My mom.

A month earlier, she had passed away.

And somewhere in the middle of grieving her, I found myself thinking about singing again.

Thinking about all the years I had let it sit quietly in the background.

Thinking about the times she asked me to sing and I didn’t.

Thinking about the fact that life had once again reminded me that there isn’t always as much time as we think there is.

In many ways, returning to voice lessons felt like a way of honoring her.

Or maybe reconnecting with a part of myself that she always encouraged.

And if I’m being honest, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted from it.

I wanted new songs.

New challenges.
New material.
New things to learn.

After all, it had been years since I had seriously worked with a voice coach.

There were entire musicals I had never explored. New composers. New stories. And honestly, that was exciting.

What I didn’t expect was how much I would find myself returning to the old songs.

The songs that had been sitting in my music books for years.
The songs I learned when I was younger.
The songs I thought I already knew.

Especially one.

This Is The Moment.

It was the very first song I learned with a voice coach back in 2000.
It became my recital piece.
It was the song I used to audition for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

The song that helped me land the role of Hero.

At 25, I loved it because it felt powerful. Hopeful. Ambitious.

It felt like standing on the edge of possibility.

The lyrics are all about finally stepping into the life you’ve been dreaming about.

And at that age, that made perfect sense.

Everything felt like it was ahead of me.

My career.
Marriage.
Fatherhood.
The boys.
The moves.
The adventures.
The successes.
The mistakes.
The heartbreaks.
The losses.

I was singing about a future I hadn’t lived yet.

A few months ago, my voice coach (A.C.) and I pulled This Is The Moment back out.

We were working in one of the smaller lesson rooms that day. Normally we’re in a larger room, but I loved the smaller space. My voice seemed to bounce off the walls and fill every corner of it.

We sang through the song once just to reacquaint me with it. It had been years since I had really listened to it, let alone sung it.

When we finished, A.C.’s reaction was basically, “Wow.”

Then she started giving me notes.

Start softer here.
Lean into this phrase.
Pull back there.

So we ran it again.

And when we finished, A.C. started laughing.

I turned around and realized we had an audience.

The lesson room door had a large glass window, and standing outside were two little kids, both staring through the glass with their mouths hanging open.

Just watching.
Listening.
Completely captivated.

It was one of those moments that was both hilarious and incredibly sweet.

A.C. laughed and said, “They’ve probably never heard anything like that in here before.”

And honestly, she was probably right.

What struck me later wasn’t that two kids stopped to listen. It was that twenty-five years later, the song still had something to say.

Twenty-five years.

And somehow it was still teaching me something.

There’s another reason I’ve always loved that song.

It fits my voice. Perfectly.

It’s one of those rare songs that sits right in my range. An easy, belt-y tenor song that feels just as comfortable to sing today as it did twenty-five years ago.

That’s actually harder to find than people might think.

Some songs are beautiful, but they’re work. You’re constantly thinking about the notes, the breath, the technique. You’re fighting to make them fit.

But every once in a while, you find a song that feels like it was written specifically for your voice.

This Is The Moment has always been that song for me.

What’s funny is that while the song still fits exactly the same, I don’t.

The twenty-five-year-old singing it and the fifty-year-old singing it are two very different people.

Because life happened.

I fell in love.
More than once.
I became a husband.
I became a dad.
I watched my boys grow from toddlers into young men.
I lost my dad.
Then I lost my mom.

I learned that some people stay forever. And some people don’t.
I learned that grief and gratitude can somehow exist in the same moment.
I learned that longing doesn’t disappear with age.

It just changes shape.

I think that’s why these songs hit differently now.

Twenty-five-year-old me could sing the words. Fifty-year-old me understands them.

When I sing For Forever, I hear the longing to belong somewhere.

When I sing You Don’t Need to Love Me, I hear the heartbreak of loving someone and letting them go anyway.

When I sing Sometimes a Day Goes By, I hear absence. The people we still carry with us long after they’re gone.

When I sing I Don’t Remember You, I think about how relationships change and how sometimes we’re left trying to understand what happened to someone who once meant so much.

When I sing Evermore or When You Say You Love Me, I hear the beauty and fragility of connection. How much courage it takes to love someone knowing nothing is guaranteed.

The songs didn’t change.

I did.

And maybe that’s the thing I’ve been discovering since returning to voice lessons. The older I get, the less I think great songs are about notes. They’re about truth.

Love.
Loss.
Hope.
Regret.
Longing.

The things that make us human.

At 25, I was mostly focused on singing the song correctly.

At 50, I’m more interested in telling the story.

Because now I’ve lived enough life to understand what some of those stories are really about.

When I started voice lessons again, I thought what I wanted were new songs. And I’ve found some.

But what surprised me most was being drawn back to the old ones. The songs I thought I understood. The songs I thought had already given me everything they had to give.

It turns out they hadn’t.

Because at 25, I could sing the notes. At 50, I understand the story. And maybe that’s the real gift of getting older. Not discovering new things.

Discovering there are still new things to learn from the old ones.

Even when you’re still singing the same song.