Part 2

What are the potentials and limits of your voice? How much of your vocal performance can and do you want to control?

As I get older, I am both more confident in my technical capabilities and aware of my limitations, and I do try to stay within them to ensure vocal health and success in my engagements.

I know that the highest note I can possibly perform is a D6. I know that the lowest note I can possibly perform is a G3. There are instances I have stepped higher or lower, but I will not take a gig that absolutely requires it because the gig might not be on my best day. I know that I can sing a C6 on a bad day. I know that I can sing a Bb3 on my worst day.

I know that I sing snappy coloratura and legato lines with equal confidence. I know that I have the technical knowledge and understanding of how my instrument works to condition melodically or rhythmically difficult passages into my voice. I know what I have to do to keep my voice in stable, healthy condition (a lot of it is sleep, water, and avoiding speaking in loud places).

Our industry places a premium on youth and “emerging” artists, but I own my voice and my artistry in ways that I could not have imagined in my 20s. I named my song commissioning project after the age I was when I embarked upon it – the 40@40 Project – so I am famously over 40 (45 to be exact), and I would never apologize for the years of study and life experience it took me to arrive at exactly this point.

I teach Professional Studies – the business of music – at the Peabody Conservatory now. I look at these wildly talented students at the beginning of their own individual journeys, who cannot imagine how much LIFE is to come. All the good and all the bad. I can only hope to provide them tools towards resilience along the path.

As a singer, it is possible to whisper at the audience, scream at the audience, reveal deep secrets or confront them with uncomfortable truths. Tell me about the sense of freedom that singing allows you to express yourself and how you perceive and build the relation with the audience.

My first album was literally called Confessions! I have committed to the bit. Audiences don’t trust singers who can’t look them directly in the eye. I am drawn to music that explores truth; the breadth and depth of the human experience.

The driving curatorial concept of LEGENDS: Rebellion is the art of storytelling, with a focus on women as the bearers of cultural legend. Each song builds a universe through text and vocal expression – characters fully realized.

A daughter pleads for her mother in Juhi Bansal’s "Stoning Ground," a widow’s voice keens and cracks in grief in Bansal’s Grief. A girl moans bereft, lonely, and still in an unfamiliar land in Exile. Ceclia Livingston’s women of the Odyssey – Penelope, Circe, Kalypso – dash with wild abandon and fluidity between classical, minimalist, jazz, and pop vocal idioms, “… virtuosity never simply decorative but deeply expressive, almost improvisatory in its freedom,” as I write in my album liner notes.



In Jens Ibsen’s "Why won’t you let me look right at you?" a woman attempts to look Death in the eye, the vocal line dripping with sensuality and building with intensity in step with her developing understanding of her own power.

Juliana Hall wrote a twelve-minute, unaccompanied song cycle for me called Sentiment which explores human emotion – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Remorse. When I get to the anger movement I see the audience visibly squirm in their seats. Every time. And I’ll know I haven’t done my job if they don’t.

The lack of an instrumental accompaniment makes the both the experience of performing and of listening to it more urgent and raw. It’s one of the things I sing the most that I am nervous to sing because it requires really reaching for the most honest vocal and physical interpretations of those distilled emotions. I’ve recorded it for my next album, LEGENDS: Restoration, so keep an eye out for that next year.

I'd love to know more about the vocal performances for your latest release, please, and the qualities of your voice that you wanted to bring to the fore.

One of the things I love about recording is that it gives me agency to explore things I find vocally compelling.

I learn and sing a lot of music I love for gigs, but I’m not always offered opportunities to choose things that I’d like to work on. I’ve already touched on the systematic, involved process with which I engaged to bring Juhi Bansal’s songs to life, vocally.

I adore Cecilia Livingston’s classical/pop hybrid compositional voice that requires a wild array of vocal/technical abilities and approaches. Recording a monumental cycle like Salt Air is exciting because you can play and take chances in ways that aren’t always possible when preparing for or engaging in live performance.

Someday I should publish the “Salt Air Variations” so you can hear how each recording take can vary wildly. It’s nearly impossible to choose just one for the final iteration because I find things I adore, and that portray the story differently, in each take. I want what I hear to invoke a visceral emotional response.

I am wild about Jasmine Barnes and Jocelyne Jam’s "The Original Rebellion." It’s probably the most traditionally “operatic” song on this album, as far as vocal approach is concerned.



An aria that implores us to dispel the darkness and look for the signs that love surrounds, through lush melodies and soaring utterances that outline a harmonic structure unique to Barnes’ compelling compositional language.

I want to show all the sides of what I am capable of whenever given the chance, and I curate to that end.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard to singing someone else's songs versus your own?

I am not a songwriter, but one of the reasons that I engage in so much commissioning is that it allows me agency over the words that I sing, and the stories that I tell. The curation of albums also lends me that freedom.

I joke that I don’t have time to learn music I’m not being paid to sing, which is a wonderful problem to have! But squeezing these recording projects into my schedule is one way I hold onto that important magic. And recital programming, of course. I rarely sing entirely the same recital twice. There is just too much wonderful repertoire to be explored and shared.

I see a recital as an EXPERIENCE. I am thoughtful about every emotional beat and every word of the journey. I want to be the reason people choose to attend the next art song recital they hear about.

Strain is a particularly serious issue for many vocalists. How do you take care of your voice? Are the recipes or techniques to get a damaged voice back in shape?

I work hard to pace my calendar of engagements in a way that protects my vocal health. I consider not only how much time I need to sing the gig itself, but how much I need to prepare the music beforehand and to recover on the other side. A recital, for example, requires a day of rest afterward.

The process of preparation is not unlike that of a marathon runner. I sing recitals often enough that my vocal cords are conditioned to the task, and I’m particularly aware of the importance of that conditioning because I’ve always done a lot of recital singing and have had great confidence in my ability to withstand that kind of extended and varied vocal engagement.

But during the COVID pandemic, when none of us were able to sing publicly for more than a year, I lost that conditioning. After my first full recital back, I was probably the most exhausted - emotionally, physically, and vocally - I’ve ever been after a performance. It took some time to regain both my confidence and my marathon-singing “feet,” and I no longer take that state of conditioning for granted.

I believe deeply in the power of sleep and hydration, and I avoid loud environments that require me to overuse my voice socially. I have never - knock on wood! - endured an actual vocal injury, but when I do experience vocal fatigue, whether the day after a recital, after a week of recording, or after singing a Verdi Requiem, complete vocal rest is the most reliable cure.

Fortunately, the majority of my engagements don’t take that kind of toll on my voice.

For recording engineers, the human voice remains a tricky element to capture. What are some of the favourite recordings of your own voice so far and what makes voices sound great on record and in a live setting?

I have been very fortunate to have stumbled somewhat blindly into enduring relationships with sound engineers to whom I entrust my musical life: Dan Shores at Sono Luminus (albums: Confessions, LEGENDS: Rebellion, LEGENDS: Restoration [coming May 2027]); Bob Attiyeh at Yarlung Records (album: James Matheson); Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio (albums: The Garden, 40@40, Infrastructure); and Charlie Post (album: Again [coming June 2028]).

They are masters of their craft, and knowing that they have the science of “sound capture” covered allows me to devote my energy fully to the creative side of the endeavor. Even after considerable experience in the recording studio, I would never claim expertise in sound engineering, but I am deeply grateful for these trusted friends and collaborators on whom I know I can rely.

I’ve performed in every possible setting: From the outdoors to house concerts to classrooms and the grandest concert halls. There are spaces which are favorable to the natural projection of sound waves. There are spaces that dampen all attempts. But whether singing for four people or four thousand, the mystical energy that propels a performance is always the response of an audience, and I have a front-row seat to the sometimes nearly imperceptible reactions they have to the music I’m performing and how I choose to present it.

I know almost immediately what resonates and what doesn’t. And I’ve learned that sometimes the most memorable, meaningful performances can happen in the humblest of places.

I was scheduled to sing a recital at the French Cultural Institute in Kabul, but a bomb threat forced the cancellation of the performance. Instead, we held an unadvertised, word-of-mouth substitute recital for a much smaller audience in a carpeted, wood-panelled classroom at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music.

That performance remains indelible in my memory — not from the disappointment of being forced into a less grand venue with a smaller audience, but because my pianist, the audience, and I prevailed. Music won the day. Community was built.

Motherese may have been the origin of music, and singing is possibly the earliest form of musical expression, and culture in general. How connected is the human voice to your own sense of wellbeing, your creativity, and society as a whole?

Night-time in the Fourth Trimester (Jodi Goble and Caitlin Vincent) shines a spotlight on a single night with a newborn baby through textual and vocal expressions of whit, sarcasm, wincing, incredulity, pleading, regret, fear, and devotion. My daughter is 10, but I felt so close to the character it seemed written for me.

“Please sleep” sung with ninety shades of desperation that I have personally uttered in my real life, now expressed through singing. It is not a topic that I’ve seen examined through song in quite this way before. But every human who has ever given birth for all time has experienced these myriad, conflicting emotions. I hope that other current and former parents of newborns will feel “seen” and that it might even help people who haven’t parented a newborn understand how the experience can affect someone.



Ultimately that is what songs have the power to do – guide us to deeper empathy for the life experiences of others.

I hate to bring it up again, but I think that the pandemic showed a lot of us what our priorities truly are. I had just started down the path on my 40@40 Project song commissioning initiative, so I had a strong anchor to keep me firmly within my creator identity and mindset. I could not have predicted how vital 40@40 would be to my journey, and I’m so grateful for the role it played in developing my artistry and my relationships.

Singing may be a job in 2026, but really, it’s an identity; An intrinsic connection with our humanity. My friends who started down the path but no longer pursue singing as a career for myriad reasons are no less “singers” now than they ever were. The journey they took through learning how to express themselves with the instrument inside their body will inform every step of their path in future in some way.

We hold the physical and emotional knowledge of our communication superpower closely.