Some years ago, during leaner times, the soprano worked for a yarn store, repairing knitted fabric that customers brought in. It wasnât always fun â sweater armpits, for example, offer a unique fusing of liquid and fiber â but there were other compensations.
âBoy, do you learn a lot when you have to find yarn that matches something thatâs 40 years old,â says Daehlin (M.A. â12), Academic Secretary in the Department of International & Transcultural Studies. âWe live in such a disposable society. If thereâs a hole in the fabric, we throw it out. So, if someone chooses to repair a 40-year-old piece of knitting, itâs because it means something to them. It might have been made by their grandmotherâs hands.â
Daehlin brings that same sense of reverence to her weekly #LovePeopleBeKind Cabaret on TCâs Come Together, Right NowâŠVirtually site. The show, which she performs in her living room at 6 p.m. on Thursday evenings, is a mĂ©lange of self-accompanied singing (âIâm not a pianist â I just play one on TVâ), readings (the fare ranges from Maxine Greene to haikus by Daehlinâs friend, Margaret Scanlon, Academic Secretary in TCâs Department of Arts & Humanities), self-deprecating humor (âYou know â make people laugh at you before they laugh at you for the thing you donât want them to laugh at you forâ) and spontaneous riffs in which Daehlin often morphs from pixie-ish and Midwestern polite to her big voice in a New York moment.
If someone chooses to repair a 40-year-old piece of knitting, itâs because it means something to them. It might have been made by their grandmotherâs hands.
âLisa Daehlin
Above all, though, Daehlin offers her audience a gentle space in which to slow down, forget their cares for an hour and appreciate some of lifeâs subtler offerings. Her living room is festooned with many of her own knitted creations, including the red hearts she crochets and gives away to friends, colleagues and chance acquaintances. After opening with the LovePeopleBeKind theme song, penned for her by her friend, the New York City composer , sheâll greet friends and family as they tune in via chat function. (âHi, Mom! Hereâs that Kurt Weill song I told you about!â) Various books and props are at the ready, and she will likely be sipping tea from a mug inscribed in Hadelansk, a dialect from a region of Norway where there is a farm called DĂŠhlin. And sheâll reflect on what sheâs singing, whether itâs the concluding work from Edvard Griegâs song cycle (âThe Mountain Maidâ), âLost in the Starsâ by Weill and Maxwell Anderson, or âImagination,â by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen.
April 2, 2020 performance
âIn songs of that time, thereâs often a male verse and a female verse â the boy sings, the girl sings, they fall in love, everythingâs great. Yeah, right,â she said in a recent interview, conducted online, as she leafed through sheet music to âLook for the Silver Liningâ (lyrics: Buddy de Sylva; music: Jerome Kern). âSo, the boy sings:
Please don't be offended if I preach to you awhile,
Tears are out of place in eyes that were meant to smile.
And the girl sings:
As I wash my dishes, I'll be following your plan,
Till I see the brightness in evâry pot and pan.
âGod â the power imbalance!â She laughed, shaking her head. âYou know, we tend to only remember the refrains, but itâs the verses that hold the story.â She paged backward to âFly Me to the Moonâ (music and lyrics by the pianist and cabaret composer Bart Howard) and sang:
Poets often use many words to say a simple thing
It takes thought and time and rhyme to make a poem sing
With music and words Iâve been playing
For you Iâve written a song
To be sure you know what Iâm saying
Iâll translate as I go along
âWow.â She sat still for a moment, letting the words resonate. âItâs great stuff, but itâs been thrown away!â
Prairie Roots
In the âbackwater Northern Minnesota townâ where Daehlin grew up, her family threw away nothing â including the piano they rescued from a flooded church basement.
âThis was pre-internet, and we had no library, and the TV, which had tin foil on the antennae, only got four channels, so we made our own fun.â
Her father was a pastor and her mother, a school teacher, pianist, organist and some-time choir director.
âThat used to be a package deal, you know. Think of the rules now â you can be nine months pregnant, and in an interview, they canât say, âOh, umâŠâ But when I was in high school, and the neighboring town was looking for a pastor, it was, âAnd does your wife play the piano?â So I grew up singing solos in church and on Christmas we kids would do a program at home â someone reads the Bible passage, someone sings. And Iâm the baby of five siblings, so it was âI want attention and Iâm a Sagittarius â people: love me! (pleaseâŠ)ââ
PROPS AT THE READY Daehlin performs at Cornelia Street Café in 2016. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Daehlin)
Her mother exposed her to a lot of music through a sheet music collection that consisted largely of selections from the Great American Songbook â popular songs written for Broadway and Hollywood throughout the first half of the 20th century, âmostly by immigrants who fled Nazi Germany for the U.S.,â says Daehlin, whose own family began arriving âin wavesâ from Norway beginning around 1850. âPeople like Erich Korngold [the Austrian-born conductor and composer who wrote scores for Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Wolf and other films], who lifted from himself for film scores. Our country has a huge ear for this stuff. And itâs such a joy to sing.â
Bright Lights
Daehlin has sung in numerous operatic roles, given concerts in Italy, Germany and Scandinavia, and performed frequently at St. Paul's Chapel, The Players Club and the Cornelia Street CafĂ© (now closed) â but there were times, when she first came to New York City (âto pursue my dream, whatever that wasâ) when her path seemed less clear.
âItâs hard to be a classical singer. It takes so much money. You have to pay a $50 application fee just to walk in the door for an audition, pay your pianist, and take the day off from your job â so youâre out a couple hundred bucks when itâs all said and done, and all just to get a letter saying âyouâre one of the 5,000 sopranos weâve heard, and maybe if youâd been a tenor.â Hmm â why am I going on about that? I guess, because it still hurts.â
My biggest fear at this point is that Iâm going to start spilling my guts as though I were talking to a therapist. Or say something bad â Momâs watching! â or, God forbid, that anyone will see the mess I shoved into the other corners of the room.
âLisa Daehlin
She has found it challenging, on occasion, to navigate her various artistic identities â like the time when a composer said, âDonât take this as an insult, but is your voice meant to be heard at more of a distance?â
âHe was right, of course â Iâm an opera singer, and opera singers arenât meant to be heard from a foot away. Itâs more like a pointillistic picture. Up close, it can overwhelm, but when you see it from further away â not, like, from New Jersey, but in a big space â you can take it in. So, Iâve had to learn to modify my voice for cabaret and other settings.â
Or the time when she auditioned for someone connected to the Metâs Young Artistsâ program, and her voice teacher, who had given the director one of Daehlinâs designs as a holiday gift, told her not to mention that she was the knitter.
April 9, 2020 performance
âShe said, âBecause then sheâll see you as a fiber artist,ââ Daehlin recalls, making quotation marks in the air.
But eventually things changed. In 2013, Daehlin, who also runs a business called âHats de Lisa,â created a show she called âTwisted Stitch: Songs of Love and Knitting,â in part just to thumb her nose at convention. Nowadays, she pretty much sings what she wants to sing (Poulenc, Satie), when she wants to.
âThereâs a Venn diagram, and Iâm in the middle of it,â she says. âThese are the buckets of my life. Iâm more than that, I hope, but maybe itâs package-able.â
The â#LovePeopleBeKind Cabaretâ is just one of her incarnations, but it may be, figuratively as well as literally, closest to home. After a somewhat discombobulated launch (âI was moving furniture around the apartment, unearthing the keyboard, cleaning up a corner to make into a stage and to show to the world, and then, exhausted, realized, âOk, now itâs time to do the show!â), she now effortlessly navigates off-screen costume changes, pre-recorded accompaniment by still other friends and musical colleagues and , and in general conjures the feeling that you are right there in the room with her.
Doing cabaret this way really opens up the reality of singing in the shower or a lullaby for yourself. Itâs whatâs comfortable for your body â and if itâs comfortable for you to sing, chances are it is for someone else to hear as well.
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âDoing cabaret this way really opens up the reality of singing in the shower or a lullaby for yourself,â she says. âItâs whatâs comfortable for your body â and if itâs comfortable for you to sing, chances are it is for someone else to hear as well. Really, my biggest fear at this point is that Iâm going to start spilling my guts as though I were talking to a therapist. Or say something bad â Momâs watching! â or, God forbid, that anyone will see the mess I shoved into the other corners of the room.â
The show also reflects a certain measure of serendipity and maybe even fate. Daehlinâs grandmother, who attended St. Olaf College in 1918 by selling her inheritance (an acre of the family farm), later served as President of the Northern Minnesota Womenâs Missionary Federation and Secretary of the National Cradle Roll, a church organization that welcomed newborns into the religious fold.
âA few years ago, my mom told me that, in one of those capacities, she traveled around holding meetings at which she sang and gave interpretive readings. And Iâm so glad to know that. Not to get all mystical about it, but I do believe that some things happen for a reason. Iâve done a million live cabaret shows, and I was planning to do a few more this year, but theyâre expensive. Now Iâm doing them every week out of my living room.â She shrugs and smiles. âNever saw that coming!â