Averted

We were nearing the end of our set at an indoor art festival when I felt it. Something in my throat. If I sang the next notes as I always did, the resulting sound would be a hacky train wreck. Even the people who weren't listening would notice.

I routed around whatever was in my throat. The hack-inducing thing went away. The mother of all clams was averted.

Everything before and after that moment went well too. We got a lot more positive attention than I would have expected, given that we were only there to enhance the ambience. Still, the thing I'm most proud of is the thing that didn't happen. Funny how that works.

When practice doesn't quite make perfect

Occasionally I write a song that's hard for me to sing. I don't mean emotionally. I mean technically. Maybe part of it is out of my range, or there's a note I have to sustain for a long time without breathing.

"You're the writer," I hear you cry. "Why would you make it difficult for yourself?" Well, mostly I don't. If I can, I tailor my songs to my strengths. But every once in a while it just doesn't sound as good the easy way. So I write it the way I think it should sound, and then practice the hell out of it.

Hold Me in Your Arms is a good example. It's a love song, and it begins with me humming over a minimal piano accompaniment. The notes would be in my range if I were na-na-ing them, but they're uncomfortably low when hummed. To do the passage without cracking or sounding weak, I have to hold my face in a way that doesn't obstruct the airflow.

Practicing this has helped a lot, but I still haven't been able to count on hitting the notes consistently.

Yesterday at rehearsal, I sang the song for the first time in a while. And just before we started, a thought popped into my head. What if I just hummed louder?

Yep. That did it. I'd been humming softly for a more sultry effect, but going louder didn't change the feel. All I had to do was back off the mic a little.

Practice is good. But sometimes it helps to come to a sticky spot fresh.

Memorizing

I spent a good part of practice tonight running through our newest song, trying to get the lyrics down.

Funny thing. When you embark on a songwriting career, nobody ever tells you that you'll have to work almost as hard at memorizing your own lyrics as you would anyone else's.

She don't want to come, my soprano friend

Whitney Houston has been having difficulties with her vocals while dealing with a respiratory infection. During a recent concert in London, those difficulties came to a head.

Houston was obviously having trouble hitting the high notes, and eventually abandoned one of her big anthems, The Greatest Love of All, after a couple of verses ... Fans waited with baited breath for the show-stopper I Will Always Love You, but Houston was not able to manage a Hollywood ending, instead stumbling through it, and eventually telling the audience, "she don't want to come, my soprano friend."

(Full article here.)

As a snarky music lover, I can't help but think that Whitney Houston being unable to hit the high notes is not a bad thing. She has an amazing range. I admire her range. I wish I had her range. But, y'know, just because you can hit those high notes doesn't mean you should.

I'm just not a fan of the sound.

As a singer, though, I feel bad for Houston. What a nightmare.

When we have a gig, and I come down with something that seriously interferes with my ability to sing, we cancel the gig. But we've had that option because the few times it's happened, the gig in question was a coffeehouse atmosphere dealie. I've always wondered what the heck we'd do if I were hacking up a lung when 20 thousand people had bought tickets to see us.

The voice of authority

I finally got to listen to Border Songs by Jordan Bullard, the the guy I met on the airplane. He writes the kind of folk I like, with skilled, soulful strumming and strong messages that don't scream "listen to this message because it is important!" Jordan and I had talked about how we hate songs that explicitly preach at you, so that didn't surprise me much.

What did catch me by surprise was his voice. You can never predict how people will sound singing by how they sound speaking. Jordan sings a lot deeper than he talks.

More than that, though, was the sense of authority. In conversation, he was just like anybody else—a person with opinions that might be correct or incorrect. Now, as the singer, he gave the impression of being all-knowing, simply presenting reality as it was.

That's the beauty and the power of music. When you sing about the world as you experience it, it's hard to be wrong.

Substance abuse, part II

Today has been the last full day I'll spend at the parental homestead before jetting back to Tucson. Know what I'm going to miss?

Well, the family, sure. It will be a while before I see them again.

Also the vast blocks of time where I'm free to do nothing at all.

But you know what else?

I'm going to miss orange juice.

My first vocal coach, during my first voice lesson, gave me a list of all the items I should not consume before singing in public: Sugar. Dairy products. Alcohol. Caffeine.

At first I thought this wouldn't pose a problem. I hardly ever drank alcohol. I never drank coffee. Avoiding sugar or dairy would be a pain because of chocolate, but I tried to do chocolate in moderation anyway. I could go without it from time to time.

Then it hit me. No sugar meant no orange juice. Which I consumed on a very regular basis—at least one of those cans of concentrate a day.

I'd had a perpetual dry cough for years. Was orange juice the reason?

I stopped buying it. The dry cough didn't disappear entirely, but it got dramatically better, very quickly.

So now, the only time I drink orange juice is when I'm on vacation. I can justify it then. It's not like a last-minute gig will pop up when 1,400 miles separates me from my keyboard, our speakers, and Ron the Drummer.

About 14 hours left to drink with impunity.

(Cough.)

Substance abuse

"Have you decided on dessert?" the waiter asked.

I knew I shouldn't. Cinder Bridge would be performing tomorrow night, and sugar and dairy tend to gunk up your throat. My general rule is to abstain from both for 24 hours before singing in public. But here I was, celebrating a friend's birthday, eating at a nice restaurant for the first time in a good while, and the last item on the menu was screaming my name.

"I'll have the flourless chocolate cake," I said.

The cake arrived, along with banana gelato. I consumed rich, delicious chocolate and guilt in equal measure. When I got through a little over half of it, I stopped and let our waiter box it.

Then came the remorse. Had I really needed dessert that much? Granted, it wasn't all that likely to cause big problems. The 24-hour rule is kind of arbitrary. I still had the rest of the night and a good part of the next day to let the effects pass. But I should've held out, you know, just in case.

Later, when I got home, it occurred to me that my personality is all wrong for the music scene.

How many musicians take the stage liquored up or coked up? How many need a joint or two before they feel relaxed enough to perform? In that context, why worry about half a slice of cake and a tiny bit of ice cream?

My lifestyle is squeaky clean! I deserve chocolate!

This rationalization has been brought to you by the letter Q and the number 9.

* * *

If you happen to be reading this from Tucson, come see us at the aforementioned gig. We'll be playing at the Glass Onion on Friday, Aug. 7, from 7 to 9 p.m. Directions here.

I promise not to have any more chocolate 'til then.

Smoke gets in my eyes (and lungs)

Every performance provides an opportunity to learn something, whether it's about musicianship, showmanship, or what have you. Saturday night's gig -- playing at a block party in Ron the Drummer's neighborhood -- was no exception. The lesson: if meat is cooking on a huge freaking barbecue, and wind is blowing the smoke right in my face, it makes for less-than-optimal singing conditions.

Granted, I probably could have guessed that on my own.

Grocery store serenader

I have a habit of singing along to the background music when I go grocery shopping. If I'm especially in the mood, I'll do this even if I don't like whatever it is they're piping through the sound system.

For some reason, the Albertson's I shopped at today didn't have any music on. Without thinking about it, I compensated by singing snatches of an old Status Quo song that happened to be going through my head at the moment.

"Piiiictures of matchstick men and you ... Images of matchstick men and you ..."

I was just loud enough to wake up my normally lethargic internal censor.

"Hey," said my internal censor. "This isn't one of your gigs. No one wants to hear you sing. You're annoying people. Quit it."

I quit it.

Maybe half a minute later, some guy walked past, singing. Not loud enough to have interrupted conversations around him if there had been any, but definitely audible. He was smiling. Totally unselfconscious.

And it occurred to me: He wasn't annoying. Not at all.

"Images of matchstick men and you ... All I ever see is them and you ..."

Fudge!

After a longish period of inactivity, Cinder Bridge has lined up a gig for Saturday, August 23. The venue: Kelly's Coffee and Fudge.

This presents a special challenge for a singer with a sweet tooth. Sugar and dairy tend to make you phlegmy -- not a big problem in everyday life, but highly inadvisable if you're about to (*hack, cough*) sing. So, for the sake of our adoring fans (or, more likely, the random passersby who hear us), I shall abstain.

Until we're done performing. After that, look out.

Introducing Steven, the contralto

While ordering Chinese takeout over the phone tonight ...

Friendly waitress: "Okay, we have egg rolls, egg drop soup, broccoli chicken, and crab crowns! Could I get your name please?"

Me: "It's Susan."

Her: "Steven?"

Me: "Susan."

Her: "Steven?"

Me: "Susan."

Her [sounding a little embarrassed]: "Susan! I'm sorry! It must be my phone."

Me: "No, I get that all the time."

Y'know, maybe I should stop feeling chagrined for considering anything higher than F over middle C to be a "high note."

The practice of practice

All the vocal practicing I do falls into one of two broad categories. The first of these is technique. Here, I attend to things like pitch control, articulation, projection, range, and generally not sucking. I focus intently on specific parts of songs that need work, repeating them over and over again until (hopefully) I start to hear improvement.

The second category is maintenance. Maintenance involves running songs from beginning to end, seeing if I can get through them without any big mistakes.

I tend to spend more time on maintenance. It's easier and more fun. There's also more of a need for it if a gig is coming up. Unfortunately, this tendency hinders improvement. The thing that separates masters from amateurs in any area, be it chess, tennis, music, or vintage Donkey Kong, is that masters attend mindfully to every facet of their performance as they practice, striving to make each one better.

So for the past couple weeks, I've resolved to spend more time on technique. In particular, I've been working on extending my upper range. (For all y'all who have never heard Cinder Bridge, I have an unusually low voice for a woman, and it's hard for me to reach "high notes" that most tenors can hit without difficulty.) We had a gig coming up on the 13th, but I figured I could get a lot of the maintenance-style work done during band rehearsal.

Well, stuff happened. Rehearsal was called due to illness -- drummer had to take care of an ailing kitty. Then other responsibilities (and horrible time management) got in the way of my doing the maintenance I needed to do. I feared that all my great attention to technique would result in me singing "na na na" really well as I struggled to remember the lyrics to my own songs.

As it turns out, last night's gig was cancelled. One of the proprietors of the coffeehouse in which we were to perform got sick, and they decided they'd probably close early.

I was not nearly as disappointed as I should have been.

Next Friday we have a gig at Old Town Artisans. Between then and now, I will find a way to balance these categories of practice.