Most of them are very humble, polite and idealistic - not the monsters they play onstage." Their lives are so messed up, and they need the release. They're up there screaming because they have to. "Ironically, most of the kids are very soft-spoken and, I would say, repressed," she said. Into her cozy studio walk these hulking tattooed guys. Rosy cheeks, fair skin, and she has lots of tapestries and crafty things lying around. But he told a bunch of people he was coming, and word got around."Ĭross has the definition of a sunny disposition.
One client was from Hatebreed, and he never showed up to his lesson. They ultimately became well-known - one called Overcast, one became Shadows Fall, another one went to All That Remains. "I had the education to deal with it, so I took them on. She decided to turn her informal lessons into something bigger.
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By 1990, she was teaching classical voice full time.īut the rockers kept asking her questions about technique. But when she got back to the States, a friend began introducing her to many of the new hard-core bands he was producing as the styles emerged in the mid-'80s. It kind of bums me out."Ĭross led her own punk band while training in Shakespearean theater and opera at school in England she even opened for Black Flag and X. "I've lost a lot of range from doing that, actually. "I would just scream and get the craziest sound I could to vent the emotion. One of his vocal chords swelled the injury looked more serious than it was, and for a time Taylor feared his meteoric rock career would end prematurely. Taylor told of an earlier vocal injury, which he suffered after screaming too hard onstage. Practicing all this stuff all together before I go out lets me hit the stage with everything, ready to go." A lot of times you go out onstage and you haven't done anything with your body, so even if you have a voice that night it just feels dead. "It's all about movement, warming up the muscles as well as the voice. "It was such a revelation," he said of Cross' vocal techniques. But his band, Slipknot, just won the Grammy for best metal performance. One confesses, "We're no Pavarottis."Ĭorey Taylor isn't, either. Many of these singers give testimonials in "The Zen of Screaming" (now in stores from, appropriately, Loud Mouth). and former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, and bands such as Lamb of God, Shadows Fall, Thursday, Killswitch Engage, the Agony Scene and Sick of It All. She now has a client roster that looks like the soundtrack to the latest big-budget horror franchise, performers such as Andrew W.K. Those major labels sought to protect their investments, so they put Cross on speed-dial. "They were getting hurt," she says of the bands she saw screaming their lungs out onstage, "and as the genre became more popular and these kids were getting picked up by major labels, I was suddenly the only voice teacher that tolerated them."
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Feelgood for the latest wave of hard-core bands tagged with such descriptors as "death metal," "death grunt," "grindcore" or "doom rock." She coaches these young men - they're almost always male, though she just picked up a girl from the band Arch Enemy - on how to communicate their passion without destroying their voices.
"He's imitating me all the time."Ĭross, 48, is not a physician, but she's the Dr.
"He certainly knows how to scream," she added during a recent phone interview from her home. "I am not your mother," she says by way of introduction on her new DVD "The Zen of Screaming: Vocal Instruction for a New Breed," though she is parent to a 5-year-old boy. Her name is Melissa Cross, but you can call her the Scream Queen. One woman has the answer - a short, cheery red-headed PTA mom in suburban New York. And whether you respect the catharsis of these "death metal" bands or shake your graying locks at these kids today, you ask the same question: How does that guy do that night after night and not completely shred his vocal chords? Calling this guy a "singer," you realize, is generous - a job title not quite accurate to the duty he performs, which is more shrieking, roaring, growling and screaming. The black-clad, tattooed viking of a singer stomps around the stage with a microphone clenched against his spittle-spewing lips.
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