Pop Repertoire for Teens & Tweens

Meredith Colby
Jul 13, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Jul 1

Our teen singers are just like we were when we were teens. They’re in love with certain artists. They’re moved by artists whose music reflects their feelings back to them. They feel certain songs very deeply, and they want to sing those songs.

We want to help them express themselves because we love them. But we also can feel a bit reticent sometimes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jYiQwCHkcs&t=1318s

Read the blog or check out the broadcast!

On one hand, teens seem like really easy clients. Typically they aren’t paying out of their own pockets, and they have time for voice lessons. They also have very little sense of consumer advocacy, so they tend to go with whatever your program is.

On the other hand, they can be more complicated. They look to you for a lot, and you’re aware of that responsibility. You want to help them develop their voices, their artistry, and the musical gifts they want to share with the world. You have to teach them about vocal health and healthy vocal habits. You’re teaching them how to have a responsive voice that gives them joy. For all those reasons, picking Pop/Rock songs for your students can be a little bit scary.

Teenage girl holding a microphone while looking at the camera.

Educational considerations

In teaching teens and tweens, we want to use our relationships as teachers to expose the teen or tween student to types of music they may not find on their own. Classical, jazz, blues, folk, or Motown are wonderful genres that a kid is not likely to happen upon, but may love once they’re introduced to singing them.

Artistic Considerations

Because of our special relationship with our teen students, we can help them learn to exercise artistic agency. We can acknowledge them as individuals and create an emotionally safe space for them to try new things. We can let them sing the music they love, and teach them to do it in a healthy and satisfying way. Sometimes, though, we don't. We may feel reluctant teaching them styles we’re either unfamiliar with or just plain don’t like very much. (If you'd like to know more about why that is, check out this blog post, Brain Are Like Cats.) I'd like to encourage you to model uncomfortable exploration with your teens. A growth mindset can be taught, and you're in the perfect position to do that!

Developmental considerations

There are hormonal receptors on nearly all the cells in the body, including on the vocal folds. Those receptors cause the vocal folds to respond to the increased hormone production that occurs in adolescence. Some of that response shows up as structural changes, and some in physiological changes. In testosterone-influenced voices (who will become baritones) it can present as the inability to modulate registers with fluidity. In estrogen-influenced voices it presents as a mild edema which can affect high notes and tonal quality.

Two teenage girls being silly together and posing with sunglasses and hats.

It’s a Family Show

Normally, their parents are paying for these lessons. The student has to understand that you cannot work on songs with a swearing, explicit sexual content, or lyrics expressing violence. You also can’t work on songs that have those things in their videos.

Extreme Ranges

As we all know, right now the commercial music world is all about higher and louder. Every so often you’ll have a teen singer who can do that. But mostly not. You can:

Teach them how to blend high, while tempering their expectations a little (the singers they want to emulate are both older and more experienced than your students)
Show them how to move between registers with fluency and without apology
Teach them how to use the qualities of the registers to create vocal texture and style
A combination of two or all three of those things!

The Artists Approach

Currently there’s a really good example of a strong artistic approach in the form of Billie Eilish. Billie is not just a singer (in the way we’ve historically understood singers). Billie is an artistic package. She represents something. Her lyrics, her clothing, her social media, her videos, etc. She’s really tapped into a zeitgeist and young people love her. The way she sings is the way she sings. Nothing against Billie. But most voice teachers are loath to teach a kid to sing like that.

Good news. You don’t have to teach a kid to sing like that. Instead, what we can do with the Billie Eilish (or similar) phenomenon, is to devote a lesson to teaching the student how to listen.

Listening as an Artist

You can help them move closer to really hearing what a singer is doing, both as a vocal instrument and as a musician. Dedicated lesson time to listening is time well spent! You can say to your student, “One of the things we love about Billie is her style, right? There’s a lot to be gained from copying the style of singers you like. Ultimately you’ll find and create your own style. So...let’s spend our lesson time today really listening to Billie (or whomever) and let’s figure out what she’s doing, both as a vocalist and as an artist.”

If you do that - and do it without judgement, but with your magical, analytical voice teacher ears - you will very likely change their lives.

No other teacher is going to do that for them.

Ever.

That 30-minute interaction with you and Billie Eilish (or, whomever...) will change the way that student listens to music forever.