Some things in life are just not clear or, probably more accurately, don’t make sense when you’re in the midst of them. Singing is one of those things for me. I sang as a kid and even had the lucky opportunity to sing leads in a couple musicals. While singing was something I enjoyed, it wasn’t the focus of my musical life and so, right around my early teens, I simply stopped singing. Maybe it was my increased focus on the guitar. Or that I added composition and recording to the list of things I was trying to learn. I guess having dropped singing makes some sense — there was, and is, only so much time in a day. For the next three or four decades, I just kept going along that path. Until one day a few years ago when, for some reason, singing became important again.
I think part of what happened came from my guitar teaching. I could see some students, particularly younger ones, responded incredibly well to my humming or singing a phrase they were trying to learn on the guitar. Singing seemed to remove the filter that the guitar was applying to the learning process. After hearing me sing a phrase, the student had an easier time internalizing the music. Another part of it was that I started writing more songs and it was simply easier to sing a vocal line or melody than to play it on an instrument. It just translated better.
So it started with teaching and songwriting, but I think there’s more to it than just that. I played in bands for most of my musical life with my focus always on the instrumental parts of the songs. How the guitar fit in texturally with the rest of the band. How I could play a better solo. Most of the tracks on my records have been instrumentals too, although I do have vocal tunes sung by some of my vocalist friends. The real change over the last while has been a shifting in how I respond to songs, with words seeming to have so much more importance to me. I can’t explain the change or rationalize it. I absolutely haven’t given up on instrumental music (in fact, I have a new guitar-based instrumental single coming out very soon!), but I am going to be adding more vocal tunes to my records and when I play live.
Jamie Bonk 