So, yes, as a little girl I did love singing.
I didn’t think of my singing or my made-up songs as something separate to me—they were just part of me; invisible, like a bone under the skin, but just as real and easy to feel.
I knew a song was mine to write not because I heard it fully formed or anything of that nature, but more because of the way it felt in me, the way it settled into me, and then rattled in me, the way it told me, it’s go time.
To this day, writing a song feels a little like scratching an itch, I suppose. First comes the feeling—a need of some sort, a request, a restlessness, an awareness of something new in the room, or something unspoken and important that wants to be spoken—and then, once I begin writing it, I can breathe a little deeper, because I know that whatever was wrong or unhoused is now in the process of being set right. That’s the way it always was for me and songs. Songs were homes for things that needed containing.
My own songs have always appeared this way: not so much as fully formed sounds at first, but as feelings attached to colour and image and story and personality and temperature that need a little room to find their place with each other. A little like animals, in a way. They feel familial, familiar. Some are tame, some are difficult. None bite. All are welcome.
I feel like my songs and I are the same in this way—we want places to belong, to feel contained, but we do not like to be trapped.
I have learned, over time, to wait, to be patient. It is the song that needs to make the first move, not me. I learned through error never to rush them, or I will scare them off. I need to give them time to trust me. To spend enough time with them—around them—to earn that trust. I circle back in again and again, my attention being the thing that feeds them. I would never want to betray a song, never want to squash it into something it is not. In my mind, I am often checking in on them—is this okay? Are you okay? Is this right? Is this true?
As a child, memories sat in the same place. I felt I had a duty of care, somehow, to both the songs and the memories.
Sometimes, while singing in church on Sundays, I used to get so bored I thought I might die.
Perhaps that’s why, as a child, I took it upon myself to liven things up a little, to—I mean, I don’t want to be presumptuous—improve upon things a little. Without asking for permission, I started adding harmonies where there were none, and drumbeats too (played on my thighs). When I couldn’t think of the right words, I just made them up. And I made sure that, at the end of every song, I was the one who held my note for the longest, so as to win (win what, I did not know; just … win). I can still feel the elbow nudge of my older sisters as they told me to stop it, stop embarrassing us, but, no, I would not be stopped! (Not unless Dad told me to stop—then, I stopped. Fear is good like that.)
One of my greatest pleasures as a kid was when the older ladies in the pews behind or in front would comment afterwards on my lovely singing. I would shine with pride, ignoring my siblings muttering under their breath, ‘Don’t encourage her!’ I was encouraged. Clearly, I was talented (so I told myself). Why else would the older ladies tell me so? I suppose I was quite confident, at the start.
In the past, when I have listened back to those tapes of me as a child singing my little songs—songs about vacuum cleaners and Sam the dog and various fantasies, such as ‘Livin’ in the jungle because it’s free, and all the animals talk to me. I like the jungle, it’s very nice. The air is fresh, and it smells like spice!’—it is quite obvious that my clear sense of being a talented singer right from the start was … a little misguided. Like all children, I did have a sweet voice, but the truth is I really had no special vocal talent to speak of. What I did have was a heart that wanted to sing, a body that felt good when a song was in it, and a brain that saw sounds as pictures, saw harmonies as streamers flying together, and I knew just how to arrange them, and just how to make them right—and when they were wrong, I knew how to turn that around as well. My relationship with my songs has almost always been excellent.
As much as my siblings found my voice rather loud, and told me to keep it down when their friends were over, I also suspected (perhaps incorrectly) that they rather liked it when I sang, and my parents were kind about my voice, and nobody ever really told me I couldn’t sing, just that I shouldn’t sing quite so much. All up, songs and singing felt good inside me and once I had started, I never stopped.
When I was nine, my first piano teacher, Mrs Anderson, gave our family her
