The potency of "It's Not Right But It's Okay," Whitney Houston's triumphant 1999 call out single, hangs from a tiny ad lib she deploys with surgical efficiency. She uses it to puncture the song's ...

The Buddha used to ask his disciples to do a certain meditation: “Go to the street and watch everybody passing by, coming and going on the street. See exactly what is happening. Don’t listen to their ...

When writing recently about election-year protest songs, I was thinking how in a different, more saturated age, no political song is going to have the impact of even a “Where Have All the Flowers Gone ...

Lyrics can be pored over, their meanings endlessly debated, but non-verbal vocals, like Whitney's "uhhh," contain multitudes that somehow get straight to the point. They make sense on an instinctual ...