The Bus Shelter Breakthrough (with Jeremy Ryan Mossman, Body Based Voice)

Christopher: One of the most fascinating singing trainings we’ve ever had at Musical U was one where relatively little actual singing happened.

Jeremy Ryan Mossman of Body Based Voice has a fascinating approach, leveraging lip-syncing to tap into your body’s natural wisdom about how to sing well.

Today, I want to share with you the mini-interview we did before his masterclass, where you’ll learn where this unique approach came from and how it all started in the unlikeliest of places… a bus shelter!

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Christopher: Today, I’m joined by Jeremy Ryan Mossman from bodybasedvoice.com. Jeremy is based in Ontario, Canada, and has a fascinating and wide-ranging background, focusing on the singing voice, but including yoga, Feldenkrais, biomechanics, and more.

And here at Musical U, we are such firm believers in the power of the voice for developing your musicality, whether you consider yourself a singer or not. So we’re always on the lookout for experts with unique approaches which can help the musicians in our community sing with more ease, joy, and success.

So we’re super excited to have Jeremy with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month. He’s going to be in coaching our Next Level clients this coming week, and today will be presenting our monthly masterclass for all members on the topic of “Body Based Voice”.

Jeremy, welcome to the show!

Jeremy: Thanks for having me.

Christopher: So I’d love to start with my favourite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is, what does musicality mean to you?

Jeremy: That’s a really interesting question, and I think that nothing exists in isolation, and that’s a big part of the platform that I stand on with the holistic kind of voice education I offer. And it’s not just voice education. It’s really holistic performance education, because we often have training that’s separate.

We take our theory classes. We take our aural skills classes. We take our singing classes.

But they have to happen together, and they have to happen sometimes together in front of an audience.

So I think musicality is a part of expression, and that’s sort of the end game when it comes to what I do, is that at the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re expressing something through our voice.

We’re expressing feelings, we’re expressing thoughts, we’re expressing our emotions, and it’s coming through our voice, and it’s in relation to the music that’s accompanying us.

Assuming that we’re accompanied and not a cappella, but even still, even a cappella, there’s a relationship to the space and a relationship to the audience. And so I think musicality is rolled into that is rolled into the way we express ourself.

Christopher: Terrific, yeah. And we’re very much in favour of that holistic perspective on music-making here at Musical U, we try and integrate everything we do. So that even if you’re working on a particular skill, you’re not losing sight of that bigger picture of what is the music you’re trying to create, what are the sounds you’re making, and how do all of the skills you’ve been developing factor into that.

I mentioned thre that you have a fascinating background. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your story, how you got started in music and how you came to explore all of these different areas that you’ve now integrated into Body Based Voice.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think, you know, like, I hear so many stories that are similar in that it was all an accident. It wasn’t pre-planned. It wasn’t what I meant to, what I thought I’d be doing with my life.

Not that I’m at all upset about it! But I got ahead, before I went to high school, I took a summer school course, and that set me a little bit ahead in high school, and I had to take a grade ten class, and I was already playing saxophone and piano, so I couldn’t take band and nine and ten at the same time. And so they’re like, well, why don’t you take vocal music in grade nine? You can get a grade ten credit for that, and you’ll be doing the grade nine theory and everything.

So I was like, sure. And I’d never really sung before, and I liked it, and I wasn’t particularly good at it. And I just sort of wound up finding myself in a musical.

I was doing Oklahoma in a community theater suddenly, which led to another musical, which led to another musical, which led to voice lessons. And at some point in this sort of, like, late teenage years, I developed a resonance that I am very grateful to a bus shelter for. Cause I’d be alone in this glass encasement and just belting away anything that I felt like singing, that I’d heard that in my feelings, like, in my skin, felt really good to hear.

And I just wanted to feel that come from me. And this bus shelter was the place. It was alone. It was so resonant.

And so I always say, like “Bette Midler and the bus shelter taught me how to belt”, for the amount of time that I spent in there, like singing “Wind Beneath My Wings”.

So now you know me!

And so, you know, one thing led to another. I wound up performing professionally when I was in high school in Canada, and then I wound up going to the University of Miami for musical theater performance and pursued the New York thing.

And through this time, everybody always treated me like a voice teacher. They were always asking me, is my technique good? Did that sound good? And they’re asking me and not everybody else. And I’m thinking “well, why are you asking me? I don’t know”.

But then I’m saying “well, I think the placement could be x, y or z” and answering them with some sort of clinical talk, as if I knew.

So I was treated like a voice teacher and also acted like a voice teacher, without knowing anything intellectually. So I did the performing thing for a bunch of years.

And then I moved home to Canada. And found myself teaching in college. And I realised day one, I did not know how to teach. And so I started to read the books, find learning communities, learn different voice models, which led me to biomechanics. And the understanding of the voice in a mechanical way, a reductive way. This muscle does this, this muscle does that. So if you want this kind of sound, you combine this muscle action with this muscle action. Very mechanical, very reductive, but very powerful to train my ear.

But I realised there was more. And so I started to investigate yoga to understand the voice-body connection.

And that led me to more, which was like Feldenkrais, because I found a mentor who was teaching in this different way, a way I’d never experienced before. That was like a mystery why my voice felt so good. And possibilities expanded so much without doing anything that involved me thinking. It was all movement-based and weird sounds with my mouth, weird shapes, like putting my tongue in one cheek, all this weird stuff. But my voice was, like, coming alive in a way I’d never felt.

So I started to pursue Feldenkrais, which really showed me holistic, experiential pedagogy. How you help somebody grow without telling them what to do, which is huge.

And that training got put on pause because of the pandemic. And somehow I wound up finding biotensegrity. Which is really an important emergent model that fills in the blanks where biomechanics leave off.

Biomechanics is this model of the body from the 15, 16 and 17 hundreds that likens us to a machine. Pulleys and levers, parts that have specific jobs.

And in reality, it’s not like that. We are a unified organism. We are a functional whole. We don’t have parts that are separate from one another. Our muscles connect to one another. They’re not doing different jobs from one another, but they’re working together.

And you can feel that. Like, if you make a muscle, you go, well, I’m flexing my bicep, but feel around your arm. Your tricep is lengthening, it’s flexing too. Your forearm, your fist, your chest. You know, this is not just bicep.

But because of biomechanical models, we think to only look here. So biotensegrity is using the laws of mother nature to understand biology. And that’s all biological organisms, all living things, viruses and slime molds and trees and plants and animals and us. We are all made of the same laws, and it’s really different. And that’s where fascia function comes in.

And so, like, just one thing spiraled into the next, into the next to the next, from voice-centric things outwards to adjacent areas of understanding that make voice make more sense as it is in the body.

And this is why your first question is so important to me, is because we can bypass so much thinking in voice training if we think, what am I expressing here? What is the musical phrase? Like, what am I trying to emit for the audience? And go right to the end game and then back up if we need to back up. But I’ll do certain things in the masterclass, in the workshop that’ll kind of prove this point.

There’s a lot of knowledge already in our body. We already know a lot, and we don’t have to be here to do it. We can do it through behaviour.

So my origin story is kind of, you know, a big spiral into the voice and then out from the voice, but it’s all to just understand the biggest picture I can get to.

Christopher: That’s tremendous. There was so much there that I wanted to follow up on, and I need to make sure we’re not here for 3 hours.

But I said to you before we started, I was super excited for today’s masterclass, and I’m now even more amped because, yeah, so much of what you just said relates to how we approach things, and in particular in the context of Next Level coaching, how our coaches are really teaching people or encouraging our clients to focus on the sound, focus on the output, and then put the pieces in place to get you there.

And, yeah, can’t wait to hear more in the masterclass. I love that image of you at the bus shelter belting Bette Midler, no less!

And it’s funny because I think, in a lot of ways, that encapsulates the moment we are most trying to get most of our members to.

So a lot of them at this point, are already on board with singing. They’re using singing. They’re diving into our singing stuff.

But when people come to us for the first time, you know, if it’s a hobbyist guitar player or it’s someone who’s been playing piano for a few months, singing isn’t necessarily even in their consciousness. They’re not even considering going in that direction.

And when we say, you know, how powerful it is or how meaningful it can be or how moving emotionally, I think until you have that kind of “bus shelter experience” of “I’m feeling something kind of magical creating this sound and doing it with nothing but my body”, I don’t think you really understand how pivotal that biological relationship with your voice can be, right?

Jeremy: Yeah, 100%. And even like professional singers, this was what happens in the best case scenario on stage is it feels like you’re outside of yourself.

And a common experience on stage is I’m in my head. And I hear that all the time. Singers are in their heads on stage. They get off stage and go “ah, I didn’t take the right breath” or “oh, I didn’t get my soft palate high enough”, and they go to the thing that they didn’t do.

But it’s all like this idea of what they didn’t do where, you know, we have multiple intelligences, and so much of the reverence we have for learning is in an intellectual capacity. We learn through information, we learn through facts. And that’s how the mind works. That’s how it learns, is through logic.

But our emotional intelligence is something completely separate from that. It doesn’t learn from logic. And our kinesthetic intelligence or kinesthetic quotient or KQ is a different language for learning as well, and it’s behavioural.

And so there’s so much of what I’m aiming for is for the learning to be about behaviour and not about the information that we try to create behaviour from, like, muscling our mind into our matter, but instead giving our body lots of experiences. And our mind’s gonna go “oh, I see something shifting here”, or “oh, that really felt like you did this with the breath”.

And you’ll glean the patterns from the experience of doing rather than from the information level, which keeps you in your head. That’s where you’re gonna revert to if you feel like you’re off track, instead of having strategies front-loaded in your own system.

Christopher: Absolutely, yeah. Wonderful. Well, give us a little teaser or a taste of what you’ll be covering in the masterclass today.

Jeremy: Sure. There’s a story. I’m a storyteller!

There was a student that I was working with some years ago, and they were having quite a hard time shifting out of their sort of default setting. And we all have one. You know, when I open my voice up, it’s like this.

And they were having a real hard time shifting from there, which is important for vocal freedom. Ultimately, you want lots of possibilities to be within your system so that you can be spontaneous and not stuck on stage. And we were really not getting very far very fast.

And somebody clued me into the fact that they were doing this lip syncing competition on social media. And so I went and looked at their content, and what I was seeing was exactly what good singing and variety of singing and different styles looks like. It was as if she was really singing.

And I watched Drag Race, and sometimes you’ll see in the lip syncs at the end of the episode, there’s a drag queen, it looks like they could really be singing. The illusion is really good. And others are just moving their mouths, and you can tell, like, if your voice was on, that’s not what it would sound like.

But some people, like, they just are able to empathise with the sounds that they hear, and their mouths are making the right shapes, and it even looks like they’re breathing with the music.

And so the next lesson I had with them, I just asked them, would you sing this – instead of out loud, would you do it silently, like a lip sync? And they kind of gave me the side eye, like, are you aware of something? And I didn’t say anything. I had total poker face.

And so they did the lip sync, and we talked about the experience of it, because she started to recognise movements, internal movements, internal feelings, alignments, breath, different shapes in their mouth that we talked about a little bit.

We investigated a little bit, and then when they turned their voice on, like, everything was different, these possibilities emerged, because what I now realise is we created a different feedback loop.

When the sound is on, you’re paying attention to the way you sound, and you’re trying to go like “oh, that’s not it” or “I want that easier”.

But when the sound is off, you can feel the sensations, you can feel the movements that lead to the sounds and actually bypass habits.

And so this inspired a major aspect of my pedagogy that I’ve shared with Broadway stars that are, like “what?!” Like, they just suddenly can feel so much more when their voice is off.

And it clarifies on a movement level. And singing is movement. There’s neurological research on singing is movement, and it clarifies that movement level of what we’re doing that is so imperative to what we want to see emerge.

And so what we’re gonna be doing today is a little sequence that is all about “voice off”, to be able to tap into the sensations of singing, the movements of singing. But in a variety of different styles just so we can expand, expand, expand.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I can tell this is going to be a lot of fun today. I can’t wait.

If you’d like to know more about Jeremy and his work, do check out bodybasedvoice.com.

Thank you, Jeremy, for joining us for this quick pre-masterclass interview, and I look forward to having you back again on the show sometime soon.

Jeremy: My pleasure. And me too!

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Christopher: Awesome. I so enjoyed that conversation with Jeremy.

I wonder, have you ever had that kind of “bus shelter experience”, where you really connect deeply with your singing voice and start to feel how powerful it can be for your own musicality and music making?

You can learn more about everything jeremy does atbodybasedvoice.com, we’ll have a link in the show notes.

I’m going to be back next episode to share a segment from that amazing masterclass to give you a little taste, a little experience of this fascinating approach to singing.

I took part myself as we went along, and I have to say it was. It was truly mind-expanding the impact it can have to explore with your “voice off”.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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