Who started the indie cursive vocal style?
Indie cursive vocal style was popularised in the 2010s by the likes of Lorde, Adele and Halsey and more recently by Tate McRae, John Legend and Shawn Mendes.
(Credits: Far Out / Duncan Shaffer)
Music » From The Vault
Wed 15 January 2025 10:00, UK
To help identify the roots of any subject, we first need to truly understand its fundamentals. While cursive singing can sometimes be referred to as indie pop voice or indie girl voice – although we’ll find that male artists have adopted the style in more recent years – the approach required in terms of technique tends to involve heavy pharyngealisation, meaning a vocalist will constrict the back of their throat or pharynx in delivering this inflexion.
According to musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding – the hosts of the podcast Switched on Pop – the style can be defined by elongated vowels (creating what are known as diphthongs), “Clipped consonants and run-on phrasing”.
Indie cursive vocal style was certainly popularised in the 2010s by the likes of Lorde, Adele and Halsey and more recently by Tate McRae, John Legend, Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber – a hat-tip to the fact it’s grown beyond the term “indie girl voice”. With this surge coming through over the past 15 years or so, alongside the increasing use of its specific terminology, many could look to the early 21st century as the birth of this style.
Taking a moment to reflect on the point that this vocal style is almost always associated with indie music, you could also assume that it can’t date back to much earlier than the late 1970s when the term “indie” was first coined.
However, one example of a vocalist who applied this vocal texture to their performances – whether consciously or subconsciously, I would guess the latter – was Amy Winehouse. It’s well documented that Winehouse drew influence from the jazz and soul pioneers of the 1950s, such as Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan.
Robert Toft, a music professor at the University of Western Ontario who teaches the history of singing, says the number of genres and singers to whom the term applies is wide, ranging from Billie Holiday in the late 1940s to 1960s soul singers, including Nina Simone and Etta James to seven-time Grammy winner Billie Eilish.
The Guardian, meanwhile, points to Lis Lewis – a vocal coach in Los Angeles whose clients include Miguel, Rihanna and Jack Black – who sees the roots of cursive singing in R&B and gospel, in which syllables are often added to words so they better fit rhythms. It’s then unsurprising that stalwarts of the R&B and soul world such as Macy Gray and Corinne Bailey Rae are often also cited as pioneers of the sound – they, no doubt, drawing stylistic qualities from the greats of the genres that have gone decades before them.
What’s interesting in recent years is the fine line that has been fading between the realms of pop and alternative/indie pop. With Billie Eilish being one torchbearer in mainstream pop, the style seems to have perhaps hit its peak, at least for the moment – such is the ebb and flow of any trend. The best artists will always look to their musical ancestors through a curious, enthusiastic and sometimes starry-eyed lens, learning their techniques and styles to then adapt and make their own.
So, while cursive singing may have plateaued for the moment, I’m sure we’ll see it appear in new forms once again.
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Amy WinehouseBillie Eilish
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