I will never forget an initial lesson with a new (to me) singer. I always begin a lesson with some grounding - as singing in front of someone new, no matter the circumstance can be little nerve-wracking. I outlined the exercise, and the ‘why’. The singer sang the pattern and as I continued to play and changed the key, the singer simply stopped singing and blinked at me.

I said, “is everything okay.?”

The singer blinked again and said, “I think so.”

Me: “why did you stop?”

The Singer: “weren’t you going to stop me to correct me?”

The singer had anticipated what had been experienced in the past: constant stop to “correct” and never following through.

It broke my heart.

What happened to just stretching and exploring and letting things be messy?

Messy doesn’t mean wrong. Especially when you are exploring, practicing, working things in, and working things out.

Here’s my philosophy in a nutshell: the voice is FINE. Where she/he chooses to reside is not always optimal. The voice responds to the physicality. We simply pay attention to the response and work to discover more balance and access to the physicality so the voice responds with more comfort and ease.

So, if we don’t honor the messy, and just explore and stretch, how can we find the truth of how the voice functions? How can we inhabit the authenticity of that?

When messy meets imperfection, THAT is the humanity and soul of the voice.

How we weave that into the behavior of the voice is what we need to learn. We can let the messy and so-called imperfections be white-washed and sanitized to nothing. Messy imperfections aren’t nothing. They are EVERYTHING.

Allow yourself to make “mistakes”; to embrace HOW your body and your voice warm up to each other.

PERFECTION is not the goal. Perfection has nothing to say and has nothing to be remembered.

YOU are the goal. Your voice, your unique authenticity and truth, your story-telling through that uniqueness that cannot be replicated by anybody else.

With fondness & fierceness,