Thing Can Sing

This thing likes to sing. This thing can't sing like anything. She sings high while the others sing low, but she is not too bad, you know.

That is not a genuine Dr. Seuss quote. Like I said, I like to sing, but my voice is what I would call completely mediocre. Sometimes, I sing really well and people compliment me and I just know I nailed it. Other times, no one says anything because they are well behaved humans who haven't calmly clamped a hand over my mouth to stop the sounds from coming out while whispering in my ear that, 'some things aren't worth dying for.'

I know what you're thinking. No one can have that large of a spectrum between awesome and Seagull from Little Mermaid. But I am telling you, I have no control over whether or not it's going to be a good day, or otherwise. I am also not particularly improved by practise. I can practice a thing, and still botch it on performance day. I also tend to cry... a lot. Now with what I've listed so far, I again know what you're thinking. I should sing in a group. Again, this is a terrible idea. If I am singing next to a person who sings, I'll just hear them singing and I won't have any clue what I'm doing with my voice. I used to try to sing in a choir, and the choir director would stop everyone, point in my direction and say, “Someone over there is off.” She wouldn't take me aside and say I was the mouldy peach in the patch, but I couldn't swear an affidavit that I wasn't the one who was off. I have ears that require silence to hear things. I'm not good at picking out overlapping voices.

Lately, I've been doing a challenge with myself to see if I can sing all the songs in church without a hymnbook. I've found I like it partly because then I don't have to hold a wrist-hurty-heavy hymnbook. So, now I tell whoever is trying to share a hymnbook with me to hold it comfortably and when they do, I can still see the words! What I want to do is yell at them that they were supposed to hold it so I couldn't see it, not hold it comfortably. How did they not understand that? Weird. I made it perfectly clear.

The most success I've ever had with singing is when I'm singing something by myself and if there is an accompanist, she's on a piano far, far, away. I'm singing something I know, I have the music in front of me and I know. I mean, I really know, that even if I blow it BIG TIME, it doesn't matter. Someone has asked me to sing something on the fly. I have had zero practice time, and something about the situation is good. I don't know what. Maybe it's that my nerves haven't tied themselves into knots with the awful knowledge that I was going to sing in front of a couple hundred people in a week or two. Maybe it's that church music has a heart of its own, no matter who is performing it. Maybe it's that my lungs are smaller than the average singer and I can take the kind of pauses I need to get the best out of my voice.

Or maybe, I have it all wrong and dying waterfowl sound better.