When I am sick, I usually can’t sing through it. I know that opera singers are taught how to sing through a cold, but for me, when my throat is swollen and I can’t feel the actual movement of my vocal chords, I lack the one thing I prize most about my voice – control.
Everything becomes harder, and some things become too risky to attempt even within the sanctuary of my own body, like a familiar lake frozen over in winter … is it safe enough to walk on, yet? Transitions between notes become jagged. I might get there … but it loses the aspects that make it sound like me. Consonants lost to the stuffed nose. A growl lost to a too-coated throat. The last moments of a long note lost to the same breath as always, exhausted having to push harder past something.
Being without MY voice, in its entirety and as I define it, reduces me to nothing. I cannot express my songs. I become worthless. What I can present to people is not myself. It’s like being slowly choked to death. And when you have to sing, at least a song a day, every single day of that process becomes endless and loathing. What day will I get it back? When will I be me again? It’s been five days … will it be a week? Will I not have my voice when we pay a two-hour college show tomorrow? Or when we try to impress the open mic attendees at the Vanilla Bean on Friday? Or when our usual fans pack Victoria Station to see us after such a long absence on Saturday? Or when we see Brian and Katie from We’re About 9 – my idols – for one of the first and last times they will hear us for a while?
And beyond vitamin C and zinc and zycam, there’s not a damn thing I can do but sleep. Wait. Sing this maimed thing.
And then you wonder why you’re not selling as many CDs as you would like, even when you give everything you do have at a show where every note actually hurts you. Because this version of what you have is mediocre at best, and sometimes my best is mediocre at best. Every day of this career, I am fighting to matter among masses. Every day I am sick, I am losing time, losing opportunity, losing myself.
“Be careful about writing autobiographically … you’ll run out of material. I wish I would run out of material…” the feature at the open mic just said.
Does that mean you want a less interesting life, maybe just a less dramatic one? Or does it mean you want your life to be over?
