Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

One of the things about singing that’s hard to explain and can be hard to get the hang of is the sense that when you’re using air for singing, you’re just releasing, releasing, releasing air.

In order for the singing to sound like singing, the air needs to be free-flowing. And that free-flowing use of air can feel, to the body, or to the mind irresponsible, wasteful, dangerous, scary, or just like too much work. Because how we use our voice for speaking is very conservatively.

I think I’ve said elsewhere that, you know, the voice works on the deathbed. You can be really sick in bed and still find enough air for speaking. You can have like no energy in your body at all and still have enough air to talk. Speech is a very conservative use of air.

But in order to make melodies, in order to make music, we need to use our breath generously and that generosity can feel really “irresponsible,” in air quotes, to the part of our brain that’s really only interested in us, you know, surviving.

The part of our brain that’s not interested in art. The part of our brain that’s just doing its best to keep us alive.

And so when I’m teaching students how to use their air more generously, I have found myself, using an image that for me works really well, which is to sing like a Mack truck.

And a couple of weeks ago in a voice lesson, a student said to me, “I have no idea what a Mack truck is. I don’t know what you mean by that.” And I’m so grateful.

I have been using this image for years, and it makes perfect sense to me, and I love hearing that it didn’t make any sense to him. So I want to tell you a little bit about my Mac truck, and maybe this will inspire useful metaphors for you as you work on or contemplate the idea of using your breath generously when you sing.

So I’m from a small town, well, relatively small town in Idaho. Idaho is not very big, so you could argue that all the towns are small. When I was growing up in Idaho Falls, there were 32,000 people. You know, the biggest roads were maybe five lanes across and there weren’t very many of them.

And one of the places that my family traveled to often by car was, Teton Village and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. To get there, you have to drive over two mountain passes. Well, you don’t have to, you can go through the valley if you want, but it’s very slow. And then you’re behind, you know, lots of RVs that can’t make it over the two mountain passes.

So I had a lot of experience as a young person being in a car, and, seeing all of these big trucks. And I don’t know why, maybe Mack had a corner on the market, I’m not even sure what the big brands of semi trucks are now, but I remember being in the back seat and turning around and just seeing the grill of this big semi behind us, and just really feeling very small at that moment, and very happy that I wasn’t driving the car.

And of course, we would see Mack trucks coming toward us. It’s a two lane road. so you, you’re intimate with the vehicles who are in the opposite lane.

On these mountain roads, there are several turn off points, sort of wide shoulders, for runaway trucks, and there are signs for runaway trucks, you know, like “Deer Crossing,” those kinds of yellow highway signs.

Forgive me if this is all really obvious to you, and you know, I’m assuming nothing now since my student said he didn’t know what a Mack truck is. I’m just going to assume…

If you haven’t been on a mountain pass before, there are off ramps for when your brakes fail. And the off ramp is, you know, full of gravel, and it’s long and it’s intended to, you know, bring your vehicle to a stop when you’re not able to.

And so that’s a pretty powerful thing to drive by I think, at least it made an impression on me, to see the sign for a runaway truck turnoff, and then to see the turnoff, and then to sometimes see trucks in the runaway truck turnoff, and just feel really deep in my body, “Oh, that’s a thing that could happen. That’s a thing that could happen. You could be in front of a Mack truck, and the truck could lose its brakes, and you just hope they get to the turnoff before they squish you.”

I’ve never been squished by a runaway truck. and I hope to never be. In Berkeley, California, we don’t have that, those kinds of inclines so much, at all. So it’s not really a fear in my present life, but as a small person, it was something I thought about a lot.

And so in my own singing lessons, learning how to use my body differently for singing, When my teacher would ask me to sing through a phrase, really sing through a phrase – don’t, make spaces between the words, just to run the whole thing together, to make a really big, beautiful legato line – as I’ve learned how to do that, that felt in my body like I needed to be a Mack truck. I just needed to run over, just run things over.

Don’t be sensitive. Don’t try to be super musical. Just produce the air that will make the sound that will deliver the melody across the room. Sing straight through.

And again, in my body, this felt like I’m being the Mack truck, who still has its brakes. The Mack truck that still has its brakes. There’s still a sense of control, but just this deep sense of power and I also self-importance, of being big, off not caring about the consonants.

Just roll over the consonants for the sake of the vowel. Sacrifice the consonants. The consonants are gravel on the road. And this truck is a great big stream of vowel.

So that’s how I came to learn how to sing a really true legato line, is imagining the power of that truck in my body and that, a fierceness.

Obviously, that image isn’t going to make sense to somebody who was raised in Northern California, without mountain passes to go over. I mean, there are semis on the road, but the highways are big, and you don’t really ever, I’ve, at least here, don’t ever really feel like a semi truck is barreling down on me when I’m on the freeway here.

If anything, the people who are driving trucks in Northern California are way more polite than the people in the little, zippy sports cars. Like, I, now in my life on the road, I worry much more about people in small cars than I do about the people in the big trucks.

So my students, so I was, we were talking through this metaphor that wasn’t working for my student and I said, what is that big, powerful, thing for you? Do you have an image like that in your life? And he suggested an oil tanker.

But what we found was a more helpful image for him and singing is the idea, the feeling of being on a sailboat, and just feel the wind carrying you along. And that feeling of freedom, and there is control, you are able to control the direction of the boat, but the air just carries you.

And that’s A really good metaphor too, as you’re singing, trying to find a legato line, the idea to let the air carry you.

Another student of mine, uh, we were talking about a similar, thing. Not so much, in this case, powering legato, but that feeling that when you are really generously releasing your air, how that feels, can feel, out of control. And we came upon the metaphor of ice skating.

If you don’t have any momentum when you’re on ice skates, you’re way more likely to fall over, right? That’s the scary part, is like, getting comfortable with a certain amount of speed so that you won’t fall.

But if you’re always trying to keep yourself from going too fast because you might fall, you’re going to fall. That’s just the way that it goes. And so the phrase that came was “skating on the edge of control.”

That feeling of using your air generously you have momentum and you’re skating on the edge of control. You’re about to lose it, but you’re just, balancing on that edge and it’s fun. It feels free. It feels amazing on ice skates, when you have that momentum, and you’re not afraid that you’re going to fall. You’re just, you can just keep going, and going, and going, and going.

So I would ask you to consider what images in your life, what experiences in your life have you had that have given you a feeling of power, a feeling of strength, a feeling of fierceness, and also a feeling of freedom, of release, of ease, of just “whoosh!”

Those images, those experiences are really useful resources for working on your singing voice, because that’s how we want you to feel. And I’m sure that you have felt this way before.

It may very well be the case right now when you think about singing for another person or singing at all, that the first thing that you’re confronted with is fear of embarrassment, fear of rejection, fear of making a mistake, fear of sounding stupid. Fill in the blank.

It may be that the first thing you’re, that you’re confronted with when you think about singing, or when you go to sing is fear. That is totally normal. That is to be expected.

And to counter that fear, we need fun. We need freedom. We need power. We need determination.

And it’s been the most effective for me, and for many, many of my students, to import the powerful, good feelings into the singing rather than to just sort of sit with the singing and wait for it to feel good.

We really need to use our past experience to guide us. When we’re looking to make a different kind of sound when we sing.

And the experience doesn’t have to be a singing experience. Sometimes the best experiences, the best physical sensations to draw on when we’re singing are those that haven’t had anything to do with singing at all.

I know this might sound a little “woo” and “airy fairy,” like not a real, not a real thing, But your body is your body, and your body has memory, and when you can leverage the strength and the power and the freedom that it’s felt in some circumstance, some time, you’re quite literally building on what you already know.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t know it as a singer. You know it as a person. You know it as a rollerblader. You know it as a skier. You know it as a dancer. You know it as a kickboxer. You know it as a soccer player. You know it as a basketball player.

You know it somewhere: baseball, hockey, gymnastics, tumbling, water slides. Somewhere in your body. you have stored the sensation of freedom and ease and “whoosh!”

And somewhere in your body you have stored the sensation of power and fierceness and strength.

So, I would love to collect more metaphors, more stories, more experiences from my own data bank of teaching, And to learn more. What’s that like in the world? How is that for people? How can we all feel like that more often, whether or not we’re singing?

It’s a good way to feel.

So please reach out with your stories, your metaphors. I really want to know. Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letter M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.