When Did YOU Start Singing?

People sometimes ask me “When did you start singing?” but I don’t understand the question. Don’t we all sing? And haven’t we always sung? Isn’t it just part of being alive? If we don’t spontaneously erupt into our own melodies, we sing along to other peoples’, even if we aren’t the best singers, or “can’t sing”, and will only do it when no one else is around to hear it because of our fear of embarrassment. (I personally don’t believe there is anyone who “can’t sing”; it’s just a matter of tunefulness…maybe your voice isn’t pleasant but you can make melodies come out of your mouth, even if they go off the rails or out of the key they started in.) Look in on any birthday party and you’ll see everyone singing along, smiling, as the candle-lit cake is carefully brought in and set on the table. Listen and you’ll hear that some voices are, invariably, way off from others and traveling to foreign, even dissonant areas and modes, with rogue wills of their own, but still following the basic architectural shape-line of the original melody…and it’s all okay because everyone is singing the Birthday Song!

Or are there people who decide to (start to) sing one day, having never done it before?

I can’t answer that question (when did I start singing?), unless they mean when did I start to do it professionally or when did I decide to try and do it for a living. But there is nothing so specific in the question so I don’t think that is what is being asked.

I always sang, from before I had a memory. Maybe we hear the music outside of us—outside of our mothers’ bodies-- when we are in the womb and so we are born already with music in us.

So, no, there was no magic or definitive moment when I decided to give it (singing) a try. But there was a first time I sang in front of an audience, yes, and that was an important, revelatory, trajectory-altering moment in my life.

It was at a party, in someone’s basement, in high school. My friend, a guitar player, had heard me hum and sing bits of songs during lulls in our long nighttime phone conversations and he could tell I had a knack for melody. He was at the party jamming with the band set up in the carpeted space, and he knew I loved the Police, and he urged me, nudged me, forced me, really, to get up in front of the microphone and take a turn (he knew I had a growing desire, even a desperation, to sing in a band, in front of people, but I was scared, so scared). I sang “Roxanne”, a song he knew how to play and knew I knew how to sing.

It was thrilling and I knew from that moment that I could do it—sing on my own in front of people-- and that my life could continue now.

But maybe that was also the moment my musical purity became tarnished, the moment my joyful and instinctive and necessary (like breathing) melody-singing lost its innocence, and I suddenly was Eve in the Garden after the Fall because before that I never questioned the perfection and purpose and eternality and naturality and instinct of singing, and never even had any consciousness about it—it was just something I did and that was part of who I was and part of what made me happy, but then, now, I wasn’t alone with it anymore (“alone”, I mean, with the gods and the muses); there was an audience, which meant there would be, and were, commentaries and comparisons and judgments about my singing and my mien in front of a mic, and opinions about my purpose and my motivations and my abilities and deficiencies and authenticity and earning potential and my looks and my influences, all of which would bungle and muddle it all up in my head and heart going forward and this confusion still dogs me, today, decades later.

Except when I am singing in the shower or singing while driving in my car or singing while dancing around in my house in the woods. Then, it’s perfect and joyful and unselfconscious again, like it was in the beginning.

My mother says that I used to make up songs in the car when I was a little girl, 4, 5 years old, as she was driving. I vaguely remember looking out the window and spontaneously improvising about what I saw, casually and quietly, like it was vocalized, melodicized thought, and the right thing to do as a passenger in the car-- to enjoy and mark the time and the space traveled instead of letting it just pass by unremarked-upon; to put my perspective into song, for no audience, just for myself, to entertain myself, maybe something like: “The leaves are green, the grass is, too, and the sky is blue and it‘s so pretty passing me by and we’re going to the grocery store to buy some food. La la la my my my”.

Later, when I was a little older, I wrote one of my first songs, about a dream I had about Sting. I called it “Totally Platonic”. The chorus lyrics went like this: “totally platonic/totally platonic/totally platonic/totally platonic”.

The dream was long and involved climbing over a very tall and thick cylindrical cement wall to get to the Police concert that I could only hear but not see, and I wanted to be in there and be part of it…and once over the wall my plan was to try and meet Sting at which time he would be irrepressibly drawn to me, but in a deeply respectful and non-sexual way; I didn’t want it to be some crude fleeting physical seduction thing—I wanted us to have a lasting meaningful cerebral spiritual mutually-musical bond, and I wanted him to Love me for who I was and not for my female desirability. It—our thing—would be Totally Platonic.

That was the dream.

Sting was just a symbol...