What Is This?

Oh no. How do you start a blog? They say the most successful ideas come from not being able to find something you want and I feel this could be one of those ideas. I am a vocalist. But not, like, a legitimate one yet. It’s not how I pay my rent, but I’m working towards it and spending quite a bit of time on the internet in between shifts at my full-time, non-music related job, just trying to find stuff to educate myself, to stay motivated and hopefully, stuff to relate to. A lot of resources, I’ve found, are created by very intimidating people. People who’ve spent years in the business; singing with and coaching incredible people; people with dozens of letters after their name. Which is great! I feel so lucky to have all of this information so available to me and no doubt it’s helped me understand my voice better and keeps me motivated. I do, however, feel like there is a place for the amateur. As someone who’s out of university, trying to work out how I can sing more and hopefully, maybe, eventually earn a living from it, it’s an incredibly confusing and, to be honest, disheartening time and I have to believe there are other people in the same boat. I’m happy to be the one to lay my cards out on the table and humiliate myself by letting you read my inner most thoughts.

And so, a little about me (proper cringe, this is where I don’t want to do this anymore). I’m in my mid-twenties, graduated from university with a degree in Popular Music Performance about two and a half years ago, I’ve always been a singer. I remember being ten years old and very adamant that I didn’t want to be a ‘popstar’; I was going to be a singer and as I’ve grown up – as I’m still, very much, growing up – I’m loving finding out everything that can mean and be. Studying vocals has made me realise how much I’m interested in the geeky side of singing. Once I finished my dissertation, I only had more ideas, the word count wasn’t high enough and I had so many more topics I wanted to cover. That’s another huge reason why I wanted to start this blog – it’s my way of feeling like a fancy academic and doing essays forever without any fees and without tutors marking me down because, although extremely well-written and researched, I’ve kind of gone off on a massive tangent and missed the point (happened quite a bit … whatever). I’m super analytical, and for that reason, I hope that I’m going to cover a lot of range (RANGE! Like singing. Love a pun.) in the subjects I write about on here. It’s not all going to be technique, it’s not all going to be performance tips and tricks, it’s not all going to be personal diary entries and self-psychoanalysis about why I feel so bad about myself all the time and WHY can’t I get anything done and WHY aren’t I where I want to be. Thank goodness! A real variety on what it means to be a singer. Which is another thing; you can’t write about singing if you’re not singing and so this blog is also a means of accountability (“I’m a vocalist!” … *does literally two gigs a year*). It’s gonna be a real ride, you guys. 

**disclaimer – this post was written over a year before I decided to publish this blog (I’ve updated how long I’ve been out of university but I’m not going to changing my age from ‘mid-twenties’ to ‘late-twenties’. Let me have that, thanks).