I'm sorry I cried today while you were singing. How unprofessional for a music teacher!. I want you to understand that I was NOT crying because you were BAD – Really, I just went somewhere else – Another place, another time – for a few minutes.
Many years ago, there was this musical snob. She liked many kinds of music, but her taste in singers was more particular. She considered herself a fair critic of singers, and in her opinion, only ones of a certain caliber should be allowed to sing at all.
She appreciated strong and precise singers of many genres – Barbra Streisand, Nat King Cole, Vince Gill, Freddy Mercury, Steve Perry – but she had NO tolerance for the likes of Ray Charles, Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart. They should leave the singing to the professionals she thought. Why would anyone WANT to hear those voices when there were so many GOOD ones out there?
This person had a musician friend, a really good friend. They shared a lot of music as well as other ideas, goals, dreams-----and special things about each other. One day he called and asked her to meet him a few minutes before band practice to go over some charts. Nothing out of the ordinary.
He was already there when she arrived. He had tuned her piano! (Remember, David, this is in the old days, before digital tuning or midi or ----a lot of the stuff you think is standard.) Just a nice gesture, nothing special.
”What'd ya wanna go over?” she asked.
“I, uh, uh,” he stammered.
This was a bit strange to her, for her friend was by no means “shy.”
“I, uh….I learned….I……learned a song you like,” he blurted in an unfamiliar tone.
She didn't get it, why was he blubbering like an idiot?
“I……I stayed late last night and tuned your piano, and I worked it out….I mean…I would never want anyone else to hear it, but I knew you liked it, and….”
“What do you mean?” she asked annoyingly. “You've got a song you want us to learn or what?” thinking, What's his damned problem?
“I learned a sss- nothing.” He stopped, then his voice changed dramatically.
“I tuned your damned piano, so you could see it wasn't my guitar that was out, and this is a damned freebie that goes with it!”
Ok, she thought, now he sounds like himself.
He glanced at her hatefully, quickly looked down at the keyboard, then started to play. Within the first bar, she recognized the song. Something, maybe the melody or maybe her guilt, struck a sad, stabbing pain in her chest.
How sweet, she thought. It IS one of my favorites, and he has such a beautiful touch.
She smiled, thinking how amazing it was that they were friends: He was so much better a musician than she. She had always been such a snob about her quick musical ear, but his was better. His piano skills were far above hers, and piano was not even his instrument. He could rock out on a guitar solo that would make you swear he was Clapton, certainly not a twenty-five-year-old science teacher on sabbatical to live out his dream.
Yet of the nine musicians who played nightly an intense and varied repertoire, she was the one he got close to. How did she manage this? Did he see her as better than she actually was, or……that had to be it. He hangs out with me because I'm no threat, she thought.
He had lengthened the piano intro – NO, he was playing the whole song as an instrumental. Well, what did she expect? He was not a singer, and how often had SHE reminded him of that fact? But the song was beautiful: It lent itself so well to a lilting piano solo. She was impressed, enthralled, honored to be serenaded, personally, in such an innocent way, then………….he started to sing.
She's got a way about her – I don' know what it is
But I know that I can't live without her
She's got a way of pleasin' – I don' know what it is
But there doesn't have to be a reason anyway
She felt her eyes filling with tears, and yet she had to stifle a giggle that was daring to escape, silly and inappropriate, from her mouth. She couldn't stop the strange visions of newborn baby farm animals – kittens, blind and begging, pink piglets, snorting with full-lunged intent, calves, gangly and klutzy but strong and beautiful – all awkward and alien but totally perfect in their place in the universe.
She's got a smile that heals me – I don't know why it is
But I have to laugh when she reveals me
She's got a way of talkin' – I don't know what it is
But it lifts me up when we are walkin' anywhere
She didn't know what the feeling was, but she knew it was a feeling she'd never experienced before. It was kind of like the first time you're stoned (not that you would know about that), you can hear music you've heard for years, yet hear new parts, instruments, embellishments, that you'd never noticed before. She was hearing a familiar, favorite song for the first time, in a new light, with a new meaning. And she was seeing and hearing the singer, who should have been the same kind of familiar, for the first time as well.
She comes to me when I'm feelin' down
Inspires me without a sound. She touches me
I get turned around
Funny how she'd never noticed his drooping eyelids, hooding the dark brown eyes which had vision so better-than-normal that he had to wear special sunglasses in the daylight. The occasional crack in his voice was no longer irritating or annoying, it was more like a well-designed artistic device used to capture the feeling of being stuck in forever puberty, where awkwardness has its place and its own beauty. The visions of the baby animals – that must have been why – the nasal whine previously accredited to his “deviated septum” was no longer a hindrance, it was part of the total picture of something perfect.
She listened to the song, but she heard new things – fear, hope, longing, pain – but also joy – the joy felt from just daring to try for something that seems impossible.
A perfect voice would've sung all the right notes, done all the right phrasing, pronounced the words in a perfect sort of way, but only one who feels the song can deliver it in this once-in-time perfection.
She's got a way of showing – how I make her feel
And I find the strength to keep on going
She's got a light around her – and everywhere she goes
A million dreams of love surround her everywhere
She was young: Way too young to realize that this was a moment she'd remember fondly, questioningly, regretfully for years, decades, perhaps the rest of her life. She still saw the world as an endless sea of possibilities – She wasn't old or wise enough to ponder that no one might ever see her in that way again.
She had no inkling that this moment would be one of the conundrums of her universe.
She only knew it was a place she'd never been before.
I'm beautiful, she thought, and for the first time in my life, someone sees ME as truly beautiful, just because I'm me. He looks at me, and he sees all the stuff I try to be and want to be and never really am. He sees ME…….I'm everything. For this one damned minute, right now, I'm beautiful. So this is what it feels like…
She could feel it all, because she had been there before.
To care about someone SO much, there weren't enough words in the world to say what you meant. and even if you found them, you'd be too afraid of sounding ridiculous. So you just kept that spine-tingling, frightening, glorious, orgasmic feeling bottled up inside like an adrenaline rush that never stopped.
If you could just figure out a way to let them know just how crazy-screwed up-manic you were over them, they would simply HAVE to feel that way back. After all, you'd give yourself as a human sacrifice for them, wouldn't that sort of thing HAVE to be reciprocal?
And it never was.
Maybe that's what makes it so intense.
Maybe unrequited love is always the strongest kind because it feeds on itself.
That beautiful, wonderful, Oh-God-I'm-dying way he feels about me, she thought, is exactly how I feel -----about somebody else.
Someone who will probably NEVER get that feeling about me, the same way I will never be able to give this WONDERFUL, PERFECT creature what he deserves in return either.
She's got a smile that heals me – I don't know why it is
But I have to laugh when she reveals me
He loves me, she thought, he loves me and he's the only person in the world that sees me for who I want to be, the me inside of me. He sees in ME exactly who I've been trying to be my whole life. He's the first one, the only one, who's really seen ME…………
She's got a way about her – I don' know why it is
But I know that I can't live without her anyway
He sang the final note, and the world as she knew it would forever be different in the way she looked at singers. Forever.
For a few seconds the final sustained chord faded, drifting out into wherever sounds go when they leave our ears. She looked into his eyes, not having a clue as to what words she could say that would have anywhere near the meaning she intended.
“That was so beautiful,” she stammered, or some useless, trite bullshit of the same vernacular.
As fate would have it, this was all she would have time to say.
“Hey, man, wassup with you guys?” interrupted the bodacious and untimely sax player, stepping up on the stage between them. The room was still dimly lit, but his presence brought a garish brightness to the area.
Faltering echoes of “not much/whatever/same ol' same ol'/ came quickly from both parties, quickly moving about with aimless intent. Perhaps if they looked “busy” no one would suspect…..though thoughtful head games would be totally wasted on this guy. One by one, the rest of the band trickled in, and they all went through the motions of rehearsal as usual.
As though nothing strange had happened – oh, but it had.
From that moment on, the sound of a singer's voice was no longer a good or bad issue, it was complex portrait in shades of gray. Scratchy, pained singers became black and white photographs of old, beautiful people –Ones with varicose veins and sagging skin where every line tells its own story.
Remember the last two notes on “You Are So Beautiful”? I'm not a big Cocker fan, but I've learned to put that song in a perspective that will make me cry every time: Imagine he's singing to his aged, dying mother or his 20-year-old cocker spaniel as she's being put down.
Suddenly Joe is the most hauntingly beautiful voice on earth.
Paul McCartney is the perfect singer for “Yesterday,” after all, he DID write it. But Paul wrote that song when he was barely twenty years old – How much regret had he had TIME to experience? At best, he's describing what happened to someone, perhaps that he cared for, and he's seeing it through their eyes.
Ray Charles has no eyes: When he sings “Yesterday” is he crying out for lost youth, young mistakes, the pain of knowing that HE let it slip away, or just the joy of “yesterday” when he could SEE? I can hear all those possibilities when he sings it, and with Paul, I hear a beautiful voice singing a beautiful song. Beauty comes in all sorts of different packaging, aurally as well as visually.
When I was in high school, I thought Kris Kristofferson was the all-to-end-all. Despite the sing/talk voice, I loved the sound and feel of his poetry suspended into the world through my eight track tape player. I got to college and found “Sunday Morning Coming Down” in my literature book for English 102 , and I knew that I must be some sort of prophet, liking him before someone told me it was good stuff.
Looking back, and remembering how shallow I really was, I know I was consumed by my own ideals of perfection: He had sensitive eyes, good hair, a beard, wrote poetry and played acoustic guitar – What else could one want?
Because HE was in that literature book, I looked to see who else was in his company. Bob Dylan, Pete Seger, Donovan Leitch all had voices I didn't care for, but I started to really look at what they said, and perhaps their voices were a damned good medium to bring those words to music.
My ideas about good singing are kinda messed up. Chorus teachers are supposed to believe in pitch, diction, breath support, tone, all that stuff. I understand the concept, but probably insist on it less than most teachers do. I definitely believe it less than most.
I am a simple musician torn between the mental worlds of what chorus teachers are supposed to think and what I think. I love perfect voices singing perfect songs, I hate voices that can't feel meter or match pitch, but I love many kinds of voices that would never make All State or do well at Literary. I love beautiful singers, but I love Sting, Springstein, Steven Tyler, and…………
David, there's a voice inside you that needs to be shared. It's a voice that writes, plays, performs, and deserves to be heard. Singing could well be a part of that voice: Just because you aren't a perfect fit in the choral box I seem to have drawn up doesn't mean that you're a misfit – The woman who drew the damned box is NO artist, remember?
Please keep doing what you do, for the sake of YOU, and for the sake of music everywhere. There is so much in you that's waiting for its right place in time to appear- So many words and songs and sounds and ideas and---------Just keep doing what you're doing and it will all happen in due time.
I was not crying because you were BAD – though I know you, and know that's probably what you CHOOSE to think.
I was crying because I was getting to share something so much bigger, and better, and more amazing than I have ever been or will ever be –
………and I guess I cried at how lucky I am to get the experience.
Keep on keeping on, Kid. I promise to be more professional next time.
Okay?
Love,
Ellyn