Category Archives: Arts & Entertainment

No Regrets (well, maybe a few…and that’s okay)

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My final professional gig as a singer (and I qualify that because I still sing at my church home, where it’s a different offering altogether from being a gigging musician) was June 27, 2024, playing a concert with the funnest project I’ve ever been a part of, the Orchestre Surreal. I’d been with that outfit longer than any other. It is unique and wild in a very goofy, brilliant way. It was fun as hell for 28 years. And it was the way I wanted to jump out of this main act of my life and dive into my Act 3.

This right here marks the first that I’ve said publicly about why I chose to retire from singing. I’ve just not wanted any kind of pity party, or to feel as though my confessions would’ve been designed to coax on the “No, you still sound fabulous!”-es or whatever. I just wanted to have a mega-meaningful final showdown, and then move on. And I got to have that in spades.

The reason I chose to retire was because the writing had been on the wall for a good 7-8 years prior that my singing voice was not moving into old age with very much grace, or spine, or muscle, or gumption, or however one sees these things. It had become a wilting flower. At first, a snail’s pace. Only I could hear it and feel it; it was imperceptible to anyone else. Then over time, it became more noticeable, and I started to feel the complete lack of control I was having over that splendid muscle that is our vocal cords. I mean, I’d always been aces at hitting a pure note, tamping down my vibrato upon stylistic command, no wavering, no pitchiness. I had nuance and subtlety. I could sculpt a song. But no more. Really tough to sing jazz without vocal nuance (if I was content to just sing some blues or rock in bars, and blast it out, I could’ve bought myself another 10 years). Bending a studied note with precision skill? Phrasing? It all just seemed to disappear. I couldn’t understand it, to my great frustration. I thought, “I haven’t stopped using it. I’m singing more than ever before. So, it’s not a case of like when people stop exercising and the muscle tone goes away and gets weaker. I’m workin’ the hell outta these cords. What gives???” It got to where I had to start taking certain songs off my list that any gig leader will call from when it’s my time to sing. Or I’d lower the key of certain other songs. Each particular adjustment would depend on what the specific struggle was when I’d sing a given song. 

The thing is, none of this baffling phenomenon was about losing my range. I’ve kept the range for the most part. I never had much of one to begin with. Never been the showy singer (except with the Orchestre Surreal) or the acrobatic singer. Didn’t have the crazy, sky-high notes, or the gaudy melismas. But also, early on in my career I got vocal nodules and was told not to sing for 6 months. And at the time I was waiting tables and not singing for my living, so I could afford to lay off. The nodules weren’t severe enough to require surgery or laser treatments, simply rest. 

When the voice slowly but surely came back, the one thing that never did return was my falsetto. And I was told I could nurse that back with some voice lessons and exercises, but I didn’t bite. Mainly because I never had money for vocal lessons on a waitress’ paycheck. So, I sufficed to live with only a chest voice and a limited range. I could live with a small range, because I decided that instead of any kind of vocal prowess (and vocal acrobatics never had any pull for me anyway) I would instead focus on honing my skills as an actor. I’d just come out of my studies at an acting academy, and had some real chops. And I believed in that kind of singer anyway. Someone who could tap emotional stores that exist deeply inside. Someone who would bleed when singing. Singers who could gut-punch me were the ones I loved best. So, I decided to develop that muscle instead. And I think it has served me well.  

But the long game, as it turns out, was going to be tough on my actual physical instrument. When the writing on the wall became a full-blown rebellion, I had just moved to Kansas City where I had hoped to continue singing. I was introduced to some musicians in this town early on in my arrival, thanks to my new friend (new at the time) woodwind player David Valdez, who set up some jam sessions expressly to introduce me to the community. And I did get a handful of gigs booked, including at the legendary Blue Room, which is connected to the Kansas City Museum of Jazz, and even a jazz festival with a wonderful octet led by woodwind player Ray Keller. They were very fun gigs, but the voice was quickly saying, “hey Angela, we’re not actually up for this anymore.” And the absolute last thing I wanted as a newbie in this town, after a robust 35-years amassing a respectable reputation in Los Angeles, was to be introduced to the insanely great Kansas City music scene donning this wilting flower of a voice. No thanks! So I abruptly stopped booking gigs. I’d gotten myself a day job (two, sort of), so I didn’t have to rely on gigging to pay bills, as I had in L.A., and that made the decision to stop a whole lot easier.  

I’m not even sure I felt a whole lot of grief around it, to be honest, as all I really wanted to do any longer was write. I’ve actually been a writer my entire life, but it had always been a back burner pursuit, if on the stove at all, while I was being steadily employed as a vocalist, signed up with several contracting offices, constantly learning new music, writing charts, steadily expanding my repertoire, especially for party bands and casuals (private parties). It was a full-time indulgence. I wrote on the side, and I hustled literary agents (went through two of them) and chased publishing deals, and eventually just established my own publishing imprint and went the indie author route. Fuck ’em. I wasn’t going to keep waiting around for some giant to give me legitimacy.

Today, in this Act 3 of my life, I want writing to be on the front burner. The only burner. All the burners. So, I essentially started my life completely over at the ripe old age of 60. And then ended one career to start a new one at 64. That takes some nerve, if not necessarily common sense, and I’m fully embracing the nerve.  

I do look back on my singing life, and, in wondering why my voice is largely failing me, I’ve come to some conclusions. But before I share what that is, let me explain that I say “largely failing me” because I can still eke out some adequate singing, if not with a stellar instrument, because I still have emotional expressions to offer. AND because I really want to continue singing at my church. It’s not gigging. It’s a spiritual offering. And I’ll do that for as long as they’ll have me, because I feel nothing but love and non-judgment coming from every single soul in this beautiful community that I have found to help keep my spiritual life alive and radiating.

Okay, so what I’ve come to realize about the current state of my singing voice is that I never took voice lessons. Never had a vocal coach. Never officially learned how to sing properly. Some intuitive lessons got learned once I recovered from the vocal nodes and got back to singing. I kind of had a sense of what not to do anymore, and I managed to get through a 35-year career on those instincts. But I’m certain I was using my voice (placement, breathing, etc.) incorrectly, and it would eventually prove to catch up with me.  

Ever since social media has become a mainstay in our lives, I’ve seen and read a lot of opinions and sternly righteous admonishments from some vocalists toward other vocalists on the ills of having never learned to sing correctly. It’s almost a kind of “how dare you!” And all I have to offer is … you know what you know until you know better. The fateful decision to go through Door 1 instead of Door 2 unfolded for me when I was very young, and arrogant myself. I could sing, and I ended up spending the better part of my life doing it, getting paid for it, and booking it constantly. Not only gigs but recording sessions in film and television. And all that without a single voice lesson. So, in many ways, maybe I felt like I was getting away with something. I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know. 

For awhile, in the present universe, when I would come across these admonishing Facebook posts, I’d find myself getting defensive. They’re never actually directed at me, so I never respond or contribute to the conversation threads. I just keep my defensiveness to myself. But I do wonder what their admonitions accomplish, other than making other singers (the ones like me whose voices are declining because we were never properly trained) feel horrible. It’s not like I can turn back the clock and do my life over. All I have is right now. And I’ve chosen to pivot my entire life in a different direction. And, more importantly, am loving the pivot.  

Believe it or not, I’m a perfectionist. I know. How can you call yourself one if you never bothered to get some proper training for your voice? Like I said, I believed I was sailing along effortlessly without that help. But I also know it’s the Perfectionist in me that decided to stop singing if I couldn’t do it to a certain standard.

So, first off, a perfectionist is not someone who does everything perfectly all the time (is that even possible?). Perfectionism describes the mental state of obsessive-compulsive behaviors that pick at a thing we deem flawed or in need of perfecting, fastidiously, till it bleeds and scabs over. It’s a kind of unquenchable pursuit. And I have done that with a lot of things in my life. Almost to the point of sabotage. I just never did it with singing because I thought I was doing everything right. And then when it started its decline, I abandoned ship as fast as you could blink. That’s a perfectionist. “If I can’t do it well, I want out.”

And that makes me think about the great goddess Joni Mitchell, who sounds nothing today like she did in her younger years. That otherworldly faerie of a voice has become a deep, resonating canyon of rich minerals. She didn’t abandon ship. She reinvented. To a certain degree I did that when, early on after the nodes, I turned my attentions toward cultivating the emotional component of singing instead of fine-tuning the instrument itself. But when it began its decline in these latter years, I couldn’t bear no longer having the voice of my prime. Joni is brave, where I am not. It’s all a process.

I discovered my Inner Perfectionist working a 12-step program, and have been steadily, with the help of much inward-turning, self-examination, and climbing that 12-step staircase, transforming the perfectionism into (I believe) a healthier state of acceptance of my flaws, my mistakes, and my missteps in this life. I’m trying hard not to berate myself as much today as I have in the past, yet at the same time still maintaining a healthy sense of regret. Some may get their haunches up over that phrase, as I think we’ve become a culture that believes it’s healthier to have no regrets. Maybe that’s true. My gut tells me that a moderate level of it actually helps us to: not repeat the past, learn from our mistakes, and a whole bunch of other familiar tropes I think we all can agree are good ones to follow.  

So, I’m learning to be self-forgiving. I can berate myself better than anyone else could. It doesn’t serve me. I like gentler me. And I also still have my moments, but I shut it down if I’m conscious enough to catch it. 

The state of my perfectionism today is such that I’m actually beginning to embrace IMPERFECTION almost to the point of it being kind of like a spirit animal to me. I have no shame whatsoever now in saying, when asked why I retired from singing, when most of my singing peers are going stronger than ever, that I fucked up. A long time ago I fucked up. I wish I’d done it differently. I do have some regrets about that. And I guess a little bit of grief, after all. But only a little bit, as I couldn’t be happier having made the decision to turn all my burners on to this writing thing. Writing gives me life and always has. And Kansas City, especially, has embraced me for it. So, I’m on the right track. If there is even such a thing. I’m more inclined to believe we’re all just on tracks, period: many, a few, maybe only ever ONE like a hyper-focused beast of brilliance, and we do what we do on those tracks until we’re ready for some new ones. 

So, now when I see these posts about what singers do wrong, I just smile, keep scrolling, try to channel a little Joni, and know that the choices I’ve made in my life (the good, the bad, the ugly, the head-slapping) have built me into who I am. And I kinda like her. She’s scrappy. She started her whole life and career over from scratch at an age when most are prepping for the cruises and the golf course. Is it bat shit crazy? Possibly so. In fact, probably so.   

The Richest Girl in the World

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This post originated on Christmas Morning 2020, after I had just finished pressing the button on the Christmas launch of my most unusual creative offering, THE RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD! What I offered then was that I knew that so many of us were more than ready to leave that strangest of years behind us, and have hope for a better, cleansed, redeemed, renewed world. I know I did. For myself, and my part, I had decided to usher in the new year with a children’s book I had written, because I believe it holds within it lessons that ring in this time of upheaval.

Today I’m updating this post, because I’ve remastered the movie, and hope you’ll check it out. I also believe that it STILL holds within it lessons that ring.

It’s a book that never existed in print, but instead has taken on the medium of a videobook. Inspired, in part, by the children’s classic, Peter and the Wolf, I simply couldn’t envision this story without it being told aloud, in the beloved tradition of the bedtime stories from our own childhoods. It was first conceived and written nearly 40 years ago, and over the decades has finally become what it was meant to be. Featuring over a hundred colorful illustrations, I had a blast narrating this tale on the indwelling nature of friendship.

When a sage old man shows up in an enchanting village, he changes the life of a little girl forever, who changes his right back. Underscored with a whimsical music score by composer Chris Hardin, THE RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD sets the stage for a timeless and quintessentially fable-istic tale. Lessons of empathy, gratitude, and seeing beauty everywhere are taught by the story’s two characters. In this new age where turning inward, self-examining, and soul-tending are no longer fringe flower-child ideas, but are in our everyday lexicon, and Namaste is a word everyone now knows, THE RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD is right on time to offer Kid Lit for a risen consciousness. 

And this newly mastered version has arrived to YouTube, JUST FOR YOU, because why not keep saturating the world with messages of love, peace, and gratitude? Why not, indeed!

For kids ages 8 to 108!

And Read On About this 40-Year Journey

I wrote this children’s book nearly 40 years ago. My first, my only. It’s been tweaked and polished here and there over the years, and each time has been put back in the drawer (or on the computer, as the years went by). It’s even gone through a few titles. Then maybe 25 years ago I started, in earnest, looking for an artist to do the illustrations. An artist friend of mine, the astonishing René Norman, who would have made magic with her own hands doing this, gave me some beautiful direction, and encouraged me that I could do this myself, even though I have never been that kind of artist. But with her encouragement I spent the next few years drawing then painting each canvas. It was painstaking (and sometimes painful) and time-consuming, but I got it done. And yet, even the canvases just got stored away, never to be used, as I moved on to other creative projects that seemed more pressing.

So, more years passed, and the world of independent publishing came into vogue, and because I was always intimidated by the children’s book world and therefore never dared try to get a publishing deal for it, the idea of putting it out myself appealed to me. STILL, I now have seven books in print, and this children’s book is not one of them. Maybe it’s children themselves I’ve been intimidated by. In any case, who knows why the story felt safer at home with me, but it did.

Then just a couple of years ago, after making a handful of little mini-documentaries and some other fun, arty videos, and beginning to get a handle on video editing, I thought, instead of a book, it could make a very cool multi-media, spoken word thing. Think “Peter and the Wolf.” I sure did! It was my absolute favorite storytelling experience as a child. So I started looking at my story again and lining it up with the artwork, which had been collecting dust, and realized I actually still needed several more illustrations, which I hadn’t thought about, as I had added to the story over the years. By this time, I’d started doing digital graphic design, so I was able to add to the collection without needing any supplies except my software. So now the artwork is a hybrid of digital and organic, and I think this has made it even more interesting.

Then last year, with the help of my dear friend Craig Pilo, and his state-of-the-art recording studio, I set about the task of recording the narration. We had so much creative fun making this narration work with one narrator (me) yet several voices needed. Truly gifted, Craig is. We still needed one more session to get it polished, and then Covid hit. I mean, it might as well have been the next thing to stop this project in its tracks, since I guess I was determined to spend my entire life making this thing a reality. The good news is, in the span of 40 years, I think it’s a story that still holds up. But yes, I had to go with the narration as it was, which was already pretty cool.

I then set about creating the moviette, tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking, like the obsessive/compulsive animal I am, over these past few months, until all the puzzle pieces were assembled into some sort of coherent narrative.

The final touch, of course, was the music. Of course I wanted this story underscored. There is nothing that is a better emotional conduit than music. Dare I try to compose said music myself? I’m certainly no Prokofiev! And I’m always wary of “one-man-band” productions, anyway, yet here I was thinking about trying to do that very thing. Enter composer, pianist, and dear friend Chris Hardin, as there are most definitely better people for this task than I. I didn’t commission him to write a score for this; I asked him if he had any existing recordings of original music that he wouldn’t mind allowing me to use. He pointed me to his album “Reflections,” which had only come out a couple of years before, and said, “have at it, girlfriend!” Well….I don’t truly know how best to impress upon you just how made-for-each-other these beautiful piano pieces and my little story were. It took several weeks to painstakingly cull through every piece (12 tracks in total) to find just the right chunk, from just the right piece, for just the right scene, to emotionally enhance a moment. But when all was said and done, you would think this music was composed specifically for my moviette. Chris Hardin, as a talent, and as a friend, is a revelation.

And that was the final piece of the puzzle. So, you may be thinking, what on earth finally made me leap to the finish line, after 40 years vacillating? Cosmically, my own tendency is to look at this problematic and enigmatic year as the year I was always intended to share this message. Who knows if it all really works that way. What I do know for sure is that if living in a pandemic, with the burden of a stunning global death toll by this horrific virus, an alarming reemergence of racial strife in this country, and a collective global trauma that the whole world is experiencing has taught me anything, it’s … don’t wait. Make it happen. Whatever IT is. Don’t second-guess if it’s good enough. Put it out there. It is valuable. I recently stumbled upon a Facebook post by someone I don’t personally know, and I wish I could remember whom to credit for this, but I only (and do I ever!) remember the sentiment: By envisioning the things we create as love letters, vow to keep creating, praying, and affirming those love letters into the world, knowing that in the energetic world, out beyond conventional ideas of time and space, fame or money, they are received and enjoyed, and they fulfill their mission.

So, that’s what I’ve done.

CREATING THE CHARACTERS

There are only two characters in this story (though there are lots of “extras” helping to create the very special paradise this takes place in). These two characters have lived with me a good 40 years now. And honestly, they’ve just gotten better with age. As with folktales and fables, I wanted to give them more of an archetypal existence, thus they are known simply as the Young Girl and the Old Man, instead of having contemporary Christian names.

The Young Girl actually began as a young boy, and was that way for years until I realized two things: I didn’t want this to be an all-male story, where a little girl couldn’t readily identify with any character. And also, I realized she was me. A child who marched to her own drummer, and didn’t fit in most social circles. These are often the struggles of childhood, with our attempts to assert a voice and an identity in our very own way. I was such a tomboy as a kid, and that seemed a natural for this character, so since she originated as a boy, there wasn’t a whole lot, visually, that needed to be changed. The more I could infuse the character with dynamics from my own often awkward, yet crazy curious, childhood, the more real she became.

Likewise, the Old Man is quintessentially fable-istic. The wise old seer, the elder, the one who has wisdom to impart, and an almost monastic centeredness that always draws others near. And like all lore, twists on that theme do happen, as the teacher also becomes the student. The Old Man was an instant and easy inspiration. He is an amalgam of my two fathers, at once artistic and creative, living with flights of fancy, as was my bio-dad, and grounded in sagacity and homey charm, which was quintessentially my stepdad. He is my grandfathers. He is the many teachers, mentors, ancestors, both male and female, whom I’ve learned from throughout my very blessed life. And his look and dress was very specifically inspired by an elderly bohemian I once met named Rozzell (introduced to me by the very artist friend, René Norman, of whom I spoke earlier). Rozzell had made an indelible imprint on me. And he seemed never to be without his red kerchief around his neck.

With these two characters, I have represented old/young, male/female (even the gender fluidity that is beautifully becoming a part of our present-day consciousness), and a world of color, both in the visual-hued sense of the word AND regarding ethnic and racial diversity. And none of this is anything that will likely dawn on a child watching this moviette, but is simply the very rich world we do live in. So, it was important to me that I create a story where inclusion was simply a given and a power.

Beyond that, these two characters have helped me to create a world where endless are the possibilities, and where the virtues of gratitude, compassion, and being present are paramount to existence. It’s an idyllic world, and at the same time there is a worldliness and a timelessness to it.

I think young children will be drawn to these two characters. They’re playful, but at the same time they’re thoughtful. They teach lessons about empathy, and seeing beauty everywhere. And here’s the rub; I think adults will be drawn in by these two as well. As, here we are, in an age—one might call it a New Age—where turning inward, self-examining, and soul-tending are no longer fringe, flower child ideas, but are in everyone’s everyday lexicon. “Namaste” is a word that now lives beyond the ashram and the yoga studio. And here stands a story, delivered by these two characters, that is all about risen consciousness, and perhaps a shifting of our ideas about what’s important in life…..told in a simple tale of friendship.

I have loved these two characters for a long time. And they finally became ready to tell this little tale for me. THE RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD. For kids ages 8 to 108, I like to say. Now available to watch absolutely free on YouTube. Because … let’s just spread love.