Since we got back from our New York trip I haven’t been able to stop listening to this song from one of the shows we saw, Shucked—a musical we selected, actually, because of the actor/singer performing it: Alex Newell. This foot-stomping showstopper of a number brought the house down for a few minutes of rapturous ovation in the middle of the play.

We’ve been pretty intense fans ever since we first saw Newell as Jane Levy’s best friend, Unique, in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, because they are one of those performers who has so much charisma and stage presence you can’t take your eyes off of them. And because Alex has some pipes, y’all.

Seriously, take a few minutes to listen to that song. You won’t be sorry. I will wait.

Now, anyone who is a regular reader can imagine my delight—my utter glee—when I happened upon this video: 12 minutes of a professional vocal instructor/professor, Jaron M. LeGrair, analyzing the living daylights out of every line and note of this single song.

The time-proven most effective way to master any craft—any skill at all, really—is to understand it at the most foundational level.

Before you balk at these extremes of analytical nerdery, or dismiss them as the picayune obsessions of folks like me and LeGrair who geek out over dissecting the minutiae of art and thus robbing all the magic from it…consider that the time-proven most effective way to master any craft—any skill at all, really—is to understand it at the most foundational level.

And the most effective way to do that is to pick apart the work of a master to see what makes it masterful.

These masterpieces aren’t accidents—they are deliberate in every nuance, the result of painstakingly learned understanding and skill in how to use one’s medium—in Newell’s case, voice, tone, phrasing, volume, musicality, and a host of other factors I can’t even conceive of, because singing isn’t my medium. All I know is this thing SLAPS.

See Alex Newell sing "Independently Owned" from the musical Shucked LIVE this Monday night, May 22, on The Voice.

Notice how LeGrair breaks it down:

• First, you see his reactions, and what is eliciting them. Revel in LeGrair’s utter delight in even the tiniest nuance of Newell’s performance: Newell’s articulation, “glottal onsets,” the confidence and character in the singer’s tone, the range.

• Then he explains why he reacts to each element: The bright, open sound of a certain note that lends it clarity and impact, a light airiness of tone that creates a lyric’s sense of playfulness, how the power of the singing elevates the impact of the performance.

• Finally, LeGrair analyzes how Newell created each effect: a larynx drop, the “throwing” and retraction of sound, pacing, intensity, focus and intentionality, vocal modulation and phrasing, tongue placement, how Newell uses their body to facilitate sound production.

I should make a video, for your entertainment, of me watching LeGrair watch and analyze the video of Newell—which I keep doing over and over—because I get jacked over the way the music and the artistry and craft of it just transport LeGrair as a musician and teacher. Picture my reacting to him with the giddy delight with which he reacts to Newell. It’s so meta. I SEE YOU, Jaron M. LeGrair. You are my people.

Yes, this kind of painstaking, picayune, pedantic analysis is learning how the sausage is made—but if you want to make sausage that’s exactly what you have to do.

Analyzing Other People’s Storytelling to Improve Your Own

Regular readers know that I frequently proselytize the inestimable value of learning to read like a writer: to analyze other people’s stories with a keen, objective eye. It’s the most effective, powerful way I know to not just learn what goes into making a successful, effective story work, but to internalize these elements of story craft in an intrinsic way so that these skills become a part of you, tools in your toolbox ready to accessed at any time—organically, intuitively.

Analyzing masterful stories is the most effective, powerful way to learn what goes into making a successful, effective story work so that these skills become a part of you, tools in your toolbox ready to accessed at any time.

The steps LeGrair uses in this delightful parsing of Newell’s performance to help other singers understand how to achieve similar effects in their own work are the same ones you can use in bringing this skillset to your own analysis of other creators’ stories—and I’ve written before that everything is story and everything can be analyzed: books, movies, TV shows, commercials, song lyrics, advertisements, everything.

Read more: “How to Read Like an Editor”

• First notice your own reactions, and where they were elicited. Where were you most rapt in the story? Where did you laugh out loud, or cry, or feel your heart racing, or couldn’t put the book down or turn off the TV? Where were you especially moved, or affected, or delighted, or engaged?

• Now dig deeper in what caused those reactions: Were you afraid for the hero’s safety at some imminent threat? Did a scene between two characters ending their marriage break your heart? Why—what about these moments, specifically, elicited these emotions, thoughts, reactions?

• And finally, look to the mechanics of how the storyteller created that effect. How exactly, specifically, granularly did they create the immediacy, believability, relatability, clarity, and depth that combine to create an overall effect that draws the reader directly into the experience of the characters?

This is the process I advocate for authors, and that I teach in my “How to Train Your Editor Brain” online Working Writer course.

Read more: “Why We Can’t Look Away from White Lotus”

How Craft Becomes Art

Here’s one more story from Shucked—and Newell’s performance—that spoke to me. Sitting in the row in front of us was a younger theatergoer—maybe mid to late teens, short haircut, gender-neutral outfit.

My husband and I delighted ourselves watching this kid experience the show—their thrilled smiles in turning to comment to their parents, the way they swayed and clapped along with some of the numbers, shot to their feet to cheer Newell’s performance in this number and the whole cast at the end, and their beatific expression and excitement as the family left afterward.

It reminded me of the first time I saw a live theater show and how it literally changed the course of my life, sending me into a career in the arts. I remembered what it felt like to see people onstage who reflected back to me something about my life that meant something to me, affected me.

I don’t know what spoke to this person, particularly—I don’t know them or anything about them. Maybe it was the power of the performances. Maybe they were seeing their first live show and being transported by it, or their first Broadway production, or it was their first trip to NYC. Maybe, in a show full of diversity, they were profoundly affected to see people onstage who reflected themselves back in a positive, joyful, self-accepting way.

This was a light, even silly little show…one that the entire audience seemed to genuinely enjoy, judging by their response.

And yet it was even more for that one single audience member—and maybe for others we didn’t happen to witness—who had what was clearly a profound experience thanks to these artists’ efforts.

Either way, the next time you’re feeling your art doesn’t matter, remember that. You never know whose life you might be changing.

If you enjoy the sort of obsessive analytical nerdery LeGrair does in the above video, or want to try it in our medium, storytelling, check out the How to Analyze Like an Editor videos on my YouTube channel, where we geek out exactly like that dissecting other writers’ stories, or my online Working Writer course “How to Train Your Editor Brain.”

And a quick addendum–after this post was written I saw this bit of news about Alex Newell, and this about their Tony nomination, so clearly I’m not the only one wowed by their performance. If you didn’t already watch the video, don’t you really want to now? 🙂