As I write this, I'm in New York City, one of my favorite places in the whole world. I love it here, I love New Yorkers, and I love that on any given night you can choose between theater and opera and jazz or a dozen things I've never even heard of. But my favorite thing about this city is that I feel completely comfortable here, with the way I talk and the way I carry myself. I'm a blunt person, I'm loud and expressive, but I don't live here, so most of my life I've had to be careful;...
5 days ago • 7 min read
There's a particular kind of quiet that happens in a room right before someone sings for the very first time in front of other people. I've been in that quiet more times than I can count now, on both sides of it, and I can tell you that the thing standing between a person and their own voice is almost never talent. It's that they have never had a safe place to be heard. You can practice alone in your car or your bedroom for years, and a lot of us do, and it genuinely helps, but there's a wall...
12 days ago • 5 min read
It's a new month, so it's time for a new theme. This October, inside The Healthy Voice Community, we're spending the whole month on where power lives. It's also a very big anniversary for me, because one year ago I launched my YouTube channel. I originally called it The Healthy Singer, but within a few weeks I changed it to The Healthy Voice because I realized I didn't just want to help singers. I wanted to help all voices, speakers too, anyone who had ever been made to feel they couldn't use...
19 days ago • 8 min read
For a long time I only offered single sessions, one at a time, because that’s how I started and it felt honest to keep it simple. But the longer I do this work, the more I notice that the real shifts don’t tend to happen in one hour. They happen across a few, when we get to build on what opened up last time instead of starting fresh every visit, and when your body has room to trust that we’re going to keep going. So I’ve finally opened two session packages, and I priced them below what you’d...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I used to walk out in front of an audience without a second thought, and for years that was the most natural thing in the world to me: the lights and the faces and the sound of my own voice filling a room I loved being in. And then somewhere along the way it changed, and I would step out to sing for the very people I had adored performing for, and I would freeze. It happened one-on-one too, in ordinary conversation; this person who had been so free and so comfortable for so long suddenly...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.There's a moment in a lot of songs where the whole thing lifts. The key changes, and the same melody suddenly feels higher, brighter, or a little more urgent. And if you're not listening for the mechanics, you don't notice them at all. You just feel that something shifted. It's been a week of big energetic shifts. We lost a truly iconic voice. And from the flood of articles and videos and posts, it's obvious how many...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.There's a moment in a lot of songs where the whole thing lifts. The key changes, and the same melody suddenly feels higher, brighter, or a little more urgent. And if you're not listening for the mechanics, you don't notice them at all. You just feel that something shifted. I've been thinking about that all month, because so many of you are in the middle of one. A key change in your own life. And from the inside, a key...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist. We've spent all of August breaking through things. Higher notes. Older stories. The tight places in the throat, and the tighter ones in the mind. Now, during the upcoming last week of the month, we do something different. We turn around and look at what was actually in the way. And here's what I keep finding, after years of this work: Most of what stops us was never actually a true wall. It was only a perception....
2 months ago • 9 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist. For the last two weeks, the community has been living in the passaggio. Learning the registers. Learning how to send the voice into different rooms of the body. That work can feel technical. Slow, even. You do it and do it, and nothing seems to move. And then one day a note you couldn't feel before just opens. The cobwebs clear, and the vibration lands somewhere new. That's the breakthrough. And it isn't a quiet one....
2 months ago • 5 min read