A Sort of an Ode
Or Why I Love Singers
“We sing because we can’t speak anymore.” — Kristen Chenoweth
I can’t exactly remember the first time I heard someone singing. It would have had to been while I was watching TV at two or three, and though I may have liked the sound, I didn’t quite register what it was.
A few years later, I heard Judy Garland sing in The Wizard of Oz, which appeared on TV every Thanksgiving (or something like that.) Watching and hearing Garland was like a thunderclap that lifted me over the rooftops of my neighborhood and brought me to a place I’d never imagined. For the first time in my life, I could hear the emotional tenor of someone’s thoughts and experiences — and even the most frightening moments were better, somehow, for being sung.
Watching The Wizard of Oz also made me want to be a singer. I sang whenever possible, and luckily, my parents and sister encouraged me. At age eleven, my mother brought me to a singing teacher — who taught me to sing classically, which was way harder than I ever thought it would be. In fact, I didn’t much like classical singing, preferring folk/alternative/country styles where the voice ranges felt much more comfortable.
Hitting the High Notes
Still, my teacher kept pushing me to sing higher notes and to stretch, and though I hardly sing at all anymore and would in any case be more of an alto than a soprano, I’m grateful she tried to steer me toward what’s known as “legitimate” singing, if only because it helped me understand what classical singers do.
I loved learning that singers project notes from their diaphragms and volume can increase or decrease through the breath. I also loved how, if I was singing correctly, my throat would stop being sore and I could sing for more than an hour.
In high school, my mother changed gears and brought me to a singing teacher whose specialty was teaching students how to sing for Broadway. Learning this style, known as “belting,” was fun and more interesting for me — and led to years of unsuccessful auditions because I could never quite get to auditions on time and more, because I was terribly self-conscious and couldn’t get past that, as you have to do when singing.
Getting Past the Snags
The most intimidating part of auditions, for me, was the unrelenting emphasis on appearance throughout the theater world, especially in New York, where I was. The other issue that tripped me up were the poker faces you encountered when you sang for people — which I didn’t understand until I got older and realized, they are seeing upwards of a hundred people a day.
I also encountered difficulties at home, as my mother wanted me to sing every time she invited guests over, as well as when she and my father and I were guests in other people’s homes. If I chose songs she liked and sang them well, we had a good evening; if not, there could be a lot of complaints directed at me afterwards. Situations like these made me feel too much depended on my performances — and that prevented me from getting into them and enjoying them.
I don’t want to blame my mother, and I’m grateful she supported my singing as much as she did. What I think happened was she got overly invested in what I was doing, without understanding that artists are not machines, and every performance is different. I wish I could have explained that some performances work, some do not — and the point of being an artist is about learning to grow; but as a sixteen-year-old, that kind of insight was (to say the least) beyond me.
Singing or Songwriting?
After college, I kept auditioning for many years until I met a singer/musician who wanted to write his own songs, and we started working together. I learned to like songwriting more than performing, and at some point, decided to let myself off the hook as a singer, continue acting, and eventually, transition to writing plays and lyrics instead.
This decision added a new dimension to my thoughts on what singing means. When working on my first musical, the director asked me to sing a certain song so he could help me polish it. Because very little was at stake, I had no qualms about breaking into song while the accompanist started playing.
As I began singing, I thought of something a mentor once said, noting that every singer needs to write their own song at least once, to experience it from the inside. During this particular song, I was singing about a very serious risk my character was about to take — and suddenly, I was inhabiting the character by discovering where she lived inside my singing voice.
Singers Do More Than Singing
That’s when I understood what singers are doing. The best ones go to the wall for us, to show, not tell, what the stakes are at any given moment. The best ones can not only hit every note on its nose, they can also endow the music with a richness that claims our attention instantly and holds it until the voices are ready to finish. As the quote above points out, songs occur when there’s just too much emotion in the room to be captured by speech — and only music will do.
Part of me now says, I wish I could have understood that earlier as a performer, but part of me is also very happy with writing songs and plays that allow other singers to shine. I also sometimes think about returning to some sort of singing again — and, as with so many things, we’ll have to see how that goes.
One thing I know for certain is that I love singers. I love their nerves before performances, their passion about getting the music right, the way they start over after mistakes, the way their voices seem to grow during rehearsals until nerves give way to confidence and the song becomes their own when the House lights come up.
I love singers because, when they do it right, God’s in the House — for them and the rest of us.
