All Over Creation: Sweet Release
By Robert Faires, Fri., March 2, 2012
By Thursday, the week felt like it had been going for, oh, about two years. Long, long days at the office had bled into nights at the office as I fought to wrestle the week's Arts feature to the ground. (Is it fair to say that by press time I had developed a Schwemmer's cramp?) Monday and Tuesday evenings were filled trying to maintain a mental grip on 21 slippery lines of Germanic Latin I was due to recite for a Texas Early Music Project concert Saturday, while simultaneously trying to recommit to memory a 40-minute speech written two years earlier that I'd be delivering again the following Tuesday. Wednesday night was the Fusebox Festival fundraiser, where I'd joined 59 other creatives in a parade of 60-second performances. (My magnum opus about the devil losing his dog at the crossroads was almost coherent.) And woven through all three days were my attempts to catch up on backlogged e-correspondence, which had the frantic, fruitless energy of a silent-film clown trying to bail water out of a rapidly sinking dinghy. When I arrived at Northwest Hills United Methodist Church on Thursday, my mind was sprained and every muscle from my neck to my instep felt like it had been worked over by overeager Boy Scouts in pursuit of their knot-tying merit badges.
I myself was in pursuit of a chance to sing. Conspirare was hosting one of its regular Big Sing programs in which anyone with a hankering to vocalize can indulge himself, with Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson there to lead the crowd as it performs generally familiar songs that he's chosen for the occasion. Despite my longstanding interest professionally (checking it out as a community outreach program?) and personally (I like to sing), I hadn't been. But the promise of singing standards from the Great American Songbook – my pop music kryptonite – finally pulled me in. And after the week I'd had, it was a welcome break from stitching sentences and memorization. If nothing else, it would be an hour without having to think or type.
It was more than that. So. Much. More. Having seen Johnson at many a Conspirare concert, I knew how warm and effusive he could be, but here he took that to a new level. He wanted everyone present to feel comfortable and loose enough to sing out, and so was looser himself, slinging encouragement peppered with sly humor and ribbing the crowd for sounding "too churchy" on its first run-through of "The Gambler." Yes, we sang us some Kenny Rogers, as well as some Irving Berlin, some Harold Arlen, some George Frideric Handel, some Neil Young, and some Rent. The mix was delightfully idiosyncratic, and with each selection I found myself opening up, physically and emotionally. All those deep breaths and exhalations loosened the knots along my spine, and the music itself soothed. Singing "Cheek to Cheek" and "Over the Rainbow" took me back to the days when my daughter was young, and I'd sing her those songs at bedtime. (What can I say? She loved The Wizard of Oz and Fred and Ginger.) Though I'd sung "Heart of Gold" countless times before, here I plumbed new depths of feeling in it. With "Seasons of Love," a song I'd never previously felt much of a personal connection to, I suddenly became so moved that I couldn't choke out the words.
Now, I've sung all my life – alone, both publicly and in private, and in choirs for more than 15 years. This was not like any singing I'd known before. It had some of the emotional richness of singing in public but without the pressure of performance. It had the unrestrained joy of singing for yourself but with the unique pleasure of singing with others – others who are enjoying singing as much as you. It was a bunch of people saying as one, "We're letting go of the rest of our lives and our anxieties about how we sound and being able to carry a tune in a bucket. For this hour, we surrender to song." There's something wondrous in that, a release that's sweet and cleansing and big. I can't wait to try it again. It's a massage with melodies.
