Singing Is Meant to Connect Us

“I think that everyone that has breath has song. And I even think, if I’m going to go all the way, that it’s part of the natural way of humans to sing, and even maybe to sing together. And that there’s a certain kind of loneliness from not doing that, or imagining we’re not good enough to do that…”

-Abigail Bengson

We need to sing. And we need to sing with one another.

We need to have chances to sing in a way that helps us feel that our voices are a gateway into knowing we are so much more like one another than we think.

We are all afraid. We all long to belong. We all need to express ourselves. We all need to create. We all need to feel. We all need to sing.

And many of us are not sure if it’s possible for us to do so. We’re not even sure that we have permission to be our wild, full, beautiful, and flawed selves through our voices.

Let’s be honest, many voices have told us we don’t have permission—that our voice must be a certain way, our preparation at a certain level, our vocal flaws appropriately covered, our authenticity socially palatable—or else it’s best we stay quiet.

Well, I call BS on all that. I’ve experienced feeling pretty solid in my technique, prepared and secure in knowing that how I was showing up was likely not “too much or too little” for the situation and confident in what my voice would do. There was a sense of safety in all of that and a profoundly boring, unsatisfying, disconnecting feeling as well. Why? Because singing in this way also usually involved trying to hold all of that together with no wiggle room for spontaneity, genuine authenticity, mistakes, or playfulness.

I started my voice education in my early 20s, and since then I’ve had the chance to sing as a soloist with orchestra, with high-level professional choruses, with phenomenal colleagues. The experience of being on stage and hearing the orchestra swell with sound as your voice soars in a beautiful theatre is a truly lovely experience.

And… those haven’t been the most meaningful experiences in my music life. Not by a long shot.

These performances often left me feeling disconnected from others. The chatter in the lobby and backstage afterwards usually centred around one of two things—the most beautiful moments of the night and the mistakes that would keep us all unable to sleep that night, reliving the shame of that moment over and over.

It felt like something essential was missing: meaning, connection, play, authenticity, and the primacy of expressing our unique human experience through sound. Of course, I can only speak to my own experience - I’m sure there are many professional musicians who are able to strike this balance but for me it was always a challenge for these experiences to not become predominated by perfectionism.

Abigail Bengson speaks eloquently about having the courage to drop perfectionism and to let your voice break and express vulnerably:

“I hope that when we sing, when we offer our breath and song to each other, that we invite the breaking in, that we welcome it. And yes, it will mean that others will discover that we are human beings…it will expose all that terrible vulnerability that we worked so hard to hide and cover and remove from ourselves. And it will show everyone that you cared…that you were frightened, that you tried really hard, that you did something you hadn’t done before… (but) when we reveal our broken-heartedness to each other… we get to be in community in a whole new way.”

To me, that new way of being in community is genuine connection and inherent belonging.

In recent years, I have been experiencing meaningful musical moments that have helped me realize what always felt missing before.

They’ve been moments singing with friends and colleagues where we intentionally sing to unlearn perfectionism—our voices guided by what Trauma-Informed Voice Specialist Megan Durham describes as ‘…the desire to not equate vocal mistakes with being a mistake.’”

They’ve been moments singing with community, allowing for spontaneous sound-making, improvisation, and exploration without any urgent need to “fix,” get the right note, or panic about balance and blending.

They’ve been in singing across from a singer who always felt their voice didn’t belong, feeling our voices soaring together, dancing through the music and feeling our inherent belonging expressed through the act of singing together.

They’ve been moments where my voice has cracked or been out of tune and I’ve noticed that I don’t feel as strong a distaste or judgment for those experiences, but rather a tenderness and acceptance. Those moments remind me of the wisdom my voice is constantly leading me toward—the wisdom of self-compassion, non-judgment, authentic expression, care, empathy, and connection.

They’ve been in moments of feeling fully connected to myself as I sing, with less preoccupation with my sound and more absorption in the complete delight of making music, alone or with others.

They’ve been in moments seeing a singer’s furrowed brow soften as they release evaluating their voice and instead anchor into story—their eyes lit up with their personal connection to the words they’re singing.

They’ve been in the instances of realizing that just enjoying singing is enough.

They’ve been in realizing that if singing doesn’t connect us in some way—to ourselves, to one another, to empathy, to what is really true, to what is really important—then I don’t know if we are actually singing at all.