Captain Summer and her Secret Heart

March will be my 1 year anniversary of starting vocal lessons.  My downstairs neighbor (I call him Downstairs Dave) was MCing for the annual Crockett Get Lucky Prom, which is an adults only fundraiser for the local high school’s educational foundation.  The theme was 1970’s so I wore a vintage Frederick’s of Hollywood polyester peach halter maxi dress that I jazzed up with some rhinestones, and platform cork wedges.

              
There’s always a silent auction as part of the fundraiser, and one of the prizes was a month of music lessons from Fiat Music in Pinole.  I put my name down on the bidding sheet, and watched it like a hawk for the rest of the night.  At the time, I was thinking about taking piano.  I’d been teaching myself some stride from Ari Kast’s book and I wanted to progress faster (I took a year of piano lessons when I was 9, and I studied the violin for 16 years, so I can read music fluently).  But when I went to the store to redeem my voucher, I surprised myself a little when I said “I’m here to sign up for voice lessons”.  

Buried deep down in my secret heart I have always wanted to be a singer, but for years I kept it locked up for lots of reasons, mainly letting others’ emotional gravity keep me in a headspace of fear and stagnation.  But I knew that if I got some training and was persistent with my practice, that I would be good at it. 
 
My secret heart was right – I love it so much!  I practice in the car, I practice at home, I go out and practice at Karaoke, I jam with friends in the Sonic Bunker, I performed Lady Stardust at my restaurant’s cabaret.  Singing has turned into a staple of my life.  My brutal daily commute into San Francisco is so much more bearable when I practice while I’m driving.  Cause I can’t do a lot of multitasking when I'm doing the Emeryville Crawl, but I CAN sing.  My quality of life has improved drastically simply from not feeling like I’m wasting so much of my life in the car. 

And recently my teacher, Paige, gave me the nicest compliment, which was that she could tell when I come to my lessons, that I practice more and put the work in more than any of her other students.  Let me tell you, I have been beaming about that for weeks lol.

So anyway, I was doing great, and then I started the DDPY Positively Unstoppable Challenge for which I set this BIG VAGUE GOAL – to become a great singer, and immediately my practicing began to fall back.  This past Saturday (January 19), I had my 3^rd voice lesson since the challenge started (I've recorded all of them and am working on making clips so that you can hear my progress). Paige and I discussed my practice backslide, and we talked about the psychology behind it. 

1)      Fear of failure now that I’ve put this HUGE goal out there

2)      So then I don’t practice because I’m afraid of failing

3)      And then I’m ashamed because I don’t sound good 

4)      Then I don’t practice because I’m ashamed

5)      And then I feel guilty for not practicing

It all turns into this ridiculous downward spiral where I’m barely practicing because all these feeling of self-doubt have entered the picture. Whereas beforehand I was like “Of course I can do this.  Of course I’ll be good at this if I just put in the work.”  I was having so much fun and feeling so proud of myself before the challenge began, and I was embodying the confidence that Dallas has been pushing us to have!!  Then I became intimidated by my goal, anxiety, shame, guilt, fear of failure, fear of not being loved, fear of not being safe.  So we agreed that I should get back to what I was doing BEFORE I started the challenge, which is breaking it WAY WAY down into very specific micro-goals like getting a new consonant, vowel, or combo, a breathing exercise, etc. and HAVING FUN WITH IT.  

So here is a more reasonable breakdown of my singing goals.  Because this is something that my whole heart wants, and I would hate to get derailed due to some bad psychology

 

End Game Singing Goal

To become a GREAT singer

Large Goals

Be the featured singer on a PostmodernJukebox song

Make it onto The Voice

Play with famous musicians

Medium sized goals

Nail down Mistakes and sing it in public

Play with accomplished musicians

Diction and breathing techniques as second nature

Small Singing Goals

Get all the vowels

Get all the consonants

Develop proper flow from one phoneme to another

Consistent proper breathing technique

Consistent resonance

Hit the top 2 notes of “Lost onYou”

How to get there?

Daily Practice

Weekly lessons

Karaoke 1x weekly

Open mic 1x monthly

Complete online music theory course

Start playing gigs w/ sonic bunker crew

Look for musicians to play with on Craigslist