The singer and the cold

Sounds like the title of an independent movie, but in this case it describes a hate-hate relationship that is especially known to singers and their very close ones, and by close I mean the ones that are bound to catch every cold that the singer brings home. This is a common topic among singers, it really is a thing. I once heard Joan Manel Serrat, one of the greatest Spanish singer-songwriters, saying in a documentary something along these lines: "this has been a very good winter, I didn't catch a single cold. Catching a cold is about the worse thing that can happen to a singer". It's no joke! This is one live performance of his, old stuff but lovely just the same, check it out.

Nobody likes a cold, that's for sure, but it is a little worse if you're a singer. It's like your boss forces you to take a holiday you don't care for plus the physical discomfort, not cool at all. In the space of a week or so your voice goes from sexy sounding to ridiculous sounding, then it's just gone, and after that, it goes through the reverse process till it goes back to normal. Obviously, everything stops: recording is out of the question, practicing hurts and nothing good will come out of it anyway, and performing... well, that's a whole other issue which requires taking out your crystal ball to try to foresee if, on the actual day of the gig, your voice is gonna be a complete goner (and therefore you should cancel as soon as possible to give the venue time to find another act) or if there's gonna be enough of it to push through. Somehow it always ends up being the latter.

So what to do, then, to stay away from the snotty hold of a cold? I have one little thing that really works for me: propolis. I first heard about it from another singer-songwriter, Paula Herrera (in the video on top of this paragraph), who I shared stage with an befriended while she was on tour in Barcelona in 2011, of course while discussing the issue of how to cope with colds. Propolis is the stuff bees use to seal holes in the hive, and it has an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial effect. The trick is, if you start taking propolis pills as soon as you feel the first symptoms, the cold seems to stop altogether, and if it's too late for that, it makes the cold a lot easier to bear. But be sure to keep taking it for the following 7 days, even if you feel like the cold is gone way before that (as if it were an antibiotic), otherwise the cold might end up sneaking up on you again. ¡Don't ask me why!

Now, does it really work or do I make it work because I want it to work so bad? That could be, I'm not gonna lie to you, the mind is a powerful thing and the body has a great ability to heal itself, so maybe propolis only works for you if you really believe in it... (oh boy! Sounds like a line for Hook). At any rate, it does help me and I worry about colds a lot less than I used to. Dalian, where I live now, gets pretty cold in the winter (metaphorically it's the North Pole of the song below, which I recorded with Sour Bounty), so I still need to worry some.

Apart from propolis, there are a bunch of other natural remedies that you can try, like the famous ginger and lemon infusion with a spoonful of honey, or the less known but equally effective saline nasal washes (check the link, it's a little gross to explain here), as well as gurgling with a hot thyme infusion to clean the throat, or with salt water if what you're trying is to stop an infection in it's tracks. All these things will help get through the process quicker and improve congestion.

Well, so these are a few of my personal ways to deal with the dreaded cold. I hope they work for you too. But better safe than sorry so WRAP UP! It's cold out there, man!