Is the shower a closet?
What if the shower is a closet? What if it’s a prison? I mean, check this out — it’s great: it echoes, it reverberates, it brings the voice back to you, it empowers you. The number of people I’ve encountered who say “oh, I’m a shower-singer,” whenever I speak to them about my choir or my career as a singer — there are so many. People who can sing, who do sing, but only associate it with very private spaces.
Whenever someone says “I am a shower singer,” it leaves me with a feeling of — but what about all the people who could hear your music? What would it be like if you let your sound reverberate with others? If the resonance wasn’t just with walls, but also with hearts? The advantage of the shower is that it leaves the voice amplified and makes it linger a little; and the fact that it makes you want to sing means you can hear the beauty of your own voice, and that hearing it brings you something good.
To sing you don’t really need any previous knowledge. Go back to the classic example — children who babble, who just feel joy in going “ba” or “ma.” As adults we cringe at the idea. It takes a lot of careful work to set up an environment where adults feel okay to be playful with their voices. What they typically need is reassurance, is recognition — the certainty that if they make a sound that is “out of the ordinary,” whatever that means to them, and then look in the eyes of the receiving person, what they will see is acceptance, curiosity, interest.
I am prone to this myself. Even in my choir leading, I often prepare something, say it, make a joke, and then notice a difficulty in myself to look in the faces of the people I’m leading, fearing that I made a fool of myself.
Going back to the shower as a closet — I know the insides of a closet very well, as a non-binary person. I know what it’s like to have thoughts, images, memories reverberating in my head, and I also know the helplessness I feel when I think: there’s so much beauty, but this will never be shared with anyone. It’s exactly this — “this will never be shared with anyone” — that makes me feel it’s a waste. To get to a place where I recognise my own voice as a gift, together with finding the words I want to say, the shouts I want to shout, the whispers I want to whisper — this took years of un-conditioning.
I am totally convinced — I know it deeply — that the child that is playful, that is the songwriter, the improviser, the communicator, is always in us. I try to make it my practice to create spaces for myself to exercise this.
Showers are great — but why is the shower so often used as a defence, as if what I do in there were something shameful? This all boils down to shame. Shame of being heard, of someone finding out what your real voice is like. And that might mean: tired, broken, stuttery, uncertain, unstable, shivering. If we’ve watched a lot of talent shows, if we associate singing with competitivity, we become convinced this means there is something wrong with us. What we hear are voices that never falter, that never skip a beat, that never sound nasal because of an allergy, that never sound hoarse or sore. Polished products for consumption.
But if we think about the history of human singing, it has always, always been a communal activity. Voices are meant to be heard. They are the connections we make with the world. Crucially, a voice is not just a vibration of the vocal folds — it is an expression of our innermost self. Right now, for example, my voice is a digital one: its sound is me tapping on my keyboard. This too evokes emotions, images, memories. I can do the same when I improvise words chanting into a microphone, or write them down on paper. I am working with meaning; I am expressing what matters to me.
From my singing experience, I know there are songs that matter to me — I might not even intellectually know why — and there are songs I sing because I’m paid for it, or because someone told me to. In some sense it doesn’t matter what notes you’re singing, what lyrics you’re singing — what matters is your own truth of what you are transmitting, and the relationship with that truth is a relationship you have with yourself. It’s what you deem worthy of naming about yourself. It’s an act of kindness to fellow beings — putting frequencies out there that resonate deeply with others. To me, this is where singing is.
And the idea that if I’m at home with thin walls and want to sing, but I’m too ashamed — or I’ve imagined that if I make a certain kind of noise I will be judged — this is political. Spaces are political. I don’t see this mentioned enough in singing pedagogies: why do I want to sing? What is that place my voice springs from? What makes me want to put words on a page, or sing them into a microphone? Do I feel valuable? Do I recognise the gift that I am to others? Do I recognise the longing that others have to hear my voice? Maybe they have never heard it. Maybe I haven’t risked being myself in front of them — and then maybe they don’t know me, and maybe that’s why I feel isolated.
This shapes how I teach. I think it’s important for a teacher to know where they’ve arrived, to name and honour the time and effort they put into their craft — but too often singing craft is presented as a “linear progression”: unlocking bridges, evening vowels. There is so much more to it: what happens between the lessons, who we meet, whether we rest. The voice is not a muscle as such; the voice is an expression of a living being. In any method-oriented pedagogy, “I don’t know” is treated as a great taboo — the teacher is not supposed to not know. I try instead to hold and name my own fear, and to position myself as a real person, with specific experience from specific traditions. I do not want my students to project omnipotence onto me and stop paying attention to their own tastes and sensations. In abdicating objective measures of musical taste — making suggestions to explore, bearing in mind the student might not like them, which is okay — I take myself out of the role of “musical judge.” It is extremely important to me that my students learn to trust their own ears and their own bodies. My job is to create a safe environment for exploration, not to mitigate risk by providing ready answers.
Out in the world, though, the judge doesn’t disappear; it moves into the walls. The work, then, is about making the judgment more adequate to the space we are in. We all carry generalised baggage — being loud, being assertive — because it had consequences: at school, at work. But we carry those consequences into places they don’t belong, keeping ourselves small at home or among friends when the space is actually conducive to playing and experimenting. In the woods, or home alone, being slightly louder than usual; breaking into song in a conversation with a trusted friend — these are nice ways into liberating your voice. It’s almost Pavlovian: we make a rational judgment about the consequences in a given space, and then allow ourselves a low-stakes step, a tiny step outside our comfort zone. Crucially, that step must not be met with any external judgment — even though in our heads we might still judge ourselves for it. The work is in creating repeated circumstances where it’s okay to put our voice out there; a memory of that experience is what gets us used to it being okay to play again. It is a slow process of deconditioning — entirely possible, and entirely social.
Once we believe we have something to share — our passion, a song, something to say — and once we locate the source of that, we can see more clearly the value of our musical contribution, the thing that motivates us. With that clarity, we are less and less inclined to stay silent about what moves us, and more inclined to see what we have as a gift to be shared.
So if the shower brings you joy, then definitely, absolutely, sing in the shower. Sing more in the shower. Sing until you can take the shower song into your living room, with someone close nearby. Don’t stop. And if you start to feel unsafe, just leave it and go back to the shower. Maybe the shower is not a closet after all. Maybe it’s an (un)dressing room.
Walls mirror differently than people: they bring the vibration directly back to you. When you sing to people, you make their hearts vibrate with exactly the same music. They can’t take your song from you. Nobody can. It’s a river we’re born into. It comes with being alive. It’s about acceptance.