Amongst my funemployed adventures, I started taking singing lessons! I’ve always wanted to try but was… honestly kind of afraid to. It felt too vulnerable to ever try before. I like singing, I especially enjoy singing karaoke, but I definitely make up for my lack of skill with enthusiasm.

Karaoke, Korea-oke?

My family has a trip to Korea coming up to visit the in-laws, and they are very good at karaoke. The last couple times we went with them were downright embarrassing. You may say, “nooo, I’m sure they were nice!”

They were.

They were lying.

When you have an aunt beautifully belting Barbra Streisand in her preferred key, and then you follow with shouting a tragic attempt at Kelly Clarkson… you don’t feel super great about your performance.

Karaoke is a deeply cultural thing over there (as it is in many Asian countries). They have phone-booth-like booths on the streets where you can quickly belt a song on your break. They have arcades where entire floors are dedicated to karaoke. No matter your demographic, you sing karaoke in Korea.

Maybe this time I should kick off some lessons

So, I decided to actually do something about my lack of skill, in preparation for the trip ahead: I signed up for singing lessons. I was deeply intimidated and filled with regret the moment I got her intro email saying, “okay, bring a song you’d like to sing to our first lesson!” I know that I shouldn’t have been, but I just felt so vulnerable, instantly.

I drove up to the first lesson with the song Maybe This Time by Liza Minnelli. It’s a hard song, but I really enjoy it and it has a good few belts in there that I wanted to try to improve.

Each singing lesson starts with some breathing exercises (particularly to practice belly breathing, look it up), and then some scales and various exercises to relax your mouth and throat. We would also do some diction exercises, which involved saying a script that was kind of tongue-twister-y, if you wanna try it yourself:

What did you do to die today, at a minute or two ‘til two?
A thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do.
And the dragon will come at the sound of the drum
with a rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tattoo.
At a minute or two ‘til two today, at a minute or two ‘til two.
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark, dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp, shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

In the first lesson, she had me do scales and tested my pitch-matching, to see what we needed to work on specifically. Luckily I didn’t have pitch issues, and my tone was okay, but I was doing a lot of… unsustainable singing. I wasn’t breathing well between notes (very shallow breathing), I was clearly nervous, my placement wasn’t great (she could visibly see how tense my neck would get at certain pitches), and I would sound kind of hoarse by the end of any given song. She had me do an audio recording of every lesson and whew, it is painful listening to that first one.

But, that’s what lessons are for! A lot of people go into lessons saying that they want to increase their range, or improve their pitch, or soften their tone… I admit all I really knew to say was, “I want to sound good when I belt.”

With Maybe This Time, a grand majority of my “fixes” (outside of shaking off the nerves) were just… breathing. The better I learned how to breathe, the better the song sounded, the louder I could sing, and I could actually get to the end of the song without going raspy. One of the exercises (that kind of blew my mind) was to practice singing it while sounding nasal, like by straight up holding my nose. A lot of belting happens there, and leaning into the nasal does sound better than you think, if you do it right! I didn’t ever really “perfect” this song, but it was a good one to get started, I think. It helped me learn a lot of basics and bad habits I had to break.

I felt… on my own

After a few lessons with that song, the next one I brought was On My Own from Les Misérables. Yet another fairly difficult song, but I liked how it started kind of “quiet” before ending on a big belt. Y’all… this song is HARD. There’s a lot of voice acting you have to do to make it sound the way it should. There was a point in one of my lessons where my teacher had me read it in a butchered British accent to force me to practice singing it with “rounder” vowels. Plus, throughout all of this, she was having me sing at myself in a mirror, which is horrifying. When I got to my “final” performance of that one, the main thing I really took away from it is that I had to act it out more than sing it out, and fully pretend to be the character, otherwise I’d really just get “in my head” with it and be too self-conscious.

I lamented

For the last song in my batch of lessons, I really wasn’t sure what to do. I was both feeling better about some parts of my singing, but also realizing that being self-conscious and the psychological aspect of it was holding me back more than anything else.

I remember driving to the lesson just listening to a random shuffle of all of the songs I know, trying to decide which one should be next. Soon enough, one of the songs that popped up was Diva’s Lament from Spamalot. It’s such a stupid song, but I love it. If you don’t know that musical, the whole thing is just spoofs of other musicals, and this song in particular is about a character who’s annoyed that she had a really good part in Act 1, but not in Act 2. I was laughing at it in the car and thought, “okay, yeah, that one will be fun.”

When I listened to the song with the teacher before trying it on my own, it hit me how it was just as hard, if not harder, than the other songs I had picked. It had classical elements, pop elements, and a LOT of belting. She was definitely trying to be nice to me and was like “you know… let’s try it, it might give us some interesting things to work on!” but I knew in my heart she was like, “girl, you are a fool, but I’ll let you do what you want.”

So, I got up, and sang the song with its exaggerated accents, silly lyrics, and belted as best as I could. At the end, my teacher stood up, walked up in front of me, pointed at me, and said, “this is the song we’ve been looking for.” My rendition wasn’t perfect by ANY means, but she said that because it was a silly, tongue-in-cheek song, I wasn’t in my head as much, and I was just singing theatrically, for the fun of it.

That moment… shocked me, more than I expected it to. I walked away from the lesson fully stunned. It was the first time I didn’t have to think about “myself” or the act of singing. I don’t think I realized how freeing that would be until it hit me, right then.

My goose is cooked silly

I am… a silly goose. And it took me 7 singing lessons deep to realize that if I sing songs that let me act like a silly goose, that let me be who I truly am, I can focus on my actual singing skills instead of being intimidated by the act of singing.

My last lesson (for now) was this week. I brought some other more silly and theatrical songs, and my teacher gave me some recommendations that could help me impress the family in Korea. I’ve got my marching orders, and I feel way better about the trip coming up, and how I’ll keep singing from now on. Like my teacher said, “there’s no such thing as bad singers; the ones who think they are just haven’t practiced correctly.” (by the way, if you’re in Chicago and want a teacher recommendation, reach out to me!)

This has been such an interesting and fun learning experience this summer. I feel like I know myself better, and my voice better, in ways I didn’t expect (and in ways that were truly under my nose the whole time). I’m really happy I did it, and I encourage you to try, too!