Learning to sing

My first guitar was a 1930s Harmony acoustic that was mostly held together by its own memory of having been a guitar. It lasted all of six months before I convinced my parents to splurge on a $100 upgrade from the local music store. I don’t even think it had a brand name. I’m pretty sure the head was labeled “GUITAR”, in case anyone was confused about that.

I kept going for the next few decades, playing a little, occasionally upgrading, setting the guitar in the corner for a while. I never really felt compelled to get better at it. Good enough felt good enough.

About two years ago, I got the itch to get better at singing. I’m not really sure what triggered it. I think there was a vague feeling of “I need to find a way to get some of the meh out of me,” and guitar alone wasn’t really cutting it (and I hadn’t really considered ramping up writing again). So, after a couple of false starts, I found a teacher.

Progress was quick, as it often is when you start something new. My recital performances were a pretty consistent upward arc through increasingly challenging songs. I started with Elliot Smith (Waltz #2) and was doing some simpler Alter Bridge and A Perfect Circle songs with reasonable competency (if not ease) within a few months. The performances themselves left me a little cold though, and I was getting frustrated once some of the early, fast ramp started to steepen.

Doing Joni Mitchell’s “River” for a Christmas showcase made me feel hollow. I hit the notes, but I couldn’t feel the room. Right after I got off stage I watched a woman with a harp melt everyone in the audience, which kept me from wallowing, because she melted me too.

So we switched it up a bit and started to focus more on performance skills rather than pure technique. And that felt good, for a few performances. I picked simpler songs (Dave Matthews, Dylan, a very simplified Sleep Token cover) for the performances and was able to inhabit them better and feel the audience reaction. I’m not good at appreciating things for longer than a millisecond though, so right after the adrenaline of performing drained out, I was right back into “I want to do X, Y, Z that are 10x harder.”

We’re trying to balance technique and performance, with lessons split in half. I’m struggling to manage my own expectations about what should be easy (or easier) at this point and recognizing the progress I’ve made. My teacher called me out on it in our last lesson. “You’re not failing at this. You just keep picking the hardest stuff to tackle and then feel bad about it because it’s not immediately what you want it to be.” I confessed that I don’t know how to not be this way. I’ve got this asshole “be better” tiger chasing me. My taste is super specific and always outpaces my skill.

But I have progressed. I can admit that - logically speaking. It’s just hard to feel any of it. My guitar playing is better, because I’ve been playing more and adapting it to vocal accompaniment. I’m by no means competent at piano yet, but the onramp has been much smoother than it would have been two years ago. My range is much wider (and higher). Hitting something like a G5 is no longer a pipe dream. I know how to breathe now. I can absolutely crush karaoke parties. And it’s not happened a lot, but on a few occasions, I’ve been able to build the audience resonance that I’m chasing — that feeling of “I just shifted the room” — and it is intoxicating.

My current project songs are mostly female performances in their original key (Lolli Wren’s “All Mine” and Maphra’s cover of “Unethical”). Another is Periphery’s “Satellites,” which is ~10 minutes of code switching gymnastics backed by jazz-infused metal. There’s a new wrinkle in the learning arc as well, where I’ve discovered that a lot of the things that sound very emotive and cathartic to the ear, like pitched screaming, are actually pretty boring and/or technical to perform. The disconnect between sound and emotion is uncomfortable and a bit of a let down. The sound of angst feels like working a math problem.

I’m not sure how people find the joy in the process. All mine seems to come in those moments where everything locks into place and I nail whatever it is I’m after. I want to be capital-G good, but I don’t know that I could easily define what that means. Maybe it’s being able to move the room consistently. Or being able to reach for a song and the skill and intuition is there more often than it isn’t. I don’t know. I’m not good at being bad at things.