The Reverence Trap
I’m very guilty of that trap we singers tend to fall into, which is believing that what we do is sacred and untouchable. I’ve been gifted with the ability to spin melodies out of nothingness using only the flesh and muscle I was born with, and this gift is fragile and must be treated with the utmost reverence.
This is bullshit. And it’s selfish. It displaces the onus of responsibility for the work, making “the voice” responsible for the magic, rather than the self.
It’s so easy to hide behind this reverence. Does this internal monologue sound familiar to you? (It does to me.) “I can’t sing today, because my voice won’t do the music justice.” Or, “I’m out-of-voice today. Tomorrow my voice will feel much better, so I’ll try then.” What does “out-of-voice” mean? Our instrument is literally the only one in the world that we can never be without — it follows us everywhere we go. “Out-of-voice” is a ridiculous paradox.
And so we place the voice — and all our art along with it — on a pedestal, a tall and thick one, and by bowing to it in deference, we conveniently hide our selves behind that pedestal. It’s a brilliant technique, when you think about it. So brilliant that we even trick ourselves into believing that we’re being “artistic.”
What if, instead of treating our voices as gods to be worshipped and mollycoddled, we treated them as our colleagues? The voice isn’t the thing itself; the voice is our coworker, a partner working alongside us in pursuit of a common purpose.
“The voice,” in this sense, can be anything. Your “voice” might be your writing, and your version of “out-of-voice” might be that myth of “writer’s block.” Your “voice” might be painting, or web design, or life coaching. Each creative pursuit seems to have its own unique version of the pedestal — the diminutive worshipping that is really just a dolled up game of hide-and-seek.
Let’s bring our art down from the pedestal, and start sharing it with others instead of hiding behind it.
Originally published here on December 15, 2020.
