Voice Lessons
How to blur your edges until you become a song.
I sensed them, shadows slinking past my door at night, hunting. If I was lucky I’d catch the slip of a tail, a tawny back leg. I’d be brushing my teeth or folding socks and I’d hear the howling and rush to the window. It became a thing we did, me and them. Sometimes I’d howl back, but most of the time I just closed my eyes and listened for the brush of fur against oat grass, padded footfalls. There was a current that ran through me that also ran through the coyotes, and the stars, and the dusty hills scattered with California sage, and I couldn’t touch it except in moments like this, when the boundary between me and the world thinned. It felt like breath and water and light, and it filled me until I was brimming. I called it wonder-crying, this silent shaking. I didn’t talk about it with anybody. I was too self-conscious, too attached to my narrow view of science and my east coast skepticism. But damn, I felt it. The coyotes would yip and keen and I’d pour myself out through the window to be swept up.
I’ve been giving my neighbor voice lessons. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I haven’t taught music in sixteen years, since I graduated with a degree in music education and took a hard left into the outdoors. I tried to tell her this, but she didn’t care. So now, a couple times a month we go to the theater up the street and stand on the stage and sing into the dark. My neighbor already has a beautiful voice. It’s husky and strong and clear. She doesn’t need my help with that. What she needs help with is confidence. We are working on connecting to the music in a way that allows her to forget that she’s singing, or that anyone’s listening. That’s the secret: blurring your edges until you become a song.
In music school they tell you that singing comes from your diaphragm, the dome of muscle beneath your lungs. You can find the diaphragm by putting two fingers into the soft space below your sternum. Breathe in, feel it push against your fingers. Breathe out, feel it relax. This is how you hold long notes, how you support breath. I should know. I spent four years studying voice in a rigorous music program, where I sang arias in a ruffled red recital dress and learned a lot of things I wasn’t very interested in, like advanced music theory and when Bach wrote his third sonata. I’m glad that there are people out there who keep this information in their heads for the rest of us. I just couldn’t be one of them, not then. The music program did not want us to have other gods. I wanted to see the world, get lost in the woods, play frisbee. I showed up to choir concerts with muddy ankles and unexplained scrapes on my elbows. I begged and scrapped my way into a semester in Greece, a minor in outdoor recreation. I was a disappointment. Most of my peers were there to grow up and get jobs as musicians and music educators. I was there because music was the only thing I could point to that deeply moved me.
What got me through those years with my love of music intact were the late nights I found an open piano in a dark recital hall. The four-part harmony my friends and I sang in the car. My junior recital, when my voice professor risked her reputation to let me bring in the step team and do a jazz flute set. The choir performances when one hundred and fifty people all hit the exact right notes at the exact right time and I became part of a wall of sound.
When I moved across the country to that house with the coyotes, I met my friend Dan, a fellow naturalist, who played beautiful finger-picking guitar. Looking back on those days, it was always Dan at the center, helping me knit my music back together, reminding me of the point. We’d jam just the two of us in my living room, and then on Thursdays the Marin Headlands outdoor educators would all gather with pots and spoons and whatever instruments we happened to have around and we’d play weird, silly, music. Sometimes it sounded good, sometimes it didn’t. None of that mattered. What mattered was that we were touching joy.
Music can be something you wield, like a tool or a weapon. I have sung songs to connect with people. It’s how I got anyone in Finland to talk to me. When I’m doing it right, singing dissolves the barrier between me and the world. People hear a song on my lips, come up from somewhere deep, that they already know. They recognize themselves in my voice, longing and hope and heartache and joy, and feel, for a moment, seen. Strangers come up to me afterward and talk to me as if they know me, as if we’ve been friends for a long time.
I’ve also used it to push people away. In my twenties I got on a kick of writing sad songs about trees and coyotes, about how nature was the only thing that could hold all of me. It wasn’t true. I was protecting myself from love, from getting hurt. But sometimes it felt like I’d come into this world a tad too big for it, and when you feel that kind of un-belonging, you get good at making excuses. You get good at leaving people before they can leave you.
I remember one night in particular, when I was camping in the redwoods with my partner at the time. We sat on a picnic table under the tall, thin silhouettes of trees, the slowly spinning stars, and I played her a song. I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember that I didn’t actually sing it. I performed it. We were trying to save our relationship and I pointed that song at her as if to say, See? I am untouchable.
When I finished, she cocked her head and looked at me for a long moment, and then she said, “It must be lonely.” It wasn’t what I was expecting her to say, though in retrospect I probably should have expected it because she is still one of the wisest people I know and she never holds back what is on her mind. She was right. It was lonely. I immediately wanted a do-over. I wanted to open, to let her in, to let her touch me, to let her know that what she felt, I was feeling, too. I didn’t know how.
Maybe this is a post about vulnerability.
My housemate asked me yesterday how you teach someone voice lessons. “Isn’t their voice already just what it is?” he said. I told him that yes, everyone has a full-throated voice, but things get in the way, like nerves, or fear, or what you think you’re supposed to sound like. People try to control their voice by singing from their throat, which cuts them off from the rest of their body. Teaching voice lessons is really about teaching people how to breathe. It’s about connecting someone to their whole self, and then letting that self out.
These days, music keeps finding me. It started with a couple open mics I played while I was at an artist residency in a small Maine town with one pub that closes at nine o’clock. The pub is a converted living room, loud and crowded and rowdy, which made it the perfect, low-stakes place to do something scary. It felt breathtakingly good. This weekend, I played my first gig at an ice cream parlor—a solo ukulele and voice set, followed by a rockin’ set with two friends who play the keys and drums (I think we might be starting a band), followed by a community jam, Headlands style. It doesn’t feel like I’m performing anymore. I’m just singing.
When I sing—really sing—my shoulders relax, my throat opens. My soul rumbles and shakes and pours out of my mouth. I pull up breath through the floor, through my legs and hips and belly, and sing until I cannot tell where I end and the music begins. It feels like space, opening inside me. I forget how I was taught to stand, what I’m supposed to do with my hands. I forget to smile for the audience, forget there’s an audience at all. This unwatched, unmoderated self. It feels like flying.
Here is a song for you that I recorded yesterday during the ice storm. It’s a cover of “Wild Heart,” by Caitlin Canty—a song that I’m obsessed with right now (when you hear it you’ll know why):
Thanks for being here.