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L!KA has been performing since age two, and Talk To Me shows it
In the verses of 'Talk To Me', L!KA sings low and close, with an airy delivery that sits neatly above a moving piano. Then the chorus arrives and L!ka opens out into a full belt, carried up into the top of her chest, and for a moment it feels as though another singer has stepped in. It is the same one. That shift is the spine of the single, and the reason anyone who likess to sings for a living should give it a listen when it comes out on 10 November.
Take the opening line. "You talk to me like I am a kid" is sung fairly dry and right in the centre, with the breath left audible rather than tidied away. Anyone who has tried this knows how unforgiving it is. A breathy tone in the lower middle of the voice tends to sag in pitch or lose its core the moment the singer stops paying attention, and with so little around it there is nowhere to hide. L!KA keeps the air in the sound without letting it thin out. On a track like this the vocals need to be exceptional and L!ka does not disappoint.
She has been performing since the age of two. As a child she appeared on television, reality TV included, and she has been in at least five musical theatre productions. Theatre trains a particular instinct: you learn to let the voice carry the character, to decide where a line should sit before you decide how loud it should be, and you learn to do it eight shows a week without wearing yourself out. She has also competed at the Kiwanis Music Festival, collecting more than one first place there along with several runner up finishes. Festival adjudication is its own discipline, the sort where someone with a score in front of them is listening for exactly the things a breathy verse can expose. Add audiences of up to approximately 1,000 people and you have a singer who has spent most of her life learning to be heard by a room, which is a fitting background for a song that is all about longing for someone to listen.
Among the singers she names as influences are Kelly Clarkson and Demi Lovato, and you can hear that school of big hearted belting in the way "You are the one I chose, please call right now" is thrown out to the back of the room. But the verses are where she sounds most like herself, and the song is built so that each half makes the other mean more. The quiet makes the belt feel earned. The belt makes you lean back in when the next verse returns to the breathy lower voice and she asks, "Tell me more or did we breakup?"
What stays with me is how deliberately she uses the gap between those two voices. The low, breathy one asks questions and gets no answer. The belted one stops asking and starts insisting. You could hear the song with the words stripped out and still follow the argument purely from where she places her voice, and that is the craft of someone who has been learning to tell stories since before she could read them.
