The effect is all that matters

I laughed out loud when I ran across this short article on The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

Basically it talks about how a woman was moved to the core of her being by lyrics that the artist put no thought into.  It's meant to be funny (it is The Onion, not the New York Times), but it reminds me of an important truth about stage performance and audiences that I think people overlook often, which is that it's not about you!  Your audience doesn't have a mind-reading device, so they can't specifically tell what you're thinking about, and moreover they just don't care.  At the end of the day they care about the emotional effect you're having on them, and nothing else is even in the equation.

I bet it happens a million times a day that someone is moved by lyrics that meant nothing to the composer, or more likely meant something completely different to the composer than what the listener took away.  After all between the singer and the listener, there's no direct link - just light waves, and vibrations in the air.  That's the nature of what we call communication.  The sound and light don't mean anything until they get through the audience's eyes and ears, and into their brains where they stimulate memories, and ultimately emotional responses.  Sometimes the listener won't even know why the emotions are happening!

I get that sometimes.  Certain female voices just hit me, and I choke up for "no reason."  I love it, but I have no idea why it happens.  Maybe I was dropped on my head as a child.  But anyway I don't know what was going through those female singers' heads when they sang the notes that get to my soul, and ultimately I don't care.  I just keep hitting rewind and going for another hit.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean you can cruise along and think about your laundry while you're on stage.  What's going on in your mind is going to have an impact on your performance.  Humans are wired up with incredible circuitry for guessing the emotional state of the people around them.  In a split second they will take in your body language, facial expression, tone of voice and words as well as the whole context, and make a snap judgment about what you're feeling.  Because you know, back in the day it was important to know whether Ug was going to give you some of the mastodon meat or club you senseless.  I imagine there were lots of people in prehistory who were bad at this game, but they all got killed.  We are the survivors.  And we can all spot a fake a mile away.

So your specific objective in the scene (a.k.a. "song", or "story"), the degree to which you are authentically pursuing that objective and reacting emotionally to it are going to affect everything about the way you come across.  The people watching you perform are going to pick up on that.  Just don't mistake your emotions for theirs.