1️⃣ What If One Word Is Enough?
March Madness, Day 8
(Welcome to Day 8 of our March Madness series and continuing celebration of Mardi Gras, with love from Genevieve & Ali & the Ally Show)
Sometimes my brain is smarter than I am.
Way back on February 12th, when I was probably packing for my trip to New Orleans, an email landed in my inbox from the redoubtable Blue Bear School of Music, a national treasure here in the Bay Area.
I am definitely not an Inbox Zero person and I will more likely than not not read any particular email that lands in my inbox (my inbox currently contains 458,358 unread messages). But the subject line of this email spoke directly to the part of my brain that is smarter than me: “Special Workshop for Singers.”
So as you may recall from March Madness Day 4, some of these labels such as “singer” can live up on a very high pedestal. It can be very hard to assemble the confidence to describe oneself as a “singer” or “writer” or “artist” or “leader.” Back on Day 4 ,I shared that I struggle all the time with describing myself as a “musician.”
However, the part of my brain that is smarter than I am definitely knows that “if you sing, you’re a singer.” The label “singer” somehow fell off the “musician” pedestal sometime back and I just scooped it up like second nature.
And this well-written invitation email lowered the bar for the label “singer” right there in the message:
“What Every Singer Needs to Know - the Blues. Blues is the most primal, powerful part of your soul . . . and singing it is more fun than you can possibly imagine. For the singer who loves to sing in the shower, this class is highly instructive and loads of fun. For the singer who's playing professionally, but still mystified at how to control what's happening on the bandstand, this class is DEFINITELY for you.”
See, this is great marketing. It works if you love to sing in the shower, and it works if you are up there singing on the bandstand, and it works if you aspire to be up there singing on the bandstand, and it works if you pretend to be up there singing on the bandstand when you are singing in the shower. See what I mean? If you can sing in any context, you can take this class. Singers gonna sing. Blues singers gonna sing the blues.
So the part of my brain that is smarter than I am went ahead and signed up for the class without even performing the deep inner inquiry of whether I deserve to take up space in this classroom, whether my particular singing in the shower really counts as singing, whether I will have an anxiety attack when it comes time to sing in this class, etc. etc.
This part of my brain may even have anticipated that I would take that trip to New Orleans and go to to the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park and hear the wonderful Arrowhead Jazz Band and Jade Perdue and Gladney sing their blues and realize on the plane ride back that I, too, can choose to sing my blues right now at this moment in history. I got back from New Orleans on February 19th and walked right into this class on February 22nd.
And there I met this incredible person, Pamela Rose:
Pamela Rose’s mission is to teach you, me, anyone who sings in the shower or on the bandstand, anyone who dreams of singing in the shower or on the bandstand, etc., how to sing the blues.
Her first words in the class were, “If we all sang more, we would need a lot less therapy.”
Now, this class was three hours long and I loved absolutely every second of it and took copious notes. I have a feeling that there will be many future posts discussing the ins and outs of the wisdom that Pamela Rose and guitarist Garth Webber and my fellow singing students shared that day. Spoiler alert, you’re gonna hear a lot about Stevie Ray Vaughan - my qigong teacher talks about him a lot, too, in what is not really a coincidence - more will be revealed soon.
But for tonight, for this midnight Friday post in this first crazy week of March Madness, I’m going to zero in on just one little tiny lesson that Pamela Rose taught us.
We were discussing improvisation - how might one start singing in such a way that you don’t even need to know the words to the song, you can already be singing your blues? And Pamela Rose demonstrated this to us by singing a single word over and over again over the blues song structure (more about that in a future post too), thereby making that one word into its own blues:
“Well, well, well, well, well”
“Low, low, low, low, low”
“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”
“Please, please, please, please, please”
“Ooooooooooh” (not even a word, still works)
“Mmmmmmm” (also not a word, also works)
“No, no, no, no, no”
And the part of my brain that is smarter than I am could immediately envision how many famous songs might have started their lives through this very exercise. I’m talking about songs like “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah),” some of the Beatles’ earliest hits, both released in 1963. And of course we have “Love Me Do,” the Beatles’ very first single, released in 1962:
Love, love me do
You know I love you
I'll always be true
So please (ee-ee-ease)
Love me do
Whoa-oh, love me do
Later I did a mini-audit of all the words used in that song but it’s late so let me save the details for another post but let me tell you tonight, it ain’t a lot. It’s, like, fewer than 20 unique words in the whole song.1
So here’s what I can tell you this evening:
People are still making up songs based on ideas as simple as this one - as simple as the idea of starting with a single word.
For example, one of my very favorite songs of the last ten years is “Shiny,” as sung by the giant crab Tamatoa (Jemaine Clement) in the film Moana (2016).
At the time, everyone was talking about “You’re Welcome” as sung by Maui (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). “You’re Welcome” was the song that landed a spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
But I as a long-time Flight of the Conchords fan knew that there was something special going on with “Shiny.”
And “Shiny” employs one of Pamela Rose’s exquisite start-with-one-word tricks in its most important verse:
Well, well, well
Little Maui’s having trouble with his look
You little semi-demi-mini-god
Ouch, what a terrible performance, get the hook
You don’t swing it like you used to, man
Yet I have to give you credit for my start
And your tattoos on the outside
For just like you I made myself a work of art
I’ll never hide, I can’t, I’m too
Shiny
You can hear that repeated word “well” right here around the one-minute mark:
And somewhere during the writing this song, Lin-Manuel Miranda fell in love with the word “shiny” and elevated it to the song’s theme and title. The song turns into an example of an oríkì (OH-ree-kee), one of my favorite types of Fight Song, a song of in which someone sings their own name and story, a poem & song form that is intimately linked to the history of the blues going all the way back to Africa. Pamela Rose could have told you that might happen.
And that’s the quick story of how starting from a single word as simple as “well” can get you all the way to a fully developed Fight Song that can hold its own in a 2016 masterpiece of musical theatre. No, no, not Hamilton this time, I’m talking about Moana! If you haven’t seen it remedy that immediately.
Today’s March Madness Mantra: Pick a Word, Any Word
So this is what I’d like to you to contemplate today. If you are stuck or stalled on how to get started with your secret little tiny redwood seed of a project, can you think of even one word that you can start to turn over in your mind? Maybe something as simple as “well,” “please,” “I,” “you,” “yeah,” “no,” “together,” “now,” “try”? Please try it and see what happens.
Friday Night Bonus Advice
You can take a singing class with Pamela Rose. Do it right now! If you blank, you’re a blanker, so remember, if you have ever even imagined the feeling of singing, you’re a singer. Let Pamela Rose help you along your journey. It’s high time that you learned to sing the blues.
Sign up for a class right here. She is teaching the same class as the one I took again on May 4, for example: “What Every Singer Needs to Know - the Blues” at the Jazzschool. It’s worth traveling for.
And I’ve traveled the world and the seven seas, and everybody’s looking for something. Along the way I had the great fortune to encounter Rishi Dastidar, who was already rather shiny when I met him and who has since become only shinier as a famous poet, writer, speaker, and teacher (not to mention Substacker):
Rishi Dastidar, poet and teacher extraordinaire. And love that t-shirt. And get this - Rishi is teaching a class too. I asked him to tell you about it:
“For those of you who are looking for a gentle way to get your creative mojo back, may I suggest joining me, Rishi Dastidar, for my Notes on Memory course. Run in conjunction with Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, it’s six online sessions packed full of prompts to get pen moving across page, or fingers across keyboard. What memories are and mean are a jumping off point to generate lots of material, some of which might even become poems. Would love to see you there.”
You can sign up right here. And it’s kicking off April 23rd, so it can help you segue from March Madness into April Flowers.
Kk team. You know I love y’all. If you have a moment today, tell me which word is blipping around in your mind. And write it down or sing it out or go for a walk with it blipping around in your mind and then see what happens next.
And don’t go it alone,
Genevieve
Footnote added 3/27/2025
“Love Me Do” contains 18 unique words. Here they are in order of frequency.
love (appears 24 times)
me (16)
do (16)
you (9)
whoa (7)
know (4)
I (4)
I'll (4)
always (4)
be (4)
true (4)
so (4)
please (4)
someone (3)
to (2)
somebody (1)
new (1)
yeah (1)
Shiny! That song/performance is intimidatingly “much”, but I will make art like that too! Just watch me :)