When I was in my early 20s, I rented a room in a sprawling mansion-turned-rooming-house that was in a beautiful part of Vancouver, Canada. Lots of tall, old trees lined the sidewalks. The area had a luxuriant park-like atmosphere…

“You may not see me, but you’re damn well going to hear me!” My good friend, Anna, boomed out to a male server in a coffee shop who refused to “see” her waiting next in line to give her order. Anna, who is 72, is a theatre actor whose well-trained voice…

n experienced singer walks onto the stage with the strong desire to elicit emotion from their audience. The best singers have an arsenal of techniques at their command. It is their job, in part, to make us feel something beyond our daily…

Many, perhaps most of us, are moved to sing. I know this from my numerous years of giving concerts. Often, I hear from audience members that they had “always wanted to sing.” “I don’t have a good voice, but I really…

Towards the end of each year, I find myself thinking about how I want to improve or refocus my life for the New Year. Yes, I recognize that the timing is purely arbitrary: you don’t have to wait for a new year to make a decision to change. And not everyone’s…

When I was a young girl, still in the single digits of life, I dreamed of walking onto the stage alone to sing for an audience. In my imagination, I grudgingly allowed for there also to be a pianist onstage with me. As a very shy person whose musical vision…

Some years ago, when my mother flew alone across Canada to visit with me, I was desperate to find a way to rekindle our former deep emotional connection. Since she had remarried several years earlier, I felt that I had lost some of our precious bond…

remember standing backstage when I was quite young, waiting to be called onstage for my first performance in a song festival. I may have been 12 or 13 years old. I was about to sing a song I loved from the musical The King and I, titled, “I Whistle a Happy Tune…

One of the first gifts that I gave to my new lover, John, some years ago was a song called, “The Nearness of You.” I had recorded myself singing the romantic song very informally on my iPhone. I sent it to him for his birthday after we had been seeing…

When I was in my early 30s, I lived in a two-story house nestled in the forest high up in the Green mountains of Vermont. We were far from the madding crowd for months at a time. It was from that perspective on one cold, sunny morning that I was looking…