Singing Like an Old Lady

Aretha belts it out!

Singing like an Old Lady.  

My voice has changed ... 

... but I'm not alone in this.

I love to sing, but my training was long ago when I was in high school and college.  I learned to be true to the pitch, to use my diaphragm, to pay attention to my breathing, to be dynamic with my volumes and to be respectful of the song.  It was classical training, albeit at a student level.  When I met my current partner Dan, a professional musician, a few years ago, he was eager to have me sing with him, especially in public.

A person can sing all day long at home or in the studio, but a singer needs to sing in public in order to improve, he would tell me. He's a great musician and a great mentor and because of him I've gotten up in front of audiences (in wine bars, after I've had a little wine myself) and I've been received pretty well by friends and other wine drinkers. 

But he has recorded me a few times, and I hear things I don't hear while I'm up there at the mic.

I am 67 now and I sound like an old lady.  

My vibrato is not controlled, and although I have always been proud of my pitch, hearing the recordings made me aware that I am no longer in control some of the time, and I hadn't realized that.  Today I listened to a recording from earlier this week, and I felt so embarrassed.

Should I stop singing?  Or should I embrace my love of singing and continue to"share my voice with the world," (as more than one of my dear friends has encouraged)?

I spent the next few hours after hearing this recording (of a Joni Mitchell song I dared to sing, fulfilling a long-held dream of mine to sing one of her tunes) thinking bad thoughts about myself. 

How dare I stand up in front of people and subject them to my flaws?

How dare I even attempt a difficult song like "Little Green?" What was I thinking?

If I am going to sound like the grandmother I am, I should only sing "old lady" songs.

Let's just keep my love of singing to lullabies I sing to my grandchildren; they love them.

Then I googled "I sound like an old lady" and I came up with this 2014 article about Aretha Franklin.  The headline knocked me out:

Aretha Franklin Is an Old Lady and She Sounds Like It; Good for Her

Here's the YouTube of Aretha's performance (corrected from the first day of this post when I had it wrong!)

https://youtu.be/mvjS8qjqrqQ

ABSOLUTELY:  Good for her!!

Apparently this  rendition of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" she sang on Letterman's show was so controversial people's responses fell into either "love it" or "hate it".  The article's author, Rich Juzwiak, described her voice thus:  

"Aretha Franklin's voice used to soar, seemingly without effort, but sometimes now she audibly gets caught on hurdles when she goes for the big jumps. Her upper range often sounds strained and threadbare. If it were a piece of cloth, you'd be able to see through most of it by this point. But whatever. Her attempts on Letterman were audacious, there's still plenty of power in those pipes, still enough of that Aretha growl to satisfy many of us who consider her voice to be one of America's greatest natural resources."

What he wrote about her "threadbare" upper range resonated with my fears about my own voice, and he also wrote, 

"Franklin hit some sour notes that night. It was far from the flawless performance that pop culture's pageant-perfect reigning contemporary diva Beyoncé has us used to hearing. If it were an American Idol audition, Franklin might not have made it through to Hollywood."

I laughed then, because I had said the same thing to Dan this morning after hearing myself, that if I was a contestant on Idol or the Voice I wouldn't have made it past three notes before they sent me packing.

Then Juzwiak continued:

"But man, what gusto the 72-year-old exhibited. What risk she took. She could have sung the entire song in her comfortable middle register, as she did mostly during the verses. This would have been safer and more likely to have earned her praise from across the board, but it also would have been boring. Instead she unleashed and went wild, opting for an abrasive octave jump during the song's pre-chorus section."

Well, ok then!  That's what Dan tells me all the time:  that my main problem is confidence.

That I hold back and I should take the risks and not worry about perfection.  

That keeping my voice to myself is kinda selfish.  

Even at my age.  

So, ok.  I won't use ageism against myself to silence myself.  What the heck.  If I stand up and sing and the wino's applaud me despite my flaws, there's something they like.  

Maybe it's just the fact that I stand up and sing at all that brings their applause.  

Maybe if I do,  more others will too.   

I ain't no Aretha Franklin, not by a million miles and never was, but maybe even I can be a role model here in my little town.