Touring 3 - the dreaded COLD

Ah yes - there it was. The last two shows of my tour could not go by without me catching the dreaded and wretched cold that hangs like a specter over me every time I'm on the road. Especially on that last show my sinuses were so clogged and my post-nasal drip in such full swing that I almost turned away from the monitor after singing the first few notes of the show with a resounding "urghh!" The horror! The sonic ugliness being hurled back at me by my monitor speaker! Maybe if I drowned it out with a very large amount of very long reverb???

The good news is that I have assembled a pretty respectable assortment of tools over the years to deal with this kind of thing, one of the most useful ones being the lengthy but very effective "Anti-edema" exercise, given to me by the marvelous Estill voice teacher Robert Sussuma. This was not the first time I came to rely on such a set of exercises to thin out my vocal folds in order to not break anything upon hitting my high notes, and it sure won't be the last. But having a constantly expanding tool box handy takes some of the pressure off, even though it doesn't make the actual gig all that much easier. Interestingly enough, I learn a ton of things about singing in these situations, because you simply cannot be imprecise in your technique then. Your voice will give you the finger and stretch out its tongue, if you don't. So yeah, even more learned, more clarified, more overcome.

In the end, the audience actually loved the show, the house was packed, I ended the tour with a dramatically belted high note during the encore ("Georgia On My Mind"), got four (!!!!) bouquets of flowers that night and sold all my CDs. So I guess it can't have been that bad. And lucky for me the coughing didn't start until the next day :)