Why Should I Sing?

 About my music, I've posted often that I can't sing. And yet I do sing on the songs I've posted on SoundCloud. Well, I had to sing. No one else knows my songs. And how could they? I've been in bands before, and I have corresponded with members of other bands. Almost always they say that when you write a song, you have to sing it, even if you can't sing. How else will a real singer know how you want your song sung?

I was hoping, at first, that a singer can just hear the tune that I wrote, and then sing the words I had written to match those tunes. I was told it's not as easy as that. So for twenty some years, my songs were sitting on cassette tapes without vocals and vanishing into obscurity. Because no way was I going to post just instrumental music anywhere. It would be like posting a painting of just a background with no subject matter in it. In other words, it would have sounded incomplete.

Then I remembered something. Years ago, I would play Black Sabbath songs on the piano and a friend of mine would sing the lyrics. He wasn't a singer, but he still sang the songs, and it worked well enough for two teenagers playing  songs in the living room. But the reason he was able to do that was because he had heard Ozzy sing those songs and he knew how they were supposed to be sung.

So I thought to myself, if he could sing the songs of someone else's music, even though he's not a singer, why the heck can't I sing the songs that were my own songs?

And that is why I went ahead and finally sang the songs and posted them. With mixed results, sure. It's clear that it would have been preferable to have a real singer. But in some of the songs I think I'm actually doing a passable job. Some, I think, are better than just passable. But that doesn't mean I think I could audition for Simon Cowell. No. Not even close.

But like anything, the more you do something, the better you get at doing it, and the same can be said for singing, especially when the songs are songs that you wrote. So for the last two albums I posted, Volumes 1 and 14, I think I'm doing a better job at singing than the first albums I posted, which are Volumes 2 through 13. 

Will there be a Volume 15? I should think so. I'm already getting ideas for more original songs. It's a matter of getting back into the mood. Might be soon. Maybe I can have another album written by summertime. We'll see.