You guys...I am so overjoyed right now. When you watch this song you may not have guessed I was feeling "overjoyed" (spoiler alert there are real tears). Do you ever look back at your younger self and feel like you had it more together, or in SOME way you were doing something better then you are now?
REAL TALK
To be completely transparent with you, the last two years or so, I have felt WORSE at singing and performing then when I was 18/19 years old. Isn't that crazy?! I have only had MORE performing experience, more training...how could I be worse? Well the thing is when I was a senior in high school, "broadway" was about the only thing on my mind. In fact, I am trying to remember what else I even thought about! I could tell you every single actress who ever played Elphaba, and spent ALL my free time doing something to better my craft. At one point I was going to 4 voice teachers (literally do not know how I afforded that cause...I couldn't) And also I do not recommend that, all the different methods will just confuse you. I was making myself go to all sorts of dance classes, and when I was at home I was singing, or memorizing a monologue, or looking up the best musical theatre colleges in New York.
I found a very special teacher January of my senior year in high school. And I had been taking lessons for a few years by then, but I wanted more help with acting and performing. Well when I went to him, he essentially told me my technique was perfect but I was boring to watch. I'm not really exaggerating that, there was no filter here.
So he made me do more things out of my comfort zone then I had ever been. Even thinking back to lessons I can FEEL the extreme discomfort. The uncomfort zone sucks ya'll. Ooooh it makes me cringe. He had me making all sorts of weird sounds with my voice to explore different colors. He asked me deep questions about my personal life/history/desires and asked me to sing about those topics. And by sing about them, I mean that as the artist you get to decide what a song means to you. So he wanted me to get in touch with my REAL emotions and actually let myself be seen while I sing.
He was the one who taught me not to "show". That singing and acting is not about showing. It's about being.
He taught me that it's way better to be real and honest and crack and sound ugly than to sound perfect and be boring.
He taught me that literally all I have to do is connect and trust my instincts, and I do not have to "show" the audience that I am acting.
I sang genres with him I had never sung before, and I started being able to connect to myself faster and faster. Eventually I would work a new song with him each week, but before I went into the lesson I had already done heaps of prep work for the song. I was not about to walk into his studio un prepared. The way I see lessons, is if you don't show up prepared it's kind of a waste of money. I wanted to go to him with my BEST work so he could help me expand even more.
Back To Today
I was looking up auditions for Disney yesterday (like I always do. I mean I am serious, visiting the Disney Auditions website is like brushing my teeth to me). And there was a casting call looking for singers for a Christmas show. It is an online submission obviously because of #Quarantine. But I started to feel the nervous "what do I sing" feeling. Because I didn't know what would be perfect for this! Should I sing a Christmas song? A Musical Theatre song? A Classic song?
So I reached out to this one of a kind teacher I had in New York one summer over a 6 Week Professional Musical Theatre program. This teacher's brain is literally a library full of basically every song in the whole world hahaha and he has an incredible gift to hear an actor sing, and go through the file in his brain and pick songs for them. I sent him a message about this audition call and asked if he had any ideas, and he told me this song and another song!
I instantly went to Youtube and started learning the words (I had only heard this song a handful of times before). I was desperate to give this song what it deserved. So I took advice from my younger self and did what I used to do when I went into my voice lesson. I printed the lyrics of the song and spent more time with them.
What do they mean to me?
What is the feeling and emotion in each line?
What do I VISUALIZE when I am delivering the lyric?
I only jotted down seven or eight words and then I really got into it. That was enough to set me back into motion. And ironically, what I discovered (re discovered) is that I had to do way less. Way less putting on a show.
Because all I do in this song, is breathe, feel the music, and really and truly communicate each lyric from my heart. That's why I cry, because this song is so relatable to all. It's about the lost things. The things you used to know. Where do they go? The memories...the people....are they gone forever?
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