Reading Time: 6 minutes I had a complicated relationship with my voice even before I figured out I was trans. When I was small I loved singing, but then my voice broke. That’s what we call it in the UK when testosterone makes a voice change at puberty—we say your voice “breaks.” As a trans woman, I find that term especially apt. Because my voice was still unpredictable, the choir teacher put me in the bass section where no one would hear me. Singing became something I was afraid to do.
music
Posted inMusic
Christian bigots condemn Amy Grant for extending Jesus’ love to gay people
Reading Time: 2 minutes When Christian evangelist Franklin Graham and hate-group leader Tony Perkins are calling you a sinner, it’s probably because you made the mistake of being kind. That’s what happened with singer Amy Grant, who received harsh condemnation from the bigots for an act of Jesus-like generosity. Grant was recently awarded the Kennedy Center Honors, an award […]
Posted inMusic
The top 10 psychedelic albums of all time
Reading Time: 8 minutes For several heady years in the late 1960s, an entire genre of popular music was devoted to echoing, capturing, or inspiring an altered state of consciousness resulting from the ingestion of potent drugs. Whatever one might think of the unhealthiness or nihilism of such a peculiar love affair between melody and mind melting, the fact […]
Posted inMusic
Rhett sings himself ‘Overboard’ and out of his faith
Reading Time: 9 minutes Rhett McLaughlin of ‘Good Mythical Morning’ put down his cross and took up a guitar to tell what happened after he broke up with Jesus.
Posted inLGBTQ
Adam and Steve: Queer artists repurpose Genesis as a gay love story
Reading Time: 7 minutes By “queering” Genesis with their music, Dorian Electra and Lil Nas X repurposed the Adam and Eve dynamic, turning it into a gay love story.
Posted inHealth
Can dance be meditation?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Like many people, I suffer from occasional anxiety. If occasional means most days. The pressure of balancing work, domestic duties, several side hustles, and trying to make time to decompress feels impossible sometimes. So I when I went looking for a way to find that balance, I found that many people find it through meditation. […]
Posted inMusic
Put your mouth where your money is: The real-world ethics of a socialist band
Reading Time: 5 minutes It begins with a strum. A simple strum that could be a guitarist, early to rehearsal, waiting for bandmates to arrive. A nonchalant, off-the-cuff melody of moving octaves around a sustained tone, 30 seconds with no perceivable tempo or direction. Then, a tempo is decided upon, and one by one the other six bandmates join […]
Posted inMusic
The deep playlist of Generation Z
Reading Time: 5 minutes I started teaching college music courses in 1991. I was 28, just five years out of college myself. On the first day of my music appreciation class, I asked the students to name a few songs or bands that they liked to listen to, that they found interesting. There was some Nirvana, Nirvana was big […]
Posted inReproductive rights
‘It’s hard to hear them celebrating’—church musicians after Roe’s demise
Reading Time: 5 minutes On June 26, two days after the ruling by the US Supreme Court on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that effectively overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a purposefully anonymous group member of the I’m a Choir Director Facebook page, posted the following: Is anyone else having a really hard time […]
Posted inMusic
The lived contradiction of atheist choir directors
Reading Time: 6 minutes After I put out a call for atheist public school choir directors to interview for a research article, I received an email from a colleague: “The choral music education program of any school must include music from the masters, which of course will include some sacred music. It is a part of our culture.” I […]