How to sing and how to not

POV: you just asked me what's on my mind and now you have to sit through 15 minutes of memories and shit

**Took me weeks to post this!**

I recently read a conversation between Lorde and Martine Syms that had me taking notes. They covered a lot of ground and dropped some great recommendations and insightful anecdotes. There was one part in particular that really resonated with me… something I could never put into words that Ella (Lorde) said so succinctly:

“That was another one of my big tenets, to avoid prowess wherever possible. Everyone’s good at everything, and I kind of don’t care. Show me what it looks like when you are bad. Show me how it looks when you get it wrong.”

“Avoiding prowess”, as she calls it, is a mode that shaped my entire artistic existence. A mode of being which for me was felt long before it was understood. The feeling first happened when I discovered alternative and post-hardcore bands after moving from Meridian, MS to Nashville, TN. One tiny little home-school program introduced me to a handful of new friends, ones that loved music as much as I did, and those new friends introduced me to lesser known (at the time) genres that completely changed the trajectory of my life. I was just 13 and my limited scope of music began broadening to a whole new underworld of genres and sub-genres. These new kinds of artists’ expressions favored confessional lyricism and unbridled passion over vocal savvy and technique. This music sounded like such a fucking relief!

Now, I’d only barely begun to write poetry, mostly thanks to writing assignments from English and Creative Writing teachers, and I certainly didn’t have any experience with songwriting. It never occurred to me that I could participate in the catharsis.

16 year old homeschooler talking about creative writing assignments on MTV

Kid me grew up loving singers and more specifically, anything R&B. T-Boz from TLC taught me to expand my low range as a vocalist and Mariah made me want to belt higher and higher. I loved New Jack Swing and anything Janet Jackson and I would imagine being able to sing and dance perfectly at the same time. There was once a time I’d set up a metronome and practice vocal runs. That was when I thought my greatest satisfaction as a singer might come from being able to sing like one of the greats. But no matter my progress—no matter how many times I thought I absolutely nailed a Wendy Moten song from the passenger seat of my mom’s car, it wouldn’t touch the angst and ancient sadness swirling inside my teenage body.

Imagine my family’s shock when I went from singing Etta James or Brandy around the house to blaring post-hardcore from my room and asking to be dropped off at tiny little clubs to see shows of bands my parents had never heard of. My mom found some of my poetry and sat me down to tell me she was worried, which still makes me laugh. This all happened over a span of just a few months. I became obsessed with looking up lyrics on the internet. Long before Genius.com was a thing, askjeeves.com was my friend and I’d waste anyone’s black ink and blank paper printing loads of lyrics from bands like Sunny Day Real Estate or mewithoutYou to put them in a folder, as if for study. The singer and lyricist of mewithoutYou, Aaron Weiss, inspired me most. He wrote such biting, beautiful poetry and then screamed it so aggressively over the band— I couldn’t get enough. Compared to the music I’d grown up loving, this kind was so unrefined yet so immediately clear. Whether it was the (relatively) low quality of a recording, a voice crack or a pitchy yell… there was an alive quality that became a beacon for me. And it’s not that I didn’t appreciate a great singer anymore, it was just that my tastes were expanding. Now my cd case was a madhouse where Thursday’s Full Collapse could live comfortably next to Brandy’s Full Moon. This may be the only time in my life I’ve experienced growth with no growing pains.

(At the very end of my first year in Nashville, I joined a garage band with my music loving friends and we started writing our own songs. That’s where I learned to apply my love for singing to a desperate need to express my inner life on paper (technically, Microsoft Word). I remember printing out some of my poetry but quickly decided handwritten was more romantic, so I wrote what I could fit on a ripped page from my journal and brought it to practice. Later that day we had our first song, “Conspiracy”. My own musical liberation in a suburban basement.)

Back to the point: There have been at least 3 instances throughout my career that feel adjacent to, if not directly related to the concept of Avoiding Prowess. I have distinct memories of each of them and their impact on me.

The first happened right after my band released our debut album. I was 16. Sitting outside the storage unit where we practiced most days, I had my very first phone interview with a writer from a site called punknews.org— which still exists! The voice on the other end of the phone sounded like any kid around my age who loved alternative music. I wasn’t nervous at all to speak to him despite how little experience I’d had doing interviews. However, when he told me that I don’t sing like any other punk singer and the implication sounded like a bad thing, I remember being at a loss for how to respond. Did I need to dumb myself down to be validated by this scene I’d fallen in love with? Was the feeling in my voice not actually felt because I wasn’t screaming all the words? That was my first flash of imposter syndrome: Credible punk artists don’t sing well. What an odd thing to be insecure about, singing well. I didn’t know how to dumb myself down. Much to teenage me’s chagrin, I wasn’t born a hardcore frontman. Though by my 19th year around the sun, enough emotional chaos had built up in my tiny body to yell a pretty decent portion of our 3rd album. There was at last, within me, no regard for my vocal health or agility as a singer. Zero prowess, zero desire to impress, only to express. It felt like I unlocked something and that something was a pandoras box of somatic debauchery. Sure enough, I lost my voice completely for like a month when touring that album. After seeking medical help I was sent to a voice coach to help me work on channeling all my raw emotions with what else but vocal ~technique, which I’d all but disavowed. Thus began a life’s work dancing along the tightrope of pure emotional expression and a desire to keep my instrument in working condition.

me and Aaron looking incredibly wholesome at Bamboozle 2006, for Alt Press

The second instance happened during an email exchange with my aforementioned favorite frontman, Aaron Weiss from mewithoutYou. (Skipping ahead a lot here but to put it simply, our bands became quite friendly after years of playing festivals and shows together.) Some time in late 2011, he wrote and asked me to come up with vocal arrangements for 2 different songs that would end up on their 5th album, Ten Stories. I went in to the studio and gave it everything I had. Or everything I thought I had. When the first notes came back from he and the band the consensus was… mixed?! Horrors! The crux of the email read, “…the placement and melody is perfect but if anything, you may be singing perhaps a bit too well for us…”. Half-flattered, half-insecure, I read over the email again, this time slower. Apparently they’d given similar notes to another guest singer who happened to be a classically trained opera singer— speaking of prowess(!!!). There was a specific note about singing in a more “pedestrian” way— more in line with their lead vocal which Aaron himself called “considerably unsophisticated”. Miraculously (and sooner than I expected), whatever needed to click clicked and suddenly, I understood something. I was already well into my career and my voice had a reputation of its own, for better and for worse… I had wrongly assumed that the mewithoutYou guys just wanted me to do *the thing* on their song, when the feeling they were really looking for was the same type of feeling that made me fall in love with their music to begin with. Not one of them needed me to impress them nor did they need me to dumb myself down. I only needed to feel into the collective character and notice what character it conjured in me. Where I landed was somewhere new, familiar and foreign all at once. This was not some shining, impressive guest vocal moment but one that better reflected a side of me that I suppose I didn’t know anyone could value. My brief reverie on their song “All Circles” just might be the favorite of any feature I’ve ever done. If you listen, I think it sounds like me but it’s not the “me” most people think of when they think of my voice. It’s actually closer to home. Through my favorite frontman’s gentle bid for much less prowess, I was gifted a lesson on integrating different parts of the self. Some parts of us are all nerve, tender and very present. Other parts are muscle, skilled and agile. All parts are viable strength and lend themselves to infinite creative landscapes. Sometimes, no matter the skill or the technique you’ve acquired, you must forget what you know (or what you’re capable of) and just feel. This experience rewired my creative brain.

Lastly, only a few months ago I was in my makeshift home studio with Moses Sumney, tracking my parts for our song, “I Like It I Like It”. Multi-instrumentalist, writer, producer, absolutely ridiculous vocalist, and one of the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen in your life— Moses is a supreme talent and I’ve been a fan for a long time. Needless to say, I was pretty nervous for our session. “For the first time in my career”, I thought, “I’m singing with the kind of singer who made me fall in love with singing in the first place”. As we moved through tracking my lead, I loved taking direction from him and I trusted fully in his taste and instincts. There was a flow happening, where I felt able to move pretty fluidly between technical and emotional flourishes… but that was just through the lyrical parts. Those verses really breathe with big spaces between each line and in those spaces, Moses wanted me to improvise soulful runs and other sounds. Every creative revelation flashed before my eyes like a montage in double time. In a single moment, every insecurity I ever had about my singing — whether too methodical, too passionate, too contrived, etc — came to surface. And there was nowhere to hide! I was sitting right next to someone I’d admired for years for his ability to color outside the lines with his voice in a way that sounds like the lines were never even there. As I fumbled through a bunch of different runs and improvisations, not really loving anything that was coming out of me, Moses remained encouraging and didn’t seem at all phased. He was pointing me back to myself while talking me through my little flubs and misses when he said something like, “Cool, so you can sing. Who cares? What are you saying?”, and it occurred to me that, coming from him, this sentiment was the ultimate full circle moment. Once again, it was so simple. I wished I didn’t need reminding of this particular lesson. That once a thing was learned it would stay rooted somewhere in the body— a wisdom tooth that you never need to lose. Now, from the opposite end of my career, one of the most technically gifted singers I knew was dancing around the concept of Avoiding Prowess with me. Here I needed to trust a built-in intelligence I’d been honing for years, to know where to lean in and how. So there, with Moses beside me on my pink settee, I resolved once again to just make noise with my feelings, paying careful attention to the characters already present in the song. With one ear on and one ear hanging out of my headphones, in the final space at the end of verse 2, out came a guttural belt that surprised me. Then, right as I got used to the feeling of being suspended midair, I felt the sound in my throat cascade down sort of sloppily. I started to say, “Yikes, ok, now lemme try it for real!”, but before I could finish my sentence I looked up to find Moses, smiling back at me with an open mouth. Was this the exact moment every musical epiphany would crystalize into the laid-back, worn-in wisdom I seem to project onto every other artist, as if they’ve never questioned a thing about themselves or their process? Likely not. But oh, how it healed something young in me. So many full circles that day. I am so very proud of our duet. The night before the song dropped I texted to thank him: “This song is everything I ever wanted to sing when I was a kid and first heard 2 divas singing together on the Prince of Egypt soundtrack.” When press posted about the song they said it was the first R&B collaboration of my career. I smiled knowing that an 11 or 12 year old me would be ecstatic over Moses’ voice and probably wouldn’t even believe that’s her own grown-up voice there, carrying with it all the experiences that have led it to some place that feels like my own.

Moses finding his light on the pink studio settee

I know I’m taking many liberties with Lorde/Ella’s words but regardless they ring true deep in my arty little bones because the best art has always been made with no fear and no pretense. No matter what genre or feeling I’ve ever channeled, avoiding my own personal “prowess” was never as much an artistic principle as it was a quicker way to get me to the point. Pure instinct, passion, and a willingness to embarrass yourself by your own sincerity is the ultimate art alchemy.

Ella goes on: “Trust [that] they know you’re smart and that you know how to do things, and that working in these simpler or more spontaneous or more naive-feeling forms is going to do something interesting.”

After seeing the band play for the first time (maybe 2003?), my Grandat teased that this new music I was making didn’t showcase what all I could do with my voice. He’d known little me and her R&B-singer dreams and he believed I had what it took to go as far with my voice as I wanted. What I couldn’t explain back then was how it only took writing a few songs with my friends and singing them out loud over a shitty, portable PA to understand something: That even if somehow it was possible to be “the best” singer in the entire world, for me that would never suffice. My new North was to follow a feeling long enough to get it off of my chest, whether the sound that made was impressive or not. Those adolescent instincts gave me a diverse creative life that keeps me curious, and maybe that’s why I still get to do what I love to do. To be this far into my musical life and still feel challenged and inspired… you really do have to trust that the right people and the right sound will meet you wherever you are.

By the way, if you’ve found me here, thanks.