Over the last nine months, I’ve asked a lot of musicians some version of this question: “What’s it been like for you?” They instantly know what I’m talking about. Because we can’t ignore what it’s been like, the fact that life as a musician has turned way, way upside down.
To sum up some of the responses, it’s been hard. Weird. Even hopeless.
When I posed this question to one Colorado Springs musician the other day, it went in a different direction. In a good way. In an inspiring way. In a way that I just wanted to know more.
For Nance Vixen, a 60-year-old jazz singer and percussionist, the pandemic has held many sad days. But, in some ways, she was prepared for something like this.
Because she’s had to learn, over and over, how to get through something hard. Because this isn’t the first time her life has turned upside down.
Like when she was just a teenager with a dream. Her parents just rolled their eyes.
The idea of music as a career, she says, was forbidden in her strict Christian family. They’d mock her singing and how much she loved it.
“I couldn’t even state my dreams,” Vixen says. “There was the mindset of, ‘You can’t possibly do that.’ It was a frivolous idea.”
At 17, she joined a band anyway. She sought out vocal coaches and gigs. She fell in love with songs by Joni Mitchell and Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin. She fell in love with Latin music. She still loved singing and she didn’t care who knew it.
But she didn’t go all in.
For 10 years, Vixen worked a full-time job in corporate administration in San Diego while doing music on the side. For the next 10 years, she didn’t pursue music at all. Balancing the two got tiring.
Then there was a divorce. Then, at 42, there was the unthinkable. Breast cancer. Fighting for her life and unable to work, Vixen didn’t let her mind go to the dark places. Her mind instead went back to her first love: music.
“Cancer can be a horrible experience, and it is a horrible experience,” Vixen says. “But it can also be a big lesson for people. My lesson was that I wasn’t paying attention for over a decade.”
She started paying attention. To her thoughts and body and her creativity.
“I decided that I’m interested in thriving,” Vixen says. “Not surviving.”
That meant turning to food and meditation as medicine. It meant trips to an India ashram. And, in 2012, it meant moving from San Diego to Colorado, where she could better focus on an alternative medicine lifestyle.
“I was 52 when I moved out here and starting a new chapter,” she says. “Who starts a new chapter at 52? I’ve learned you can be 60 or 70 and start a new chapter.”
Here, she’s gotten into the local jazz and blues scenes, while teaching vocal lessons. She’s played gigs at venues such as Mother Muffs, Jazz Funk-Connection and Tap Traders.
She says she likes to play upbeat tunes, but sometimes she sings a heartbreaker. Like one show at Rico’s, when she noticed a young woman crying to a blues song.
“She was balling her eyes out,” Vixen said. “And I thought that was the biggest compliment. Because she’s really listening and feeling it.”
Without live shows in recent months, she’s missed those moments. She’s cried about missing music. She’s cried about losing her dog. She’s cried about canceling a trip to Bali to celebrate her 60th birthday.
“You have to go through it and you have to deal with your pain,” she says. “I could write a song about that.”
She’s found ways to get through it. She writes tongue-and-cheek songs inspired by some of her favorite songs. Most days, she does yoga and dances around her house. She talks to herself and sometimes makes herself laugh, which goes with one of her mottos: “If you can’t laugh once or twice a day, it’s not worth it.”
“I remind myself that this isn’t permanent and nothing is permanent,” Vixen said. “I tell myself to keep going.”
Just like she has so many other times.
On most days, she sings to herself, too. And she likes what she hears.
“I could’ve easily stopped when I was 17,” Vixen said. “But I didn’t give up.”
Vixen says that’s become part of her identity.
And then she said something that’s probably going to stay with me for awhile.
“I like to tell people this about me,” she said. “Anything I am is from my willingness not to give up.”
This content was originally published here.
