Mandy

Mandy

It’s good to see you in the flesh!

Mandy

Oh, we did a lot of it ourselves. Reall

Mandy

This actually was a formal dining room. I laid the floor.

Mandy

Of course. It’s all part of the magic.

Joe

As you guys probably know, I was Mandy's road manager before the whole COVID thing hit. And so for about almost two years, we had a rule everywhere she goes, I go. And so I would arrange all of our travel, I'd arrange our meals, and I would be the contact person for all the venues.

Mandy

Right now, I'm finishing up my fifth album, my studio album. It's going to be called Paper Cuts. And it's life lessons and things that I've experienced over the last year and a half. And it's the first album that is just really personal…. I know that my last couple of years, you know, like, I've finally started to really come into myself and love myself, and see the world differently. And so, I wanted to be able to have an album where I didn't, I didn't think, "Oh, I want to make sure that this sounds good for somebody else." I just want to express. I am more proud of this album than pretty much any body of work I've done so far.

Mandy

Yeah, I’m excited.

Joe

I caught myself still being amazed, still trying to figure out, how does she do it? When she describes feeling vibrations at various places in her throat; when she describes how you feel some notes in your, in your nasal cavity and some notes in your chest; when she describes the different things that she's done in order to learn how to stay on pitch and, and to trust her pitch and things like that, it— there was, there was a sense in which it was kind of a genie that escaped from a bottle. And you were always wondering if it was going to go back in, you know? And I found myself, when we were at a concert, I would be almost holding my breath going, you know, I don't want this to be the day that it doesn't work, you know? And it — and as time passed, and I began to realize, especially as I traveled with her, I realized actually how extraordinary her talent is.

Mandy

You know, you—have you ever done those silly childhood, like, audiology things, you know, where the person comes to your school, and then you put those little hard headphones that squeeze your head really tightly, and then there's a beep, and you have to raise your hand as to what side and what ear the noise is coming into? I've never passed one of those tests in my life. It was always there. It was always obvious.

Mandy

I mean, that was something that I never really could hide from. But I had constant surgeries and constant problems with my eardrum stopping vibrating and, and chunks of time without any sound at all. So it was not anything that was really a secret.

Mandy

Yeah. I mean, it, it always came back, but it was always, it was always broken.

Joe

She loved to sing, she would be involved in church choirs and things like that. But it wasn't till she got to high school that all of a sudden, all of us around her started thinking, holy cow, this, this young lady has an outstanding talent, you know? And it's hard when it's your own family, right? Because people say, "Wow, listen to Mandy's voice." And in our family, we would always say, "She just sounds like Mandy to us," you know?

Joe

She was very introverted. Always, as a kid. Very quiet. She wanted to be in the back row. And she wanted to be part of a team and to blend in. So, if you had said to me when she was in middle school, high school, "Oh, your daughter's going to be a performer," especially on stage, I would have said, "Nah, that'll never happen.”

Mandy

What I used to do more often than anything is kind of tell kids what they were getting for Christmas. So they would pay me for it. I had a hustle. [laughs] I mean, like, somebody would be talking, and I would, you know—we'd have like, a, like, a church gathering or something like that. And they'd be talking about doing this or that. And I'd be like, looking into a conversation. I was like, "You want to know what you're getting for Christmas? They're talking about it right now." And they're like, "Yeah!" And I was like—

Mandy

Like a quarter. You could have paid me in worms, that would have been fine. It was just more of like the, I have the advantage, which I'd never had. And so, when I had it from time to time, it just made me feel good.

Joe

I underestimated at first what was going on, because I thought, this is just another ear infection, another, you know, another come-and-go experience. And of course, it didn't turn out to be that way.

Joe

My wife, Valerie, called me at work one day, and she said, "You need to go talk to Mandy. Something is really wrong." And so, I rode up, drove up and Mandy met me in the parking lot, and we were sitting in the car together. And, and she was clearly, you know, very upset. I tried to kind of do the dad thing of, you know, "It's, you know, okay. You know, you've been through this before. You, you know, sometimes you struggle with your hearing” and things like that. And she, she, she asked me to stop, stop talking. And she said,

Joe

And after all these years, it—that, that—those words, just sweep, they sweep over me, you know, they capture me emotionally. And at that point, I realized that this was not— this wasn't going away, that, that it was, it was different. And our girl, our girl was deaf. [laughs] And she, she was a, she was a music major. This, this was her goal, her life, her—it's where she was headed.

Mandy

I was 18, 19 years old. I went from being slightly hard of hearing to profoundly deaf in a matter of nine months.

I didn't even know what direction the sky was, you know? Like, I needed to figure out how to learn how to live again. You know, music education was the farthest thing from my mind.

You know, music education was the farthest thing from my mind.

Mandy

Yeah. I had a couple of days. I call them the day the music died. And the first day the music died, I was at the final recital for my freshman voice. And I was laying in my dorm room. I was on the first floor just by myself. And I never turned the lights on. I hardly showered on a regular basis, because it was just difficult. I was so depressed about this being over. And I was laying in bed and looking at the clock, and knowing that I needed to be at the recital studio at, say, one o'clock. And so, I was like, just laying there, watching the time tick by, and feeling that pressure of, you probably should get up, you probably should get up. And then eventually, just dragging myself there.

Mandy

And I showed up. And I was in a room full of family members of all these people who were continuing to do the dream that I wasn't able to do anymore. And I sat there watching every single person perform, knowing that I couldn't understand what they were singing, knowing that I was just sitting in a room for what felt like hours, being the only stupid person there. And then it eventually became my turn. And I stood up and I put my hand on the piano. And I could feel the beat of how many measures before I was supposed to start to sing. And they started. And I couldn't get the note out. I couldn't remember what it was.

Mandy

Nope. We packed the car and it was all blank after that. I genuinely don't remember much for the next several months. It was just like a hole. I just fell in a hole. And I had to claw my way out of it.

Joe

When Mandy came home from college, she stopped singing. For the first time that I could remember, she had no voice. And for about a year, she, she never tried, tried to sing again. It was like she was trying to push it away and set it aside. And then, we did, Valerie and I did, what I think all parents do, is when your kids lose hope, you have to loan them some. And so, we were in that place of encouraging her to realize that no matter how horrible it seemed like the circumstances were, that there was a story beyond that story.

Mandy

[Giggling] The next, the next step was pushed upon me by my father.

Joe

I would have you believe that I had a master strategy to get her back involved in music. But that wasn't true. What I was trying to do was sort of help heal her heart. I said to her one day, “The music is in you. I want you to learn a new song."

Mandy

In my head, I'm going to sit in a basement, and I was going to sit there for hours watching my dad play chords and following along, while also not understanding what's going on and feeling stupid the whole time. That's what I thought I was signing up for.

Joe

Now, according to her, I didn't know at that time, she said that was the stupidest idea she ever heard.

Joe

I thought I was giving her some guidance that could lead to hope.

Mandy

And then we came downstairs into the basement, and he pulled out his Gibson, I pulled out my Gibson. And I'm watching him sing, and I'm playing the chords, and I'm smiling, even though I really—don't really need to.

Mandy

So I was starting to pay more attention to my fingers and less about my dad. And then, as I was playing like, the chord, I wasn't doing the strum pattern, I was just landing the chord, and then strumming down, changing the chord, strumming down so that I could stay in time with him.

And it's something that I'd never really paid too much attention to. I mean, you know that it's there. But when you can't hear the instrument, it's the only thing to pay attention to.

And as I'm holding on to this instrument, I could feel the sound that I was making rumbling on my chest and rolling down my arm as I was holding on to the guitar with my other arm, and then digging string by string with my thumb as I was strumming these chords.

The sound is still being made, even though I'm not digesting it in the right way, or in the same way. It's still here. And I wonder how far down this rabbit hole I could go.

And then my sister Sam was listening to the radio to a song by One Republic called, "Come Home".

I looked up the sheet music online, and printed it off. And what I ended up doing is I took a guitar tuner, and I started singing, and then looking to see when the note would light up, and what that would be.

So I sang in this guitar tuner until I found C. And then the little light turned green, that it was an accurate C. And that took me what felt like years. It was probably more like two hours. But two hours of struggling to just consistently hit one note was really frustrating. [Laughs]

And so, I would sing a C, then I'd do a scale, and then come back to it. And if it was still a C, I called that a success. And I had to do like, 10 successes before I would actually start the song, which was in the key of C.

Joe

So, we go down into the basement, and I sit down with the guitar. When she starts singing, I'm delighted. You know, I—it's—and I'm thinking, this is, this is good, this is good, this is good. But by the time she gets to the end of the song, she's rediscovered something of herself that was always there, waiting to be found again. And I knew, I expected that she would learn the song. I expected that she would sing well. I expected it to happen.

But when it actually did happen, I felt like, yeah, now she is free to move on, to move beyond the loss of the past, and not knowing where that was going to go. But we looked at each other, and we, we both knew things had changed. What was going to happen next, we didn't know. But things, things had changed.

Mandy

It still takes that time, yeah. I mean, like, I'm more confident, and I think confidence and trusting yourself is a major part of it.

Mandy

Um, I got pushed. I don't, I don't really feel like confidence was something that I just gained. I think something—it was definitely earned with time and abuse to myself, was what it felt like.

Mandy

And she was like, "Oh, that's beautiful. You sang it before you lost your hearing. It's awesome." I was like, "No, I did this, like, yesterday." And she just stopped and sat down. And then she's like, "Let me listen to it again.” And then she was like, "You're gonna have to start, start taking lessons." And I was like, "Okay, now I've committed to something. Now I can't take it back." So then I started taking lessons...

Mandy

My dad asked me to learn a song. I learned a song.

Mandy

Then she pushed me to sing at a jazz club for open mic night, because I was singing jazz stuff.

Mandy

And then from there, like, patrons would ask for songs, and I'd have to learn them for them.

Mandy

Because they wanted to take my music home with them. And everything started to change after that, because it became normal to push myself.

Mandy

You know, I think for—even after making my first album, which was called Smile, I was still wildly in a bad place. And then when I was doing After You've Gone, which was my second album, I was still wildly in a bad place. I think just because you're successfully accomplishing goals doesn't necessarily mean that you're a healthy person. And my focus was always to please others, you know.

So I would say yes, but I would never feed myself.

Mandy

I think it's different. I, I really do.

And then once I cracked that door open, it was like a floodgate opened. And I was like, I've got all of this stuff to say. [laughs] And once I started saying it out loud, I just—it was like, the best therapy I've ever done, but...

Mandy

When I did AGT and I sang "Try," - "Try" was one of the first songs that I had written, period, but also one of the very first songs, if not the first song, that I wrote about myself. And so, when I would sing "Try" to other people, I was still very much frail in who I was. And so, when I sang it on AGT, what I was seeing before me was the work. So, I was looking at the staff of music across the faces. And I was watching the notes that I was supposed to be singing, and I was doing the math, and I was counting rhythms, and I was focused on the performing aspect of it, while also expressing myself.

Mandy

I want to make people smile. I want to encourage people. I want to show a different side of what a disability looks like. And I want to prove that it's okay to fail.

Mandy

I feel like I'm a more empathetic person because I have been broken down to the studs.

I've fallen down so many wells and dark holes, and had to claw my way back up time and time again, that I'm just not surprised by it anymore. And I think that when you're living your life, regardless of if it's easy or difficult, you're constantly learning. And I am excited to learn and grow as a person.

So, from my 18-year-old self, who didn't have any idea what the future was gonna hold, am I surprised that I'm where I am now? Yeah, but just as much as anybody would be, because nobody knows what tomorrow is going to be. You can only have control over what you're doing right now.