Liz Caplan

And the perspective I actually have in my mind right now, based on what we're talking about, is Joni Mitchell's Blue came out when I was about just turning 14.

So I would sit at the piano and play through the music on the piano, singing her entire album.

And she wrote that as a healing salve for her, herself.

And I felt...

that she was speaking for so many others and that you can be hurt and you could go through these dark periods and yet you still have creative use of vocabulary in music and you also can use your voice

to cry in the sense of how it makes sound.

And you can use your voice to feel joy in how you make sound.

So I have a distinct memory of that beginning my need to use my voice mostly for myself

Because if I think about my life now and how I'm completely dedicated to educating, you know, A-list people, but it didn't start that way, but entertaining and listening and hearing people's voices all throughout my teaching career.

I never, ever wanted it to be about me.

I felt like I wanted to be the clear canvas and let everybody come in and just like, you know, throw up their emotions at me.

And I was all clear and ready to accept because I didn't have any business that needed to be intertwined with their things that they were going through.

So I...

I realized, like I said early on, that singing should be mostly a healing art form.

And the teaching of singing

should be exactly that too so and i had come from teachers myself all throughout junior high school and high school and college who were not particularly lovely human beings and i say that because i never felt very comfortable in myself with them so the feeling i had was

I mean, I don't think anybody used the word dysfunctional back in that time, but it was.

It was completely a dysfunctional situation.

And I kept saying to myself, I asked myself these questions as a young person, why is singing, which is supposed to bring joy to myself and to others, feeling so tense and tight and restrictive?

And why?