Singing: A House Is Not A Home
If you know the song, maybe you also recall the first time you heard it. I was home, washing dishes, putting laundry away, and letting YouTube do its thing, running through music videos. But then I had to stop everything and pull a chair up to my computer monitor and watch in absolute astonishment and admiration Luther Vandross singing A House Is Not A Home. He pulled out all his bells and whistles and still made the moment seem so real, so urgent, so deeply from the heart. It didn’t cross my mind for a moment to learn the tune. He’d DONE IT. Period. Stop. It was years later, the day I heard Burt Bacharach had passed away. That’s when I knew I wanted to learn this song, as my own humble way to honor the great composer.
Challenge One: What the heck does this song mean to me? As I studied the lyrics and melody — that was the burning question I had. I struggled learning the lyrics mainly because they didn’t mean a thing to me. I kept mixing the lyrics with a Magritte painting “This is not a pipe,” and I’d sing “a chair is not a chair” instead of “a chair is still a chair”.
Part of my practice when learning a song is to let it play on repeat while I’m going about other activities. I find my sub-conscious gets a lot of good work accomplished that way. And sure enough, my break through came while I was otherwise occupied. I was working for several hours at my computer (my day job) with a rotation of multiple versions of House Is Not A Home in my ear buds, when I suddenly found tears were rolling from my eyes. The meaning of the lyrics had found me. “When I climb the stairs…”, those were the five words that set off a series of images for me. The “stairs” I saw were of my childhood home, and the next words, “please be there…”, was my fourteen year old self wishing my Dad would be there, but my Dad was deceased. The images came readily then, “a chair is still a chair”, I saw my Dad’s chair at the head of our dining room table. ‘A room is still a room, even when there’s nothing there but gloom,” I saw the doorway to my parent’s bedroom as I crossed the threshold to my own room. So “A House Is Not A Home” became my song about a young girl grieving her father.
Once I connected with the lyrics, I still needed to connect to the music. I worked with musical director Gregory Toroian and mapped out the tempo, the dynamics, the tag. Still a work in progress, I chose to sing it at an open mic where he and his trio were accompanying. I embedded a recording below. I’m still singing the song, and working on my interpretation. Most frequently I’ve sung it accompanied by Mark Piro at Sid Gold’s Request Room. But as with every song, it will always be a work in progress.