From the Oracle
Dispatches
News, tour writing, and voice notes from Tanya.
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Your Mouth Already Knows What To Do
Every student I teach practises this, even though almost everyone resists it at first because it feels silly. You stand in front of a mirror, you put your hands on your own face, and you let your hands trace the shape your mouth wants to make. Not the shape you think a vowel should look…
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The Container Makes the Sound
I always start this lesson with a glass of water. Not literally, most days, but the image does the real teaching. Pour water into a tall thin glass and it becomes a tall thin column. Pour the same water into a wide shallow bowl and it spreads out flat and wide. The water doesn’t decide…
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Breathe Out First
When a student comes to me tense in the neck and shoulders before they’ve even sung a note, I know exactly where to look. It’s almost never their voice. It’s their breath, and more specifically, it’s the half of the breath cycle everyone gets backwards. Ask most people how they breathe and they’ll tell you…
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The Instrument You Can’t Put Down
Every other musician gets to walk away from the thing they’re tuning. A guitarist can hand off a badly strung guitar and blame the guitar. A pianist can walk into a hall, sit down, and if the piano’s out of tune, everyone in the room knows it’s not personal. But a singer doesn’t have an…
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A Kerala invitation, revisited
Back in a 2024 profile for Bold Journey Magazine, Tanya spoke about a breakout season of shows, including an invitation to perform at a concert in Trivandrum, Kerala, that October. The Trivandrum invitation landed in the same stretch as her debut solo concert and a run of festival dates on the West Coast, part of…