Now Is The Time To Sing
Way back in the autumn of 2019, I did something ridiculous, something bold. Something so wildly out of character that no younger version of myself would have believed it: I took a singing class.
I was single, hated my job, and wanted to meet new people, but I was also living with a temporary disability that severely limited my options for travel, dating, and all other kinds of physical adventures I was used to having. I decided that taking a class would achieve many of the same benefits, opening my mind and making me a little uncomfortable and introducing me to people I would otherwise never meet. I looked on Course Horse for classes in watercolor painting, beginning Portuguese, and sculpting, but when I saw a listing for a one called Everybody Can Sing, I smirked and thought, I’ll be the judge of that. It was practically a dare. It made all the other classes seemed cowardly in comparison, so, of course, I had to do it.
Like every class I’ve ever taken at the 92nd St. Y, it was mostly me and a lot of old ladies, but that was okay, because now I had a cane, too. I quickly dispensed with any hope of meeting eligible bachelors as I took a seat in one of the chairs set up in a circle. Our teacher, a cheery, goofy lady named Marge* who looked like a Mary Engelbreight illustration come to life, entered with an acoustic guitar and asked us all to describe why we had signed up for the class.
I wasn’t expecting Everybody Can Sing to be a group therapy session, but nearly everyone shared a traumatic memory or decades-long shame around the simple human tradition of singing. Many women cited some wretched adult from their childhood who’d told them they couldn’t or shouldn’t sing, so they’d avoided it for most of their lives; some were there in defiance of ex-husbands who’d criticized their voices. One well-coiffed lady wearing an expertly tied Hermès scarf around her wrinkled neck shared how, during her childhood in Turkey, she had loved to sing, but her voice didn’t sound like it used to. She wanted to return to that version of herself. As for me, “I just want to be able to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ without feeling embarrassed,” I told the group, but it was more than that: I, too, once had a partner who regretfully informed me that I was tone-deaf; I’d sung my heart out at karaoke only to be met with crickets and slow claps. Singing only felt good when I was driving a car, alone, and, since I lived in New York City, you can guess how often that happened.
As Marge warmed us up with scales and rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” encouraging us to open our mouths and eyes wide at the high notes and furrow our brows for low notes, we looked to each other with trepidation, blushing and giggling nervously. But it quickly became clear that, if we accepted that all of us were there because we were “bad singers” and let ourselves try without embarrassment, we could simply enjoy the act of singing. I noticed that it required me to be fully present and focused; it was impossible for me to worry about the news or my crappy job or my disability while I was trying to keep time and find the right notes. I had to be there and in it, and nowhere else. What’s more, I had to engage my whole body to do it: I had to control my breath and use my abs and sit up straight. I had to pay attention to what my throat was doing and practice controlling what was going on in there. I was pleased to discover, in our very first lesson, that singing was not just a lark I’d gone on out of boredom; it was the physical adventure I’d been longing for.
***
Over the course of the next six weeks, Marge helped us grow from awful, timid singers to not-bad, less fearful singers. It was so uncomfortable, and so great. The discomfort was what made it great. No matter what was happening in our individual lives, this was one place, for an hour and a half each week, where we came to be flawed together, to fail together, to let ourselves be bad in service of becoming better.
Sometimes Marge broke us into groups of three to practice a song, which we would then perform for the class. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in a room of fifteen women who are deathly afraid of singing, but it’s pretty painful. The body language alone during these performances said it all: arms crossed in front of bodies, shoulders curled up as though to shield the singer from judgment raining down from above. Breathy, timid ventures into beloved tunes by Wham! or The Beatles. Everybody messing up but trying anyway, and our unflappable teacher giving us specific tricks that, like magic, transformed us into decent vocalists. “Think about the next note you’re going to sing after this one, and that will help you be ready by the time you get to it,” she’d advise. “Hold onto a chair!” she’d declare to a singer who couldn’t help but sway somewhat nauseously while pushing notes from her fearful body. “It’ll really keep you grounded!”
Patience and kindness and compassion were required to be in the class — hell, to be in the classroom. If all fifteen of us were sobbing and talking about the worst things that had ever happened to us, it still would not match the vulnerability required to sing one solo line of “Love Me Do.”
One woman, Francine, was an accomplished author and professor in her late fifties who had given dozens of lectures to audiences in excess of five hundred people. Yet, in the second week of class, when Francine attempted to sing “Yesterday” to the other two of us in her trio, Francine’s voice came out as a fearful whisper of notes, like an abused animal. You could see the little girl in her; you could hear the terror in her throat. But she got through it, and when she was done, Francine blinked and said, “That’s the first time I’ve sung in front of anyone by myself since I was twelve years old.”
I had never been the kind of person who sang at home, even in the shower, for fear of bothering my neighbors with a voice I’d been told was unbearable. But now I found myself doing just that as I washed dishes, humming as I hobbled down the street with my cane, singing along to music or busting out a few lines of songs I hadn’t thought of in years. Singing made me seem like a happier person, until I realized that it was actually making me feel like a happier person.
For our final class in December, we each had to perform a full solo for the class, twice: once as we’d prepared it, then a second time after Marge gave us tips. I had selected a Molly Burch song called “To The Boys” and, during my first go-round, I found myself having trouble with the higher notes, even though they’d sounded fine when I’d performed for my pillows at home. Marge leaned forward in her seat and said, “Do me a favor. When you get to that line that goes, ‘Answer me,’ can you really push the air from the center of your stomach?”
“Well, I can try!” I laughed, sarcastic.
“There!” Marge pointed at me. “Do that, sing it just like you just said ‘I can try’. Go!”
I’d learned in this class not to overthink it, so I didn’t even pause — I just dove back into the song. And then something incredible happened: my voice, which had never before gone where I wanted it to go or did what I wanted it to do, not only hit the right notes; it soared. Somewhat outside of myself, I heard my voice swelling to fill the room with a beautiful noise, propelled by power and confidence. It was both familiar and wholly new; I couldn’t believe that voice belonged to me. I felt like I’d dug up a treasure from inside my own body. And I knew it wasn’t just my imagination, because when I finished, the whole class gasped and broke into applause.
***
Of course, we didn’t know that, at that very moment, a virus on the other side of the world had recently made its first foray into a human body. By the time the autumn of 2020 arrived, it was hard for me to believe that I’d taken a singing class only a year earlier. That I’d ever been so relatively carefree, that I’d sat in a closed room full of people exhaling at each other, that fifteen strangers had voluntarily spent an hour each week being vulnerable together.
By February of 2021, that life felt impossibly far in the past. I now had no job at all, let alone a crappy one, and I hadn’t adapted to the pandemic so much as let go of my sense of time and self. I woke each morning an hour before my alarm, curled in the dark, heavy with an unnameable dread. I took a break from social media, but that made my studio apartment feel even smaller, quieter. It was so still; nothing happened in my home that I didn’t make happen.
Living alone and going weeks or months without human touch, months without a job or any sense of purpose each day, smudged my sense of self. During these long stretches without change or hope or actual human contact, I felt that parts of myself were dissolving. Beyond the abstract comfort of having a reason to exist, I began to lose my understanding of my own physical boundaries, the tangible molecules and weight that literally held me on this planet. One day my doctor put his ungloved hand on my bare ankle and, feeling another person’s skin against my skin, I abruptly regained a sense of my own size, my fragility, and it tethered me back into the physical present, and I almost burst into tears.
Somewhere in that dark time, I remembered that Marge had told us that singing is something you have to do every day. You have to keep your body used to the feeling of it. I realized I hadn’t sung a single note since the pandemic began; in fact, I sometimes went days without speaking a word aloud. And, although my body was now healed, I once again longed for a physical adventure I had little access to.
So I began to sing again, a capella in the mornings as I looked out my window to the brightening day, or in the evenings, with music, as I cooked yet another dinner. At first it was a little embarrassing, almost disrespectful; it was strange to make a joyful noise during a joyless time, for no one but myself. But it felt good to do it, a forgotten pleasure returned to me.
As I sang along to Neko Case or Fleet Foxes, The Free Design or Air Supply, and I felt the muscles in my throat fluctuate to accommodate the notes or my abdomen push out air to give them something to float on, I noticed how much this physical practice anchored me back to the world. Singing situated me in a specific time and place, inhabiting only this body, with only these abilities, in only this spot on the earth. Singing drew definition around a self that had begun to feel dangerously borderless. I was still a pretty bad singer, but it could only be my voice doing the bad singing. There was a past, present, and future for the body that owned this voice.
There was one song that became a sort of default for me; I wished I could sing it for my class of old, shy women, whom, as the winter unfolded into spring, I imagined all getting their vaccinations. Like a ritual, whenever I started to feel that familiar, heavy dread pull at my stomach, the fear of an infinite, indefinite future looming not only in front but all around and inside and below me, and I needed something to tie me to the earth, I reached for the first few lines of an old samba song by a Brazilian artist named Marcos Valle titled, fittingly, “It’s Time To Sing.”
They say it’s time for crying,
that love is dead or dying
They even say it’s wrong in making plans
For sentimental things like holding hands
(but) we have the stars, the sun, the moonlight
and hearts to carve on willow trees
So if the world is wrong, let’s change the song
for now is the right time to sing!
The more I do just that, the more I agree with Marcos. My darkest moments of the last year and even before have yielded the simplest, starkest pleasures, be they singing alone in my apartment, spotting a bluejay on a snowy branch in the park, or feeling the breeze of a spring that’s come exactly on schedule, despite a world out of time. I feel surer than ever that we must run to those pleasures, no matter how little they seem, for they are what draw boundaries around a vanishing self.
As I write this, the days are growing warmer, and as more and more people get the vaccine, things have begun to feel brighter, lighter, easier. And while I know that dark days may always come again, I now have one more way to endure them, because although it may not feel like it — it may feel silly or disrespectful — it is exactly those times, the darkest and most uncertain, that are the best times to love the stars, the sun, the moonlight, and, indeed, the right times to sing.
*Names have been changed.
