In America

 As a singer, you are a blender who needs to blend in the emotion of the song, the music of the song and the rhythm of the song.  "Bhava raaga thala sangamam - Bharatham" While that is a one liner for a famous music based malayalam movie, I think that sentence succinctly captures what a singer should strive for.  You can get all the emotion right, but if the tune is incorrect, the song would feel incomplete.  Same for other combinations as well. Sometimes, you hear technically awesome performances with great rhythm sense and musical notes but lacking in emotion. 

 You don't set some of the notes right not because you can't make those notes but because you don't know the notes well enough.  A song is not just a page of lyrics,  not just three paragraphs in a page, not just four lines in a paragraph, not just five words in a line, not just four letter sounds in a word, it is also the notes within these letter sounds.  You don't know a song till you know these notes.  And if you have not paid attention of all the notes within a sound, when you sing you don't know   how to render that sound, and your lack of clarity manifests as misplaced notes, voice shakes, voice aberrations.  Again, it is not that the note was beyond your reach. It is that you did not have enough clarity on what notes were involved in that sound.