Deena Kamm is on a mission to help people sing, sing loudly, and live with the freedom that comes with using your full vocal expression in every area of your life. She’s a vocal coach, founder and director of Sing Bend as well as the Public (Rock) Choir, and now, co-writer of a full-length musical titled “Voiceless: A Musical.” You can catch one of the eight performances at Caldera Theatre located in Caldera High School, from July 24 through Aug. 3.
the Source: Have you ever written a musical before?
Deena Kamm: No, but I have written three full-length albums with my band, and I’ve written many, many songs and soundtrack music… I mean, I’ve been a songwriter since I was about 21 or 22. So, I’ve been writing songs forever, but I actually got bored with writing little three-and-a-half-minute songs. So, I stopped writing songs and I finally just looked into the exact opposite. I wanted to do something bigger that had a little more meat to it, so that the songs connect. I didn’t really want to do a concept album because, you know, the music industry changed so much with the internet that concept albums are kind of irrelevant, because everybody is putting out individual singles. And I wanted to do something that just kind of mattered more. And to have more time to say it, because in a three-and-a-half-minute song, you basically only get to say four things, and that’s it. So, I wanted to explore a topic fully, and I’m getting that with this musical.
tS: The topic is something many people may not know about, which is Muscle Tension Dysphonia (MTD). What interested you about this topic?
DK: I’m a voice coach, so I work with people with all kinds of disorders. And I had never heard of MDS specifically, but I had worked with people who have other forms of dysphonia [alteration of normal voice quality]. My writing partner, Anne Fenn, this is her story. She had written an article, and it popped into my Google feed. I read the story, and because she was already a comedy writer, she had written for TV. She was a stand-up comedian, she teaches comedy and writing… and she knows how to write scripts, so I contacted her and said, I love your story and I would love to do this, because you are “my” client, the kind of people I work with every day. The reasons behind MTD are very important to me. It’s my passion, my work. It’s what I want to change in society.
tS: Can you explain MTD?
DK: MTD is a very extreme version of what most people have, which is fear around their voice. And then MTD comes in and wipes out the voice completely. You can’t talk, it freezes your vocal chords. It’s basically years of misappropriation of muscles and how you are coming at your voice is usually not ergonomic. It’s not how it’s built to vocalize. So you keep reinforcing the wrong muscle set, and I’m writing a whole book about this. So if you use your voice the way it’s built to work, it’s dominant [and loud]. And if you don’t feel your voice is allowed to be dominant, then you will “fix” it with different kinds of muscles when you sing, speak or yell. Almost every single person I work with has a version of this.
tS: If someone reading this article has the realization that they aren’t using their voice fully or they are habitually being too quiet and not using their voice in the way they should, what would you suggest to them?
DK: I would say really embrace your voice. The theme of our show is “use it or lose it.” If you don’t use your voice, you will lose it, and your voice is everything about your personal self-expression. It’s who you are. It’s emotional, communicative, esoteric, physical. It’s not just the physical voice. What happens when you stop using your voice is your diaphragm breaks down. So, if we start using our voice properly again, we actually fix quite a lot of health problems that we pop pills for all day long.
tS: Is this why you founded the Public (Rock) Choir?
DK: Yes, this is 100% why. I don’t tell people all of this. I just want to give people a place to come and vocalize. Singing is the only time your diaphragm is fully contracted at length, and your parasympathetic nervous system is triggered at length. It’s the only natural thing we do that does that.
tS: What else excites you about your upcoming musical?
DK: There is a very large neurodivergent piece to the show. The show is set in a company called Spectrum Services that hires autistic people to do the work. So we use autism as a way to show honest ways of communicating, because many, if not most autistic people don’t have that filter of “people pleasing,” so they are honest. We use their honesty in the musical to show how dishonest neurotypical brains are. And how we’ve trained ourselves to be so dishonest about who we are and what we’re doing and how we feel. So that’s a big piece of the show that I feel is important.
tS: I have the urge to get in my car and do some loud singing now. What singers do you suggest people try to sing along with or emulate?
DK: Whitney Houston was the best. She’s always my go-to, and anybody who has worked with me knows I talk about her voice all the time. Beyonce is a powerhouse of diaphragm and voice, she uses her whole voice. She uses all different sounds from very low, up to her big opera voice. If we are talking about a male singer: Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Billy Joel, Harry Styles and Benson Boone— he has a great, great voice. Just anybody who uses a full throttle voice, and everybody has access to it, every single person.
This article appears in Source Weekly July 10, 2025.
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