Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

singing

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Ambient room noise is just the computers hissing at us with quiet piano from my headphones down the line. We are clackers, typing, sleepy, sniffling, dutifully moving from one record to the next. It’s hard to care about anything that’s in front of you at a quarter to three on Friday, even harder when you’re busy caring about anything else. There is only one voice inside here (tangled in the ivory piano threads), though in the hallway the construction crew are chatterattertattering about vans and pounds and heavy things.

I seem to have lost my voice – not in the traditional sense. I can speak. However, i cannot seem to sing. Every time i move past my safest three notes tucked into the lower middle of the treble staff it’s as if my throat is collapsing upon itself so as to resist anything that could be construed as a beautiful noise coming out. I am shackled to my tinny falsetto… sounds like all of our bad dance classics records singing out from the tiny headphones connected to their turntables, but i could only wish for that tactile needle-noise in the back of my throat. Instead i get a dull and angry throb that i have learned to almost taste.

The quiet piano has given way entirely to a wondering vocal: love you, love you not? I was up and out at eight in the morning today, and my eyes shot the world through a different speed of film than i’m used to. How can they let in so much light?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85078123/

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Is there a reason that three different phone companies just called attempting to get me to switch my service within a single hour? Does it have something to do with today being Tax Day and everyone wanting to save a few bucks? I have no idea. Meanwhile, me performing Extreme’s “More Than Words” with any amount of vocal accuracy is about as likely as my getting signed on the strength of my stripped down cover of “Walk Like An Egyptian” — which is to say that i can’t hit the melody or even find the harmony on the former (and have yet to figure out the chords to the latter).

My god, life moves so slowly sometimes.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85008836/

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There is a mutiny building in my fingers; a resistance is gathering between my knuckles and around my wrists. They are not used to this sort of treatment… five hours of playing songs that i don’t have the option to fudge … songs that sound only how they sound. Towards the end my fingers were on automatic, picking out strings without my even having to think of it, but in the middle they were clumsy and tired as the muscles in my arms sighed with exertion.


There was a power to it — to making other people’s songs sound how they were meant, and to making my own songs sound out like i hear them in my own head. Kat sat on the bed mostly non-plussed, pecking away at her laptop, but Laurel seemed to be in a mild form of shock. And i… i wasn’t even in the room. The songs had filled it beyond its capacity to hold me.

Fingers aside, my voice amazed me. After having barely mustered up enough of it to power through my jury last week, imagine my surprise as it rose to the top of the staff and i was still hitting clean notes, open throated and howling. Sometimes a song finds one spectacular note inside of itself that my voice is attracted to like a moth to flame, willing to burn itself around the edges just to hit that one note and hold hold hold hold it over the four chords in the progression.

There is definitely a Trio brewing around here, somewhere.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75024430/

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I am surprised when i do anything well.

I just got back from my voice jury … my hands did not tremble, i did not quake. I smiled. I sang the easier of my two songs first, letting my voice fall into the slack of the piano accompaniment — getting all of the unsureness out of my system. Better to be unsure on the easy one and powerful on the harder. And, so, without much ado, i was.

I am not perfect — it’s something that i’ve come to terms with over the years. But, sometimes i do things right, and when i do those things i am perfect for one barely measurable moment, and i am living from one of those moments to the next right now.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75010270/