Announcer: 0:06

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host, psychotherapist, coach, and empowerment expert, Beverley Glazer.

Beverley Glazer: 0:32

What if the dream you set aside years ago was waiting for you to claim? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer, a transition coach and catalyst for women who are ready to raise the bar in their own lives. And you can find me on readventimpossible.com. Barbara Lewis is a gifted singer, a songwriter, a vocal coach, whose voice has been compared to Anne Murray and Judy Collins. She has performed with Juno nominated musicians, appeared on PBS, and sung for thousands at the International AIDS Conference. But what sets Barbara Lewis apart from the others is how she inspires us to find our voices and sing with joy in later life. But this isn't just a story about music, it's about courage, it's about creativity, and it's about the power of returning to living your dreams. Welcome, Barbara.

Barbara Lewis: 1:41

Thank you, Beverley. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Beverley Glazer: 1:45

Barbara, you started singing just as a child, seven years old. Um, I mean, I sang as a child. I, you know, children sing. What was your life like as a child and a singer? I mean, most children want to be a star somewhere, a singer, a dancer. Who was who was Barbara Lewis at seven years old?

Barbara Lewis: 2:12

Seven's a long time ago. 72 now. Trying to get back to seven. Um, I had I was brought up in in an unusual religion, Christian science. And we were taught that we were spiritual beings. And I think I had back when I was seven, I'm sure my mom had something to do with this. I think she said to me, you know, you're going to express beauty and you're going to heal people. And I think that that was part of my desire as a singer was to be a healer in some way. I didn't know really what that meant, but I did feel a lot of passion as a young singer. And so that was my beginning. And actually, my real beginning was when I uh booked myself for a competition without my parents knowing when I was 11. And I sang on this big stage with a lot of other people. But at one point I was put on there to sing uh Tammy by myself as a soloist. And I think my mom and dad were shocked to see me singing by myself. And I won that competition. So for me, that was kind of the beginning. I said to myself, one day I'm going to be a great singer. That was the beginning. So did that shape your confidence? I'm sure it did. Oh, yes. And and I'm I'm sure that my my mom, who was very, very supportive, and my dad, I'm sure that they gave me a lot of confidence too. But you know, it took many, many years for me to to gather confidence. And uh I went through a lot of very difficult times in my life, as most of us do.

Beverley Glazer: 3:50

But you were drawn to classical music, and not everybody is. So what drew you to that?

Barbara Lewis: 3:58

Well, I think it I I I loved uh Maureen Forrester. I loved her voice, I loved how she expressed herself. Uh I love Leonine Price. I heard a lot of this music uh when I was a little girl, and I loved the the passion that came through a voice, the ability to sing in a wide, wide range, which gave you a lot of opportunity to have different colors, emotional colors. And that was very, very attractive to me to be able to uh ooze these uh or or seduce myself and others with uh the beauty of vocal colors. So that was my first passion.

Beverley Glazer: 4:36

But operatic training, that's a whole different thing.

Barbara Lewis: 4:41

Yeah, operatic training. It's you're you really are an athlete, a vocal athlete. And I and I loved, I loved the the music. I didn't love the business. I also didn't love having to sing about victimized women all the time. And in the end, that's what took me away from singing operatic music. And I kind of turned a corner and I decided that I would write my own music and sing what I had to say about life. I felt that uh the the beauty of operatic music was that you you had to be such a wonderful singer to do it well. But the drawback was that you were singing about things from hundreds of years before. This was not modern women. I did not want to be an old-fashioned woman. I wanted to say things to a current audience. So I started to write my own music.

Beverley Glazer: 5:29

That's huge. I mean, let's face it, that's huge. To just switch out because you were also invited to sing in an operatic company in Germany and you walked away from that.

Barbara Lewis: 5:40

Yes, I did. Yeah. And it's it was huge for me, yes, but I think it was hugely disappointing for the many people who got me, helped to get me to that point. Because you don't do that by yourself, especially in opera, but also in pop. You know, you have a team of people who help you to to get to that place. And and getting there and then saying no was it was very hard to to say no and say, look, this is my truth, this is my life, and I'm sorry, but I'm going another direction. It was very hard on people. My mom was disappointed, and certainly my teachers, my singing teachers.

Beverley Glazer: 6:18

Sure. It was hard. It had to be hard. Yeah. And then you had to start and retrain your voice because now, yeah, how did you do that?

Barbara Lewis: 6:29

Um, you know, I I thought mistakenly, it turns out, I thought that I would be able to retrain to a degree and then sing with the voice that I had developed over many years, my own new music. So I wrote a lot for myself. I wrote several shows, um all original material, and I sang it, and then some of those did very well. But you know, I still was seen as a classical musician, still a classical soprano. So I would say that it's been a whole life's journey, even to this point, where I've still am retraining and retraining my voice. I I think I'm now at 72 at my most retrained. I can now sing the wide range, but I can also sing in the more pop style. And that's taken many, many years. What a journey it's been. What an adventure. And so many difficulties to to go through to get to that point.

Beverley Glazer: 7:31

Yes. And there was a point also where you just couldn't sing.

Barbara Lewis: 7:37

Yeah, that's that happened. Um first of all, my husband and I, my first husband, I'm remarried and very happy. My my first husband, uh, whom I loved so deeply. We were like one person in a way. We were in New York at the time that the trade towers came down. Actually, we were downtown uh when that happened. And uh it's a long story, and I will shorten it. Um, he was supposed to be in one of those trade towers. And I was going downtown on a bus, and uh, we saw the plane go into the first one, and the bus driver who understood immediately what was going on, pulled over. He said, This something something terrible has happened. The second plane went in and he said, Everybody off, this was terrorism. So I still didn't really understand what that was about. And so I got off with all of my music equipment and suddenly realized that Nick was supposed to be in one of those towers having a meeting. I stood on the corner of the road uh shaking. I tried to get my phone to work, but all of the cell phones were down immediately. And uh so I stood there with all my stuff, and I thought, what do I do? Uh I looked down the road, I thought maybe I'll walk this way, and I saw someone in the great distance waving like this to me. And Nick's appointment had been changed. It was not in one of the trade towers, so he was okay. He met me and we walked uptown out of the smoke, out of the debris, not knowing that behind us hundreds of body parts were falling to the ground. It was a very, very shocking time. So we left New York and uh it was very, very hard. He had to leave all of his work that he'd worked up to to that point, me too, totally had to leave it all behind. Went back to Montreal and we lived there for a couple of years, and then suddenly he died. And that's for me, it was like that was the end of my singing. Uh, I said to my friends, uh, that's the end of men in my life. You know, I had a tremendous man, and uh I don't know what I'll do now, but uh it's you know, my life is totally different. Uh and it was. But I I continued to teach. I had been teaching, I continued to do that, and I began over a couple of years to feel a need again to express real love. I felt like a lot of the world at that time, as it is now, lacked real love. I think so many people felt terribly, terribly hurt and angry, as did I, uh, and in a sense of great grief. But I felt love amazingly, maybe it was my upbringing, my mother my mother speaking to me from the grave. I I felt this love inside, and uh I decided I would come back to to singing in some way. But then I met this wonderful man with whom I'm married now, and he said, Barbara, you gotta sing. So uh, you know, I I started to sing again. I feel very, very fortunate that uh uh I came back to it because I have to tell you, Beverly, I'm sure you know this, but singing, especially when you sing with others, it's it's an inner healing for the body. It wakes up, I mean you would know this, it wakes up all of those amazing feel-good hormones in the body. And so when you sing, you're you're in a way, you're you're kind of creating a a wash of healing inside. So for me, that's that's I I teach that the great joy of thing. I sing about it in my in my shows, and I talk about it a lot. The joy of of singing and what it does for us.

Beverley Glazer: 11:29

How could you just build that confidence again from teaching and then stopping? I mean, it's huge to go back on a large stage or even in an intimate venue and and express yourself when you have all this judgment. People are looking and you're judging yourself. Is my voice still good? Yes. How did you get your confidence back? Yes.

Barbara Lewis: 11:55

Um you know, I feel that inside we have a universe of being to call on. I think most of the time, or much of the time, we're not able for one reason or another to call on that. But I think it during times of great extremity, either we shut down and we have to heal in different ways, or we say, I've got to find that place inside that will lift me up again. And uh again, you know, maybe it was my upbringing, but also it was friends, the the strength of friends around me. I had great, great friends, family members who uh gave me a lot of encouragement. I think we need a good support structure to to regain momentum and equilibrium. And I I was very lucky to have that. And I also felt that I had love welling up inside of me. And I wanted to express it. And for me, the best way to express love is is uh, if not through friends and family, it's through singing. So that gave me a lot of courage to walk on the stage and say, here I am, like it or not, I have something to say, and I'm gonna say it. And fortunately, uh many people, uh, enough people liked what I was doing.

Beverley Glazer: 13:15

And today you coach adults to really do the same, but they're not necessarily singers. These are people that love to sing. Why did you choose that?

Barbara Lewis: 13:28

Well, you know, it's it's funny. Uh, when I was quite young, uh living in Vermont, lived on a hilltop in Vermont, I loved it there, with my husband, Nicholas. He was a writer, a deep thinker. And I remember saying to him, you know, I think I'm gonna be a late bloomer. I'm sorry to tell you that. I don't think I'm gonna come to fruition early in life. And he said, Oh, whatever, you know, be the artist you are, a great freedom. But I said to him, I think that I'm gonna come to fruition later in life, and I'm gonna help older people sing and love music and love nature too. And so I kind of felt that very early in my life. I I can't explain it. It's it's not that I'm a seer. I just had that feeling, maybe because it was taking me a long time to get where I wanted to get. So it wasn't strange for me now, later in life, to say my specialty is going to be helping people who are a bit older. I usually I say, you know, 50 plus. On my on my uh YouTube channel, it's 40 plus, but that's not old. So 55, 60. Some of my students are in their 75, 80 range. But I wanted to help older people rediscover the joy of making a wonderful sound, of speaking uh or or singing a wide variety of emotions that we don't often get the the pleasure of speaking in our lives. So many women are kind of shut down when they get older. They feel like they don't have much left or they live for their children. But when you sing, you reach inside and you find a wide variety, a gamut of emotions. And to be able to express that, even if your voice is not great, I don't care. I say to them, we don't care. We're just here to to find what's inside and to let it come out on the wings of a song. So for me, it's a great, great joy. I I work with people who used to sing and are coming back to it, and with those who always had the dream to sing and now they're gonna do it. So for me, it's an adventure. It's cathartic. I love it.

Beverley Glazer: 15:36

Right. What do you think is the biggest stumbling block that you see in um not just women, men too, when they think about their voice? What do you think holds them back?

Barbara Lewis: 15:47

Well, so many people say to me, I can't sing. And I say, Why do you say that? Well, when I was a kid at at school, the school teacher said to me, Everybody can sing except you, Norma. You don't have a voice. And I always feel like, oh, what damage that teacher did. It's so unfair. So I say, Well, let's just leave that behind. That's when you were a kid. Just trust me for the next few months, and let's see what we can bring out of you. Because if you can speak and you have not damaged your your hearing, you can sing. I mean, when you get older, you lose hearing. But even people, I I teach a wonderful singer who who is legally deaf. And we have, she learned how to sing, and she sings beautifully. Claire Duchayneau, she's an amazing singer. So, you know, I'd I I try to allow them to let go of these very early childhood traumas and say, let's try it now. Now is the point of power.

Beverley Glazer: 16:53

Yes, it's true. There's only now. Yep. And so you have to take that step. If you want to do it, you have to take that step and get out there and just play do it. Yeah, you do. Yeah, it takes courage. It sure does. You've suffered grief, you've suffered loss, you've suffered reinvention many, many times. What keeps you grounded?

Barbara Lewis: 17:18

Well, I would say um friends and family, uh, the love of friends and family and loving them. But also, um, I love nature. I have a little garden and I dream about that garden in the winter, and and I plant it in the winter, and in the spring I begin to work in it, and all summer I work on that garden. And ah, the garden, like music, I think, gardens. Well, you know, one of those fame uh famous quotes from Oliver Sachs, he talks about taking his neurologically disabled clients and patients to the botanical gardens in New York City. He says that that just walking through those gardens was better often than any drug that he could give them. So gardens, I don't know why, but they uplift us and they certainly uplift me. So that's one thing. Well, music, you know, I get to sing a lot, I get to perform a lot. So I get a lot of sleep. I think sleep's hugely important. We're finding that it is. I'm very fortunate to be able to eat well, you know. All of these things come together as kind of a a tapestry of well-being. But I think music and nature are things that if you don't have those in your life, they're so easy to add. Just to having a plant in in your room can make a difference. I was talking about imagine this. Oh, sure. Okay. Well, you know, I uh before I wrote this uh or put together this show called Imagine This, I went through during the the period of COVID, the second year of COVID, I went through something I would call an inner desert. I just had nothing left to give, even though I had a lot of commitments. Uh I was I had a YouTube channel that I was working on, I was teaching, I was singing concerts online, I was writing music and writing about music. I had a lot of commitments, and yet I felt not dead inside, but but like I had no more ideas, I had no more juice. And uh so I did what I have done in the past when I've really been in dire straits. I I picked up some books, I'd read a lot of books, and there were several books that really, really touched me. And uh I did the exercises, morning exercises where you you just write, write, write. I think that was um Julia Cameron. She wrote a book about being an artist, but for older people, and I did some of her exercises. Uh, there was another book that I read that was uh Three Simple Steps, I think it was called. And I did those exercises where you just allow your yourself to find out again what you're curious about. For me, curiosity had died, and that's crucial. Curiosity is crucial when you're older, I'm finding. So over a period of about nine months, I worked on myself a lot with books, uh, with meditation, did a lot of meditation. And eventually I started to revive inside it. It went from being a desert to being kind of a tropical rainforest, a little out of control at times. But I realized that there was there was a show there for older people, not just singing. I I love to sing, but I wanted also to have a talk. I wanted it to be a concert talk. So that's what imagine this is. It's um it's a way of of talking about creativity when we're older. It's coming back to creativity. Uh, I sing beautiful music, I talk about what it is to be a late bloomer. I encourage people. It's an encouragement of and a support for creativity throughout your whole life. And I find, much to my joy and kind of surprise, that people love this show. Right now it's it's an hour only. It could it could be a little longer, and I can shorten it, but it's it's a solid hour of music and talk about the joy of creativity, of finding, refining, rediscovering uh the creative energy inside. And I suppose, in a way, my my hope is that people when they leave the show will feel more alive inside and that they have ideas. At the last one I did in Ottawa, a woman came to me and she said, You know, Barbara, I'm almost a hundred. And I said, My goodness, you don't look a hundred. She said, Well, I'm 96. And she said, You know, you've encouraged me. I've always wanted to write. And darn it, I'm gonna do it, even though I'm 96. I have things to tell my grandchildren. I'm just gonna write. That is the kind of response that I love from Imagine This. And I've I've got bookings now into the new year, and I'll travel a little bit. My hope is to take it across Canada. So I'm working on that. And I love the show. I love doing it, and I feel really fortunate, very lucky to still be singing.

Beverley Glazer: 22:23

Yes, and you're doing something good, it's beyond singing and just going to a concert. What I'm seeing is it's a combination of both singing and therapy. You're gonna walk out feeling really good, knowing a little bit about yourself and music. What's better than that? You're singing. You know, what have you found when you're teaching, and there people are teaching and using their voice, sometimes for the first time in a long time? What changes do you see in them?

Barbara Lewis: 22:59

All sorts of changes. Um people are amazed by the emotion that that comes up. And I was speaking about that earlier, that we don't in life uh often have chances to emote in very uh in many subtle ways, romantic ways as well. I think when we're older, we're not quite as romantic, don't feel as sexual. But through a song, you can explore those feelings. And so that's something I notice in in older people that they're finding, they're re-finding feelings that they've had. They're they're rediscovering that that out of their beautiful older bodies can come something that delights other people as well as themselves. Uh, so I I love that notion that you can rediscover things that have been kind of dormant for a long time. And uh it's a a reliving, it's coming alive in a in a new way. I mean, none of us have ever been in our 70s before. When you get there, you go, holy moly, this is the first time I've been 72. And wow, this is like I didn't expect this, the the the lines and the wrinkles and the lack of energy and stuff. But you still can feel so alive if you find the roots to do so, and singing is one of them.

Beverley Glazer: 24:19

Yeah. What's one thing you'd like to tell people just to find their joy? One encouraging thing.

Barbara Lewis: 24:27

I would say if you don't, if you don't have a plant in your life, buy yourself a beautiful plant. One plant. I found that I took one plant to a woman who was very down in an old folks' home, and she called me the next day and she said, Barbara, you brought me alive. I love this plant. And it wasn't just that one time. She called me week after week and she said, I got to tell you about my plant today. So that's one thing. Another thing is just to start humming. Just hum a bit, just feel what it is to make sound inside your head. Sing a song that you love, sing a song to your cat or to your plant. Just sing a little bit without a judgmental audience. Just see what it feels like to get some music in your body. So that's another. And also, I would say tell somebody you haven't told for a while that you love them. I think that goes a long way too.

Beverley Glazer: 25:22

Wonderful. Wise, words. Thank you so much, Barbara.

Barbara Lewis: 25:27

Oh, it was a joy.

Beverley Glazer: 25:28

Barbara Lewis is a singer, a songwriter, and a vocal coach. She's known for her wide range of for a wide range of voice, vulnerable stage presence, and elegant storytelling. Coming up are her current shows, The Simple Joys of Christmas, which is an annual event. And imagine this: a one-woman show featuring songs and stories that celebrate and encourage creativity in our later years. Here are a few takeaways from this episode. Grief can cause your passion, but it doesn't need to destroy it. Creativity matures with age, it doesn't fade. And joy always returns when you go back to what you love. If you've been relating to this episode, here are a few things that you can do for yourself right now. Pause when that inner critic tells you it's too late and shut that baby down. Take a tiny step towards an old dream. Perhaps book a class, dust off an instrument, become an old tune. This can motivate you to do more. And if you want to sing, sing. Sing in the shower, sing in the car, sing while making coffee, reclaim your joy, but no judgment. For similar episodes on aging, creativity, and finding joy, check out episodes 120 and 151 of Aging with Purpose and Passion. And you might also enjoy Wellness Wednesdays. That's hosted by gerontologist Sally Duplantier. And these free recorded webinars feature experts on healthy aging. That's my thinglife.com. And it will also be in the show notes underneath this episode. And so, Barbara, where can people learn more about you and find your links?

Barbara Lewis: 27:32

Um, I've got a website, Barberlewis.com, and uh I'm on Facebook. That's where my my audience is on Facebook, on Instagram as well, and my YouTube channel, Singing After 40. It's all of I think more than 150 free videos for people over 40, 50, 60 to learn more about their voices. Oh, there's lots of places to find me.

Beverley Glazer: 27:56

Terrific. And if you didn't catch that, Barbara Lewis's links are in the show notes, and they'll also be on my site too. That's reinventimpossible.com. And so, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you living the life that you truly love? Get my free guide to go from stuck to unstoppable. And where do you think that is? Yep. You guessed it, it's in the show notes too. You can connect with me, Beverley Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook. That's Women Over50 Rock. And thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe to help us spread the word by dropping a review and sending this to a friend. And remember, you only have one life, so live it with purpose and passion.

Announcer: 28:56

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website reInventimpossible.com. And while you're there, join our newsletter. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion. And celebrate life.