter (“Oh, Jessica, the world is our snowball!”) to put us in mind of those Crosby recordings where he and his guest stars would ad lib their way through the last verse.
You didn’t always need to go to a pundit’s self-made CD to find unambiguously jolly, irony-free Christmas music. In the golden age of North American Christmas pop, from the first appearance of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town in 1934 through a pre-murder-trial Phil Spector’s all-star Christmas album in 1963, American Christmas music portrayed a perfect world where snowmen come to life, reindeer are randomly added to Santa’s roster, and you meet some nice old man named Parson Brown or Farmer Grey. Holiday songs with some sense of melancholy or realism were revised to satisfy America’s appetite for Christmas cheer: at the request of Frank Sinatra, songwriter Hugh Martin rewrote the lyrics of his classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to turn it from a sad song to a happy one, while Irving Berlin deleted the introduction to White Christmas because it mentioned how depressing it is to celebrate Christmas in snow-deprived California.
In other parts of the world, it’s been acceptable to create Christmas music that mentions the less upbeat aspects of being caught in a snowstorm. In the Marshmallow recording, Steyn and Martin even tip their hat to British holiday non-cheer: they throw in a brief snippet of the English carol In the Bleak Midwinter, the story of how Christmas livened up some otherwise horrible weather. But in their heyday, American songwriters wouldn’t stand for that kind of talk, and Steyn likes that just fine: “The English Christmas is sort of bleak, grey, dour, whereas in the North American Christmas, the land is just a winter playground.” If you want confirmation that America is different from Europe, don’t look at politics, just compare Hark! The Herald Angels Sing to Jingle Bell Rock.
But even the unnaturally happy yuletide song is a relic of a bygone America; nearly all the most-recorded Christmas songs were written before the late 1960s, when American culture started to break apart. Today, recording this type of song is an act of cultural nostalgia, whether they’re recorded by Céline Dion or a Canadian pundit living in New Hampshire: “I feel like in a sort of fragmented culture,” Steyn explains, “they’re really the last songs we all share.” In a musical world of hip hop, I Kissed a Girl, and various people named Cyrus, maybe a traditional, un-cynical version of Marshmallow World is a blow for traditionalism. Or would be, if that song didn’t rhyme “girl” with “world.”
