the song that can make you cry

She walks up to the stage, unassuming, even tiny by some standards. She is carrying her guitar. There is a murmur of appreciation that music is about to start. People are paying attention, but not really. It is background, but it is why they are here. She fumbles with the chord attaching the amplifiers. And then she starts playing.

It is not even three notes into her singing before one knows that she has a special voice, that this is a special time, a time that will never happen again, when she is unknown to the public, but nearly there. Being someone who has heard thousands of talented players, I know. She is a talented player. There is some other classification though for her voice. It is not an Opera quality, it is the quality of the process running through her, the time that it took, the feelings that she felt, the ambitions that she keeps inside herself that nobody will ever really change. Maybe everybody told her it was impossible, maybe they told her that she was great, but the edge in her voice says that those are not the things that drive her. It is becoming easy for her.

Listening, not knowing her habits, her daily lifestyle, it is hard to know if she will keep working as hard as she already has. Maybe she doesn't want to reach the place her voice has already taken her, maybe she doesn't know that she is among a handful of people who have that "thing" that people who have heard her say twenty years later, "oh I remember her, I liked her ...". What is she doing now? She's been cruising around the back halls of the songwriter universe. She's better, but she doesn't know how much better than she was the previous time the wave came through. Her music before had the voice, but not the reach of the emotion. This time it is different. Whether the song story is her story or not is no longer important, she has found the space to climb in around the phrasing and the story and the hopes and fears of the listeners. She is becoming the breath of the emotion. It is a skill extraordinarily few ever approach. If it is approached consciously, it comes across consciously. After it is attained, those around can only hope they don't move the skill too fast into the center of her attention, for she will wake up laughing and fall off for a time. Then it will be work. It will always be work, but she will learn to control the give and take, to move her audience, and then she will have the gift, the gift to tell her stories, her way.

Men can come close to this mystical gift, but they cannot have it, or at least none so far has. The closest to it in my lifetime so far was Paul McCartney when John Lennon was torturing him to do something useful, to imagine that his wife was gone (oh darling), that it was his daughter who was murdered (hey Jude [the obscure])..., then you could almost hear the gift in Paul, but that was loud. She has something different, something quiet, peaceful, and something that only a woman can deliver.

I know I love her. My problem is that I feel like every person in the room feels the same thing. That is how I know. It is my job to know. I hate the feeling of the industry, the quick buck, the distortion of the real reason why we chose to be artists, particularly sound artists. Unlike any other job I have ever had, I know this one is what I was born to do. If I say too much, I will sound like I am scheming, if I say not enough she'll think I didn't feel all of it. There's that place where we all know what we've done to be ourselves as artists, and we are not competing, but it's hard to just jump in right there, particularly with the shooting star. She is singing; she is the shooting star, the comet that makes everyone, including the accomplished say "WOW". I am waiting, and I am listening, because the job cannot be rushed, it has to be love, which grows somewhere on trees or something .... She is the sound, but there are many sounds.

I wonder, will she walk away like every other person with the gift has? I prepare to see her for that last moment. I remember Richie Havens telling the story of the girl from New York, from Soho who sang one night in a club where he was sitting with friends, "everybody came back the next day still raving about her and asked, 'who was that girl', but she never sang there again, was never seen again in that club" -- it was a one night gig. She is not just one night. She is only starting out. She is singing the song that can make you cry ...