Gabrielle Goodman on Chaka Khan, Roberta Flack, and Nailing Singing Auditions

Who would you want to play you in a movie about your life?

Gabrielle Goodman: Fantasia Barrino. Because she sings so well. I would just love to hear her sing my songs. That would be just amazing. The gospel songs that have been in my life, my own compositions, all of it!

I know a lot of professional singers don’t normally do karaoke, but if you get roped into it, what are you going to sing?

Gabrielle Goodman: “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan or “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, because they’re so fun. They’re such fun songs!

Who is your most reliable source for music?

Gabrielle Goodman: One of the people, and I miss him dearly, who used to tell me was Jeff Ramsey [co-author of R&B Vocals]. He would say, “Well, this is a great new singer and you should listen to her!” or “This is a great new song!” And I don’t have that right now, so I just sort of go on YouTube.

What kind of rituals or routines do you have when you’re about to perform?

Gabrielle Goodman: Before or after I put my eyelashes on … [Laughs] Generally, it’s after I put my eyelashes on, I like to get the band together to say a prayer over the event. I pray for perfect musicianship and that the audience will accept us because, sometimes everything can be perfect onstage, but the audience can look at you like, “What are you doing?” So I pray for all of those things. And then we just go. I always warm up before I sing, so many times in the dressing room, I’ll warm up. So it’s sort of make-up, warm-up, and prayer.

What do you do to win over an audience if they’re not on your side right away?

Gabrielle Goodman: I have a sort of a vivacious spirit, so if someone is sitting in front of me, I’ll just walk right up to them and maybe grab someone’s hand. And if I’m close enough to them I just start singing to them. Or if it’s a large audience, I’ll just say “Hey, come on, everybody, put your hands together!” and just get them involved. I find that getting people involved, depending on what kind of crowd it is, with an uptempo song, is really important.

What was your first professional gig?

Gabrielle Goodman: I did a lot of local projects in Baltimore when I was growing up, because the very first gig that I did was with my oldest brother, and I sang in church for a long time. When I think about it, I was 14 to 16 before I started gigging. And my oldest brother would come to the church and I started gigging with his group. Then internationally, I was in school at the Peabody Conservatory and a friend of mine called from New York and asked me if I could come to New York the next day and sing background for Roberta Flack.

Now, there was a conversation that we had about this, like probably six months to a year prior, where I said, “Well, if you know anybody in New York who needs a background singer, please pass my name along. I would love to do this kind of work.” And then I just forgot about it and I focused on my studies.

Anyway, flash-forward, Howard King calls me and says, “Can you be in New York tomorrow?” It’s the end of the spring semester and I have final exams coming up, so it was quite the decision to make! So what I decided to do is talk to my professors and say, “Well, listen, I have this amazing opportunity. Do you mind if I take my exams next week? Because I’d like to go to New York tomorrow to sing with Roberta Flack.” And then the other part of that was that I had to learn her show overnight. [Laughs] So there were several things going on!

But the great thing about college—and I see it with my students here at Berklee—is that it prepares you to take in a lot of information all at once. It also prepares you to multitask. And so I found that because I was working on so many things already, I said, “Well, okay!” I had listened to Roberta Flack’s music so much when I was growing up as well, so I was really familiar with it. I was shaking in my boots because Roberta Flack is an amazing musician and so I thought, “I can’t sing a wrong note.”

Describe the audition process.

Gabrielle Goodman: I did not audition.

Oh, you didn’t even audition?

Gabrielle Goodman: I recently spoke to my friend Howard King, who recommended me for the gig. And he said they were all saying, “Well, who is she? Who is she?” and he said, “Don’t worry about it, she can sing.” And so I didn’t audition. They sent me a tape—these were back in the days of cassette tapes—and they said, “you have to learn these” and it was basically a two-day process. I went to New York one day, and then the show was the next day in Amherst. So we took a bus up to Amherst.

Anyway, we met at the Dakota. The whole thing was like a Cinderella story. So I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, the Dakota,” and Yoko Ono is Roberta Flack’s next-door neighbor, so she has these stories about Yoko Ono and John Lennon. It was just amazing. But anyway, the first thing she said to me was “it’s nice to meet you,” looking over her glasses, “Do you know my music?” Very professorial! And we had many moments like that.

I had learned everything, and I did a good job. But I was still, so very nervous and being the church girl that I am, I think that it was my gospel singing that took things over the top. I remember that it was a Sunday, and at the end of the performance, she said, “And now it’s Sunday; we’re all going to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’” She invited these other singers who had come up from New York, and she gave everybody a verse, and then she gave me a verse. And then as people tell it, they were all like, “Oh, you just blew everybody out of the water.” I tend to over-sing when I get scared, and it works well. So I think that was one of those moments. And what she said to me after was, “Do you realize you just blew out all the New York singers? Do you realize what you’ve just done?!” And then she said, “Would you like to go on tour with me next month to Japan?” And that was the tour where we opened for Miles Davis. That’s a whole other story.

I’ve had some peculiar moments with people and Miles Davis is one of them. So Roberta Flack introduces me to Miles. I was not going to speak to him because I was totally afraid of him. He was a very good friend of hers. She was sharing her dressing room with me at the time because they didn’t have a dressing room for me. She would share her dressing room when they didn’t have a specified dressing room for me on the tours, so that was one of those situations. I had already said to myself, “I’m just not going to get close to this person. I’m not going to say anything,” because he had already cursed somebody out. “I’m not going to put myself in that position.” Anyway, he comes in and she says, “This is my new singer. She’s a conservatory student, and she has these great high Cs and Ds,” and all of this stuff, and then he takes my hand and I think that he’s going to kiss it, and he licks it! [Laughs] So I was not really sure what to do. I think that I just looked at my hand and said, “Okay, well.”

You mentioned that when you are nervous, you might over-sing and out-sing somebody. When you are specifically hired as a background vocalist, are there any “stay in your lane” moments or do you find the main singers are usually gracious and encouraging?

Gabrielle Goodman: Well, you have to realize that you are in a certain position so you can’t go on somebody’s gig just trying to overpower everybody and out-sing everybody. That’s already understood when someone hires you. But that’s just a part of it. And so as someone who was a lead singer, I did struggle with that a bit, which is why I always had gigs (outside of the background gigs that I did) because I wanted to have the freedom to sing my songs and do what I wanted to do.

There’s an understanding when you accept a background gig that you’re in a supportive position, and you know it’s your job to be a supportive instrument. Now, the beauty of that is that in different situations when I have worked with other backing vocalists, sometimes with Roberta Flack, for instance, we were just creating parts on the spot, and we would have fun and she would say, “Oh, that’s nice, okay, let’s keep that.”

The last time Chaka Khan hired me to sing: Normally I sing the high part, the soprano part, but they were missing the contralto singer, and they said, “Well, on this gig, we want you to sing the low part,” and we hadn’t rehearsed. It’s like when someone calls you to do those gigs, there is not a pianist telling you, “You sing this, this, and this.” People expect you to just do your homework and just show up at the gig or show up at the rehearsal knowing your part and my quest has always been to learn all of the parts, because you just never know. And that’s just what I like to do anyway.

So they said, “Well, can you sing the low part?” I said, “Well, okay.” And it never occurred to me that some of it might be out of my range. We were in Chicago for this gig and we were singing, and we got to this part and in the moment I thought, “Oh my God, this part is too low.” So I inverted the harmony and took it up, above the highest part. So Chaka turned around and looked at me and she’s like, “That works!” So there are moments that are fun, where you can sort of be creative with backing vocal parts, and sometimes it’s just a necessity in the moment and sometimes you are just having fun at the gig.

How many songs would you reckon you know?

Gabrielle Goodman: I was talking to Roberta Flack about this one time. I was telling her that I admired her for knowing so many songs. She was like, “You know a lot of songs too, and you know a lot of songs in different languages.” So how many do I know? Gosh, I don’t know. I mean, hundreds, probably.

But the real question is, “What would I have to do to get them in shape for a performance?” and that would really depend on the song and the language, because I’m thinking broader now in terms of my classical repertoire too. But a lot of the R&B songs, I could easily sing and the gospel and jazz songs too. So I can’t say how many. [Laughs]

That’s a very interesting question though. I always ask my students to make lists of the songs, when we’re going through the lessons. I ask them to make lists of the songs that they know, and then we delineate what they sort of know, like if they just had to review the lyrics from what they absolutely know without even having to think about any lyrics or anything. And that’s what I’m thinking of now, and there are probably about 1,000 songs that I sort of know. And that’s a really good thing. When I did my first solo symphony gig, the music didn’t show up and this was a classical and gospel gig, and they said, “Well, what classical pieces do you know?” And I had to think, “What do I know for sure that I can take out on the stage?” And it’s always a good idea to have a list of your songs and have your keys beside the songs so that you’ll know what works for you.

When you are singing with a symphony or in any ensemble, is there any instrument that you look to for guidance more than another?

Gabrielle Goodman: Another funny story: I’m on the stage of Symphony Hall, and it’s the Christmas Pops concert. And the first song of the show starts acapella. And I have relative pitch, but it hadn’t occurred to me that we hadn’t worked out how I was going to get the tonality of the first song. And then all of a sudden I started shaking. But then the strings started going “bloop bloop” in this case, so they set up the tonality for me for that song. We hadn’t had the conversation, but I was so glad that someone had that conversation. But what I look at generally on R&B gigs is the piano.

You’ve not only written a course on vocal improvisation, but a book as well. Do you ever use improvisation to write a full song?

Gabrielle Goodman: In the process of writing a song, improvisation just happens. It just happens because that’s part of the songwriting process, so I always give myself permission, and I say, “Well, this is the first idea that I have of this song.” And then I record it and I listen to it. Three days later I may come up with a slightly different melody, which to me is improvisatory, and I’ll say, “Okay, well, I give myself permission to change it.”

Changing something in that respect is improvisatory. You already have one thing and you turn it inside out, the melody goes up and then all of a sudden it descends. It started off ascending, but you say, “Well, no, I think I’ll make this a descending melody.”

Even with lyrics, the gentleman that I was speaking about—Howard King, who arranged the Roberta Flack gig for me—he and I have been songwriting partners, and when I first started writing with him, I wrote the first verse to a song and he said, “I think that the first lines that you wrote here work better in the second verse.” Then as I looked at the storyline, I said, “My goodness, yes this works!” So you can change things, turn them inside out, or you can take a line from the first part of the song upon the last part of the song. As long as it helps the storyline, if you’re speaking lyrically or melodically, as long as it helps the melodic pattern, you can change it.

How did it come to pass that you went from performing with Chaka Khan to writing a song that she recorded?

Gabrielle Goodman: I wrote a song for her with my partner Wayne Brathwaite. I was at a rehearsal with Roberta Flack and her percussionist, Don Alias, who had worked with Miles and so many other people. He was Roberta’s percussionist at that time, and he said to me, “You’re a songwriter?” I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “I have someone I want you to meet. … Come with me to this studio in lower Manhattan after the rehearsal.” So we went and we met this gentleman, Wayne Brathwaite, who had written all of Billy Ocean’s biggest hits, and his music was just being played everywhere at that time.

He said, “Well, I have three songs, and they don’t have lyrics to them. They have partial melodies. Do you think you can do anything with them?” And I said, “Well, yeah, if you just give me a cassette.” We were in the days of cassette tapes and he had one ready for me before I left the studio. I get on a train (I’m still in school, by the way), and go back to Baltimore. I started writing one of the songs on the train on the way back. At midnight, I called him, and I sang it in his ear. I said, “Well, this is the song I have.” He said, “Well, now you’ve gotta come back to New York.”

So when I went back to New York that weekend, he had “You Can Make the Story Right.” He had the music to it and he had just like one or two lyrics to it. And then when I got there, I wrote the melody to the verses and the hook. And we put everything together. And he ran into Chaka at CBGB, and he played it for her and she said, “I want to have this song on my recording.”

Sadly, he passed away in the interim. She went to Warner and they agreed that they were going to put it on the recording and I just lost touch with everything that was happening at that point. And then a friend of mine called me. He said, “Well, Chaka is still working on your song and she’s bragging about it in New York.” I’m like, “What?”

When did you realize that you had gathered enough knowledge and experience to share with the next generation as a teacher?

Gabrielle Goodman: People started coming to me when I was on the road, asking me for lessons. I think I started teaching lessons when I was in New York or between tours and things of that nature, and I liked it. I liked having musical conversations with people. I liked taking a voice that only had one octave and stretching it to two or three or more. I liked that process even then. So, teaching on a collegiate level just broadened everything, and I just absolutely fell in love with it.

Have you had any former students go on to great success?

Gabrielle Goodman: There are several students out there doing great things. Taylor Deneen comes to mind. She was on The Voice recently. She’s a phenomenal singer. Look for her. She’s going to do great things.

Do you sing every single day?

Gabrielle Goodman: Oh, yeah. My boyfriend—one of them [laughs]—told me that I sing in my sleep. I didn’t know that I sang in my sleep, but that makes sense. I write songs, sometimes I dream of songs, and so I probably sing them while I’m sleeping or something. So consciously, I either sing a song that I know or that I’m trying to learn, that I have to work on for a gig or something, and then they’re just unconscious too. I mean, there are times that I just sing where I’m just not even thinking about it, and I think, “Oh, I am singing this song.” So yeah, I sing all the time.