Mom used to tell me I was tone deaf and quite frankly, she told me lots of things that were untrue about myself. It took a long time to undo all her teachings and of course I still struggle with some of them. It's made easier without her around trying to reinforce them all the time. If it had been up to her, I'd be a single mom with five kids, no teeth, no friends, and would be living on welfare while taking care of her and telling her how awesome she is while believing I was the worst person on the face of the planet (which wouldn't be a huge leap from everyone else, really).
Eff that.
Instead, I took the useful skills she gave me - and yes, I know these may be somewhat contradictory - and put them to use, then built upon them. Reading, love of learning, fierce independence, and the ability to think well ahead of many people... these have served me well. She didn't want me to have my faith, she wanted me to have hers, but I somehow kept my beliefs anyway and never let her tempt me away from my own sense of that.
I have, with much awareness, kept my awareness of my intuition and observational skills (also a contradiction, since I find it difficult to notice and remember people's appearances, such as whether they're skinny, fat, black, white, etc), and had the nerve to build relationships with other people. Even to the point of having my own reputation (it seems to help me, but I'm still not sure exactly what I'm known for, and I kinda don't really want to know but I hope it involves honesty and customer service in some fashion).
While my self confidence still struggles, I have mostly boosted it with a lot of help from chosen family, and many friends and colleagues over the years. I have made personal choices to keep myself on the right track, to take care of myself and not forget my roots and the easy pitfalls I could have made if I hadn't climbed out.
It still struggles, though. If I trust someone, and my instincts tell me they're wrong, but they insist they're right, I will go with their words over my own instincts. And whenever I know inside that I'm hitting notes properly, I'm never sure that I really know. There is always a part of me that wonders... is it just that Dale and his mother are tone-deaf themselves or so sensitive to my delicately fragile self-esteem that they tell me what I want to hear? Are my friends unwilling to burst my bubble? Is my own voice teacher lying to me to avoid her own failures? But then I listen to a newer recording, or to someone online who I like the voice of, or watch as I'm spot-on with my phone's little measuring app... and I think, what the hell. You may still have some moments, but by God, you're far from tone deaf. You can do this. With the amount of practicing you do (very little), you have come along amazingly well.
After weeks of not practicing, I managed to sing a song I'd practiced with my teacher some time ago, thrice, and got most of it with pretty much no effort... and I flipped the page upside down the first two times and simply changed the words as I kept up, as if I'd been doing it for years. "--and the page is upside downnnn... remind meeeee to reprint this stupid little page... oh my that's so much betterrrr..." and I laughed a bit as I kept up, and then got back on track, catching little moments of slipping off a bit but just continuing on, not caring. You know what? Not everyone can do that. Not everyone knows. There was a time /I/ didn't know when I did that. I may not be Mariah Carey or Celine Dion or Whitney Houston or Vienna Teng, but damn, that's pretty cool.
So after the lesson, I'm wandering around the house singing to Vienna Teng's "Gravity" and remember the bread rising in the oven - someone wanted to try some of my pan bread some day. They may be back here with Dale later, so I figured I'd at least have it ready for cooking just in case they hung around before I had to leave. Can I just be a normal person and make it as I always do? No. I toss it on the grill. Of course. I tried making some at camp last week and it came out awesome. Never mind that we had charcoal, not gas. Never mind that it was out in the open air, and I could position the rack well over the coals and still keep some heat on it. Oh, no. Plop.
Seems to be ok. I shut off the gas and left it in there once the outside was hard but pre-burnt. Then me in my infinite wisdom wandered around the house wanting lunch but not wanting to make it. I could see it coming. The flour came back out. Next thing I knew, I had sour cream and butter mixed into what I'm guessing is a scone base. It ends up on the griddle, the big greasy smooshed together pile of crumbly mess. What was I thinking? That will never flip. I'm surprised it didn't totally fall apart. I can hear myself tsk tsking my creative little child. I could also hear it in the background, loudly wondering why it wasn't being listened to. The parent! That was the parent. I remember those lessons, the parent, child, and adult... yup, that's a parent all right. Eventually my spidey senses went off and I ventured back out to flip the mess. I was right. It was a little burnt on the bottom, but salvageable. It flipped in piece. Wait, what? And that patient silence simply pushed my hand in the direction of the knob. I shut off the gas, closed the lid, and walked away. How long do I leave it out there? No answer. I will know when it's time. She'll tell me. I didn't even glance at a clock.
Is the child the creative one? She did these things in an automated, non-thinking fashion, out of a simple decision. It isn't even will, exactly. It's simply intent. There were no words. It was a sheer line of singing accompanied by hands squishing flour and butter and sour cream into crumbles, taking note of the texture and being vaguely aware that I may need to clean that out from under my rings later. She may be a child, I'm not sure. She must be, because she is not the adult since she has desire, and she is certainly not the parent because she's not a bitchy I-told-you-you-suck mother. She is the one I often call The Muse. I like her. A lot. But she tends to come out on her own when she damned well feels like it. She is never malicious, she just does whatever she feels like doing at any given time. She is the one that tells me when I *must* write, she is the one that knows how to make my voice sing with feeling. She knows how to play along to a song on the piano without studying first, and she's the one that makes me go do it as if I'm in a trance. She can paint birds, cows, trees, landscapes, Sinclair's eyes, and sketch Dale's face with a light curtain partially obscuring it. The Muse can make scones from scratch without a recipe the first time. She tells me how to make bread and refuses to listen to directions. Refuse isn't quite the word... she simply ignores instructions. And she is very much in tune with my intuition. I often think of how glad I am that she's not malevolent, because I swear she can do anything.
Mom may have inadvertently helped The Muse to form. Leaving me alone for so long to my own devices, what else could have formed? I was trapped in my own little world of not understanding people, of what boils down to an inner silence. I had thought, and little interaction, and I was ok with that much of the time. So later, when this little being was told to be someone else... the growth on the outside might have been listening and trying to conforming and being frequently scared and sad, but The Muse just sat there wrapped up in her little blanket having conversations with Love in her silent little way. If that's my core coming out when it decides to, then it's no wonder I'm so damned strong, no wonder I was able to break away from the poison of my upbringing and be who I am now. Nobody can tell Muse what to do. She simply doesn't acknowledge restraint or direction from anyone other than herself and what I label as God for lack of a better name.
Oh, and... as I finished that last sentence, I overheard the very end of Richard Marx's Part of Me. Something seemed off. It didn't raise my little hackles as being /wrong/ but it was decided different. My first thought was that his voice went flat or something and someone overlooked it and left it in there. But no. After four more listens, it finally hit me. Double-tracking! Sure enough, "Cause you're a part of meeeee" has at least two of him in it. Elated, I let it finish and my head snapped back up. WAIT!! The second one had at least three, maybe four... I don't know... but it's even more obvious, and this time they're decidedly different notes. Yeah, no doubt, different friggin' notes. Wait... if that-- that means--
I'd been having problems singing along to the chorus piece of his "When You're Gone." I found myself singing something other than what's on my sheet music, even though the first two pages seem fine and match up. Sometimes pieces of it later on also match up, so I had no idea what I was doing wrong. I told my voice teacher about it and she suggested I not use the word, "Wrong," because she'd heard me singing "different" notes in various chords before with other exercises or whatever. We'd concluded after a while that I wasn't necessarily flat or sharp when I lost where I was, but that I was hearing an entire chord and my brain wasn't sure what part to sing so it selected something even if it wasn't the part that should be getting sung as the main melody line. Sometimes it's one of the vocals, sometimes it's an instrument near the vocals, but it was never wrong, just a different part of the song. It wasn't the melody, forsooth, so what's the difference, one might say. But... it IS different. It's far from being tone-deaf. It's hearing too many things at once and not being able to decide which tone is in the melody and which ones aren't.
So I listened to When You're Gone and sure enough, he's multi-tracking in various pieces of the chorus (and after that), but not in the part I had no trouble with. I should have know. I thought it was the rasp, or the way the track was mixed. But now that I'm aware of it, it's so friggin' obvious that it's there!
Doesn't mean I know which notes they all are, but at least now they're distinct enough to know they are different. I've made a note for the teacher and have happily moved on. Richard Marx is an awesome singer, but either he or someone on his team at the time knew that doing this would make his song that much more interesting and... rich. It's no different from layering instruments together, or playing chords on a piano. It's just that voices don't natively do that, so my brain is all confused. Frankly, it's amazing that any of us can deal with any of that at all - sound is simply vibration, and for our brains to pick up vibrations from an ear drum and translate it into different instruments playing different vibrations at the same time... that is intensely awesome.
Aight, off we go then.
~nv
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