Chords of Strength

  I knew that the other kids competing were able to hear me sing, and I was starting to really suffer thinking about how I must’ve sounded. I don’t know how, but I kept going to the next round with each cycle, and I even believed they kept picking me on the show out of mercy because they felt bad that I was so sick. I mean, I knew I sounded like I had a problem, and it had to be obvious to everyone else listening as well.

  One night my dad sat with me and said, “David, you may have a medical condition. Do you still want to sing tonight? Or should we just talk to the show people and tell them that we should withdraw?” I thought about it for a while and my reply was, “Dad, I don’t care if I lose or win, I just want to have one last chance to try.” I sang my song for week 6, and I guess I sounded okay; but my belief in myself was starting to dwindle slightly, and my ability to stay as strong as I could was also starting to fade. This was obviously not a regular cold and whatever it was, we didn’t want to make it worse. It was time to see a specialist.

  I really had a great time putting my all into it

  The doctor said that they would have to use an endoscope (a type of camera that they run through the nasal passage) to see what was going on. “Very interesting,” he said. “What I am seeing is really not normal for a child. It’s usually something we see in our elderly patients.” He showed us the video of my vocal cords, and we could clearly see that only one of them was vibrating when I spoke or tried to sing; the other was barely moving. The doctor said it looked partially paralyzed, which could have come from a virus I may have caught when I had bronchitis. The good news was that it was not completely paralyzed, because if it had been, I would be getting no sound at all. At least now, we understood why I had to work so hard when I sang, but I was crushed. When you’re someone who loves to sing, “vocal paralysis” are not words you ever want to hear.

  Especially discouraging was the fact that there wasn’t much we could do about it. Our two options were basically high-risk surgery that could permanently mess up my ability to sing or vocal therapy that would slowly rehabilitate the damaged cord. That sounded kind of vague and wishy-washy to me, but the surgery sounded even worse. That was the only thing I could do. The surgery was out of the question.

  After Star Search and the news of my diagnosis, we hung out in Hollywood for a couple of weeks, meeting with producers and songwriters. Star Search had opened a lot of doors, and we tried to be as productive as possible while things were fresh in people’s minds. We must have met with six or seven different lawyers just to try to learn how things work. People were so helpful, considerate and kind to me, but still, no one seemed to know what to do with me. I still wasn’t able to communicate verbally what I wanted to do musically, and so there was no clear sense of direction for us to take.

  There were times in L.A. when my dad would ask me to sing, or talk to some executive about singing, and I just couldn’t get the words out. Maybe I was overwhelmed by everything, or maybe I really was just too young to get it—but there were many moments where I was at a total loss for what to say. My personality wasn’t yet fully developed, and the only way I knew to truly let go was when I was singing onstage. But you can’t sing for every single second of your life, can you?

  When everything simmered down in California, we went back home where, despite my new diagnosis, I continued to have a few local opportunities to sing. The doctors never told me not to sing, so I sang at our church, and at a few special events. I did the best I could, and simply tried to avoid singing for extended sets. I remember one show at Pioneer Day, which is a state holiday in Utah and kind of like the Fourth of July. The show producers put together some custom arrangements for me, including an orchestral version of “Dream Sky High” with a full-blown orchestra and a background choir. The event itself was held in this grand and elegant hall in Salt Lake, Abravenal Hall. I walked onstage in my tuxedo and sang several songs including “Joyful, Joyful,” “Down by the River to Pray,” and, of course, “Dream Sky High,” trying to enjoy the moment but knowing deep down that my voice wasn’t what it used to be.

  I tried to keep up with my singing as much as I could, but now I was thirteen and getting older, so I was also starting to think about the rest of my life. I couldn’t do more than one or two songs in any performance, and it seriously bummed me out. I didn’t think I could force my voice to work the way I wanted it to. Sometimes you just have to accept things the way they are, I told myself.

  Here I am singing at a wedding in Utah

  I continued with my vocal therapy exercises. I’d go to my voice lessons for a while, and then I’d stop, feeling like the whole thing was a waste of time and that I’d never be able to sing like I used to. My situation was like someone who’s suffered a stroke and needs to retrain certain muscles how to work. I literally needed to train my paralyzed vocal cord how to vibrate again. I did special exercises that helped strengthen the vocal cord little by little, and I learned to turn my head to one side while I sang, to relieve the cord that was doing all the work and to be sure the weak cord was having to vibrate. That seemed to help a little, but it was hard not to feel negative or discouraged at times. Sometimes I thought the whole therapy thing was going nowhere. Other times, I thought, maybe it will work; let’s keep giving it a shot. But all in all, I wasn’t too hopeful; I was starting to give up.

  I thought, how could I possibly be a serious singer with a paralyzed vocal cord that will only get worse with time? Singing was getting harder and harder to do. I didn’t have the energy I used to have when I was eleven—I figured I’d have to come up with other ways to make my life meaningful and complete. But up until now, besides family and friends, music was pretty much the only thing I ever wanted. From the moment, I got the diagnosis, life quickly went from Star Search to soul search.

  At school, I tried to be a normal kid. I wanted to be as unassuming as possible and simply have a life like all the rest of the kids around me. I just wanted to be normal. I would do little gigs here and there, but I was starting to treat it more like a hobby that I loved and less like a career path. It was almost time to start high school and I was excited to get to hang out with my friends and just do what other kids my age do. I started to focus on getting good grades and learning as much as I could so that I could make clear decisions when it was time for college.

  From ninth through eleventh grades I just assumed the singing part of my life was over. I found a way to accept it by trying to be a bit more social and to even start brainstorming about what kind of direction I would take after school. I knew the SAT tests would be coming, so studying would certainly take some time and energy. I wanted to do well so that I could have real options down the line. There were so many subjects that were interesting to me, and there would soon come a time when I would have to make decisions about college and majors—things that I was really looking forward to and wanted to take as seriously as I did my singing.

  Between eighth grade and ninth grade, I rediscovered running, which was an activity that always made me feel relaxed and peaceful as well as made my body feel good. I would run all the way from the house to school and I’d keep going on the track there. Running calmed me down and in general it was a great way to relieve stress. That summer, while I was running at the high school track, I was approached by the cross country coach who invited me to just come work out with his team. He said that as a ninth grader, I could even participate in the meets if I wanted to. I met with them for a party, which meant we were going to go up the canyon and run, then meet at the bottom of the canyon and have a bonfire and just get to know one another as a team. I really enjoyed that, and during ninth grade, I did participate in the high school meets. I continued running on my own a bit, but after ninth grade, I decided not to continue once I was actually in high school.

  I wanted to be as unassuming as possible and simply have a life like all the rest of the kids around me.

  But I couldn’t kid myself too much. Though I was having fun at school with my friend
s, it was also kind of depressing because I felt like I had somehow lost a little piece of my identity. I had spent a good part of my childhood with a microphone in my hand, and now I felt kind of useless. I started to wonder if maybe it was a test from God; maybe He wanted to see how strong I was, how open-minded I could be when faced with obstacles that were out of my control. With that in mind, I tried as hard as I could to see the bright side of things by being grateful for the fact that at least both of my vocal cords were not damaged, and that thankfully, I could still speak and sing a song or two now and again. I wanted to be optimistic. But very often, it was hard to find that bright side. I guess I saw it as a sign that singing maybe wasn’t my path. You know what they say: Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

  CHAPTER 5

  HOPE RISES

  “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Sometimes it takes a miracle to reignite a person’s passion. Sometimes when you least expect it, the tables turn and that scary feeling that has taken hold of you for so long somehow turns into hope. Call it luck, call it help from above, call it whatever you will. As for me, I definitely believe some kind of miracle was at play when my voice, for no understandable or explainable reason, started to gradually feel better again over the period of a year or so from tenth grade to the eleventh grade. Maybe the vocal exercises and just taking it a lot easier vocally had made a difference after all. All I know is that when I tried to sing, I didn’t have to work so hard. My sound was freer, my pitch was improving dramatically and my overall sense of control was getting back to where it was supposed to be.

  I had been able to sing off and on during the previous few years, but only for short periods of time. I would get tired after just a few minutes and this continued for a year or so. But at a certain point, it seemed that gradually I was feeling better and better. After I was about fifteen or so, it suddenly felt like my voice was getting stronger and I could sing several songs at a time. I even started doing gigs again like singing at a wedding for one of my friend’s sister and also for a corporate event that I was going to have to sing for about an hour.

  I was still taking it slow because after all those years with “my condition,” I felt that I’d gotten rusty, and I no longer had the confidence I’d had after the validation we’d gotten at the Idol finale and throughout all the Star Search shows. In many ways, I was afraid to sing, or maybe afraid that I would remember just how much I loved to. When I look back, I think I was scared of rekindling this passion because I didn’t want to have to let it go again. I didn’t want to set myself up for that kind of personal disappointment, and by now the truth is that I was okay with just being a normal kid. If I was naive about singing at age eleven, at age sixteen, it just made me anxious. But I was still grateful for the fact that I didn’t have to suffer through a song anymore—even if I was just singing in the shower.

  Slowly but surely I started to sing again, just to test myself to see how much I could handle. Though the feelings that came up when I sang were still the same as they had always been, the process was a little different because my voice had lowered quite a bit and I was working with a new kind of sound. My taste had also evolved over the years and now I could sing songs by male vocalists that were more mature as I now had a more tenor range to my voice. There were also all these new genres I was exploring, so while I was still hesitant to sing full out, I have to admit that there was also a part of me that really wanted to dive back in. But you know how it is when you’re a teenager: One minute you’re super-excited about something, and the next minute you’re doubting the exact same thing. But when you know something you can’t just “un-know” it, and the one thing I knew for sure was that nothing filled that void, that feeling, that I got from singing. All setbacks aside—insecurity, vocal paralysis and age (to name a few)—I still loved music and I felt that it was time for me to figure out a way to get back into it. I still felt a connection to it that was deeper than any of the setbacks themselves. I couldn’t think of anything else in the world that I cared about more, and every time I would think about my purpose, the answers seemed to come in sounds. In melodies. In feelings. There was no escaping the fact that the music was still after me. When it came down to it, it was really very simple: I would rather sing than not sing.

  At that point, we all decided it would be good to test the waters again by accepting a full-set gig. It had been three years since I’d sung more than a song or two at a time. Three years since I went for it with a full set, and three years since I felt confident enough to do so. I was out of practice and believed that any return to singing would pretty much mean having to start from scratch. Did I have the energy to do it all over again? After giving it a lot of thought and really trying to figure out if this was a door I wanted to reopen, I made a choice. I decided that this was one of those moments in life when I would have to choose optimism. I forced myself back into the saddle by agreeing to sing a full set of songs for a local performance. I didn’t know what to expect, but I made a commitment to do my absolute best. I figured that if I gave it my best and things didn’t work out, at least my conscience would be clear that it wasn’t for lack of effort. My part, I thought, would be to try my hardest and be as positive as I could. Even though everything else felt a bit like a wild card, my intention to give it my all was the one variable that I could control.

  My dad helped me work on the arrangements for the songs and also ran sound for me, and Richard, a friend of ours, came along to play the keyboards. I would start each number by telling the audience a bit about the song and what it meant to me. This was a way of connecting more with the crowd, but also a quick way to help get me in the mindset of the songs’ emotional essence. My dad helped me write out an outline of my ideas, and for the first time onstage I felt that I was no longer seeing my audience through the eyes of a child. I was a little older, a little less naive, and a little clearer about just how much music meant to me. After the whole vocal cord issue, I had a brand-new appreciation for what it means to be able to get up there and sing.

  I felt pretty good after the gig and was happy I made it through the whole set and that my voice didn’t wear out. Somehow, the hardest part was not the singing but having to talk in between the songs. The audience couldn’t have been better though, and they even laughed at a lot of what I was saying although I never thought I was trying to be funny. I think I just have a dry sense of humor that comes through sometimes, and it seemed to that day. I felt natural and calm, unlike the early days when it would often feel like I couldn’t hear the music over the thump of my own heart. The audience’s response was extremely positive. It felt like they were seeing me not as a cute little boy with a good voice but more as a skilled singer with interesting potential. I was happy with how things went, grateful for my recovery and excited about the fact that I didn’t have to suppress my love of singing anymore. I felt happy and hopeful that the door I’d chosen to reopen might lead me to something nice.

  Seeing the many smiles and shining eyes in the crowd that day was a small infusion of encouragement at a time when I needed it most, because a couple of months later, we realized three very interesting things: American Idol was still on, now in its sixth cycle; I was sixteen and finally old enough to try out; and the auditions for the seventh season were just around the corner and taking place in San Diego. I found myself in a very strange situation. Now that I was finally sixteen, you’d have thought I’d jump all over the chance to get on the show. I’m sure many people in my life imagined that I would want to be the first in line. But in fact it was the total opposite. I hadn’t been counting the days in anticipation of this moment. After all those years of being told that I was too young to start a career in music, and then my vocal cord being paralyzed, I had accepted a new reality. After everything that happened (or didn’t happen), I had accepted that maybe singing just wasn’t for me after all and I should
just move on to something more practical like becoming an ear, nose, and throat specialist.

  My parents didn’t push me at all; instead they put the idea out there and let me know that they would help support me if I felt it was something I wanted to do. They would gently remind me of how obsessive I used to be about singing when I was younger, and about the whole crazy L.A. experience with the finalists and Paula Abdul and New York—all of the mayhem of that time. I distinctly remember one conversation when I said, “Mom, what should I do with my life? I know I’m supposed to be in music. But I’m not sure how.” The wonderful mom that she is, she just encouraged me and told me that if I really believed in music, I should follow my gut.

  Don’t get me wrong: I still loved singing as much as I ever had, but love doesn’t necessarily equal confidence, and it certainly didn’t in my case. I was afraid to try, afraid of what I would sound like now as a teenager, a bit out of practice after so much time thinking that singing was a dead end. I knew that to be on a show like American Idol, you really had to be able to sing. I thought it would be a complete waste of time. Why should I go out there just to be rejected?