Mitch Seekins Interview Transcript
SFN Rush Fancast
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Host: Something great about the Fifty Something tour is how amazing Geddy Lee sounds, not only at age 73, but after an 11-year hiatus. And the man has been working with not only Geddy Lee, but also Alex Lifeson to get their voices in peak shape is acclaimed vocal coach Mitch Seekins. Mitch, welcome to the Rush Fancast.
Mitch Seekins: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
Host: So Mitch, we like to start out by asking our guests their Rush origin story. When did you first hear Rush and how did you become a fan?
Mitch Seekins: Well, that would take me back to high school in the mid-seventies. I heard—oh my God, what was it? I guess 2112. I guess I would have to do some research to figure out what it was. It really made an impression on me. I’m a farm boy from northern Canada, northern Alberta, Canada. It was a trek to go and see a band. It was about 400 miles for me to get to Edmonton to go see a band.
Mitch Seekins: So my first band was Kiss and some unknown, very strange band named Cheap Trick who was opening for them. But my second band that I saw was Rush. I’ve seen Rush, I think—you’re talking so many years ago—at least twice and probably three times I’ve seen them before I started my own career and then wasn’t really able to focus on anything anybody else was doing. I had to work on my own stuff. I remember seeing the first show and it was a great show, but the second show made a real impression on me because of [unclear wording] Rush.
Mitch Seekins: And then I saw Styx literally maybe four or five days later in the same venue. It just really made me realize how much I loved Rush [unclear wording]. Styx was the biggest band in the world at that moment. They were the biggest band in the world, and I far, far liked the Rush concert much, much more.
Jerry: Is that like Paradise Theatre-era Styx?
Mitch Seekins: You got it.
Mitch Seekins: That was it. That was the one. And it made an impression on me because somebody didn’t bring a snare head in from the truck for Neil Peart and he broke a snare head during the show.
Mitch Seekins: And so they had to send somebody out to the truck to get another snare head. They didn’t have an extra snare behind stage for some reason, I mean, they’re playing the Edmonton Coliseum. It wasn’t as if it was a small gig. And so the guys,
Mitch Seekins: Geddy and Alex, they goofed around. They told a joke. They played some [unclear: possibly ‘polka’] music. They played some country tunes. They had fun, and it was just a real honest personality out of all those guys that came through. And unfortunately I didn’t get that from Styx.
Mitch Seekins: Because it was the Paradise Theatre tour. And I understand that there’s a certain concept to the show and everything, but I really, really liked Rush because it was real. It was honest.
Jerry: Just in case you’re curious about what date that was, one of our listeners would definitely be able to tell us what date that was exactly that he broke his snare head.
Mitch Seekins: Yeah. That would have been in the early eighties, I believe. I think ’81, ’82, something like that.
Host: So Mitch, tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into not only singing, but voice coaching?
Mitch Seekins: It’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it short. When I was five years old—so where I come from, I’m basically a hillbilly. I had no power growing up. We didn’t get electricity until I was the age of maybe nine, something like that. I left home at 17, still didn’t have indoor plumbing. It was the outhouse out in the woods. But for the first few years living on the farm, the house wasn’t winterized. So we had to move into a little town 50 miles away where we had power and heat and all the rest of that.
Mitch Seekins: My mom played me an old 78. Now, I’m not totally dating myself. It was a very old record even at that time. At the age of five, it was Mario Lanza, a tune called ‘Drink, Drink, Drink.’ And I literally remember listening to that song and just being completely blown away and thinking to myself, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do.’ And it has literally been my focus from the age of five onwards. I’ve listened to voices, tried to emulate different voices, learned phrasing, learned different styles, really learned to listen to voices.
Mitch Seekins: And all I wanted to do was become a rock singer, rock-pop guy, rock guy, really. So that’s been my entire focus for the majority of my life. What’s interesting, though, from about grade six, grade seven, I became a provincial-level athlete. I was doing shot put. I’m a big guy. I’m built like a linebacker, six foot two, 250 pounds, that kind of thing. So I was throwing shot put and I surpassed my coach within about two months.
Mitch Seekins: There was nothing he could show me anymore. And I spent every noon hour for five years throwing this bloody metal ball, but analyzing what little tiny muscular movements did, the results. Did I get more power? Did I get more distance? Did I get more speed? Really paying attention to what was going on in my body. And then I finished high school and joined a rock band and went on the road, and away I went. After three years of touring constantly, I was touring about 51 weeks out of every year, six nights a week.
Mitch Seekins: You can’t really do that much anymore.
Mitch Seekins: I decided I wanted to know what in the world I was doing. I was surviving, but I wanted to know why I was a weaker vocalist on Saturday night than I was on Monday night. So I moved across the country to Ontario, found myself a vocal coach and started this whole learning process. I did no touring for almost two years and then went back out, and I was amazed at the difference. I still sounded like me, but all of a sudden there was no weakness anymore. My range had increased. My control, my endurance had skyrocketed, and I decided I wanted to continue to study.
Mitch Seekins: Once a lot of the road work finished, about the five-year mark on that, I was concentrating basically in town, and I had gotten married and had a new family. My coach at the time said, ‘You should try coaching. I think you’d be good at it.’ It wasn’t something I ever considered before. He wanted to retire. So I thought it would be a fun way to increase my income and support my growing family. So I started, and I only had, I think, four students that first year.
Mitch Seekins: Two or three, three or four students, something like that. It was pretty minimal, but I found I really, really enjoyed it, and I was still gigging at the time. And the next year something happened, and my business grew by 400%.
Mitch Seekins: It became a full-time gig as well as gigging, singing, and I really enjoyed it. And the reason why I mentioned the athletic standpoint is because what I found is that I could equate little tiny muscle movement in my students, my clients, and kind of envision what they were doing and be able to tweak it to get a result out of them. So I’ve always equated being a coach and coaching singers as an athlete and approach it from that standpoint.
Mitch Seekins: I retired from gigging in 2018, and I started teaching in 1990. It was full-time from then onwards, and gigging full-time as much as you could, but I was flying in and out of cities, doing a show, flying home kind of thing. That’s the level that I got to, and then decided to retire and just do the teaching thing. And here I am. That’s the whole story.
Jerry: If you’re talking about your physical body and the muscles, people can kind of envision, ‘This muscle over here does this,’ and you can kind of see it. What about with your throat? There are so many muscles in your throat and by your vocal cords. How do you tell somebody you have to work on that particular muscle?
Mitch Seekins: I actually don’t tell them that. What I’m able to do is I can kind of mimic what they’re doing and then show them how to do it right and try to get them to emulate the proper way. Because you can’t really say to somebody, ‘Okay, I want you to concentrate on the little tiny muscle that’s on the lower right of your larynx and pull that.’ It’s so minute. It’s just more of an empathetic kind of feeling. Okay, there’s tension in the chest or there’s tension here. Try to get them to relax and try things again and build it from there.
Mitch Seekins: It is a slow process, but it’s reteaching an athlete how to get more results out of a particular kind of performance, whether you’re a hockey player, baseball player. It’s all the same kind of thing. It’s being as efficient as possible.
Host: So Mitch, tell us how you ended up working with Geddy and Alex, the athletes in Rush.
Mitch Seekins: The athletes in Rush, exactly. Well, I got a phone call from a fellow named Andy Curran, who was the bass player, one of the singers in a band called Coney Hatch. He studied with me for a while, and in the meantime he had moved into Rush’s management staff, I should say, in the office. So I’ve known Andy for 12 years, 13 years, something along those lines. Of course he knows Rush.
Mitch Seekins: He was on the road with them for a while and took care of their publicity, I believe is what he was doing, their book. And he called me and said, ‘So, how are you doing?’ All this kind of thing. ‘Hey, I got a question for you. Would you consider working with Geddy Lee to help him prep for this upcoming tour? He’s pretty badly out of shape.’ It was like…
Mitch Seekins: What? Well, yeah, duh, of course.
Mitch Seekins: Yeah, I’d help him, sure. He said, ‘Okay, I will make an introduction and just expect an email from him.’ Then he called me five minutes later, maybe 10 minutes later, and he said, ‘Oh, Alex says he wants to study too, because he wants to sing more on this tour. So he wants to take a bigger vocal role in this tour.’ And Alex has a great voice. He actually has a really good voice. He’s just really shy. He’s very shy with it. So of course I said, ‘Yes, I would love to help both guys.’
Mitch Seekins: And then they both got ahold of me and we went to work.
Jerry: So how do you start working with someone like Geddy Lee? I mean, he’s obviously been singing for so long.
Mitch Seekins: Yeah.
Jerry: So many albums.
Mitch Seekins: Yeah.
Jerry: His voice was so high back in the day. How do you start from where he was to where he is now?
Mitch Seekins: Well, I had to kind of analyze what he had, what he had left, because I’ve never had a student, number one, of this caliber. Kind of—Ian Thornley from Big Wreck is a very, very high-level vocalist. [Name unclear] from Three Days Grace is a very, very high-level vocalist. But Rush is a very unique gig, and in my books it’s one of the hardest music to sing.
Mitch Seekins: And Geddy did it all night, singing in the stratosphere all night. It’s very, very difficult. So I needed to see what he had left. He’s had a 50-year career already by the time they finished touring, or something along those lines, and then he hadn’t sung for 11 years. He did a couple little gigs. He did the South Park guys at Red Rocks. He did that thing, and then he did the Taylor Hawkins tribute with Dave Grohl. So there was a couple little things, but he basically hadn’t really vocalized in 11 years.
Mitch Seekins: And not only that, he’d also aged 11 years. So he was 72. So I needed to find out what he had, what he had left. Was there any damage occurred? Because the one shocking thing to me was that I found out that I was his first vocal coach. He’s never had any coaching before. So he was flying by the seat of his pants all those years. Did he damage himself? I have no clue. So I had to kind of strip things back and find out what was there and begin the process of rebuilding the voice.
Host: What was your assessment? What condition was his voice in? He clearly hadn’t damaged it, right?
Mitch Seekins: He hadn’t damaged it in all those years. He had not damaged his voice, which is incredibly rare. He basically did everything correctly. Support was a bit of an issue, but there’s something called blending, which is accessing all that top end that he has. And he did that from a natural way. It was organic to him. He did it when he was a teenager, and it just kept on building, and it became incredibly strong. And he did it, like I said, naturally.
Mitch Seekins: So there was no damage, which was great to discover. There was no damage, but the voice was in really, really rough shape. And of course it is. Just like any athlete that doesn’t practice their craft, or whatever you want to call that, for 11 years, well, they’re going to be horribly out of shape. That wasn’t a surprise. And so that just left the age factor. What kind of effect has the aging had on his voice? And in the beginning it was pretty rough because it was so out of shape, but I began to hear elements in his sound that, okay, it wasn’t coming out yet, but I could hear that it was still there.
Mitch Seekins: So then there was the psychological building of, number one, getting him to trust me.
Mitch Seekins: And then really believe that it was there and he was going to be able to do this. That is what is so interesting about my job. It isn’t just the physicality of everything. There’s a huge, huge psychological element to it as well. Talk about a crappy factory job. Doing ‘nah, hey, oh, nah’ would drive most people nuts. [Unclear phrase] behind the muscles, behind the psychological aspect, I would have probably been committed a long time ago.
Jerry: So is that where you start? Just doing vocal exercises, warming it up?
Mitch Seekins: It’s all vocal exercises. Comparing it to an athlete, in my mind, anyway, the majority of the improvement is made doing the drills, not necessarily the game. You have to build the skills before you really get into the game. If you want to play at a high level, you have to have the skills. It’s very, very similar to that. So it’s vocal drills. It’s muscle work. I am a very strong believer in simplicity.
Mitch Seekins: Like I told both those guys, ‘Listen, these are going to sound really, really juvenile, these exercises. They are so stupidly simple.’ Talk about guys who play complex music, and I’m getting them to do one, three, five, one, three, five. It’s so stupidly simple. It would be mind-bogglingly numbing.
Jerry: Yeah. It’s like, have you heard of the pentatonic scale?
Mitch Seekins: Yeah.
Mitch Seekins: Exactly. But you can’t hide with it, and that’s the beauty of it. The voice is rendered completely naked. So I hear all the imperfections. So I can start the process of building things back up again.
Host: Now, were your sessions with Geddy and Alex in person or over Zoom or both?
Mitch Seekins: No, it’s all Zoom. Yeah, the only way to get ahold of me now is Zoom. I’ve been teaching strictly online for nine years now.
Mitch Seekins: So as far as I can tell…
Mitch Seekins: I might be wrong. As far as I can tell, I was the first person in the world to teach voice online. I’ve been teaching since 2001 online, which was very, very difficult. And I prepared for two years, essentially in my mind, buying domain names, because I had a feeling it was going to be a thing. So I wanted to be able to service clients when they were on the road, because I was teaching recording artists by ’94 or something like that.
Mitch Seekins: But I was also still touring occasionally, and I wanted to make sure that I was able to help my clients when I was on the road as well. So I started to prep for it, and then I got a chance to begin the teaching process online in 2001, when a student moved away down to Florida and he wanted to keep on studying. So when I started, it was a one-inch-square AOL video. So I had to get really close, and that was all the bandwidth that there was. And the audio had to come through the telephone, and it just built from there.
Mitch Seekins: Somebody kindly invented Skype, and I was off to the races.
Jerry: So when you started working with Geddy,
Jerry: Did you work on particular songs that he was more concerned about than others?
Mitch Seekins: Oh, there’s definitely songs that he was more concerned about: ‘2112,’ ‘A Farewell to Kings.’
Host: ‘Anthem,’ maybe?
Mitch Seekins: Definitely ‘Anthem.’ For example, last night’s set list: ‘Xanadu’ was pretty good. ‘Headlong Flight’ was an issue. ‘Red Sector A,’ there was some stuff. I think ‘A Farewell to Kings.’ ‘Spirit’ was questionable. ‘Red Barchetta’ was questionable. ‘Limelight,’ surprisingly enough, there was some issues in that. ‘Closer to the Heart,’ ‘2112,’ ‘Temples.’ Yeah, so ‘Temples’ was the big one. ‘By-Tor,’ ‘Working Man.’
Mitch Seekins: And what was the very first one we worked on? Because the debut of the band was at the Juno Awards here in Canada.
Host: ‘Finding My Way.’
Mitch Seekins: Yeah. You guys are down in the States. Yeah.
Host: Yes. Yep.
Mitch Seekins: Yeah, so it’s kind of our version of—yeah, ‘Finding My Way.’ So we worked on that for literally, I’m not joking, for two months prior to that performance to get him ready, because it’s stupidly difficult to sing. It’s high E’s. It’s ridiculous how hard it is to sing that. But the management company chose it because it was the very first song off the very first record. So it was kind of a special kind of thing. It’s not a song that I think a lot of people know, and just being ridiculously difficult to sing, there was a lot of work put into that and a lot of prayers on my side going, ‘Please, please just let it work,’ because it was live broadcast nationally with the new lineup.
Mitch Seekins: Rush is coming back. There was so much riding on that performance, and they nailed it. They nailed it, but he’s singing way better now than he did on that first performance.
Host: Yeah, you were going through the list: ‘There was issues. There was issues.’ But we’ve seen Rush four times already on this tour, and I don’t see—you’re an expert, but I don’t see any issues. He’s singing better than he has in 20 years to me. And you, Jerry, too, right?
Jerry: Absolutely.
Mitch Seekins: Yeah, I know. Even he says that. He knows. We worked through a lot of those issues. We didn’t get as much time as I would have liked to actually work on the songs, because there were interruptions. They are busy guys, man.
Host: Oh yeah.
Mitch Seekins: There’s always something going on between shooting,
Mitch Seekins: a Neil Peart documentary in L.A. They went to a retreat for Al to get him healthy again, to really help his medical stuff, and Geddy went along as moral support, which is great. So there was that and a few side trips here and there where I couldn’t see him as much as I wanted to. We did work through that time, don’t get me wrong. But I work with Geddy almost every day because there was so much work to do to get everything more consistent, build up strength,
Mitch Seekins: get the range back. But that was the most important thing, was rebuilding his range, because that’s what everybody wants to hear. They want him singing all the high notes. That was the primary focus. And then I wanted to start building endurance, which is real important because they’re long shows. They’re very long shows.
Mitch Seekins: And we ran out of time. We started on that. All the range was [unclear], but the endurance wasn’t quite there. And they went into that final rehearsal cycle. So I was seeing him every day before rehearsal. There was a couple of rehearsal cycles that I was a part of where I was seeing him every day, warming him up, checking to see what kind of condition the voice was in, because rehearsals were six hours long. It wasn’t all singing, but it was a lot of singing, and it’s really difficult stuff. So as you age, your endurance naturally retreats.
Mitch Seekins: So I needed to make sure that he was balancing and not overworking and maintaining things so he didn’t hurt himself through that cycle.
Jerry: So when you meet with Geddy every day now, while he’s on tour,
Mitch Seekins: I don’t every day. Now I see him on non-show days.
Jerry: So on the days that you do work with him, is he coming to you with notes saying, ‘I didn’t feel like this song—I sang this and this was the issue,’ or strictly doing the warmups and stuff?
Mitch Seekins: Yeah, no, I actually go to him with notes, because with YouTube now,
Mitch Seekins: it’s been really, really handy. And for all those fans out there, they don’t mind you guys posting so much of each show. And I got to tell you, it’s really helpful for me and Geddy because I sit with my coffee in the morning and I review last night’s show and make notes of what I hear. I’m not able to go through everything, but I know there’s songs that, when he’s really tired, certain issues will arise. And there’s certain songs that we’re still kind of tweaking to try and get it into a sweet spot.
Mitch Seekins: And then we’ll kind of review how he felt last night. Were there any problem spots that he could remember? Because you’ve got to realize he’s really busy up there. He’s very, very busy up there. So it’s really hard to kind of pinpoint certain songs and certain instances in every song, because he’s very busy mentally the whole night. And then we stretch out. I want to see how fatigued he is, how balanced he still is, and stretch things out so the muscles don’t tighten up on the day off and that kind of thing.
Host: One of the highlights for me, Mitch was ‘The Garden’. And I feel like he almost sounds better live now than he sounds on the record. If that’s possible, do you think that’s possibly true?
Mitch Seekins: Well, I have to be honest. That’s not one of the songs I listen to. He doesn’t have any problems with it.
Host: [Unclear short remark.]
Mitch Seekins: Doesn’t he? I know. Believe me, I have listened to it, but I don’t listen to it from show to show to show because it’s one of those placeholder songs where it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, he can rest.’ And then he goes into ‘By-Tor’ or ‘2112’ or something, or ‘Anthem’ after that.
Host: But could the exercises he’s been working on with you have improved his voice in a song like that as well?
Mitch Seekins: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I’ve just really begun, because we worked on the top end so much. I went and saw the show in Toronto on the 13th, and it was really good to see the entire show in the building because I was able to kind of pinpoint some of the lower end of his range needs to be tweaked a little bit, just so it’s easier for him. It will reduce the fatigue factor after a show because he was actually working a bit too hard.
Mitch Seekins: But still, we did work on it prior to the 13th. We worked on everything, but now I’m going to start getting him to focus a little more on that because the high end is nicely established. And if I can get him to relax a little bit more on the bottom end, he’ll sound a little bit better and not have a fatigue factor. But in the meantime, all the work that we have done has improved songs like that, just because things are more focused. We’ve worked on his bottom range too. There’s that song, and it might be ‘Trees.’
Mitch Seekins: I think it might be ‘Trees,’ where he sings an A, like a low A, and he was always bottoming out on it. So I’ve stretched him down to an A-flat, and he’s really consistent. So he doesn’t have an issue with it anymore. This is stuff that he didn’t work on in his younger days. So like I said, he was flying by the seat of his pants. So yeah,
Mitch Seekins: There’s a strong possibility he could be singing it better than he was.
Jerry: And how was it working with Alex? Not known for his singing, more known for guitar, I think, Alex.
Mitch Seekins: I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
Jerry: How did you establish his vocal prowess at the beginning?
Mitch Seekins: Exactly the same way. It’s all the same. It was the same exercises. Geddy’s just went a lot higher than Alex’s did,
Mitch Seekins: because the process is the same. Now, of course, Geddy, having 55 years of vocal experience under his belt, responded quicker, but Alex did great. And both those guys wholeheartedly jumped into the project in willingness to kind of—it is really exposing when you do something like that with a guy like me. You’re kind of baring your soul, so to speak.
Mitch Seekins: It’s very humbling. And both those guys had no problem, and they both worked really hard. After people work with me for a short period of time, once they understand my terminology, what I mean when I say ‘think line of movement’ or something along those lines, I build them a workout file. It’s just an MP3, but it’s for them. It’s for their range, what they should be working on. And both guys have multiple files, and Alex, when he got that first file, he was doing it every day.
Mitch Seekins: And he built it up, and he’s doing great. He’s doing really, really well. Some of the video that I see online when Alex is singing, they put him up on the big screen so I can see positioning and everything. He’s doing exactly what we worked on, and it’s really good. It’s great.
Host: So Mitch, you mentioned you saw Rush in Toronto on the 13th. You’re out in that audience. How proud are you of the work that these guys did and then being able to see it on stage?
Mitch Seekins: It is really something else. They are global icons, respected worldwide, and to have them come back at this age and do so well, it is a good news story that I really think the world needs right now. It’s not so great out there now due to things beyond our means.
Mitch Seekins: You and I don’t really have much of a choice, and we just have to kind of go along with the ride. But the ride is so much fun, and to see them do this incredible music, which is so exciting and so inspiring at such a high level, and then have a shitload of fun while they’re doing it. What more do you want? Really, what more do you want? Yeah, it’s awe-inspiring. I’m still grateful to be a part of this incredible story.
Mitch Seekins: I’m a part of it. There’s so much going on. I’m very grateful for my little part, what I’ve been able to do.
Host: So Mitch, if there are any listeners out there who are in need of your services who want to work with you, how can they get in touch with you?
Mitch Seekins: Go to my website. There’s information on how to get ahold of me there. You just have to Google my name. There’s only one of me, which is really handy. There’s only one Mitch Seekins in the entire world, thank goodness. So I don’t have to compete. It’s pretty simple. Or just type in, ‘Who the hell is Geddy Lee’s vocal coach?’
Mitch Seekins: Everything exploded on a media side for me about two weeks ago, on the 13th when the Rolling Stone thing came out. Just all of a sudden, my phone lit up.
Host: So, well, Mitch, thanks so much for joining us today on the Rush Fancast and sharing your story with us. And thanks so much for helping out Geddy and Alex. They sound fantastic. Thanks to you.
Mitch Seekins: They certainly do. And believe me, it’s been my pleasure.
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