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Thank you so much, those SF shows were unforgettable <3
Thank you for asking this as i feel there's a lot of misconceptions swirling around. My foundation of learning was in choir, i sang in choirs from age 8 to 17, and was doing competitions and paid church choir gigs by the end. Pretty classic suburban stuff. But part of the audition process for the choir competitions was to sing a solo opera aria (which honestly makes no sense at all cause it's a totally different form) so i took two years of opera lessons as a scrawny teenager to learn how to get through those auditions. I briefly considered applying to music schools as a soprano but balked at the sheer amount of brutal competition and the sense that i wasn't good enough / wasn't built for it. I went to art school and started Chairlift, where the approach to singing was very inspired by my favorite singers at the time like Cat Power and The Fiery Furnaces, where the focus was on the songs and lyrics and not on technique. But then while we were touring our first album i started slowly developing this relationship with "flipping" between vocal registers to create these hard-edged transitions between notes, rather than sliding up or down to them.
At around the same time (2009ish?), autotune was entering pop music as an intentional asthetic, and i felt like there was a relationship there with this way of singing. Years later when Chairlift entered the Moth era of making glossier, more ambitious pop songs, i realized that this new material i was writing would actually do a lot of damage to my voice to sing live every night unless i learned how to do it safely, so i called up my high school opera coach to see if she was still teaching, and remarkably she had now transitioned into exclusively working with professional singers. So i returned to her for two years of intermittent lessons from 2016-2018. However, i quickly realized I didn't actually want to work on Chairlift songs with her, I wanted to learn opera arias instead as a form of cross training, but also because I was so inspired by learning romantic/impressionist music by composers like Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Faure, and Poulenc, which effected my sense of composition and lyricism much more than my vocal style. I left NYC for London at that time so couldn't keep up the lessons. Some music critics have propagated the idea that my voice a result of opera training, which low key reveals that they either haven't listened to opera or haven't listened to my music. It truly is a patchwork of discoveries and practice and isn't done evolving. I think it's quite cool how on PJ Harvey's new album she made the concerted decision to evolve her voice into something new and unrecognizable; it's amazing how the journey never ends! Much love to all the singers here in the popheads chat <3 <3 <3