Bio

Phoenix Wolf-Ray

When I was a little girl, I was a star at my parents' parties. My dad played music and all his friends were musicians, and then after my parents split up, my mom got together with my dad's cousin, who happened to be another musican, so the parties continued with a lot of the same players. I sang at the parties from an early age and I was a hit.

This went on for a few years, me singing my little heart out, feeling like hot stuff and fantasizing about being the next Tanya Tucker. Then at the extreme age of thirteen I was introduced to home cassette tapes and heard my voice, tinny and scratchy. Oh the humiliation! "Nooo!! I sound like that? They've lied to me all this time, letting me think I was good while laughing at me, stupid kid who thinks she's hot..." Oh, thirteen. From that moment on I refused to sing where anyone but family could hear me.

Still, I couldn't stop singing, so the next year when we moved to a big city down south (which was actually Kamloops BC, which if you check it on a map shows you how far out in the bush we'd been) I signed up for choir class. The choir teacher was a competitive guy and liked to enter the class in the BC Choral competitions every year.

He insisted the girls sing soprano; trouble was, I hadn't discovered my upper range. Squeaking in falsetto gave me a terrible sore throat and squeezed the joy from my singing. Turned out, the class did poorly in the competition. Mr. Lewis raged, sulked, called us incompetent, unmusical twits and crushed our tiny egos into the dirt.

I tried to learn the guitar around this time, too, but with all good intentions, my stepdad was a terrible teacher. He'd taught himself to play at the age of eight, and I was already fourteen. He couldn't understand why what he was trying to show me wasn't obvious, just listen, dammit, what's wrong with you? I was anything but a natural. I needed detailed instruction and patient supervision.

The end result was, I quit music. Gave it up cold. I couldn't stop singing, but I was only comfortable singing alone now. My by-now ex-husband got a charge out of such jokes as, "Can you sing solo? So low I can't hear you..." and "Can you sing tenor? Ten or fifteen miles from here... Haw haw"!

I've learned some things (like how to make better choices in men), and got my self-confidence back around singing. The songs, they made do it. Once I started writing, the songs compelled me to sing them for people.

I wrote my first song in '86, when I was nearly thirty. I'd never written anything more than a poem before then, and just one, for English class. It got a lot of attention and made it into the local newspaper (submitted by Mom) but I was ridiculously shy about it; I was, you guessed it, still at the extreme age. I held back the muse for many years. Then, out of the blue somebody said (since he liked to write songs himself), "Why don't you write him a song?"

"A song? What a strange suggestion. I wonder if I could do that?" I struggled over a couple of lines, and a wonderful thing happened. This perfect song poured out of me, complete with its own melody. It was like giving birth without knowing I was pregnant. I showed the song to the boyfriend, who seemed almost offended when he said, "This is... good..."

After that, it was crazy. It was as though all these dammed up songs had been banging at my brain for years but I'd been deaf to them. I wrote a song or two a week for months before the flow slowed somewhat. Songwriting is still a peak experience, better than drugs. Better than ice cream. Better than... well, you get the idea.

I took an intensive two-weekend workshop to open my voice so I could be a better vehicle for the songs, as though they were children I was trying to learn how to parent. Since then my life has revolved around the songs more than my actual children, to their detriment, I fear. I hope they can forgive me that.

I've waited a long time for my muse to come home. It feels good. I work hard to expand my vocal and stylistic range, and I continue to grow and change as a musician and as a person. My music and songwriting progress parallels and reflects my personal growth.

I could not have written most of these songs when I was young, I had to live them first. I'm still living; I'm not in a hurry.