Sing Life

So-Song is a metaphor for life.  So-life needs both Spirit and Soul.  So-singing needs Spirit and Soul; breath and communication of the human condition.  Most people I meet tell me, "I can't sing."  Since most people I meet are breathing at the time, I can only hear that to mean that there is something asleep in their souls.  Something silences their need to communicate their human condition to others.

After all, what more is a song? I need to share loss in disaster.  I need to share ecstasy in love.  I need to share terror amidst cultural disintegration.  I need to share my doubts-Dave Matthews' Band: Mother Father.  I need to share assurance-Matisyahu: One Day.  Neil Diamond sang I Am . . . I Said because sometimes we fear we "are not."  We test our existence by singing.   Singing is a work of the Soul.

Here is where I take issue with fame and celebrity.  Here is where I take issue with the Arts.  Somehow, we Americans have convinced ourselves that singing is a work that solely belongs to the artist.  We have decided that we sing primarily to be noticed, revered, or expressing some Kantian ideal of perfected Will.  We have decided there is not room for a wobbly vibrato, a pitch that hasn't been rendered inhuman through a sound mixer, and that singing belongs only to the individual with talent; as though what the rest of us need to say is not worthy of hearing.

If this is where you find yourself, you have been deceived.  Your voice is yours.  It is perfect when it wobbles.  It is beautiful when it grinds and gravels.  Maybe it doesn't fit in a choir.  Maybe it requires a different instrument to be set free, but it does not belong to arbiters of taste.  It does not belong to Simon, BMI or me.  It is something you inherited with your humanity, and it is there to express what exists beyond words in the human experience.  

You may think I am wrong, but singers without Soul, though they breathe into a microphone and move us to dance, wither.  You can see it in many celebrities.  People who "can sing," but cannot seem to connect with another human being without a veil of drugs and exploitative relationships.  They can breathe with the Spirit of life but they are not singing with Soul.

If you have been listening, you have started to hear the song.  May you have the courage to try and give it voice.