About Singing

“I’m the world’s worst singer.  Can’t carry a tune in a bucket!”

“I used to sing. Then I stopped.  Went to school, got a job, had a family, got busy.  I sure miss it.”

“The only reason I go to church, confidentially, is for the singing!  Where else do people sing any more?”

As a visible singer in the world, I hear a LOT of stories about singing.
Some are tragic.
Some hilarious.
All touching.

Mostly I hear about why people don’t sing.
They’re waiting for a better time, the right teacher, or – heaven forbid – the perfect voice.

Here’s what I have to say about singing.
Want it to sound beautiful every single time you open your mouth?
It won’t happen.
Want to quit your day job, be “discovered,” get a recording contract, make a ton of money?
Don’t hold your breath, Sweetheart.

Music is not a commodity.
It’s not a product for sale.
It’s not something you need extensive training to enjoy or claim as your own.
It’s just….well….HUMAN.

All of the judgment, money, and competition (don’t get me started on “American Idol”….) has so little to do with the deep nourishment that comes from singing. Especially if you’re a “Singer” — which I often pronounce “Big-S Singer.” (Yes, enjoy that double entendre…). If you’re one of those, your heart breaks a little every day you don’t sing.
Your soul gets pruny and wizened.

When you do sing, suddenly there is a storm of inner critics telling you to sit down, shut up, get trained, don’t make a mistake, etc. So you have to assume that trying to sing at all is a big mistake.  That one magical day those critical voices will fall silent and leave you to your singing pleasure.

Well, don’t hold your breath about that either!

As I told a new singing friend this week – those “brain rats” aren’t going to be quiet. It’s downright foolish to wait for them to be quiet before you sing, sing, sing.
Just sing anyway.

Sing in places where singing isn’t expected.
Sing for lonely people.
Sing your prayers.
Sing in traffic jams, with or without the radio.
Sing while you walk in the park or shop for groceries.
To quote the great Sufi mystic, Hafiz:
“Sing some songs to your pets and plants;
why not let them get all drunk and wild?”

Sing WITH people, too. Cultivate a dozen useful little songs for marking life events — like the sun coming up AGAIN (!) or welcoming a stranger or expressing grief.
Then teach them to the people in your life.
Become the song-carrier in your community.
You don’t need a fabulous voice to invite people to sing.
In fact, it can make them more comfortable to try it themselves if you are less than perfect.

Sing past the crazy notion that unless you make your living at something, it doesn’t count. Sing past your own personal “American Idol” panel saying snarky things and voting you down.

Most of all, sing into the deep ancestry we all carry — of people who persisted through unthinkable hardship, privation, displacement, and pain by raising their voices in beauty. Remember them.
Ask them to sing with you.

I guarantee they will come –and walk beside you in those wide open fields of blooming, buzzing, enlivening SONG.

Music as a mode of travel

September 2, 2009 was a perfect day. And by some miracle, I found a way to share it.

That day I was on a songwriting retreat at a tiny, beloved island in the border waters of Minnesota and Ontario. The days are long there. I awaken before dawn and slip into the cool, still water before I am awake. I emerge refreshed, dress against the chill, and make my way to the eastern end of the island to watch the sunrise across the water. Loons call. The breeze comes up. Another day of wonder begins.

I live deeply at the island – away from phones, computers, cars, keys, clocks, money, even running water. I follow rhythms and impulses in ways I can’t in the city.

Near the end of a particularly delicious day there, I sat down at the piano in my cabin and started writing a song of gratitude.

The last of the sun’s rays poured in as I wrote. I was certain that the song would provide me with a way to re-live that magical day any time I wanted. What I didn’t expect was that the song would make my experience vividly available to other people.

Every time I play the song, people tell me that the song carries them to the island. They feel the chill in the air during “the brilliant, watermelon dawn.” They smell the “sweet basil crushed between the fingers.” And often, they share the “grateful tears for having lived this perfect day.”

I wonder how songs – and other art forms – are capable of transmitting very specific experiences of memory, emotion, or experience from one imagination to another? What might this capacity mean in a world of increasing isolation and loneliness? What function will music play when the oil runs out and we need to find other ways to travel the world?

I vividly remember “traveling” on the songs of a Tuvan throat singer who was performing here in Minneapolis. The Tuvan throat singers from southern Siberia actually sing the geography of the places where they linger with their herds. They replicate the sounds of a particular waterfall or rock face through their strangely beautiful overtone singing.

His songs became vehicles for carrying me to specific landscapes and ways of life I will never directly experience.

I find the same phenomenon when I lead community singing. The African songs carry us to dusty squares or rainforests. The Irish songs invoke the rugged coasts and impossibly green hills. And the song from the high Andes leaves us all a little dizzy.

Inside of every song we sing is some essence of the person who created it and to the land they inhabited. When we fully open and deeply listen, we are able to use songs to visit other experiences, worldviews, and geographies. It’s all there inside the music.

Tell me, how have you traveled through time and space on wings of song?

In My Own Voice: The Brilliance of Karly Wahlin

Update:  Karly Elizabeth Wahlin passed away peacefully at home on August 20, 2012.  We who knew her were deeply blessed.  Now she is free.

In the winter of 2009 my friend and recording engineer, Matthew Zimmerman, called to invite me into a remarkable project that was being recorded at his studio, Wild Sound, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A 24-year-old composer named Karly Wahlin was seeking a producer for a collection of ten of her classical piano pieces and he knew I was the person for the job.

Karly lives with a genetic condition called Rett Syndrome. Rett, which mostly affects girls, makes it impossible for Karly to walk on her own, speak, control her movements, and even breathe in a relaxed way. She experiences frequent seizures, vision problems, digestive issues, acute anxiety, and orthopedic problems. Every day Karly struggles to live in her body in ways that most of us cannot imagine. Nonetheless, she and her music therapist, Karen Bohnert, found a way for her to compose music one laborious note at a time. Each song takes a year to complete. When I heard a rough recording of her music, I was touched by the beauty, wit, and purity of her musical “voice.” I whole-heartedly said yes to producing her record.

Karly named her CD “In My Own Voice.” This is particularly significant given that she was unable to communicate with the outside world until the age of ten. The breakthrough came when her mother, Lois Swope, began experimenting with stabilizing Karly’s hand on a computer keyboard. This facilitated communication enabled Karly to express her preferences, joys, love, and ideas for the first time in her life. And she had a lot to say!

Eventually Karly started a blog that is now followed by thousands of people around the world. She has become a powerful advocate for others with her condition and is one of a few women who are able to describe what it is like to live in what she calls her “Rett Body.” Karly’s great wish is to use her music and writing to support people with disabilities of all kinds to be recognized for their gifts, not just their limitations.

Karly loves many things: praying, music, her family and friends, good stories, writing poetry and blogs, her witty and rambunctious pony, Beau (to whom the song, below, is dedicated), and spending time in the beautiful garden her friends and neighbors recently created for her.  Karly is also a public speaker for audiences that have included professional groups, people in recovery from addiction, and others who live with disabilities. Her mother, Lois, reads Karly’s carefully crafted messages aloud to her audiences.  Karly is present for her speeches whenever her health allows.

As a professional voice coach, I think about voices every day. Getting to know Karly has changed the way I think about voice forever. Even though she can’t speak, I’ve come to recognize her distinct “voice” in the way she expresses herself through words and music. Our friendship has been forged through many profound conversations about self-expression, music, spirituality, creativity, living, and dying.

Karly’s poetry is elegant and deep, expressing both the truth of her struggles and shining gems of spiritual wisdom. I humbly offer Karly the last word. Here is one of the poems we recorded on her CD:

In the quiet of my heart
I am slow
I breathe deeply
I sit quietly
I think freely
I do not struggle
I love deeply
I contribute
I participate
I speak in ways others can hear
I am more than my body
I am

© Karly Wahlin (used by permission)

Karly’s blog can be found at:
spiritdances.wordpress.com
Karly’s music can be heard and purchased at:
www.cdbaby.com/cd/KarlyWahlin

Portions of this post are excerpted from Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence by Barbara McAfee. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco).

No one else can sing your song

Voices are so personal. They mirror our story – our gifts, doubts, history, mood, identity, and secret dreams. Every time we speak, we are revealing something about ourselves – the things we’re proud of and perhaps the things we most want to hide.

When people hear that I am a voice coach, they often roll their eyes and say something like, “Wow, you must hear the most horrible sounds in your studio!” Or “Good thing I’m not your client! My voice is so terrible it would land you in the hospital!”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I want to tell them how moved I am by the first tentative, shaky sounds emerging from a long-silenced voice. I want to shout about the joy that gallops in on a newly bold voice set free at last. I want to bring them to the room when someone who believed for decades that their voice wasn’t worth hearing is moved to tears by their own beautiful singing. I want to express the deep honor I feel when the exiled, imprisoned aspects of a person are granted amnesty and welcomed back home.

Those tender, vulnerable moments in the teaching studio touch me more deeply than a highly trained, confident performance ever will.

Voices are so personal. They mirror our story – our gifts, doubts, history, mood, identity, and secret dreams. Every time we speak, we are revealing something about ourselves – the things we’re proud of and perhaps the things we most want to hide.

I believe each voice is an essential part of our collective story. We are all part of a vast choir that is singing the song of life. When any of the voices fall silent, our song is incomplete.

Several years ago I co-created a song with Stephanie Pace Marshall, a brilliant pioneer in education who founded the innovative Illinois Math and Science Academy near Chicago. It was based on a poem Stephanie wrote for her grandchildren – and all of the children. As I began searching for the thread of the song, I found these lines:

“As long as you have breath, there is still time
To awaken the dream that’s been yours all along.
And if you don’t sing it, no one else can sing your song.”

Sitting at my piano late at night, I was grieved and overwhelmed by how many of the songs in this world will never be sung. Some will be stolen by poverty, war, oppression, and the chaos that runs rampant in the world. Others will be silenced by abuse, shame, perfectionism, and the loneliness that pervades our Western consumer culture. We are taught to doubt our voices – literally and metaphorically. We are encouraged to outsource singing to the professionals and surrender our ears to highly processed and perfected music.

When people walk into my studio, before they even open their mouths, it is an act of emancipation. They come to this work to be “unsilenced.” To reclaim some aspect of their full humanness. To share their most secret and sacred wishes. To open their mouths and – bravely, beautifully, tremblingly – sing their song.

And lucky me – I get to listen.

What If?

I’m just being exactly who I am right now and seeing how that goes.

After spending nearly half of my time on planet Earth in some kind of earnest form of self-development, I’m giving it up.

That’s right, for the past several years, I’ve suspended my yearning after a new, improved, shinier version of myself. No more workshops, self-help books, therapists, coaches, rigorous exercise regimes, or radical diets. I’m just being exactly who I am right now and seeing how that goes.

Those persistent shortcomings that have been my trusty companions for lo, these many years keep showing up as they always have. Now instead of rolling up my sleeves, getting out my spiritual wrenches, and making a lengthy self-improvement to-do list, I nod and sigh and carry on.

I’m willing to bet that on the day I die I will still tend to impatience, judgment, a craving for salty-crunchy things, and a fundamentalist kind of loathing for any kind of fundamentalism. I’ll have flabby arms and so-so posture and a propensity to waste time on the computer.

This new phase of my life began in a cab in Chicago several years ago. I overheard a conversation between friends as we were driving through the drizzly streets:

Friend One: “I’m on a new raw-food diet now. I’m working with a pilates coach several times a week and enrolling in a new workshop series and working with a new business coach.”

Friend Two: “Sweetheart, you’re such a lovely person. What if you stopped working so damn hard on yourself and just lived your life?”

What if, indeed?

That proposition struck me so deeply that I went home and wrote a song about it (you can see a video of the song, below). The line that still makes me squirm a little is “what if all this striving to be my best was just self-hatred in a fancy dress?”

I’m growing suspicious about the habit of self-improvement. It feels like a subtler, more “enlightened” version of consumerism… a kind of spiritual cosmetics industry. As long as I’m obsessed with a bigger (or smaller), better Barbara out there, I might not notice poverty and injustice. As long as I’m dithering about some intractable personality trait, I might not notice Nature’s incredible unfolding outside my window or my neighbor’s need for a friendly gesture or what a stunning miracle it is to be alive at all.

Just to be clear, I’m not averse to learning. As a singer/songwriter, I will continue to reach for the clear note, the true turn of phrase, the effortless piano riff. As a voice coach, I’ll keep listening deeply to beauty and wisdom within the voices of my clients. As a friend and family member, I’ll continue to bring my heart and attention to the precious humans around me. These things feel distinctly different from those other kinds of self-improvement projects I’ve given up. They seem to emerge from inside me rather than being imposed from some external expectation or standard.

Meanwhile, I don’t need to seek out challenges. Life will keep on bringing me nose to nose with my shortcomings. And when it does, I’ll whine and squirm and – as poet Theodore Roethke so beautifully writes – “learn by going where I have to go.”

 

Taming your brain rats

Negative self-talk is a signal that you’re on the verge of learning something new.

Swimmers at Lincoln Park swimming pool, 1925 | Photo via Seattle Municipal Archives

You are about to take a big risk, inhabit your true power, or speak your mind. Just as you step up, you hear them. Brain rats.

Their squeaky, scratchy voices whisper dreadful things, ”Sit down.”
“Who do you think you are…somebody special?” ”Be quiet, for goodness sake!” ”Someone’s going to notice you’re a complete fake.” ”Why not just give up?”

A few years ago, I wrote a song about my own brain rats:

I wrote the lyrics by transcribing the wretched messages in my own thoughts. Then I wrote them into a dramatic and very silly song. Of course, they were about relationships, money, insecurity, and the rest of those topics that prey on most of us in our doubtful moments. Much to my surprise, “Brain Rats” has become the most popular song in my repertoire.

Listening to the terrible things our brain rats say is so uncomfortable that we think the best approach to them is….well….pest control. We want them gone. We yearn for a utopian state when they will disappear forever, leaving us confident, nonplussed, and radiant with self-esteem.

Yeah, right.

Twenty years as a voice coach has given me the opportunity to listen in on hundreds of brain rats. Nothing stirs them up like inhabiting your full voice, visibility and power. Though our gifts and talents are unique and intriguing, our brain rats all sound pretty much alike. They are dramatic, convincing, and persistent in doing their best to convince us that we are—as the last verse states—“the piece of crap around which this whole world revolves.”

I recently came to a surprising conclusion about brain rats: They mean well.

Our brain rats represent that part of our psyche whose job is to keep us just the way we are right now. It’s vigilant about killing off anything that doesn’t fit our current identity much like antibodies rush to kill off viruses in our bodies. The trouble is, we can’t learn anything by staying exactly the way we are. Any new learning lies beyond the boundary of the familiar.

Brain rats aren’t a sign of failure or insecurity. On the contrary, their presence in your internal dialogue is a sure signal that you are on the verge of learning something new. Why not roll out the red carpet and welcome them in?

The great Sufi poet Rumi has a wonderful poem to this effect. It begins,

“This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.”

(Translation by Coleman Barks)

Here’s one more suggestion for making brain rats less painful: Lighten up about them. These messages get more powerful and toxic when they are kept secret and taken seriously. I think that’s why my song has had such success: People feel a palpable relief when they get a chance to laugh at the ridiculous exaggerations of their own negative self-talk. Sometimes they even sing along….

Next time you step outside your comfort zone, listen for the brain rats. Then crank up the song and serenade them while you take the next step… and the next… toward the life you most desire.

By Barbara McAfee

Patterns, Sound, and Surprises: Client Interview #1

This is the first of a series of blog posts based on interviews with voice coaching clients.  I am consistently astonished at how working with opening a person’s full voice affects other aspects of their lives.  Their stories touch me deeply.

Michael Bailey (her real name) is a spitfire – a brilliant painter, voluble conversationalist, and fearless lifelong seeker.  Though she is physically petite, her effervescent presence fills the room.

Here are excerpts from my conversation with her several weeks ago.

Barbara:  Tell me about how you experience our work together?

Michael:  Every time I’m with you, there’s huge permission to express myself.  Giving a person that experience, no matter who they are, offers them a touchstone for being able to go out and express in the world – in writing, speaking, music, whatever.

I thought I was coming here to learn how to sing a little better.  You started by asking me why I came.  When I answered your question, I was surprised to hear myself say that I wanted my creativity to express itself in a bigger way than ever before.  I thought, “Wow, what a great idea!”

After a few sessions with you, I did start singing with more confidence and pleasure.  But the big bonanza was this:  I sat down and started writing a novel.  A novel!  I’ve never written fiction – just a few short self-help pieces here are there.  And writing in this new way was the easiest thing I’d ever done.  It was like watching a movie and writing it down.  The pages just kept coming.  I see this novel as a direct expression of my work with you.

Barbara;  Tell me about your life as a visual artist.

Michael:  Creativity defines my interest in life. Curiosity has brought me to my spirit.

After pondering and wondering and experimenting with art for years, I had a sudden breakthrough in my mid-twenties.  I started making art that didn’t resemble anything I’d done before.  I drew the patterns that made up nature – the energy that’s underneath nature.

Years later a guy at an art show told me I was drawing fractals.  Later I discovered what they are – the macro- and microscopic patterns that run through all forms of life.  I figured out that I started drawing them about the same time they were being discovered by scientists. How about that!

Barbara:  It strikes me that the work you’ve been doing with patterns in your art all these years has prepared you to embrace the work with your voice.  Both are about patterns.  You work with patterns in your painting using color and shape.  Our voice coaching work explores those same patterns through sound.

When you came to this work with me, you brought your facility with patterns along with you.  And the self-trust you developed through years as a practicing artist prepared you for this experience of opening a new voice in your creativity.  Even though the form – fiction – was completely new to you, you knew enough about the creative process to jump on the wave and ride it.

Michael:  That’s right. And your sincerity and love made me feel safe in expressing whatever showed up.  Your spirit read my spirit.  You joined hands with me and off we went!

Here are some of Michael’s paintings.