Progress Report. Or the effects of 3 acts of God on 1 active songwriter.

To quote Heavy D & The Boyz: "Now that we found [F6] what are we going to do / with it?"

Well, I don't know.

I've been playing around with that upper range a bit since discovering it but I've also been busy digesting new music and writing press releases for projects that I'm promoting this Fall. I mainly went back just to make sure the whole F6 thing wasn't a fluke and that it was/is still there. It is. So strange.

At this point, my super upper range, as with my chest voice, has two volumes: ON and OFF. Fine. I can work with that. Mark Baxter gave me some interesting exercises to build strength in volumes pp p mf f ff:

one          two               three               four               five

I've been working on "you're an old man" such that it ends appropriately on a D-minor arpeggio from D5 up to D6. So there's that.

Otherwise, I feel like I've hit a bit of a lull. I was working on combining two of my songs (january ballet song and la plus belle but I haven't been able to find a suitable transition from one to the other (one as verse, the other as chorus). For that song, I also wanted to visit and possibly record a class at a ballet studio but, after asking around and emailing Dance New Amsterdam, I've waited for weeks with no reply. I did find a potential translator/collaborator for the French lyrics and collaborating sounds like fun. This feels broader in scope than other songs I've recorded so far, and I'm feeling like I need to equip myself with some composition lessons in order to actualize what I'm envisioning. The same goes for the 4-part hymn "i will grow old and grow apart from all that's dear to me." I got my first copy of Sibelius and started learning it but an earthquake outside of my home county happened in the middle of my tutoring session, then my dad had a bunch of surgeries, then there was a hurricane, then my fall PR projects started. I'm feeling like I could use some guidance. [HELP ME.]

Meanwhile, I've circled back to "laundry" and "you're an old man" because they are more straightforward -- me + guitar or me + ukulele. That'll do for homemade demos, at least.

If I record both of those, that'll be 6 completed demos with about 13 songs still to finish/demo, and about 13 beyond that that I think I'll just let go of. My vocal coach says about 30-50 songs are typically written for each album of music, only 12-ish make the cut. 10 core songs + 2 novelties.

Also worth noting, watching Season 1 of Mad Men is so much easier than writing music.

I Am the Queen of Night! F6! F6!

I'm not saying that Royal Opera House is going to fly me in to replace Diana Damrau as Queen of Night in its next production of Mozart's Magic Flute (or that I'd be auditioning for any such thing), but this is important (to me): please listen to this aria. Go ahead. It's Sunday night, what else are you doing?

OK, so here's why it was important to me that you listen. You heard those high F's? (F6's to be exact?) Out of the spanking blue I suddenly have that. Yep. I got it. It's allllll mine.

Ten-fifteen years ago when I was actually in classical vocal training/ensembles, I was a very resentful mezzo soprano who always whined about preferring to sing alto where 1) my voice was comfortable 2) I could harmonize = much more fun. Because, after all, my only "training" beyond that had been singing shape note hymns with regular folks in church. (No choral program in my rural high school.) But both of my voice teachers shoved a mezzo version of 26 Italian Songs and Arias in my face and made me sing very uncomfortable things in very uncomfortable ranges. I once, at age 18, sang a painfully strained, gasping version of Samuel Barber's "Sure on This Shining Night" for a recital and thought my voice (sure on my shining life) wasn't built to sing above a D5. Hitting those F5s and G5s was like wriggling and pretending to attempt pull-ups in front of the entire gym class. And I hated it. And I hated singing that way. Such was the case until last summer.

The irony is this happened quite on accident, while working with a pop vocal coach, while focusing on my lower register/chest voice, while on a mission to declassically train my voice. (If you're just catching up, here is the post about how this guy made me cry before my first lesson and another about how he told me why nobody was going to bother to listen to me sing in my second lesson. No, really, it's some of the best stuff anyone's ever said to me. Check it out.)

And here's the story in pictures (click to enlarge! because I want you to!):

This all happened with three voice lessons and regular vocal exercises over a period of one year. All of this focused on making use of my lower register (chest voice) and producing a more me-sounding, unpolished tone. And it's crazytown because, now that I'm not trying to be able to sing arias or art songs, I magically can. And now that I'm trying to unearth a more raw, speech-like quality in my voice, my voice can sound as clear as a bell. So . . . what am I going to do with that? That is the question.

I have some ideas. On that note, I had my fourth lesson today. I'll write about that next.

Sing It So I Believe It

Parents packed and shipped safely home, Alaska and I declared today a day of rest. So, as the "180 minutes" of ALL THREE football games slowly passed, I propped up my socked feet and hunkered down with a backlog of glossies to see what's sleek in this world of ours.

I didn't travel far before coming across Justin Davidson's New York magazine profile on vocal coach to the opera stars, Steven Blier. Here's the link to the full story entitled "Sing It So I Believe It," nicely done: http://nymag.com/arts/classicaldance/classical/reviews/69638/.

It's interesting to see Blier's philosophies up against those of my own vocal coach. While Mark Baxter is busily stripping away my classical training so that I can deliver the message, Blier seemingly maximizes every last drop of his students' training so they can do the same. Different styles, different venues, but plenty of room for intersection. These snippets were particularly apropos to my latest blogvestigations.

Justin writes:

"Over the past 35 years, Blier has become a guru of song, the man who patiently guides singers past their vulnerabilities, who coaxes them to scrutinize and express some tiny grain of meaning in the text, who homes in pitilessly on glints of fake feeling. A mixture of therapist, teacher, impresario, and pianist-for-hire..." 

(Uh-huh...sounds familiar.)

"What separates the [songs] that interest him from those that don’t is not style, but a nugget of emotional intensity. 'A song is the closest thing I know in waking life to dreaming,' he says. 'It’s a coded version of reality. It’s not like playing a scene from Chekhov, where you’re trying to look like you’re having a tea party or a nervous breakdown. Instead, you’re enacting a coded, ritualized version of that moment, and somehow everyone in the hall is dreaming along with you.'"

(Hmm. Hadn't thought of it that way.)

 “'When I roll onstage, I am the song’s messenger,' he says. 'Maybe some other guy can play it better than I can, but I was given the message, and I have to deliver it.'”

(This one's  MOS DEFinitely going up on the bulletin board.)

"In concert, Blier’s emotional curiosity emerges as good humor and tenderness, but it can startle singers, says Sasha Cooke. 'People open up when they’re around him,' she says. 'You enter the room and all of a sudden everything feels very intimate. But some people don’t want to be figured out.'” 

(Do I want to be figured out??) 

 "Vulnerability and determination are the performing artist’s two contradictory but equally essential tools..."

(Those two specifically? Well, I certainly feel vulnerable enough and will even 80 times so when I brace myself and post that first song in a few weeks. Determination? Against my better judgement, perhaps, yes.)

And, on that note, the basement recording session is set for this Friday at 7PM. AUUUGGGHHHHH!!!!

I've Been Wholly Insincere

Yesterday at a power lunch with an incredibly talented and attractive (he's available, gentleman) publicist friend of mine, we overheard a singer at a nearby table talking to his date about His Voice. (Eyeroll. The brass player comes out in me. Blasted vocalists with their scarves and their hot herbal tea and matching mittens and perfect posture and make-up on their faces. Gag me. )

. . .

So let's talk about My Voice!

Prior to my first lesson with Mark Baxter (has it already been 5 months?!), I sent him a few tracks from a piano-vocal demo I made back when I was living in Miami in 2002, along with one single solitary track of my own music, just to give him a sense of my voice. I told him that, for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, I L-O-V-E to sing but have never liked the sound of my singing voice. I told him that I find it boring, uninteresting. Kind of lame. How to fix this? A gal who loves singing more than just about anything but cayen't stayend the sound of it?

And this is how this dude shot me right between the eyes before I had so much as walked in the studio and unwrapped my scarf (kidding! remember, it was June). He said he had listened to the tracks I sent and wanted to tell me something. (Yes, I think. Fix it. Make it sound Right.) And he spent about 10 minutes talking to me about honesty.

WHAM. OK. Well, that was not what I was expecting. I shall now paraphrase (though I could transcribe the whole thing from that cruel, cruel, disc he makes me bring to each session):

Here's the thing, he said. We are all animals. We have a finely tuned sense of whether or not somebody is being straight with us. The moment a stranger walks into a room we have made an almost instantaneous judgment of them: safe or unsafe, trust or don't trust, real or hiding something? And we do that very same thing when we hear someone sing. Singing is primal. We can all tell (or at least we think we can tell) when somebody means it. If they let down their guard, we let down ours. If they let us in, we let them in. Trust. 

 And here's the blow that won the match before it had started:

When I listen to you sing, what speaks loudest to me is not what you are saying, but how careful you are being. How you are hiding behind all of your training. How all of your defenses are up, ensuring that no vulnerability shows through. You are heavily guarded, shielded. I hear someone who is going through acrobatics to sound correct. If that's what people hear, they won't even bother to pay attention to the words because they won't be interested, they'll be bored, they won't believe you because they won't trust you. Is that what you want people to hear when they listen to you?

Jesus. Well . . . no.

For someone who has, on more than one occasion, been referred to as "honest to a fault," this is pretty much the last lecture I was expecting to receive. I mean, for better or for worse, I can't stand talking to someone whose guard is up and who's only presenting veneer. I consider making conversation to be part of my job and I can definitely do it when I'm "on duty" but I find myself counting the minutes and wishing for the moment when the crap is up and the conversation can finally start. And I'm pretty awful at sustaining any friendship that stalls out in facade territory. Boring. Get real. I surround myself with friends who dig deep. To a large extent I don't think I can help it.

BUT - he's completely, totally, 100% right! I mean, he nailed it. And I felt this huge sense of relief! I didn't realize it, but that is precisely why I haven't liked listening to myself sing. I don't even believe myself! How can I expect anyone else to??

I was always frustrated in voice lessons because every teacher I ever had was training me to be a mezzo soprano with 26 Italian Songs and Arias, coaching me on "Sure on This Shining Night" (OK, I actually really loved that one but wished it was about a fourth lower). Those weren't the kinds of sounds I wanted to be making. I didn't want to wiggle my hand to remind myself to use vibrato. I never wanted a big fat lacquered voice. I just wanted to sing what I was feeling, seeing. I wanted to tell the story as I see it. That's all I still want to do. I have all of these words and melodies and harmonies and stories inside that I want to tell. I want to make songs that people can hear and say "Yes! It's just like that! I see it too!" I want to write a song that somebody can crawl inside and call home the same way Sufjan Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Emily Saliers have done for me.

And so, the past few months have been warbly. Unstable. Edgy. I'm making some of the uhg-liest croaking sounds imaginable. I'm flat. I'm sharp. I'm weird. I'm resisting the almost-consuming compulsion to sing like "somebody who knows better." I'm singing "too high" in my chest voice. He assures me the cracking and squawking is no sign of injury, just a sign of a control freak who's refusing to let go of all of her safety nets. Sounds like a hot mess.

But I see signs of progress. There is no correct way to pronounce, to inflect, to phrase. I am discovering the myriad effects a person can get with a single tone. It's endless. It's overwhelming. And each one means something different, totally, slightly. There is no Right. And maybe, so what if my voice cracks?

I don't know. As of now, it doesn't feel like I have any...control...over the sound. As in, how can I convey the feelings behind the words if my voice is bucking around Brooklyn like some freaking startled bronco? I suppose I could only sing songs that are intended to sound haphazard and reckless? Mmm. Still, it's been six months since I started this blog and I ain't let nobody hear nuttin' yet. I mean, if I keep waiting until I sound awesome and everything's perfect then it's never going to happen and everyone's going to lose interest, right?

So many questions. And only two lessons. But I heard Sufjan Stevens's voice almost crack a few times on Monday night and it was heart-breakingly effective. I paid attention because he meant it.

And I mean it. I really really do. I just have to let go and get out of it's way.

Yes, Even Unto the Ends of the Earth and Autotune, Sufjan Stevens

"The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics." ~ GH Hardy

 

I was introduced to the songs of Sufjan Stevens as prelude music to Wednesday night "small group" Bible studies when I first moved to New York in 2004. In a Brooklyn apartment that felt oddly like an old farm house, while plain popcorn shook on the stove and assorted teas steeped in mismatched mugs, I'd tell this rather understated crowd how my prior week was (something very much akin to The Devil Wears Prada with more dish-washing and less swag, by the way), as we played squirrel with Sophie-the-dog and waited for the others to get started. All the while, the musical sounds of (it must have been) Seven Swans shushed us from the host's boom box. Once, in exchange for some quality time, Sophie-the-dog made me a mix CD that began and ended with bird calls, and included four yet-unreleased Sufjan tracks: Opie's Funeral Song, What Goes On, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, and Rake. I shall love them forever.

At that point, if you'd asked me about the music of this songwriter friend of theirs, I'd have said "it's quiet."

Monday night, at Sufjan's Beacon Theatre NYC homecoming concert with Alaska and our friends, Lemon Peele, Professor Lime, Daisy, and Jasper, I'd have said it's anything but. It was a balloonèd pop dance party, an autotunèd Martian landing of the numerological kind, a schizophrenic-prophetic journey into prog rock's epic Weird. And yet, it was unmistakably 100% Sufjan.

How is that? At Manhattan Diner, after the the show, Lemon Peele made the comparison: "It's not like when Jewel all of the sudden tried to be Gwen Stefani. He's still himself."

True. If I scoot back through the discs, there have always been dance (folk), mixed meters, electronic effects, programmatic story-telling, the observations and reflections of a spiritually-minded researcher, and something inexplicably off-kilter. With his two latest discs, he just takes it all waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy off on a diagonal.

When I listen to Seven Swans, Illinois, or Michigan, I feel like I'm at home. Like Sufjan has somehow tapped into my core desires and made me a nice universe to revel in. In the words of Lemon Peele Liz Lemon, when I hear those albums, "I want to go to there."

Is it nostalgia? Does my heart leap every single time I hear Chicago because I remember that amazing night at BAM with Jenny Bilfield when we sipped cosmos and munched popcorn at Robert Redford's advance screening of Little Miss Sunshine, having no idea what to expect but crying with laughter at the surprise ending? Is it because Sufjan's music feels like my first few years in New York City, those small group meetings of real people talking about real things? Or does it go back to what Mark Baxter (vocal coach) said in my first lesson? We're all looking for music that makes us feel like we are not alone in our hopes, fears, and dreams.  

Maybe it's all of the above. But whatever it is, it has won my loyalty. Yes, even unto the ends of the Earth and Autotune will I follow Sufjan Stevens. And, to be honest, I too hate chemistry but love physics and algebra. (I screamed a little bit during his math monologue.) So there.

"I was in love with the place in my mind, in my mind / I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind."

More anon.