I get done with my song. Some song, a Billy Joel song seems to add up, if foreshadowing were to mean anything. I come sit down, next to a friend, and he starts talking about singing anything with perfect pitch, or whatever, I really don’t know. All I know is I heard the word “perfect”. At that point my ears tuned him out, and I have retreating back into my mind to think of important things, like, how hard will it be to mount a horizontal radial engine to a small pickup truck. I mean, the thing is, horizontal means the flywheel, what connects to the transmission is going to face straight down. This means…

Sorry, sorry, as I said, important things. Back to the story. Lecture, I shall call it what it is, this is a lecture.

Here’s the thing. When you tell me you can sing perfectly, or do anything perfectly but focusing on karaoke here, you no longer need me to be part of the conversation. You have already decided what my reaction, review, or suggestions I may have. “Whoa, amazing.” “Truly you are the most amazing singer I have heard yet. You just nailed every note.” “You shouldn’t change a thing, you are perfect the way you are.” At that point, I am just glorified audience that no longer wants to be there.

I’m not on the stage to sing perfectly. Most of what I sing, are songs I barely know or rarely listen too, I think by unconscious design to hide my feelings of inadequacy so I don’t have to feel pressured to really know a song. One day I stepped out of boundaries, and got my horrendous voice up there to sing. What amazed me was the sound of my voice, and hearing myself controlling my voice. I don’t have real good vocal control, and so when I am up there, it about the amazement, the challenge of controlling the sounds coming out of my mouth. It is about the magnificent feelings I feel as I’m listening to myself sing, yet still able to be in my own mind and thinking about what is happening, like a self-feeding loop. It isn’t about singing, performing, to show how awesome I am. As a bonus, it turns out I have a much better voice then I ever knew, and met some most important and fun friends in the process.

So when I hear somebody self-describe themselves as perfect, that person has just shat on every reason I am up there to sing.

And then he says he thinks he’ll sing “Just a Woman”. He had no reason to know, but that stung. That is a majorly important song to me, and then to have to be shown the “perfect” version, that really would have tainted that song for me. I really don’t care if anybody sings “my song”, I don’t have any “my song”, I only that song was going to be used to show me up. Fortunately, we left before he had a chance to.

Fuck perfect

– Duckin’ Kev