Selfies get a bad rap, but I think a selfie saved my voice
This is album promo, let’s not lie, but it’s also, I realised, 15 years ago (last month) since I won my second APRA Children’s Song of the Year.
It's been the path that I never knew my musical life would take, chasing songs up into treehouses and down slides, as every day taught me new things, and brought laughs, sunshine, learning, and a bad habit of not remembering where I had just written down the last song. (Housekeeping and filing - not my strong points).
But anyway, this award was announced only just after I had to have some fairly decent surgery on an odd lump on my neck. It turned out to be a ‘thyroglossal cyst’, and rather more massive than the doctor first suspected, wrapped right around my voice box and windpipe.
We had to go to Christchurch, it was pre-quakes in 2010, and my baby Ella and I set off together. We met Kath Bee for the first time, and Arthur Baysting and Craig Smith for a second time. Our family had, in fact, just bought our first home, and it’s not the first song of mine that’s a little autobiographical.
But I never wrote a song about nearly losing my voice. I don’t think I wanted to even consider it a close call at the time. Looking back now, I feel pretty lucky that my eagle-eyed doc didn’t think I was a hypochondriac when I queried the lopsidedness I randomly noticed in a selfie, and instead escalated me for surgery right away. Who knows, maybe it saved my voice?
I went on to record my first album Little Wild Lullabies, and quite a few more songs - according to Every Noise At Once, it’s 334 songs now. (Thank you, Glenn MacDonald).
A lot of these are alternative versions (instrumentals, remixes), and there may be a few missing co-writes, featured on other artists' pages. It's not about the numbers, but a reminder to be grateful, grateful about getting to follow a musical path and work with like-minded humans. So I do feel stupidly lucky that I have got to keep on singing, and that my teen can now advise me on social media etiquette (I took 15 exclamation marks out of this article already).
Little Wild Music song number 335 (give or take) is out in two more sleeps - this Friday on ‘Little Wild Singable Songs: Play, Help, Wonder’
What reminds you to be grateful ?