Sunday, February 20, 2005
The Non-Drinking Yogi's Guide to Singing and Songwriting
I'm not exactly pretzel man. I'm not exactly loose as a piece of spaghetti. But I've been to yoga class six days this week. My bones and muscles are just getting to know each other after all these years. "Hello, femur, we're the quads. Lets spiral in a bit so Buckley's tailbone can ride without getting all twisted up again. He looks like Quasimodo when he does that." My singing breath control kept me from losing my voice and sounding like a trachea patient after that night on the street, screaming to be heard over the rock band next door. I'm singing from my heart more than my throat. I find it much easier to smile. People react to that. You should see my tip jar.One of my students, Jim, keeps coming up with terrific songs. He explores the music part by tinkering. Inventing chords that I'm hard pressed to name. D sus 2 flat 5, to a D sus 2/G for instance. I'm not even sure that's an accepted name but it describes it accurately enough. We looked up a song that he says inspired that chord change and found that his mind's ear remembered it accurately but he approached it as walk down within one chord instead of a change to a new chord. I love it when I can learn from a student. I used to learn more basic things from 10-year-olds. This is stimulating in a different way. I relearned every year that kids can teach each other way better than Sr. Mary Confusing or I can.
Today's songwriting assignment to myself: attend a wine tasting this evening and observe how people react to the fact that I'm a nondrinker. I predict reactions will vary from, "Oh, he must be AA" to "What a superior AH." The in-between reactions are the hardest to spot and thus the most interesting. And for the record, I have the equal talent to most humans to be an AH but I'm not AA. I'll be grateful to get a few lines out of tonight's observation. Deep sense diving tonight.
posted by Bud @ 7:58 AM
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