Yap Sesh S2 E5: Featuring Yapper John Lindsey

Anna: Welcome to Yap Sesh. I'm your host, Anna Diemer, and we at VoiceProEd have so much stuff coming up for you—so many learning opportunities. And by that, I mean two, but that is kind of a lot.

We are getting ready for two excellent courses coming up just for you. The first one is on Tuesday, October 21st at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, and it is called Under Pressure, Customizing SOVTs for Professional Voice Users. If Maurice were here, he would be going [sings Under Pressure], so just imagine the theme song for Under Pressure. I think that's enough that we don't have to pay rights for that.

So we’re talking about subglottal pressure. We’re talking about the balance of pressure. We’re talking about what kind of SOVT exercises do what, and how to use those with your voice users who have specific voice needs. What SOVT exercise do I pick? What pitch patterns do I do this on? These are the questions that we get all the time, and this one-hour introductory course aims to answer them.

So if you want to come hang out with us and sing lots of SOVT exercises, we will be doing that on October 21st.

And we are so excited to announce that our flagship course is running again. This will be the fourth time we've run this course. And it is, of course, Singing Voice for the Speech-Language Pathologist. This is the course that is the reason VoiceProEd exists. Maurice and I first came together and gave this course to bring more information about the singing voice to SLPs that might not get all of this in-depth information in just a regular SLP master's program.

And it is a whopping five hours long, and we are now excited to offer it for ASHA CEUs. So if you have been thinking about getting into voice—maybe you're a student or a CF and you want to work in voice, but haven’t really sung a lot in your life and want to learn more about what that's like—this is the course for you.

We have interactive demos throughout the whole thing, and I teach a whole voice lesson live in front of you with one of the participants during SVSLP. So it's one of my favorite teaching moments of the entire year.

And if you are interested, we hope you will join us on Sunday, November 9th at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. We'll go from 12 to 6 Eastern with some breaks in there for you. So it is a long, packed day of learning, but it will be a ton of fun.

You can register for both of these courses on our website at voiceproed.com/courses.

All right—now I can go from marketing mode into yapping mode. Thank you for sticking with us and listening to our course info. I am so excited that today we have another featured yapper. I'm excited that we have John Lindsay with us today. John, say hello and tell us a little bit about yourself.

John: Hi, Anna. It's really good to see you again.

Anna: Thank you for sitting through that whole situation.

John: No, it was great. I mean, they're really wonderful things to offer, so I'm very happy to sit through it.

Anna: Well, thank you.

John: My name is John Lindsay. My pronouns are he/they. I'm an assistant professor of voice at Colorado State University, and I'm a recovering tenor. I now sing mostly baritone.

Anna and I met at the NATS internship this past summer. And because I know he's going to listen to this at some point, I want to say hello to Maurice—because Maurice and I got to work together when I was living in the Houston area. He was my SLP while I was there, and it's just fantastic.

Anna: Oh, well, it's sad that he couldn't be here today because you have a whole vibe with all of VoiceProEd now.

John: That's right. You can tell him hi for me.

Anna: I certainly, certainly will. I love that you said that you're a recovering tenor. I'm interested in hearing more about that—maybe your singing slash voice teaching. So you're a voice teacher now, maybe singing other rep. What's that journey looked like for you? What would you like to share about that?

John: Yeah. So I actually went to Colorado State for my undergrad. I came here, I started as music education, switched to vocal performance after a couple of years, and graduated with a degree in vocal performance.

I went on and got a master's at CU Boulder in performance as well. And then went from there to Minnesota Opera for three seasons as a resident artist. And from there to being a managed singer up until about 2022 or so.

I came into CSU as a tenor, sort of a very light lyric tenor, actually. And by about my junior year, I figured out that that's not what I was—because I finally figured out how to stabilize my larynx and stop it from climbing as I was going up the staff. I was so proud of my high notes. And I came back after a summer and lost like a fourth off the top of my range, because I could finally allow my larynx to sit a bit lower.

And so from that point forward, it was kind of about re-stabilizing the upper part of the range with this sort of newly found baritonal timbre that I was working with. So throughout the time that I was working professionally, I sang everything from comprimario roles to character roles to what people thought I was headed toward—dramatic tenor-ish territory.

I covered Johnson in Fanciulla del West with Des Moines Metro Opera. I sang the Prince in Rusalka, sang Don José, did some of the larger tenor repertoire. But it was always sort of a place where I knew I could do it, but I wasn’t always certain how comfortable it was—pushing my voice to such an extreme and living in this really challenging tessitura.

Eventually my career started to slow down. My daughter was born. I had to deal with a bunch of health issues that all kind of coalesced at one time, and things just needed to slow down for me a bit.

And then in 2021, I was diagnosed with a vocal fold cyst on my left vocal fold. The laryngologist at the time said, you've probably had this for a really long time, but it's very small. So it’s been covert, coming and going. And that made so much sense to me, because I had this sort of inconsistency that I couldn’t attribute to my singing technique.

I knew I had really bad reflux—I’ve had surgery for reflux, all kinds of fun stomach stuff. But when we saw this cyst, it was, oddly, a feeling of relief. Like, I finally knew what was happening.

So I did have microsurgery and had the cyst removed. Did rehab with another yapper you've talked with—Claire Henderson, who's just amazing.

Anna: Love them so much.

John: Yes, they're wonderful. They helped me bounce back from that. And since then, I’ve decided to stay in this more lyric baritone territory. I’ve found so much more ease and musicality that’s accessible to me.

When I was singing tenor rep, it’s impressive, it’s very loud, but I couldn’t necessarily be as musical or as expressive as I wanted to be. Moving into this lower tessitura has been a very welcome transition.

Anna: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing the trajectory of that. I think that's going to be really interesting to the folks—to our yappers out there—who are clinicians working with singers going through some of these same things, like with Claire and Maurice. And for folks newer to this work, being an example of: this is what can happen, these are the choices we sometimes have to help singers make. Choices that are sometimes hard, sometimes full of grief. But ultimately, I’m so glad to hear that you’ve found a place where your voice wants to live right now.

And that’s my big goal as a clinician: to find a place where you’re feeling comfort, efficiency, sustainability, enjoyment, and musicality—all those wonderful things about singing.

John: Yeah, absolutely, Anna. And I think one of the things that’s important to me as a singer and as a teacher now is to be really transparent around things like vocal injury or the athletic capacities we work with as singers.

The cyst was one thing, but I’ve also hemorrhaged before. I’ve had partial paresis. I’ve dealt with MTD, muscle tension dysphonia. A lot of things have happened. And honestly—I know this might sound strange—but I’m grateful for them. Because I had to develop skills to work through them.

Now, when students come into the studio, I can not only refer them to the right professionals, but I can also say: You are not alone. You are not the only person this has happened to. And you’re going to be okay.

Anna: That’s so valuable—for you to have had that experience, and for your students to feel that support. I’m also wondering how you got from singer to teacher. You were singing for so long and continue to sing, which I think is also valuable for our clients. But did you always teach alongside performing? Or did you come into teaching more recently? What brought you into the studio?

John: That’s a really good question. I essentially taught most of the way alongside my professional singing career. At the beginning it was very sporadic. My first real private voice student was an 11-year-old in the chorus of Werther, when I was performing at Minnesota Opera. His name was Alex, and he was wonderful.

So he and I started working together, and he was my first real private voice student. From there I taught other members of the chorus while I was at Minnesota Opera.

Later, my partner and I relocated to Conroe, just outside of Houston. I wound up teaching high school students privately when I was home between gigs. At one point, I had a studio of about 25 students there.

When we found out we were moving to Colorado—my wife was awarded a position in the voice area at CSU—she told them, “My husband is going to lose all of his private students. Is there anything he can do at the university?” They offered me a part-time adjunct position, so I was able to continue teaching.

The first few years I didn’t have many students—just a couple of minors here and there—and I mostly taught lecture-style classes. But eventually, I was very fortunate to be awarded a tenure-track position after a national search. I had filled in for a colleague for a year, interviewed for that same line, and was awarded the position—which was very stressful.

Anna: But very fortunate for you—that's great, to win a national search.

John: Yeah, I mean, I feel incredibly lucky. So this is my third year being full-time tenure track here at the university. And I think I've always known that I really enjoy teaching, but I didn't know how much I enjoyed teaching. And I also didn’t exactly know why I enjoyed teaching so much until I really started getting the opportunity to dive into it full-time about four years ago.

And since then, I've been slowly and steadily developing my pedagogical approach to working with students in the voice studio—in this very vulnerable, exposed, and also incredibly meaningful context that we get to work with people as instructors of singing.

Anna: So you mentioned that you learned why you love teaching so much. Would you like to share? What is that why? Why are you doing this? Why are we here? Why are we doing what we're doing?

John: I think it really varies from person to person. One of the things I didn’t mention about my singing journey from the outset is that I started singing completely by accident. I came to college for singing completely by accident.

I had fully intended to go into the military after high school, but injured myself and wasn’t able to. So that’s how I wound up deciding to go to college for an undergraduate degree in music—essentially as a placeholder: Okay, I’ll recover for the next year and then I’ll try again. Fortunately, I stuck with music and made this entire career path happen over time.

But I think the crux for me, as a teacher, is the connection and relationship that fosters artistic growth in another human being—and in myself. I learn probably more from my students every day than they learn from me, because we allow ourselves to engage this process as deeply and authentically as possible.

I think I was trained very, very well as a singer in terms of the mechanics of the voice and the physiological aspects of what it takes to maintain healthy vocalism, and I’m really grateful for that. I also worked professionally in the opera world for a long time. But one of the things that was missing for me was who I was as a human being beyond the function of my voice and what it could do. Does that make sense?

Anna: 100%.

John: Yeah. And I think one of the things I wish I had been able to find—or offer myself—earlier in the process was this component of my own worth as a person, my own shared humanity with others, beyond just what I could produce.

So I started moving in the direction of a pedagogy that is very relationally focused. It has large components of trauma-informed practice, which I’ve done a lot of research and work around. I’ve had a contemplative or meditation practice for about the past 15 years, so I use aspects of that in my teaching. I also practice non-violent communication, and I use that in the studio with students.

Mainly, it’s about creating an environment that adheres to principles allowing students to open up and be their authentic selves—regardless of what that means and regardless of whether they are “achieving” what we’re going after technically. Because I can’t tell you how many coachings and voice lessons I’ve participated in, watched, or taught where, because we hadn’t reached that level playing field of: we’re both just people in relationship together, the voice couldn’t release.

And in my opinion—this is an opinion, not a fact—that plays a much bigger role in healthy vocalism than we sometimes give it credit for.

Anna: Yeah, I'm just listening and nodding along so hard. I know you cannot hear that because this is a podcast. You can’t see me doing that. Y’all can’t. John can. But that’s so important to me.

I think a lot about that as also a singer who has been in lessons and coachings that have felt less like a place where I could be my authentic self. It’s so important to me to create an environment and a relationship with singers that helps them feel empowered in that way. And even “empowered” can sound extreme—sometimes it’s just about regulation.

We want singers to feel an increased sense that it’s okay to do this thing that’s hard and vulnerable—singing. And how can we as teachers, as clinicians, create an environment and a relationship that facilitates that? Yeah, that’s so important.

John: Yeah, very much, Anna. And I think one of the funny things about the NATS internship this summer is that I came and watched you teach, and I was like, oh thank God. Here’s somebody else. Because it was literally like watching one of my own voice lessons.

You allow so much agency for the people you’re working with, and you’re attentive to their needs, not what you want. You have goals for them, a direction to steer them toward, but it’s not about you. Sometimes I’ll say “mechanically colonizing their technique,” right?

Anna: Love that phrase.

John: Yeah. It’s about: I’m here to facilitate this thing you already know you want to do and already know how to do, because you’re in this room. So now, how do we partner together without making it about some pedantic mechanical approach?

It was so lovely to watch you work. It was really validating for me—because sometimes we get in our little bubbles as voice teachers, and I wonder: How on point am I with this approach?

All of that to say, it was such a lovely thing to watch and get to see you work. And I think another thing I’ve found over the past several years is that this kind of approach is not just “touchy-feely nice.”

It’s been validated in healthcare over and over again: compassion improves patient outcomes and provider satisfaction. It’s been shown that there are neural correlates with compassion that facilitate learning—things you can’t access if you’re in fight-or-flight, or in a people-pleasing state that shuts the brain down. You’re not capable of learning or making technical changes in that place.

So yeah—it’s not just nice. It’s science. It’s backed by neurological studies many times over. And I think one of the shifts happening in voice instruction is that we’re starting to take that seriously.

People like Megan Durham come to mind—she’s written wonderful articles in the NATS Journal. David Sisco just put out this amazing, heartfelt book with instructional strategy. It makes me really hopeful and very grateful to be part of the field at a time when compassion and empathy are being recognized as practical, essential tools for teaching—and also help us be better humans to one another, as a bonus.

Anna: Always a fantastic bonus. If someone wanted to learn more about trauma-informed voice, about relational focus like this, about non-violent communication—all the things you’ve mentioned today—do you have any resources? You’ve mentioned Megan Durham, David Sisco. Those are great places to start. Anything else you’d recommend for folks who want to take their clinical practice along this journey?

John: Yeah, I think—gosh, I've been helped by so many people and so many resources along the way. I think one that comes to mind is Marshall Rosenberg's book Non-Violent Communication. It's his foundational book about that. NVC is a communication style that is based around four primary points: observations, feelings, needs, and requests. And so it's this way of just being very clear and succinct with what we're looking for. So Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

I also, just this past summer, did a certificate through Columbia College in South Carolina on trauma-informed education. It was an amazing resource and very enriching—sort of a further solidifying experience as far as trauma-informed practice.

I think those are the two that come to mind as the most salient for the work I’m currently doing. The other one I would very highly recommend, just for anybody, is Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff. She’s a clinical psychologist based in Austin and has written extensively about the benefits of self-compassion and compassion for others from a psychological viewpoint.

Anna: Excellent. Thank you so much. I'm going to snag those titles out, pop them in the show notes so that y'all can read them, click on them—after you're listening. Please don't do that while you're driving your car. That's usually where I'm listening to podcasts.

John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It is our tradition to have tool time. Tool time. Tool time. Yeah, awesome. So if there is a tool, exercise, or method that you're using right now, or that's on your mind when you’ve been working with students, I would love to hear about it.

John: I think the one that I've been using really often lately is—it’s a silly one, which is part of why I like it so much. I call it the snore inhale. And so I hope that we can get this to record well, but it's essentially inhaling on a snort or a snore sound and then suspending what happens at the end of that before you sing.

So breathe in on the vowel that you're about to sing, but allow kind of a snore sound. And then go—because it gives just enough loft to the palate without feeling like you're having to muscularly activate the palate somehow. It's this very human thing that we all know how to do. And it also opens up the space of the pharynx.

And if you can get there and suspend that and then sing through it, it's just much clearer than me saying, “Lift your soft palate.” It's very succinct, on point. There’s a physical sensation, and it’s silly to boot. So it's one of my favorites lately. Yeah. How about you?

Anna: Yeah, I also have a silly tool. I was working with a client today who is working on strengthening her mode one, kind of belty. I'll often approach this from a—I’m from the South, grew up in North Carolina, now I've made it back—so hollering is the term that I use. But using, you know, Ken Bozeman calls this yell timbre.

So I'll ask someone, “Do you call out to your wife from across the house?” And this client was particularly soft-spoken. So the word that ended up being the thing that she would holler was the F-bomb. So we spent about 20 minutes using that.

The scaffolding, the progression of this exercise, is just to see if we can holler on a particular pitch. So we’re turning off the part of the brain that says, “I’m singing, I’m gonna belt this note,” and going into just like, hey! Right? It doesn’t have to be the F-bomb—it can be “hey, you over there.”

And then slowly turning that into: okay, what if this time we held that out? We’re still not singing, we’re just increasing the duration. What if this time we hit it—hey!—and we add a little scale to that. We’re still not activating the part of the brain that says, “Oh, I’m singing, so when I sing this pitch, I have to go into head voice.” Or, “That’s kind of high, so I’m going to squeeze.”

We’re tapping into the thing babies know how to do when they cry. By hollering something that taps into the emotional, animal part of our bodies, and then transferring that into singing.

So I had a great day because I got to sing the F word a bunch with my client today. I love a silly tool, and I love that you brought one to share with us today.

John: Awesome. Yeah, I’m gonna—I will definitely use hollerin’ in some of my lessons coming up later this week.

Anna: Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. John, if people would like to find you on the internet, where can they do so?

John: I have a website at john-lindsey.com. So you can find me there, find out a little bit more about the teaching method that I use, and a couple videos of me hollering on stage.

Anna: Fantastic. Well, I'll pop that in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you to all of our yappers out there for listening. If there's something you'd like to have us yap about, a guest you'd like us to have on the show, or you would like to be a featured yapper on Yap Sesh, get in the comments, send us a DM, let us know.

We will see you back in two weeks for another episode of Yap Sesh. Bye!