I'd Give My Life For You
Kim ran away from a small village in Vietnam around 1958, three years after the war started. At age 13, she was betrothed to her cousin Thuy, to which she confessed to not loving him. During the war, Kim's family was killed by a bomb during a raid and as she ran through the rice fields she saw their bodies, this event affected Kim and it changed her mindset that she would rather die than look back again. Kim finally finds a job as a bargirl at a nightclub in Saigon named 'Dreamland' where she meets The Engineer, catering to the American GIs stationed in the city.
On Kim's first night at Dreamland, the other girls laugh and mock her for being innocent and the patrons seem turned off by her naive figure except for a young sergeant named Chris Scott, which his friend John notices. As the night goes on Chris grows more fond of Kim after learning she's not like the other girls he's seen, Which leads to Chris asking Kim to move to America with him and they both think their relationship is a blessing since they have come from different backgrounds. After Chris goes to the engineer to make a deal to trade Kim, the bargirls hold a wedding for them both, but as they are all celebrating the wedding Thuy comes rushing in and confronts Kim, accusing her of betraying her father's wishes before he passed and how she will be cursed for it. Kim claims that the promise made by her parents died with them when Thuy sided with the North Vietnam Army.
As Chris is leaving he tries to take Kim which John doesn't allow so he leaves his gun with her for protection, 3 years later Kim has Chris's child and she is in hiding determined to get back to Chris but she finds Thuy who has gone up the ranks and is the commissar under the communist government. He mocks Kim for waiting on Chris while the war is going on and tries to force her into marriage once again but she refuses and reveals that she has a child with Chris. Thuy accuses her of being a traitor to her country and decides to execute Tam who is Kim and Chris's child. Kim is only left with the option to kill Thuy to protect her son.
Why I have chosen this song?
I have chosen this song due to how challenging it would be for me with certain vocal sections and bringing the character to the song. I felt like I could push myself into being confident with belting at certain parts and adding the same energy and attack every time I would sing the song. When the song is sung by Kim you can start to see how she will stop at nothing to protect her son and when she adds the emotion to certain parts it shows that she has come so far and battled a lot of things to get to this point. The song goes through a range of different emotions and tells a story throughout, to represent this I will change the way I sing it, for example, I would say parts of it or project some parts louder than others to show her anger.
Process
When I first sang this song I struggled to connect with the character and tried not to make the melody sound the same which was difficult at first since I watched Eva Noblezada and many more actors singing this song which made me start to sing like them and not making it my own or how I see Kim. As I started to learn about the different things that could be added to my score this changed how I saw Kim as a character and this helped my understanding more especially since Kim is determined to help her son in any way after she sings the song they moved to away from Vietnam. This is my first time learning how to annotate a music score which I found difficult but managed to make the notes easy to understand including a key that was kept the same while editing the whole score so it couldn't confuse me. The score that is shown here represents the first part that I learnt which helped bring the character to life since it was an aspirate onset which means that it has a lot of breath at the beginning which helped bring out how desperate she was to leave this place with her son.
For the first part of my song, I wanted it to have an emotional approach which could help the audience connect with me then on the word "you" I thought about speaking it since it would sound like she's almost talking about her pain and her past is hurting her. In the score, I have a lot of aspirate onsets which I found difficult at first but then as I progressed and started to sing it more it helped me understand how much breath control is important when singing this section of the song. At first, I struggled a lot with trying to sing out the song since I kept forgetting the words which made me overthink sometimes my voice would crack and I couldn't make some of the notes since I wouldn't have enough breath which improved on in my other rehearsals.
Final Performance
For my final performance, I went to Live Lounge to perform the song as I went into it I was nervous since this would be in front of a bigger audience than ever. As I went through the song I started to act more and added more passion and different volumes throughout to show how honest she needs to get out of the place especially since she hasn't been treated nicely. When I was going through the song as a rehearsal beforehand I couldn't be serious at times which stopped by the time I would snap back to character but as the audience where there it added more pressure which helped me as a performer to bring all my energy into it. The problem I had was the long outro/intro of the song I tried to introduce what the song was but by the time the song finished, there wasn't anything I could say which lost the character which you can see in the video.
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