The Kindness of Strangers

and the wisdom of sensation

Last Sunday I fell off a Citi Bike. It was one of those motorized bikes that zipped through the city with an arrogance, past the finance bros, past the delivery boys with their packs of pizza on their backs, past the wealthy wives and the spoodles and the laborers and the children and the tired mothers. 

I sped past them all. Full of determination and pride in my speed. I played with fire and picked up my phone out of the pouch of my bag which was in the basket in front of the handlebars. In the blink of an eye I saw a car door open in front of me, without time to think, I had made contact with the vehicle and fell with a huge clunk onto the concrete. My phone flew out of my hand, smashed on the road and my arm begun to sting. 

My body has been hurt but I don’t know where. I lay on the ground, my eyes level with the road, suddenly New York feels very silent. I don’t move. I’m fine, I know I’m fine, but I am hovering in a liminal space, scarily aware that I have escaped a horrible fate by a hair or two. It is strangely peaceful to lay there. Waiting, for a stranger. Will anyone come? 

I feel invisible in New York and honestly, I love it that way. I relax into the chaos of this city because I know whatever way I turn up, on any given day, no one will be too phased or surprised. New Yorkers have seen it all.

If you have taken the subway for any real period of time, you have probably seen a serious crime scene. You may have even seen someone jumping in front of the tracks or at least people talking about it. A homeless man having a psychotic break. A girl crying in the priority seating after being dumped for someone better looking. A young mother selling mango slices, desperate for money to feed her child. And if you haven’t seen one of these things, then frankly, you’re not looking.

You’ve probably also experienced the kindness of strangers. New Yorkers mind their own business for the most part, but when they are needed in a crisis, I have seen people risk their own lives to help someone they don’t know. 

A young man rushes down to meet my horizontal eye line on the black tarmac. He asks if I’m okay. I mumble with embarrassment, yes I’m fine. He puts the bike back on its feet, the motorized ones are so heavy and he struggles to balance it. I try to help him but it becomes clear that my hand is now quite sore and the grazes on my arm are screaming at me.

I have a lot of questions. Why would I look at my phone on a bike? Why would I play with fire like that? Why would that person not look before opening that door? And why would they leave and drive off? Why wouldn’t they check on the person who had been thrown to the ground by their carelessness? My carelessness. All that carelessness. 

And the Kindness of Strangers.

Richard Sandler, New York

Richard Sandler, New York

Richard Sandler, New York

Richard Sandler, New York

There are times in my life when I realize I am moving too fast for my body. Times when I observe my need for speed and how I try to gain a feeling of control in a world where I feel so often powerless to change the things I wish to change. 

I feel myself tempting fate, chasing the high of being too close to the edge, the intoxicating potentiality of a moment, that euphoric stupor of being on the winning side! And harnessing it by not being crushed by it. Yes, I like beating the odds. 

But here’s the thing. We are not invincible. The intelligence of my body far exceeds the racing of my mind. She speaks softly to me, until she can no longer….. IF YOU DON’T SLOW DOWN WELL I’LL MAKE YOU GOD DAMMIT.

Something like that.

There’s a reason I like going fast. When life is a blur, I can’t hear the sound of my secret tapes running. And honestly, that’s a nice change of scene. What are Secret Tapes? Aside from being the title of a song I wrote and never released (cue future post), they’re mental tapes that run on replay. They’re secret because they happen in my head. I know they’re delusional, but they’re mine. And that feels good. They’re tapes because they run on loop. When they hit the end they rewind themselves and start again.

There’s a thrill to flying through the world turned all the way up, unfazed and unhinged, roaring and untouchable. It’s insatiable.

But the body knows better.

C.S Lewis says pain is G-o-d’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He says, ‘we can ignore even pleasure, but pain insists upon being attended to.’

Insists. What a firm, serious word.

I feel the sharp edge of life and how unbelievable it is to be here at all. I feel the temptation to flirt with that messianic vigor, and yet there is the grace of my vessel to keep calling me back to sensation. 

I. Am. Sensation.

My friend Alex Toth plays in a few bands but one of my favourite projects of his is a thrashy punk band he started called Alexander F.

For that album, he wrote a relentlessly weird and cathartic song called I Am Sensation. It was written after returning from a silent meditation retreat (many beautiful things happen after silence, see almost every archival post on my Substack). This song has been there for me through many seasons. Mainly the ones when I am tempted to flee myself. It’s a fucking banger too. I suggest turning it up very loud as soon you finish reading this.

To sense ourselves as a body is the first step to sensation.

Hand on cup. Cup on table. Finger in splint. Pressure on nerve. Bone wrapped in fascia. Ibuprofen on tongue. Neosporin on cut.

I can’t think of a more primal sensation than to make sound.

People may find this curious but I’m actually very nervous to sing without a microphone. I find my voice is shaky without amplification. I hear the rough edges in a way where I can’t control them. With good microphone technique I can gather the rough edges and emphasize them, make them intentional. I can hold the mic toward my nose and highlight the nasal bone conduction to sound like Michael Jackson or the French singer Camille, harnessing that thin top-range that cuts the air like a horn.

If I move the microphone down to my jaw I open up all the depth of frequency range. The low end gets brought forward, my throat is sovereign, everything resounds in a warm chamber. My tongue lifts and the mouth becomes a perfect round orifice for resonance, a cave, an invitation, a siren. 

With my microphone I can manipulate my voice into a character, a being, a feeling. It’s the paintbrush and all the vibrations are, of course, the colours I paint with.

I say vibrations because that is what they are, long before they are ever sound. 

And, the body is sensation long before it is feeling.

My vocal coach would paint this concept to me in a terrific diagram of scribbles. I still have the piece of paper to prove it.

Drawing by Cheryl Mcleay

The different coloured highlighters show the various palatal placement for air. Soft palate, mid palate, hard palate. Vibrations hitting surfaces. Creating reflections. Becoming sound. 

More and more, I feel the world is just one huge series of surfaces for the reflecting.

Singing without a microphone, for me, is like singing without being able to manipulate the sound. I can’t amplify one part of who I am and disguise another. I can’t direct the focus of the audience. I am in the hands of the beholder. Or in this case, the hands of the ears?

I like the idea of ears having hands.

Drawing by Casey Burns

Or maybe it’s like coming back to the campfire. The humility of a lone voice singing in the dark lit only by the burning of embers and the hum of bugs and the witness of stars. No depth of field or tight focus. The velocity of sound is controlled only by the depth of my breath and the support of my muscles. There’s no middle man.

It’s a bit like how I think of this newsletter, actually (neat segue!).

I turn up here with nothing in between you and me.
No algorithms sending you to the successful sides of who I am.
No A&R curating the aesthetic! (*vomits*)
No publicist highlighting key points.
No microphone.
No performance.

I am consciously choosing to make many facets of myself seen here. Sometimes that’ll be music but a lot of the time it wont.

And truthfully, the reason I probably don’t like the sound of my voice without a microphone is because it reveals sides of myself I don’t recognize.

‘People are afraid of things they don’t understand’

- Joni Mitchell

There are noises inside of me that are so unfamiliar, raw and untouched that they feel like they need to be protected. And they probably do. Something revealed in that unadorned sound of my voice is foreign and a little unnerving to me.

I’ve given my life to trying to understand my instrument on a deep level. The resonance of it, the colours I’m capable of achieving though subtle gestures with my body, hands and the shape of my mouth. I have made it my study to investigate my voice under the scrupulous magnifying glass of a microphone.

But without amplification, I am left simply with the voice I was born with. The same sound that came out of me when I dangled my legs over the helm of my fathers boat in New Zealand, coasting on Lake Rotoiti, staring out at an ancient mountain with the ghosts of Maori ancestors orbiting around me. It’s the rawest manifestation I have. 

I. Am. Sensation.

To sing or to sound is to experience the most primal sensation of being.

The hum of air in various spaces inside my body.

Drawing by Tade Garbem

My vocal coach was named Cheryl McLeay. We met on a kids TV show when I was about 11. She was firm with a mischievous sense of humour and I took lessons with her right up until I left New Zealand in 2007 to begin recording my first album.
She passed away two years ago.

Cheryl taught me how to see my whole self, and use my whole self when I sing. To see my body as an instrument. She had this irreverence for the breath which I always found hilarious and a rather surprising stance for a vocal coach. While other teachers preached diaphragmatic breathing and flowery techniques for the breath, she rolled her eyes and shouted ‘The sniff of a rose is enough! Nothing more and nothing less!’

What’s the point of having all that breath and nothing to support it? You need only a little air to sing, she’d say. It is the body and every muscle in it that sustains and supports the air, therefore, translating it into, sound and colour.

My vocal warm ups actually involve no vocals at all (this video comes from my course with Soundfly). They are all muscle work outs intended to train the mind to transfer muscle tension away from that tiny vocal ligament in my throat. In activating other muscles when I go for big notes (I’m looking at you, eyebrows), I learn to keep the jaw loose like jelly and the throat relaxed like a footless sock. 

Photos by Chester Travis from Primal Heart Tour

It’s a tall order. How do you learn to activate every large muscle in your body while simultaneously leaving the muscle you associate most with making sound, completely relaxed?

How can you activate sensation in every part of the body except the part you have been taught all your life is responsible for the momentum? 

For some reason I can’t help but draw parallels here to life.

What does it mean to keep the body present while the brain runs amok?

To awaken my faculties for action (brain, body, heart) while keeping still my soul?

I think of the soul as something that is by nature ineffable. Capturing it is like trying to measure the infinite with the finite. Such ephemera cannot be bound to metrics! It defies time and space. 

Can we relinquish our desire to control and contain the ineffable in us? Can we take the pressure off of our souls and say, just be a soul….. Just be you. I’ll do the rest. I’ll activate all the other muscle groups so you can stay soft and trusting. So you can flow and be safe to expand. I’ll keep the walls of the container up to hold you. I’ll hold down home base. You, old soul, go soar !! And I’ll create the infrastructure for when you fall. I’ll build the house for you to rest. 

‘Your deepest truest self is not yet home. It quickly gets scared. Since your intimate self does not feel safe with you, it continues to look for others, especially those who offer it some real, though temporary, consolation. But when you become more childlike it will no longer feel the need to dwell elsewhere. It will begin to look to you as home.’

- Frederick Buechner

Watercolour by me

I. Am. Sensation. 

I. Am. Sensation. 

Body on hot road. Finger in splint. Cheek on tarmac. Bike hitting car door. Steel on skin.

Put your attention on the place where two surfaces meet. 

I am vowing to slow down this week. To listen to my body so my soul can sing. 

I have a post-it note on my bathroom mirror that says:

It can take a long time to make a home inside yourself.

Or as Miles Davis put it (more eloquently)….

…..‘it takes a long time to sound like yourself’.

Till next time,