Doing the Dumb and the Difficult

TL: DR: Waiting hurts more than doing.

Like you, I thought we’d be back to “normal” by now. But, this IS the normal. If only there was a date on the calendar where everything would reopen and stay open. I wrote a song about it, in fact! ;)

“I haven’t picked up my guitar in five months.” “I’m just trying to hang on.” “I’m overwhelmed, grateful, and discouraged.” “I’ve let fear of failure hold me back.” “My motivation just disappeared.”

These are real quotes from real clients and colleagues of mine, past and present. They completed the free, no-obligation "2021 Planning Survey” that I launched earlier this month. Their responses floored me. (You can take the survey here!)

Having places to perform and dates on the calendar gives us a sense of control, organization, purpose, and hope. When those guardrails aren’t there, it’s natural to feel like it’s not even worth picking up the guitar, writing down a lyric, taking a class on Zoom, or singing in the car. Why bother getting better just to play to your own four walls?

I invite you to stop comparing the current “Normal” to last year’s “Normal,” except in one way that might hurt a little:

The reasons you’re not making music now were there a year ago.

Blame the pandemic for ruining a lot of things, but you can’t blame it for taking away your ability to make music. You still have the ability. However, it might be buried under a lot of self-imposed conditions.

If you were only motivated by playing at open mics, you’re lost without them. If you are busy thinking about how to get everything done and don’t have room or time to practice in your crowded house — you had a variation on that excuse in 2019, too (I sure did). If you depended on auditions to give you a reason to learn a new song, then yeah, you’re out of reasons.

And if you still think Zoom and Facebook Live are the only ways you can make music online, you’re screwed. Yeah, I said it. I have spent most of this pandemic trying to show you and everyone I know that there are musical alternatives that let you play live, in collaboration with other players and in front of an audience. Are you listening? :)

Stop waiting for someone or something to sanction your musical activity. It’s in your power to play right now. Just like a certain other activity that usually gets more enjoyable even when you’re not initially in the mood, you can get into the mood for music. No candles or special lighting needed!

Step One: Do something you think is dumb. Set a timer and play three scales in one minute, then put the guitar down until tomorrow. Play wrong notes on purpose. Find a warmup video on YouTube (this one is only two minutes long!) and sing along badly, then turn it off and throw in another load of laundry. Sing, but don’t sing in your own voice. Sing in your best Kermit The Frog voice. Then do a Marilyn Monroe voice. Keep it short, and keep it dumb. Take all the risk out of it so you can put the fun back into it.

Step Two: Do something you think is difficult. Take the workshop about how to use online music tech. Come to the songwriting seminar. Do morning pages in “The Artist’s Way.” Buy a microphone for your laptop on Amazon and record cover songs. Let your kids teach you how to use social media so you can share your performing. Listen to a new Spotify channel of music you really dislike, and find two good things about it. Audition for my next studio album, even if you don’t like country music! Take a big risk. Don’t wait for months on end, in the hopes of going back to before. Normal is now.

Doing the dumb and the difficult works in and out of pandemics. Short, stupid music actitives keep you from feeling overwhelmed. Undertaking something big makes you feel like the rock star you actually are. Bring musical mojo back into your life by changing your expectations. It feels a lot better than missing what’s already gone.

Audition for The ECMS Country Album here.

Do you really need a voice teacher?

TL; DR: Maybe, maybe not.

After a promising start in middle school, my performing career was going nowhere. My confidence had been shaken when I, the upstart who stole the show in “Coming Of Age” in Seventh Grade, was totally shut out of “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” in Eighth Grade. I didn’t look or sound like a Lucy or a Sally and that’s all that was available. I was crestfallen. My mom thought, “Let’s get her some voice lessons and see if that helps.” And sure enough, two months after I started studying with Prof. Paul Hickfang of Ohio State University, I was singing “As Long As He Needs Me” in a transposed key at the spring choir concert. Voice lessons work!, I thought. I kept taking them.

Most of the singers who come for a Hello Session with me are frustrated a little bit vocally, and a whole lot professionally. They audition for the same few shows in the same few theaters. They get feedback like “sorry, there were just so many good people for only a few parts.” They love singing with their choir friends but they’re bored to death with the material, and the soloists always get hired from outside, anyway. Their audition experiences are tedious or terrifying and they rarely have the right songs in their audition books. They aren’t sure open mics are for them, either. They don’t look like Jasmin in “Aladdin Jr.” so they get cast as a townsperson, again. They’re singing the wrong music, at the wrong venue, for the wrong reasons, in the wrong key, at the wrong time.

Can a voice teacher solve all of these problems? No. You need a voice teacher AND a vocal coach, career counselor, repertoire specialist, talented pianist, talent agent, director, public relations person. And a drill sergeant. Voice lessons will build your voice, but what you really need is to expand your options. That takes a lot of additional skills and support. I didn’t get that help when I was thirteen and struggling to find my way to the mic, and it’s still a challenge to find it now.

You don’t need a voice teacher. You need an “All-Of-The-Above” teacher who can not only tell you to stop using “Hallelujah” to audition for The Music Man (please stop using “Hallelujah” altogether, okay?) but can also tell you to abstain from local theater auditions altogether, pull out the ukulele, and get working on the EP that’s been swimming around in your brain for a few years. And can then spend the second half of your lesson helping you write a song.

You need a voice teacher who can help you arrange your cover song setlist so you don’t get vocally tired in the middle, and help you find open mic venues that don’t have a six-hour waiting list. Or teach you how to livestream and avoid the lines altogether.

You need a voice teacher who can help you write, arrange, and record your songs in keys and styles that work for your voice, help you release them, and coach you as you take them on the road. Who can help you organize your vocal interests so you really can do it all.

You need a voice teacher who tells you it’s okay to quit choir, and then gives you a chance to sing rock and roll with her studio band. Someone who can also say, “check out this Italian aria from the 18th century, I think it would be a great way for you to work on your falsetto for that Prince song.”

You need a voice teacher who understands not only your voice but YOU. Someone who sees options and possibilities that you can’t see for yourself. Someone who helps you create a musical life that celebrates who you are and points you where you’re heading.

If you can find all of this in a voice teacher . . . .well, it’s nice to meet you! ;) Let’s get going. Book an online Hello Session with me here.

Ac-cen-tchu-ate The Positive

Well Hello There . . . I've had a lot of "Deep Thinking" this week . . . thinking a lot about music and liturgy, and faith, and life and love. This week marks the second anniversary of the death of my beloved teacher and friend, Prof. Paul Hickfang. I miss him more now than I ever did. He taught me a great deal about music, and life, and love. The more I teach, the more I wish I could pick up the phone and talk with him about my students and my life now. But, I believe he is happily watching me, and I talk to him anyway. That's not unusual.

In addition to wishing I could still have Prof. Hickfang on this Earth, I wish I could just walk into a parish down the road and open up the Liber Usualis and start chanting along with 200 other people, or even find a few sangin' friends and start a South County version of The Anonymous 4. But that's not likely to happen. So, I'm focusing on what I can do:

1. Play really good classical sacred music at home and in the car, and sing along. Or, when I'm feeling silly, I'll play the Dogma Dogs.

2. Volunteer for Catholic Charities, because works of mercy happen outside of choir lofts, too. I've volunteered for Salvation Army in the past and have supported seminary and pro-life fundraisers, but I think it's time to be a little more involved in the Church Universal.

3. Keep casting the net for like-minded musical friends, because even though I feel isolated sometimes, I can't be the ONLY person in a 50 mile radius who likes to sing traditional hymnody and chant!

4.  Relax and realize that all my frustrations are but temporary. The best is yet to come.

XO Eden

It's me or the vacuum

I recently attended a meeting of fellow liturgical laborers. It was a meeting of singing specialists who were not yet familiar with programming music for the Catholic Mass. I attended the meeting too, hoping to network with my fellow church musicians, maybe get a cantor gig here or there. Since I moved here I've heard a depressing sameness in the music in many parishes I've visited. There are organs, but they are all set to tremolo, which makes every hymn sound like it's coming out of a flocked-wallpaper funeral home. (I used to sell Lowrey organs, back in the day.) Hymn selection is heavily weighted towards folk tunes with lyrics my piano teacher used to jokingly call "Jesus-Is-My-Boyfriend." The cantors charged with performing this music are unpaid and untrained. One cantor I heard recently sounded like she had asthma, her voice was so small. The microphone had to be turned way up for her, so in addition to hearing her pitches, we could also hear every wheezy breath she took too. I was actually kind of worried for her.

Yep, I'm complaining, but this situation is not news to anyone who works in sacred music. Parishes everywhere have moved away from more classical sounds, and have embraced more contemporary sounds, rendering folks like me nearly obsolete. We dinosaurs have to sigh and admit that many people prefer contemporary worship music to what we would offer them. Even musicians trained in Bach and Mozart will program more Marty Haugen than George Frederic Handel -- it's easy, it's poppy, it makes people perky. Folks like me -- who go happily prostrate at the sound of transcendent Chant and powerful choral polyphony -- are fewer and farther between now. Prof. Thomas Day of Salve Regina University wrote a really funny book about this situation: Why Catholics Can't Sing.

Full disclosure: Even I like some contemporary music -- in very small doses. I like Gospel music in a Gospel church, and I love the traditional Gospel station on Pandora. But I don't want it at Mass each and every week. I just think if you're going to play music that sounds like Jesus whispering in your ear, play it on headphones or in a small space, not in a majestic, stone-built Catholic church. The church is a place for majestic music. I like to feel "out" of myself at Mass, and I feel very "out" of me and very close to God when I hear well-trained singers and organists playing centuries-old music expressly created for His praise in His temple. I like knowing that I am singing the same music that centuries of the Faithful have used to praise God -- it makes me feel connected to the saints. I fall right back to Earth when I am forced to watch cantors make YMCA signs at the front of the church while clunking loudly around the microphones.

I can't seem to find musical transendence in a Catholic church in my area at the moment, and it's very frustrating. I worry that I'm never going to find it.

I know there are many roads to God and that's a good and necessary thing. I like to imagine the road to God as a long, gold-paved majestic highway, that starts out as dirt and gets more golden as you get closer. The music helps keep me focused on the road ahead. When I hear music like this, it makes me imagine a road to God that meanders past a bunch of strip malls and county fairs, the kind of detour where you're forced to spend an hour watching someone demonstrate a fancy vacuum and then wheedle you for a sale. You can get distracted from looking forward. To me, it's distracting to the point of annoyance.

Even though I find the current music situation extremely frustrating, it's not going to keep me away from Catholic Mass. Sometimes I think that's the lesson that God is trying to teach me: Stay focused, Eden. The Eucharist trumps anything and everything. So I turn my focus to the readings, to the homily, to everything but the music, and I try to remember that it's not about me, it's about God. And there's always Adoration. And, I'm working on developing a small group of local, like-minded singers (yep, it will be a small group) who want to get together and sing a little traditional sacred music. If we're welcomed into a parish occasionally to share what we can offer, well, that would be nice but I'm not going to sit by the phone waiting for an invitation. Those vacuums are really loud.

Sometimes when I get out of Mass, I get in the car and crank up my iPod, and screech out of the parking lot to music like this. It helps.