Many years ago, when I first met my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, the woman who fixed us up lent her a cassette tape that I’d made, called “Entering Harmony”. I thought the title was pretty clever; the photo on the cover was of me, standing under a sign for Harmony, Rhode Island, the hometown of woman I’d been dating when I recorded the cassette. I thought the music was pretty clever, too; the singing, well, what did I know, is what it came down to.
Because the fact was, I couldn’t sing my way out of the proverbial paper bag. Some people are born to sing; they open their mouths and music comes out. I, on the other hand, did wrong just about everything a human being could do wrong, other than hit notes other than the ones I was supposed to hit. SWMBT tells me that as she got to know me, she dreaded having to inform me about my unfortunate deficit. But she didn’t have to, because between the time I’d made the tape and met my wife, I’d found Ruth – or, more to the point, she’d found me.
Ruth Harcovitz approached me at the Java Jo’s open mike one night, early in my solo “career”, and handed me her card. She’d taught vocal technique to a number of other people on the scene – Steve Rapson and Ken Batts, among others I knew – and suggested to me, a little less than tactfully, that I could really use her help. Fortunately for SWMBT and everyone else who’s had to listen to me over the last decade and a half, I decided to take someone else’s advice, for once.
I cringe when I imagine what it must be like for her, as a trained professional singer, to tour these cesspools of vocal technique in search of students. Because nowadays, I’m starting to hear things the way Ruth must have heard them, and it takes a little getting used to. See, what you learn, mostly, when you learn to sing, is that your body is your instrument, and you need to take care of it, and deploy it, with every bit of precision you’d expend on a guitar, piano, or violin. I can control muscles I didn’t even know I had. And the upshot of this, at times, is a little disconcerting.
Ruth has always been able to hear what I’m doing wrong; and by that, I don’t mean that she can tell when I’m singing badly – I mean she can hear which muscles aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And I’m shocked to discover that I’m starting to hear the same thing. At recent open mike, one of the feature performers – relatively young, so it’s really not her fault – repeatedly reached for high notes that were clearly within her range, but she couldn’t hit them. And I could feel my back ribs expanding as she reached for those notes, in the same way that you mash your foot into the floor of the car in the passenger seat when you want the driver to stop. But I could not help her – she could not use my ribs.
I can’t claim to be a good singer yet – I don’t practice nearly enough for that to happen. But I’m starting to experience my mistakes differently, and I’m starting to learn what they mean (and yes, I know, I’ve been at it for fifteen years already, but when you don’t practice, well, this is what you get). And while I’m a better singer in my lessons than I am on stage, one of the primary reasons for this, as I keep trying to explain to Ruth, is that it’s more important to me to focus on you lovely people, and our experience together in a show, than on the pure, dulcet tones that I’m supposedly capable of producing.
Some of you may never notice any of this. But singing is like umpiring – you only notice it when it’s wrong. So the next time you don’t hear me inhaling; the next time you don’t hear me squeak when I hit a high note; the next time you don’t notice me, well, working, at all – just remember that it’s all due to the only instrument I couldn’t buy.