Finding my voice

I was driving home yesterday listening to a Steve Forbert CD. "Romeo's Tune" (a song I love and that he dedicated to the memory of Florence Ballard, late of The Supremes) came on. I started singing with it. I do a pretty dead-on imitation of Mr. Forbert on that particular song. A friend once commented on how eerily I capture his sound.

Similarly, I do a pretty decent imitation of Elton John on "Candle in the Wind" - the one from the Live in Australia album, not the one from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; I find the former has more emotion than the latter.

Even if a song is not in my key or my range I can transpose and still sound at least a little like the artist. For example, I tend to sing harmony rather than lead on early Beach Boys songs.

When do I sound the worst? When I'm singing 'cold,' without a recorded reference. In other words, I can sing like other people, but I can't really sing like me.

I think this is because I learned to sing from the radio and from records. My goal was to sound like the artists I was hearing. If I were serious about learning to sing I'd hire a teacher, learn to read music, and learn to sing like me.

Happy Anniversary

My wife has put up with me for 25 years. Whoda thunk it?

That's why I had a question mark at the end of "Hope"

An update on my father-in-law: He had gone to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to see if he was eligible for a drug trial for his acute myelogous leukemia (aml). He didn't fit the criteria for the trial he originally had gone down for, but they found another for which he did qualify.

That's the good news.

The bad news? Several weeks on the regimen shows not only no improvement in his condition, but a deterioration. He and his doctors have decided that it is pointless to leave him in the study.

He and his wife currently live alone in a house in Arkansas. They are considering moving to a house closer to one of his children, probably in Texas.

As Warren Zevon said on the title track to one of his last CDs, Life'll Kill Ya.