I feel a great sadness in the business at the moment, and I don’t know exactly why. There is a certain great and deep fragility about singers and the human voice. It’s part of the package, and that’s why all early training should have as much a spiritual as a technical element. One sings, not just to improve, not to have success, or money and fame–but because one loves it. It is a relationship with song and with music that has to bear up under great and grueling circumstances.
I’ve dealt with the things that afflict us all, like depression and disappointment and great hurt in the business, as well as the silly shame that seems to haunt singers. But I truly believe that there is a higher power, and that the results are not ours to control. We can just put it out there and out there and out there. That’s our part in it. We’re in one of the hardest professions of all, where looks, talents, and luck all make a very fragile package at any point and at any level.
Maybe the expectations are just too high. I do think we are in an age when not only are we all suffering much more from stress than ever before, but we are attempting to totally control our environment, with pills and solutions that are just not ours as human beings to have. We feel bad, and then feel like failures because we feel bad. In life, you just plain feel bad a lot of the time. There’s a lot in our world to feel bad about! We’re trying to get joy all the time; perfect health (although we do little to really commit to it as a nation); perfect babies (although once we have them, we don’t take the time to really take care of them); perfect old age; and perfect career (although the business is crueler and more difficult than ever). It just isn’t going to happen the way we want it, and no drugs or programs can take away our sorrow and suffering because they are, along with joy and faith, part of the human condition. I think we’ve all just forgotten this along the way.
