9:59AM
I was in the vocal cave yesterday.
The studio is a room inside a factory with other creatives doing creative things, sometimes at the same time.
The walls are soundproof but the ceiling is not. Sometimes I can hear a lady selling custom kitchen cabinets or a guy running a metal saw or a guitar teacher showing a 10-yr-old how to play 7-Nation Army, all wafting through the drop ceiling.
I know sometimes they can hear me singing about small towns and the end of days. And sometimes it's enough to make me hold back.
I wish I had a Roald Dahl cabin out in the middle of nowhere just to record vocal takes, because when that day comes, it is the Day of Judgement.
What's the word for pathological procrastination? Where you secretly dread doing a thing that will scratch your vulnerabilities like a nail on a chalkboard? What's the word for when you actively resist looking at your own photos or listen to yourself in a voicemail?
It's....I have that.
I have put off the day's recording for going on two weeks now. Why? Because I'm afraid to fail.
If you've ever seen powerlifters going for PR, slapping themselves in the faces and growling, throwing folding chairs, that's how I have to sit my ass behind the mic.
You have this. You can do this. Stop wasting time. Hit the button. You have to do this.
Self talk.
I roll tape, flub the lead-in, stop and do it again. Do it five times again. Sounds like shit until I double it. Then we have something.
Maybe.
I read somewhere that the thing you don't like about your own voice is your own humanness. And that human voices are what people attach themselves to. The off-keyness of Neil Young. Bob Dylan. Jason Molina. This is heart. This is soul.
This is what I tell myself.
I try to remember what my old vocal coach told me about connecting long vowels in a steady stream of breath. I try to remember what my old publisher said about me having an interesting voice that needs to be on a lot of different things. (Meant less, I think, as a compliment and more like an acquired taste.)
Maybe my voice is like curry. Or kim chi. You hate it until you don't.
(It should be noted that that particular publisher did, in fact, like my voice very much.)
But I can always find something wrong with it. It's a frequency band that fails to penetrate the din of a crowded bar. It fails to sound powerful when I try to make an argument. On some days, it makes telemarketers respond with "ma'am."
Maybe it's because we always want to be what we aren't.
When I was little I wanted brown, straight hair. But what I got was blond curly locks. What I got was a sinus configuration that makes me flatten the diphthong, hit esses way too hard, all seemingly through a clothespin on the nose.
I wanted a big booming voice, but this is what I got.
John Lennon hated his voice. Lorde hates her voice. Mac Miller hates his voice. I know a British girl with the most lovely West End accent, but she absolutely hates hearing herself on tape, and yet I could listen to her read the phone book.
"Will you ever get used to the sound of yourself, when it’s enough to make you fall in love with the sound of anything else?"
...says Mac Macaughan from Superchunk, another high-voiced singer like myself.
I guess we're all like this. But do we ever learn to live with the sound of ourselves?
Twenty years a singer.
Every vocal session, for me, isn't just a task on a long list of production TODOs. It's an internal process. A mind game. It's an exercise in brutal self-acceptance, hard won like a record bench press or a 50K endurance race.
So I slap myself, drink the throat coat, and sit in the chair behind the mic. Lyrics up that I half-hate, a Pro Tools instrumental session that sounds pretty damn good and that I think I'll probably ruin.
I walk away feeling dissatisfied.
But...
If history proves correct, I'll listen again six months later and think, damn that's pretty good.
And when I record the next time, I'll start from zero once again.
Is there a therapist in the house?
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What I’m reading: Jesus' Son (Denis Johnson)
What I'm listening to: Arrythmia (Loscil)
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