She had one of the most incredible voices I had ever heard.
Grammy winner. A career most singers would trade anything for. A voice that made you stop — the kind that reorganizes something in your chest when you hear it.
She sat down across from me and we got to work.
And within that first session, two things happened that I have never forgotten.
The first: everything I showed her — she had never been shown before. Not in any of her years of voice lessons, her training, her studies. At the end of the session she looked at me and said it was the best voice lesson she had ever had.
I remember the feeling in the room as we worked — the way it seemed to expand, to light up from within. It was one of those sessions that stays with you. Not because of who she was. Because of what the voice did when it finally had room.
I sat with that for a long time afterward. Not with pride — with something more like awe. If a singer at that level, with that voice, with that career, had never encountered this work — then the gap in what singers are being taught is even wider than I knew.
The second thing: she wanted more.
She wanted more. Not because something was wrong. Because she understood that there was always further to go. That is the moment I want to tell you about. Not the Grammy. Not the extraordinary voice. A singer at the top of her field, still hungry, still reaching, still refusing to plateau.
That is what the greats have in common.
***
Different genres, different levels of fame, different sounds. But certain things appear again and again, so consistently that I’ve stopped thinking of them as personality traits and started thinking of them as a particular relationship to the craft.
The first thing is obsession. Not ambition — obsession. A true, deep, non-negotiable need to make music. It’s their life. Not their career, not their brand — their life. The music is not what they do. It is who they are.
Ambition fades when the going gets hard. Obsession doesn’t.
***
The second thing is that they never stop evolving.
They don’t rest on the last record. They keep pushing the boundaries of what they’re capable of. The question they’re always asking, whether they say it out loud or not, is: what’s next? What’s better? What haven’t I done yet?
This is not ego. This is almost the opposite of ego. Ego wants to protect what it has. The greats are willing to risk what they have in the pursuit of something greater. They are not interested in their own legend. They are interested in the music.
***
The third thing is that they ask for help.
They are not too proud, too famous, too established to enlist the people around them — coaches, collaborators, producers, teachers — to help them get better. They understand that no one becomes extraordinary alone.
This is their superpower. Not the voice. Not the talent. The willingness to keep learning.
***
The greats are not finished products who emerged fully formed. They are people who made a choice — over and over, across years and decades — to keep going deeper. To treat the voice not as something they were given but as something they are building, always, for the rest of their lives.
You don’t have to have a Grammy to make that choice.
You just have to make it.
To your vocal freedom,
Cari Cole
caricole.com/voice-youniversity
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