The Accidental Beginner

Why the feeling that you don't belong is proof that you do.

When I was growing up, if the TV was off in our house, music was on. Whether it was Frank Sinatra, Anne Murray, or ABBA, let’s just say there was no lack of that 70s vibe in our household. That is where I first started learning to harmonize, although I had no idea that was what I was doing. “Could I Have This Dance” and “Fernando” were ripe for the picking, and I picked them clean. I rarely sang the melody, instead always kind of naturally sliding into the harmony lines. I remember my parents had an LP (that’s vinyl, for you kids) of Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park. This was my masterclass. Looking back now, I realize that from a very young age, I learned to listen for the melody and then chase the other notes that were tucked around it. Harmonies have always been more interesting to me.

I started reading music at the age of seven, in our grade four class, squawking away on a plastic recorder with my classmates (poor Mrs. Thorgeirson!). By age thirteen I had decided I wanted to be Zoot from the Muppets (didn’t we all?), so I took up the saxophone, and in spectacularly awkward teenage fashion, band camp rearranged my whole understanding of what music was even for (thank you, Ms. Wallace!). I learned that making music was not about being the best player in the room; it was about a group of people creating something together that none of us could make alone. I played 2nd alto sax and loved it there because 2nd sax, when you’re playing in a concert or jazz band, is mostly the harmony line.

It did not occur to me until my mid-twenties that singing in public was a thing I could actually do if I wanted to. I was working in television, producing a local music show, and I found myself surrounded by musical folks at every stage of their careers. When you hang out in a room full of musicians, jamming is something that just naturally occurs sooner or later. I sang along (the harmonies, of course), but barely above a whisper, careful not to inflict my less-than-dulcet tones on people who actually did this for a living. The thing was, my voice was there the whole time. My harmonies were (mostly) spot on. But I kept my voice quiet, because I was a blender. It’s what I liked to do. And then some of these pros actually told me I had a “nice voice” and started to ask me to sing WITH them on occasion. Like, in front of other people. ACK!

Eventually I admitted to myself that I loved singing far too much to keep my voice tucked away. Enough people had encouraged me that I scraped together the nerve to audition for a community women’s choir, and to my genuine surprise, I got in. They placed me in second soprano, the lower of the upper parts, and that is where I learned the thing band camp had only hinted at. Music’s real gift is community, which is developed via the particular intimacy of breathing together and tuning to one another until a room full of separate people becomes a single sound. If you have ever sung in any kind of group, you know this to be true.

I sang with them for four years before three of my choir mates and I broke off to form an a cappella quartet. We busked, we played private parties, and, astonishingly, people started to give us money to do it. By any honest accounting I was now a semi-professional singer, I guess. What the actual heck? In that quartet, I sang baritone, which in our barbershop formation was the second-lowest voice (right above the bass). Somewhere in those four years I discovered I was not a soprano who had been slumming in the low parts at all. I was actually a low alto. So here I was, decades into singing, and still finding out where my own voice actually lived, and it turned out to be lower than anyone, including me (especially me!), had assumed.

When the quartet went its separate ways, I had caught the singing bug for good. I dabbled with playing guitar badly, creating my own material; I even wrote a few songs that weren’t half bad. All the while, as I muddled through the process of picking, strumming, and writing, I was sharpening my ear, even though I didn’t really realize it at the time.

Then someone asked me to join a rock band as a backup singer. Harmonies again…who would’ve thought? LOL. We had a few good years before we imploded, as these things do sometimes, but that band is where I learned about musical collaboration, how to listen hard enough to lock into someone else’s phrasing, and place myself into the blend.

After the band dissolved, the choir bug came back in a big way, and I auditioned for another community choir. Once again, to my surprise, I got in. That was nine years ago, and it remains one of the most creatively fulfilling things I have ever been part of, in no small part because of the friendships it has given me.

Which brings me to a local recording studio right now. My friend Chris, who is an award-winning singer-songwriter and is surrounded by other award-winning musicians, has me laying down harmonies and backup vocals for his upcoming album. Chris and I have been singing together for more than fifteen years (we were in the rock band together), and his songs are full of tight, intricate harmonies stacked so close together that sometimes there is little room for error.

Here is the part I did not expect after forty-eight years of singing and fifteen of them singing with Chris. Sometimes I still cannot find my note. I will sit with a line, I will try lots of different approaches, and it simply will not come. Then, the familiar voice pipes right up, the one that tells me I am not good enough, not professional enough, that I am taking too long and wasting everyone’s time. After all, I’m only a beginner at this, right? I mean, these guys have been doing music their whole lives!

Wait a minute.

I have been doing music my whole life too.

Some of the very first harmonies I ever studied were those of Simon and Garfunkel. Now here I am, decades later, still chasing impossible notes, but doing it collaboratively with real, actual professionals. Yet, in that moment, I feel like I am seven years old again, reciting Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge over and over and over….

For most of my life I read that feeling as a verdict. It showed up at the high school band, the choir, the quartet, the rock band, and now the studio, and every single time I took it as proof that I had not yet earned my place.

Here is what I finally understand as I stand in front of a microphone next to people who have most definitely earned their place on the stage. I always assumed harmonizing came naturally to me, that it was some knack I was born with. It was not. It took forty-eight years and a ginormous number of wrong notes to grow this ear. The beginner feeling was never a verdict on whether I belonged. It was the toll I had been paying, year after year, for exactly the experience that finally led to me being in this room with these people, creating music together.

I missed this at first, too…you cannot harmonize if you walk in with certainty that you are right. Harmony only happens when you arrive willing to listen, to adjust, and to bend your note toward someone else’s until the two of you make a third thing neither could make alone.

The humility that makes me feel like a beginner is the same instinct that has had me reaching for the harmony line since I was a little kid singing along to ABBA. It is not the thing holding me back at all, but the thing that makes me a musician other people want to sing with.

I get it. We all have impostor syndrome at one time or another. It doesn’t matter how accomplished and capable you are; it’s pretty easy to still feel like a fraud every time you start something new.

Here’s another way to look at it that has taken me most of my life to figure out. That nervous, not-good-enough feeling at the start of a new thing is never evidence that you do not belong. It is evidence of having a beginner’s attitude in every room you walk into, every wrong note you have ever sung, and every time you chose to try something new instead of staying safely where you were already doing well.

The willingness to acknowledge that is the same willingness that ultimately lets you create something beautiful with other people.

Read it that way, and the next time a door opens, maybe you’ll consider walking through it.