For a singer, the only solution for nerves (and the resultant disease, “cotton mouth”) is a humble little thing called “acceptance.”

Nerves are nerves. We get anxious or we overthink something and, “wheee!,” there they are.

No amount of water from the fountain, a cooler or 10-gallon plastic bottle is going wet your whistle enough to overcome a case of nerves before that callback, meeting with the director or producer, or life-changing performance opportunity.

Truly, the best way to deal with nerves is not to focus on them at all. Don’t expend good energy on trying to suppress something very normal. Accept nerves as part of your current condition.

Yeah, some singers go nutty with their water and throat sprays, lozenges, etc., because –at that point/by that time — it’s too late for them to treat the cause and they are now stuck treating the symptom.

How to avoid the cause?

Train your body to lead your voice, not your voice to lead your body.

Train athletically, incorporating your body into your voice, not just leaving your vocal cords to do all the heavy lifting.

Don’t think against yourself. Circumvent the mind by first training your spirit into your singing. The use of energy is crucial, whether you want to conquer a stage or a stadium.

Train body, spirit, voice in that order and the mind won’t be able to play the naughty tricks we like to play on ourselves.

Like talking ourselves out of our passion for singing, bringing up old wounds, rejections, resentments, criticism, childhood traumas… ferget ’em!

As in a 100 meter dash, when we train our voices athletically, nerves disappear at the sound of the starting pistol (or at the bell tone of our audition song). There can be no nerves, nor any awareness of nerves, when we are only focused on winning the race.

Interesting thing about learning how to sing and making it big and loud and round and warm and high and low and gorgeous and all…is, once we finally acheive that vocal apex, we have a tendency to forget what thrilled us about singing in the first place which, uh, “used to be” that direct, electrical and emotional connection between ourselves and our audience.

It was almost better when we didn’t know what we were doing, right?

Now we’re so good, we thrill ourselves every time we open our collective mouth.

We basically sing love songs to ourselves.

After all of our vocal working out, we now believe that a perfect voice is the perfect choice.

It’s not.

Someone may have a chiseled body defined by years of lifting weights and exercise, but if all they ever do is just stand there pointing out how great their lats, pecs, quads, etc. are, it gets pretty damn dull pretty quick, doesn’t it?

So why do we do that same thing as singers?

How many cabarets do we have to sit through with singers affecting emotion through vocal hi-jinks?

How about those musical theatre “actors” who stomp and knit their brow or scrunch up their face to show emotion?

(Yawn.)

We are singers. We sing the songs.

We can’t let the songs sing us.

If we “fake it,” all of us end up in Performance Hell where it’s more important to remember all the words and hit all the high notes. Fun, huh? The real drama on stage ends up being the game of catch-up we play with ourselves.

Not fun. Not dangerous enough.

Definitely not an artistic experience.

A live performance has to be electric.

Every time.

A live performer has to be present.

Consistently.

And a song is an ongoing journey that a singer takes the audience on.

Step by step by step.

Otherwise, the song sings the singer.

And we can’t have that, can we?

So what should we do?

1) Have fundamental, great technique;

2) Know our material upside down, inside out, backwards and forwards, fast, slow and in a foreign language if need be;

3) Get on stage, forget about 1 and 2 and focus on who you’re singing to and why you need to sing to them. Create the question, create the debate, make it a conversation and let it fly.

How many of us have heard the old chestnut, “Don’t sing a song from the show for your audition!” or “Don’t ever sing a composer’s song for the composer in an audition!”?

Let’s take a look at these urban-legend-schools-of-musical-theatre-thought for a moment, shall we?

1. “Don’t Sing A Song From The Show”

Hooboy, this makes no sense whatsoever. Since, reasonably, we don’t know the songs from a new show that has yet to open, we must be talking about revivals; stuff that has been done to death already.

A year or so ago, I saw a listing for “Fiddler On The Roof” on the Equity website where they specifically requested that artists not sing a song from the show for the audition. It was one of those theatre groups that traditionally hires two or four Equity artists for their community musical out in the boonies. I’ll keep the organization’s identity private so as not to embarrass them (*cough, cough* Performance Riverside…). But if it’s a revival…who cares if someone auditions with a song from the show?

Really, how does one cast a legendary role like Tevye by listening to a bunch of old duffers sing “Some Enchanted Evening”?

Thirty-two bars of “If I Were A Rich Man” aren’t good enough?

Should Golde bring in something from Madame Butterfly, perhaps?

Maybe Yente can do something from Rent…that would be really good.

And, beyond that, if, after you have sung your audition with material from another show and you’re asked to stay and read, do they also give you sides from another musical?

“Since we don’t want to hear songs from Fiddler – as we are casting Fiddler – please read this script from Hello Dolly as it has nothing to do with Fiddler either…”

Bottom Line: If you have the character’s song in your back pocket and you’re right for the part in age, range, looks and talent…just sing it. At callbacks, everybody will be singing the same songs anyway!

2. “Don’t Sing A Composer’s Song For The Composer”

Uh huh. And safe to assume here that Stephen Sondheim would rather hear an Andrew Lloyd Webber tune from Phantom instead of something from his own insanely deep catalog of Pulitzer Prize-winning material.

If you have the chops and the courage to show off those chops, then do something the composer wrote. Why play it safe like everyone else? It’s an act of risk and artistic respect and you’ll be remembered for doing it.

Regardless, if you get in their new show, you’re going to end up singing their material anyway…. Show ‘em you can do their stuff now.