"Do A Lot of Work" - Ira Glass

Thank you, Ira Glass, sir. Hat tip Rob Deemer.

An album and two shows; I am not a sitcom.

To quote the sensible words of a 5-year-old I once met:

WHY IS NOBODY PAYING ATTENTION TO ME RIGHT NOW.

I have been at this blog journey thing for over a year. I have been squirreling away into dark basements with laptops to write and record songs that I timidly post in hopes that someone somewhere won't mind listening to them once. But tonight I watched the premiere of Zooey Deschanel in The New Girl and a) I was embarrassed to identify so strongly with the lead in a Fox sitcom b) I was pissed that she stole* my "Thanks, they help me see" line regarding her glasses c) I was most pissed that everybody was paying attention to her, a caricature of me, because really I want everybody to pay attention to me.

*Yes, this is childish of me to say.
** I know you are but what am I.

AMERICA, if you want a gluten intolerant brunette who sings songs to/about herself during the course of a normal conversation, has boundless nervous energy expressed in unusual mannerisms, is painfully awkward in bars, and still owns both Dirty Dancing soundtracks on cassette tape (covered in purple glitter puffy paint heart stickers) THEN LOOK NO FURTHER. I GOT THAT B-ROLL! And I have been here the whole time. Since 1978 even! Put me on the cover of your New York magazine! Yes!

I mean, that's it. I can't take it any more. I'm writing this blog because I want to sing and dance and make music and I want you to listen to me and watch me do it. WATCH ME.

I am beating my swords into French horns and my spears into pianos. I am learning the ukulele. I am writing songs. I am finding my own voice and I am telling you all about it. There will be marching bands, there will be hymns, there will be shouting and dancing. And in the end, or possibly the beginning, there will be at least one album and two shows.

I need musicians, I need a collaborating arranger/producer, I need some more vocal coaching and I need some composition/arranging lessons. But I will NOT be out me'd be a Channel 5 sitcom.

Big Decision Flow Chart (reprise)

Back by necessity and popular demand, it's...

The Big Decision Flow Chart

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.

Song Alert: Nothing to do with you

A Summer Night. Credit: Keru

Here's the "rough draft recording," as I've been calling them: Nothing to do with you. (It's also in the SoundCloud widget above.)

To quote my favorite New Yorker cartoon: "This song is very difficult for me, emotionally. Plus, the chords are hard." No no no, it's not true. The chords are actually very easy. A simple harmonic ostinato.

This is the song that I wrestled with all through July (that didst bring a most grievous spirit upon me). Last Thursday I sat myself down at 11 AM and decided I was not going to shower, leave the apartment, or focus my attention on anything else whatsoever until it was finished. It was pretty grueling. While the hook came to me in a flash at the beginning of July, I'd tried many times to hash out the verses but I wasn't getting any ideas. Every line was a real struggle. But finally, by about 4 PM, all holes had been filled and I decided it was Good Enough.

Which means, as it does with all of my songs when I've just finished them, that I thought it was terrible and boring and I hated it. I sent off the lyrics to a trusted songwriter friend who cheered with me for finishing it (THANK YOU, DANI!). A composer friend added, with French accent, "Today, you've just given birth. You don't know yet whether this one will go off to college. Just, you know, give it some time and let it grow."

Half a bottle of Grenache on Friday night, and what-the-hell-it's-beautiful-let's-record-it. It's a song about love, God, sex, on a backdrop of cicadas, crickets, katydids, frogs, and other insects ... all the good stuff. Notice! It becomes gently NSFW in the fourth verse.

I'm a lyrics girl.

Two things:

1. Alaska and I listened to this This American Life segment on our most recent drive to my sweet Virginia homeland. Phil Collins talks about the divorce behind his break-out solo album and its role in his songwriting. (Yet Taylor Swift got a lot of flack for writing songs about her exes. Hmm.)

(I'm sorry about the messy embed. Something's screwy with the code.)

2. The Fleet Foxes album and its title song, "Helplessness Blues," just stopped me dead in my tracks. Had to back it up and listen again:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

The lesson from Phil Collins? Don't try to be too clever. The best songs are simple and honest. And the lesson from Fleet Foxes (and, by the way, Mumford and Sons)? Ask your questions. Everyone else has them to.

So, in response to my previous blog post, I've spoken with some trusted friends/mentors (some in the music industry), consulted Phil Collins, inferred from the Fleet Foxes, and I've come to some conclusions:

• Not everyone listens to lyrics, so many won't even notice if I'm saying intimate things.
• Those who do pay attention to lyrics will not care that these words represent my feelings. They will attach the lyrics to their own lives and make the words about their feelings.
• The music business is full of people who have varying levels of skill as performers, promoters, writers, presenters, listeners. A great curator is a mild composer. A great record producer is a mediocre guitar player, etc. A music critic who writes bland songs. There's room for me in all this. It's really no big deal.