Join me… …I am your Father!

This afternoon, I started the process of Turning Caitlin. I’m not sure if it’s to the Dark Side or away from it though – probably depends on your point of view. However, either way I think I might have managed to make her see that there’s more to music than Country.

For the last couple of months on Mondays, I’ve been attempting to give Caitlin singing lessons. This came about at Easter time when we had a bit of a talk about what she wanted to do when she grew up. “Country Singer” was the top of her list (out ranking zoo keeper and teacher). I’d seen a Kasey Chambers song book in Dymocks, and since she’s Caitlin’s favourite singer, I figured I could get her to pick a few of her favourite songs, record a backing track, and help her practice them.

It’s been going not too badly really – she’s fairly patient with my insistence on doing some listening excersizes before we start (getting her to sing notes and intervals I play on the piano), and I managed to break her habit of adding a horribly exagerated American / Country and Western accent to everything she sings, and she’s only wanted to skip the sessions once or twice in that time.
She’s still got a long way to go of course – mostly in learning to listen, the rest will just come with practice, but she seems to be enjoying it, and so am I.

Today, after going doing her excercises and going through Barricades and Brick Walls, she started talking about when she went and saw Kasey. So I told her about how I’d gone to see Nightwish. In the course of that, I mention that they were a metal band – to which she said “Heavy Metal, ugh!”.
I asked her if she knew what heavy metal sounded like, to which she replied “ummm…no”.
So I decided it was time my daughter received an Education!

I hunted around, and found a video clip I had downloaded of Nightwish performing Walking in the Air. Not exactly Metal personified, in fact not exactly Metal at all, but I was hardly going throw Nevermore or Megadeth at her straight up ;)

She seemed rather entranced by it, and particularly intrigued by the way it started out very sedately, with Tarja standing elegantly motionless in front of the microphone for the first half of the song, and then growing progressively more animated as the music builds up until she’s jumping around head banging and playing air guitar by the end of it.
Afterwards she commented that she couldn’t really understand what Tarja was singing – which I can understand, as it was live, and it’s a piece that Tarja tends to use a more operatic voice than normal, neither of which make it easy to pick up the words if you’ve never heard the song before. Of course then I had to demonstrate that Metal wasn’t really about opera singers singing old movie themes to guitar, keyboard and drum accompanyment – so I played her a few things here and there – a couple more Nightwish pieces, some Metallica, and some Within Temptation. She seemed to particularly like Enter Sandman, and appears to be an instinctive headbanger *proud beam*.
We then spent the rest of the afternoon watching Metal videos together – Nightwish and Within Temptation first – Nemo, Over the Hills and Far Away, and Running Up That Hill, Mother Earth, Ice Queen and Stand My Ground (very, very nice video that – lots of pretty special effects – if you’re not too distracted by what Sharon’s wearing that is…hehehe), then I actually _did_ slip some Nevermore in – Believe in Nothing, and then finished up with a couple of Iron Maiden(!) – Can I Play With Madness and From Here to Eternity.

After all that, she still wanted more! But by that time Emma had arrived, and I had to go cook dinner.

Caitlin really seemed to quite enjoy the music, although one thing she said was rather interesting – She said that she had trouble understanding the words. At first I thought she meant hearing them, but then she quoted some at me so that wasn’t it. It seems that the heavy use of metaphor was what she was having trouble with. I guess that’s not really suprising – Caitlin really only listens to Country (mostly Kasey Chambers, but a few others too) which tends to tell things pretty much as they are and is not really big on symbolism. But it didn’t seem to bother her much, she just found it rather strange…

So now I have to find a way to slip a wedge into this crack I’ve managed to make in her mother’s musical influence on her. I’ll definitely have to hunt out more good Metal videos, and I’m considering putting together a couple of CD mixes for her to listen to. Then maybe when I’m preparing backing tracks for her to practice singing against, I won’t have to torture myself finding a suitable replacement for a banjo part ;)