About Carrie

My First Great Triumph 

My first great triumph in music took place in the 6^th grade, when I was chosen to sing the coveted “Five Gold Rings” line in the Twelve Days of Christmas for the Parson’s Elementary Christmas pageant.  It was a great moment, one I can still see in my mind’s eye.  Really.

Now fast forward ten years or so.  I had been singing in occasional choirs and around campfires, always glowing when someone commented on my lovely voice.  But a great shyness had descended upon me and singing solo was really not an option.

After college, I fell into a career in computer programmer, back when this was called Data Processing (DP).  To give you a feel for the times, I was the only female programmer in the DP department, so when the secretary took a break, naturally I was selected to cover the phones.  Here I am in the photo on the right, with short skirts and long hair I tried to straighten with Dippity Do and huge pink rollers.   

I met my husband, Ed, at work when he dropped my card deck in the computer room.  And we built a good life together near LA, one we still share.  It amazes me sometimes that I have had the good fortune to love and be loved by someone, to have a daily partner, for over 30 years.  We spent weekends, summers and holidays with his two kids, Katherine and John, who are now both grown and living near us, with children of their own.  As for singing, well, it was relegated to a little Christmas caroling at work.

An Important Choice

So more years passed, and one day I thought I might go back to college to get an MBA.  The application arrived in the mail and I set it on the coffee table.  And as long as it was sitting there, I had nightmares of being back in college.  You know, the ones where you go into a class and find that there is a test you didn’t know about.  Or find out the day before the final that you are registered for a class you never attended.  Or that great favorite, where you are in class and look down to discover that you are in your pajamas.

Well, obviously, this was not what I was meant to do.  So I tossed out the application and thought, why don’t I spend that time, money and effort doing something I always wanted to do?  Why don’t I study singing?

I was working at the time in the Hollywood area.  I looked in the yellow pages and there it was, an ad for “Al Berkman, Vocal Coach to the Stars.”  Oh, my heart beat fast!  It took all my nerve to call him up.  I actually asked him if it was too late for me to study singing.  After all, I was over thirty!

Well, Al was from the Catskills and had been rattling around the music scene for many years.  I recall an autographed photo of Vic Damone in his lobby.  I was so scared at the audition.  I expected that he would either reject me outright or tell me I was the greatest singer he had ever encountered.  Instead, he said, “OK, let’s get to work.”

And that’s what we did.  It was great.  I practiced diligently every day, singing into a foam-stuffed coffee pot in the closet (Al’s suggestion), so as not to disturb the family.  As one of Al’s students, I helped put on shows for rest home patients, veterans and senior citizens.  We did a lot of music from the forties and fifties to Al’s stride piano, and Hava Nagila was a big hit at the Senior Citizens’ Hall, just before Bingo.

It was great.  Really.

The Albums

Somewhere along the line, in my late thirties, I started taking piano lessons and writing songs.  I worked with a musician, Rich Wenzel, on arrangements, and after a time a style emerged and then an album.  This first album, Let’s Make Love, is sensual and bluesy, full of that hormonal flood that runs through “older women” of around forty or so. 

When I listen to these songs now, I am taken back to that intense yearning, to the fun of just being so electric.  I hope you’ll listen to these songs and just enjoy the thrill of being alive.  You'll find both the music and the lyrics on this site, some intensely passionate, some full of lusty yearning and some just plain fun.

So time marched on and I was still working with computers, although the name of the department had evolved from DP to MIS to IT, and I had moved up the ranks in the corporate world.

I was also seriously studying songwriting, putting on shows whenever I could and working with Lis Lewis, a wonderful vocal coach, who lifted my performance immeasurably.  (Lis is now the vocal coach for reality TV shows.)

I also began digging deep into self-discovery and spirituality.  My next album, It’s Personal, is an expression of both of these areas. 

On my first album, I wrote both the words and music.  On this second album, I wrote all the lyrics and Porter Hansen wrote much of the music, taking me into a pop style and out of blues. 

I hope you’ll not only listen to the music, but will read the lyrics of these songs.  They speak deeply to me and I hope they will touch a chord with you.

And if you're on a spiritual quest of your own, please go to the Links page to visit my other websites, for inspirational messages, meditations and more.

Courage of the Creative Spirit

Several years ago, I read the biographies of the greats of the golden age of musicals, men like Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Lerner & Lowe.  I was amazed not only by their talent and creativity, but by their courage, how they kept on going and never gave up.  I felt they had so much to teach us about never losing heart.  So I put together a show in which I told their inspiring stories of overcoming hardship and going on to greatness, all while singing their fabulous songs.   

I performed the show as a dinner show for my local yacht club.  At the end of the show, the audience gave me a standing ovation, and I thought, hmmm, I may have something here.  And my old vocal coach, Al, must have been smiling down from heaven, so proud to see me singing songs from the Great American Songbook.

I have since developed and refined this show and call it The Courage of the Creative Spirit.  I can’t begin to tell you how much joy it brings me to perform some of the greatest music ever written--and I am overwhelmed and delighted at how well the show is received.  I hope you will come to one of my performances very soon and see for yourself what Al and Lis taught me over the years.   

Another Important Choice

Recently, I read a wonderful book, Steering by Starlight by Martha Beck, that leads you through discovering your true purpose. For a month, you follow her technique and see a vision of what you are meant to do.  Well, there I was, every day for a month, looking at a variation of this:  I am walking down a long hallway.  I open a door at the end.  Then I step out onto a lighted stage where tens of thousands of people are waiting to hear me sing.

I feel now as if I’m back with the MBA forms on the coffee table, with my whole being calling out for me to do what I am truly meant to do, what I love to do more than anything else:  sing for you.

There is a saying in computer software sales:  “If you can’t fix it, feature it.”  So I thought that’s what I would do now.  I can’t fix the fact that the years have gone by so fast and I am no longer that girl in the short skirts and long hair.  So I think I may just feature being one of those people who just won’t give up on the dream and thinks they can still launch a serious, new career no matter how old they are. 

Of course I can—I’m a baby boomer and we don’t ever even grow up, much less give up!

Catch Me While You Can! 

So please, listen to my music—better yet, buy my music, so I can finally stop implementing computer systems—and come see my show.  I’m way over my shyness and I promise to give you a fabulous time.  And if you can gather together a few hundred people and want me to sing for you, just give me a buzz. 

In a very few years, I hope to be performing before thousands, tens of thousands, so now’s the time to catch me while I’m still young and am just starting out!

Dream on!

Love, Carrie