Indie Rock vs. Spirituality

I've been living a dual life of a singer-songwriter and a person with a pretty intense spiritual practice for a long time. Indie rock has a certain lifestyle of being out at clubs every night surrounded by alcohol. There was this fragmentation in my life. Every time I would get an advance, I would go to India and study with my teachers. This was my life. It was very compartmentalized and after about two years, this was getting pretty unsustainable and I was not authentically presenting what I am.

I started leaning more into voice and sound-healing work and then when the pandemic hit, live shows were off, and everything got canceled. This got me thinking about how just starting at the voice can be an access to so many other interesting points within your personal and creative history and future.

Anyone, from people who have been in the music industry and got burned out, to people who have never sung and want to sing, or people who feel unheard, it's all the different ways in which you might or might not be using the voice.

I really think teaching is the best way to learn. It helps to keep me accountable to myself in terms of moment to moment and to stay living in my truth, because every week I get to this class and tell people how to use their voice to express their truth. As an artist I think it's enabled me to communicate more authentically.

"The Clearing"

I saw Misty [Boyce] perform at Desert Nights at the Standard Hotel one night and I was blown away by how talented she was and how raw her performance was. I approached her and asked if she was interested in writing something. When we sat down to write this song it just came out of both of us. The whole time the both of us were kind of electric with this song.

The first line actually came because I was housesitting for drummer Aaron Steele. I left for two hours and it happened to be raining that day. When do you housesit and something actually happens? When I came back there was literally two inches of water in his apartment and it was a good thing I came back when I did because I was able to save a bunch of equipment. I was thinking, What does it take to start a flood? It started with one drop and a few hours passed and everything was up in water, and that is what I came to Misty with.

Music As Refuge

I'm from Syracuse, New York, and I was a really moody teenager living in a city that didn't have much going on. Like so many other people, music was my refuge. I would hear a song and realize there were other people feeling the same as I was and I fell deeply in love with music, listening to records for hours. I actually made a record when I was 15.

I had a few guitar lessons at around that age, but vocally I am self-taught. I don't think of myself as a super-confident person, but it was really this deep soul call. I had these songs and it was all I cared about. I didn't care about other teenage things and I was totally driven by music.

Tibetan Opera

I went to India and was living with Tibetan teachers in the Himalayas there. That was a very influential trip. As I'm a self-taught singer, I learned through imitation. For a long time I was trying to write songs and it wasn't really resonating with myself. When I went to India, I was introduced to Tibetan opera singing. I was literally in the forest one day and heard this singing and followed it. I ended up at this Tibetan conservatory for performing arts where they were teaching people how to sing. It was the most enchanting, mystical sound that I didn't know the human voice could make.

Learning how to make that sound and learning that the body could do that, I started to really understand my voice. To get that high you have to know how to move the breath in the voice through the body. Everything changed for me after that.

I'm a firm believer that anyone can sing and that if you want to sing high, you can sing high. It's just so meaningful to go from that point. The moment you say yes to something that really speaks to you, that's where the opening is. That was literally the moment that everything changed for me.

Favorites

Whenever I get asked this question, my mind goes blank and I can only ever think of three singers. Lauryn Hill, because I used to listen to her as a kid and was a really big fan of The Fugees. Then she made a solo record that impacted how I thought about music.

Fiona Apple, because she is somebody that I have legitimately been listening to since I was a teenager and still listen to now, and a few years ago I got the chance to sing backup for her in a show and it was just amazing.

Also Nina Simone. Those three are the three icons of truth. It's rare to hear somebody with so little doubt.

"Soft But Strong"

It's an idea that I've been trying to understand for a long time. My own paradox is how to stay soft in this world and stay strong. It's funny because when I was trying to come up with a title for my third record it took me a year. There was a list and it was so annoying. I hadn't found it yet and felt really lazy. I was at my cousin's house for a holiday and she had a book that said the softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest. It's a political term but it's not really political for me. It felt like a continuation of a conversation I'm here to have.

It is also the start of me really diving into the Tibetan teachings. How do you keep waking up in a world where there is a lot of ignorance? How do you stay soft when there's so much hate? These two things go together, the spiritual end of music and the question of continuing to stay in that space of refusing to get hardened in the world.

Paoro performing at National Sawdust in Brooklyn with the all-female orchestra Little Kruta (photo: Walter Wlodarczyk)

Person, Artist and Spirit

I think maybe it would be better if I had more separation between the person, the artist and the spirit, but right now they're all the same.

I took a break from writing. I thought I would write a lot during the quarantine and I almost feel like it's been too inward to pull from. I feel like I haven't been fired and I personally don't like pushing with that. I know what it's like to be in that state of real inspiration, where the songs are writing themselves and I'm just writing them down. I do think that's coming soon though because I have been feeling really excited about music and listening to a lot of new music recently. For me that's always a sign that it's on its way.

I really like having this no-pressure relationship to writing. If a song isn't coming up I don't labor it. I did record two songs at the beginning of the quarantine with Rob Schnapf, who I have worked with a lot over the past few years. He's a really great producer that is really sensitive to sensitive artists. We wrote and produced two songs together and plan on writing a third one and then will release them together.

Activating The Voice

I have been staying at a permaculture community in Costa Rica and I would love to bring people down here to do this voice work. The course is less of a songwriting course as it is more a course of finding strength within your voice so you are speaking your truth and asserting yourself. Feeling fully creative and inspiring yourself, using the chakra system as a guide.

The root chakra would be financial stability and trust issues, going into where communication gets started and stops. We have a weekly chanting practice. The idea behind the chanting is that each mantra correlates to a different chakra and activates it through sound. This is from ancient Sanskrit in Hindu practices. I decided to make a record from these mantras which is kind of like an ambient meditation record.

March 17, 2021

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