Blissfully Aware Episode 8
Wake Up the Voices
Stephanie Rooker’s never been casual about music
“My mission is to wake up the voices. We need all the voices, we need all the songs. No one can be left out. We need all of them, more than ever. The more people can step into owning their power and their magic and their capacity to heal themselves and heal this world, the better.” — Stephanie Rooker
Stephanie Rooker is a force of soul in the New York music community and beyond. She is a vocalist, composer, voice teacher, therapeutic sound facilitator, and founder of Voice Journey.
Her albums have been described as brooding, sometimes sultry, with lyrics that draw just as profoundly from conscious hip-hop as from classic soul and funk. Stephanie wants people to feel the full spectrum of emotion through sound, and she has used her practice to heal and activate social change.
I visited her Brooklyn studio, and we chatted about her career, music, creative culture, and the windy road that brought her to where she is today. You’ll hear us talk about the power of listening with our minds AND bodies. Finding our voice and using it to heal discord and pain and expand our capacity for creativity, connection, and joy. I could not be more excited to share this conversation with you. I think I’ve gently fallen in love with Stephanie, and I think you will too.
Highlights
Stop having the voice be a measure of your attractiveness, or your goodness, or proficiency or how much you value you have. And realize how powerful an instrument you are and tap into that. I think the hardest part is for people to get out of the way. Once you get out of the way of your voice and stop trying to tell it what you think it needs to do or how you think it needs to sound — oh my God — everything changes.
I think it’s all about getting out of the way. Can you enter a space and put your ideology aside, your politics aside, your judgment aside, put the things aside that make you feel separate? The voice does that. Even though it holds everything that you are and everything that you ever have been, it also is pure energy.
The transcript can be found here:
