9-1-2014

A Hum Becomes A Song

Everybody hums. Multi-dimensional musician/entrepreneur Sherese Chrétien turns her hums into songs, and believes everyone else can, too.

As her composer/producer persona, Sherese Timeless,™ Chrétien pays very close attention to any tune bubbling up into a hum, and any lyric phrases wanting to be heard. They come at completely random times. “It’s happened all my life,” she says, “I’ve spent my life scribbling on scraps of paper and recording hums. Now I finally get to open the floodgates and let them flow!”

She says it is as if, along with the gift of a voice, God has given her a “song garden” full of songs she is here to harvest, delivering the message she is here to deliver.  She believes everyone has a song garden, if they’ll only believe and listen.  Sometimes, it can be annoying, like when you hear the songs in the middle of the night.  Chrétien dutifully gets up and records them, then tries to go back to sleep. Laughing, she describes the experience of hearing another musician’s song garden.

“It’s the funniest thing! I was staying at a boutique hotel in Santa Fe for vacation a couple years ago that was owned by a musician.  I went to sleep and actually started hearing a song that was clearly from his song garden, not mine.  What can I do?  I went ahead, got up and recorded it, then tried to go back to sleep.  I never got a chance to give it to him, and it’s clearly his, so I guess one got away!” she says.

“Sometimes, I’ll hear songs when I can’t possibly stop and record them.  I do get a little annoyed, ‘Really? Now?!’ but I nicely tell the song to come again at a better time, hoping it will.  I’ve probably lost some, too, that way, but what can I do?!” she says.

How does she turn a short hum into a song? “I just keep listening, waiting to hear the rest of it.” she says.  Sometimes she hears just the melody, sometimes it’s just lyrics, sometimes it’s both and occasionally, she’ll hear ALL of the instrumentation as well.

Chrétien tells of a musician friend who says he struggles to write songs, and asks her how she can write so many so easily. “I know him pretty well, and told him I think it’s because he thinks about it,” she adds, “I can’t come up with anything either when I think about it, I have to let go and just listen, just feel.” She shares how she has to try to stay out of the way. “If I try to think and get cute or be a smarty pants with the lyrics, for instance, instead of just listening, I’ll end up with nothing but wasted time, and may lose the song altogether!  They’re kind of finicky that way!”

She makes “listening” and “feeling” songs in her “song garden” sound easy.  But she knows it comes with being willing to trust what you hear and feel without anyone else’s interference or “approval.” Chrétien believes beginning to perform at the age of 3 made her feel as if that was a normal thing to do. “If only I could gather up all the 3-year-olds in the world and show them that they can write songs before anyone tells them any different!” she says, adding, “If we could all continue to believe in what we hear and feel, can you imagine the music we would get to experience?”

Okay, so maybe 3-year-olds don’t have much life experience to write about, she says, but the point is to believe and never stop believing — then, she maintains, they could hear their very own song garden for the rest of their lives.  They could write what they hear, instead of writing what they think people want to hear.

It would be an interesting experiment.  Meanwhile, Chrétien feels grateful that she still believes, and is madly at work trying to gather in her perpetual harvest.

Thanks to her sponsors, you can hear all of Chrétien’s original songs free at Ever Entertainment.®

Eliyora Entertainment LLC.  Ever Entertainment®.  © Paradunai LLC.  All international rights reserved.  All trademarks property of Paradunai LLC.  All personas, concepts and original songs created and performed by Sherese Chrétien.