Lift Your Voice
I started learning to sing when I was eighteen. Some people realize in their early adulthood that they have a vocal talent that is worth pursuing. I was not one of them. I learned to sing in spite of the vocal cords I was dealt, not because of them. My uncle saw me perform recently and said to my father “I didn’t know there was a vocal gift in our gene pool.” There wasn’t, Uncle Todd. I cultivated it, slowly and frustratedly, over nine years of practice and performance. When I decided to learn to sing, I’d been playing guitar for one year, and was a little bit obsessed with music. I practiced for four hours most days, sometimes as many as twelve. I wrote songs, and wanted to perform them. When you write a song, you write a melody, and when you write a melody, someone sings it. I wanted to be that someone, because they were my songs and all else felt wrong. My favorite artists were artists who wrote their own songs and sang them — Jeff Buckley, D’Angelo, Jimi Hendrix — and I wanted to be like them. I also realized, in a rare moment of teenage discernment, that gig opportunities for musicians who could sing and play an instrument were greater than those for musicians who could do one or the other. I didn’t like the idea of having to rely on another person’s schedule to work, so my freshman year of college, my vocal journey started.
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the music majors at Longwood University who spent any time in or around the practice rooms of Wygal Music Hall in early 2015. I can only imagine the horrible sounds that you heard, that came out of my mouth all those nights, that you put up with. I hope you, like I, have managed to forget them. May there be peace in the aftermath, for all those ears affected.
I don’t know that I was quite that bad, but I was bad. Well, I should try and be more exact. I was someone with a decent sounding voice who had no idea how to use it, which made that voice unpleasant. Bob Dylan is an example of someone with a not decent sounding voice who knows how to use it, which makes that voice pleasant. Like his breath control and stuff are fine, he just sounds like that. My voice could be pretty, but I ran out of breath before the ends of lines, had vocal fry, and struggled to stay in key. My voice was also very very quiet. For years, I could hardly sing over an acoustic guitar, and singing over a full band was hopeless. It did not matter if I had professional amplification and the greatest sound engineer in the world, I was too quiet. The louder I’d try to sing, the farther off-key I would get. I would try and sing from my diaphragm, breathe deeper for greater support, all that — and maybe this will sound silly and make me look stupid to other musicians, but I could never figure out, for the life of me, when to start breathing. It just didn’t make sense to me. I would start too early and feel like I was holding. I would start too late and get a shallow breath. But people just kept telling me “sing louder,” so I kept trying to sing louder. And the louder I tried to sing, the worse the singing got. I struggled with that problem for five years.
I sang at least four days a week for the four years I was in college. I sang for hours those nights, took vocal lessons at multiple points with multiple people, ran scales, learned about breathing and the diaphragm, vocal resonance, vibrato, placement and all that stuff. By the time I graduated, I still struggled to stay in key. I still couldn’t really sing over a band. I felt like I didn’t just lack natural talent, I had an aversion to good singing. Particularly under pressure — much of my technique would crumble, and my performances wouldn’t reflect what I was capable of, in the studio especially. It was like I had some mental block that manifested itself physically, and when I didn’t have that mental block, I still had a physical one. That’s the best way I can describe it. My vocal cords were so weak, that by the time they’d significantly strengthened, they were still so weak. And don’t speak to me about patience. We’ve all heard about actors learning to sing from zilch in the six months leading up to a movie shoot, and then winning a Grammy. And yeah, those actors get the best vocal coaches in the country and all they do for six months is study singing, but it’s hard not to feel like one should be able to equal that progress in four years of consistent work.
A part of growing up is coming to terms with the disappointments in your life that have come as a result of mistakes you’ve made, and not just bad luck. I made mistakes learning to sing. I worked hard during college, but I could have worked better. I showed up all those nights, but not with the right approach. A consistent plan of study, and an equal focus on the different aspects of the voice was what I needed. My approach mostly involved working my vocal cords until they strengthened by repetitive use, while half-heartedly studying the technical side. I was naïve to think that was an effective way to go at something, but you have to learn some lessons to know them, I suppose.
For the past year or so, I’ve been going to the gym, and an up-close look into the fitness world has really put things into perspective for me with singing. Anyone who has ever succeeded at an extreme weight gain or loss goal knows how much attention to detail goes into transforming one’s body. It’s not just a matter of showing up every day and doing random exercises and cutting/adding a meal or two. How you work out matters, when you work out matters, when you eat matters, what you eat matters, it is the body as sculpture. Getting into the world of fitness, one realizes that some people put the same level of attention to detail into building their bodies as a writer puts into constructing a novel. I wish I had looked at my voice that way when I was younger. The vocal folds are muscles, and you exercise them, and they get stronger. But when it comes to lifting, to singing, there must be a great attentiveness to every aspect, and a consistency in that attentiveness to yield reliable results. This is especially true, for those who are not genetically predisposed to the place they seek. Some people are not very coordinated physically, and some people are not very coordinated vocally. Some people can go to the gym and do whatever and eat whatever and see results because they are genetically predisposed to those results, just like some people can sing well, and they work at it, sure, sort of — but their body picks everything up so quickly, they hardly need to. People like me can learn, but we need guidance.
Great guidance, in general, is hard to come by, and great vocal guidance is particularly hard to find. Most of the people singing professionally did not have to climb the mountain of their genetics to do it. Singing isn’t like our physical appearance, where the need to reach a certain “standard” is shoved down our throats every time we walk outside. There aren’t as many people you’ll meet with transformation stories. Most people who realize they can’t sing well just don’t sing. A lot of people don’t even know that you can learn to sing. I was told multiple times during my college era “you’re not a singer.” That I should get someone else to sing my songs. (A slight digression about learning something as an adult: unlike when you’re a kid, people love to tell you that you “just don’t have [thing] in you.” Especially people that really have [thing] in them, and people that really don’t). Teachers will struggle to know why you are struggling, because they did not struggle in the way you struggle.
Perfect example is: sing louder. All I heard for years. From bandmates, from sound engineers, from teachers, other singers — all sorts of people. The memory of those folks now tickles and annoys me, though I do understand that the majority of them meant well. It’s just such shallow advice. Sing louder. It’s like telling the smallest person in the gym to “lift heavier,” when they can hardly handle the bar. Sing louder! Like yeah, I’m working towards that. Vocal projection is a technical process, it’s not just raising your voice. I remember once someone told me to “sing louder” and I asked “how do you sing louder?” and they just looked at me. Looked at me like the thought had never occurred to them. Because it probably hadn’t. They were someone who, when they needed to project their voice, they just asked their body to do it, and their body did. And honestly, I get it. Sometimes writing is that way for me. There are changes I make editing where it’s like, “look, I can’t explain why I needed to fix that to make it work, but I fixed it, and ah, there we go, now it’s better.” This is why sometimes good artists make bad teachers. Like, how in the world would you teach someone to blink? You say “close your eyes,” and they ask “how?” and you go “umm…” Some people feel that way about the basics of their craft, and in order to be a good teacher, they have to relearn learning. Nothing wrong with those folks, my advice is just to be wary of the naturals who try to tell you it should be natural.
The happy ending is that I sing for money now, can sing over a band (the band can always play quieter too, it took me too long to learn that), and honestly dig my voice most of the time these days. I still struggle with the vocal yips, and have yet to put a performance down on record that I’m happy with. But I’m so glad I learned to sing. Money aside, it’s such a beautiful thing to have a relationship with one’s own voice. Or to have an intentional relationship with any part of one’s body. I don’t even look at it as trying to make my voice “professional” or “the best it can be” or whatever, I don’t even know what those things mean. I just want to continue making my voice better. Getting used to what it is, what it will and won’t do, and steadily working with and around those things. Learning to love it. I will admit I have an easier time accepting where I’m at when I’m putting in the work to move past my current point. Maybe that’s not self-love, but it’s what I’ve got. Don’t let anyone convince you that you shouldn’t do something because it doesn’t come easy to you. Even if that person is yourself. There is more to be gained from hard, attentive work than from natural talent that can’t stop staring at itself. I think I stole that from either Aesop or Naruto. But it’s true.
