But it is difficult getting there. Added to the challenge of looking for something for which you have no prior example, once you find it, you’re the only one who will never truly see what’s special about it. What an artist has to offer is obvious to just about anyone else but the artist him- or herself. It’s not terribly profound or abstract to say that the way we hear our speaking voice, reverberating in our own skull, is not the way we sound to others. We never get a chance to meet ourselves the way others have. It’s the same with the artistic voice. It’s something you feel in the dark.
When I’m working with successful artists—usually in the studio, that particularly self-conscious fishbowl—I can often see them working the angle they think is their calling card. And they are usually way off. Of course, they’re pros and accustomed to finding their way back, so they snap out of it. But it’s striking to witness. It’s like when you ask a little kid why others like her and she says something like, “Because I’m funny! I make farting jokes in class.” Well, if you ask her classmates, they may well tell you that they tolerate that class-clown crap but that actually, “I like Ethel because she’s nice.” They see her in a way her ego will never allow. Ethel never needed to act like the village idiot to make people like her. Being herself was all she needed to do. It can take some time to find the thing that lives in your blind spot.
As you get closer to finding your voice, you’ll feel resistance. You’ll want to retreat. It’s scary to just be you. You may notice that criticism from others starts to sting more, because now it’s personal. You’re being seen and addressed directly, not through the sunglasses you finally removed. But once you’ve relaxed, you can apply the effort to the important part—that which projects and amplifies the expression of the real you. That’s technique. And by the way, when it’s said that someone is “trying too hard,” we should take that to mean “trying too hard at the wrong thing.” Once the wrong thing, usually affectation or tension, is stripped away, by all means, please try too hard. Try as hard as you can to express what you feel, and don’t let anyone bully you otherwise.
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I arrived at some kind of unique artistic voice in my songwriting, my piano-playing, and my singing at different times in my life. And I’d say the whole package came together rather late. And that I lost my grip on it and found it over and over again. It’s still something I struggle with.
My songwriting clicked first. That’s where I put the time in early on, enduring constant failure, mostly in the privacy of my bedroom. Imitating my heroes and then rebelling against them as I matured. Writing and throwing away hundreds of songs.
I came to a point in my musical development where I wanted to listen to albums that didn’t exist. I wanted more than anything to hear a specific record and realized I had to be the one to make it. For instance, I wanted to hear a rock star who didn’t need to cast themselves heroically. I wanted to hear a record where, for once, the singer wasn’t always right. Where the rock star didn’t have to always be the sexy one, the strong one, or the victimized party. Because even when on the losing end, they didn’t seem to me to be showing honest vulnerability. They’d sing shit like, Girl, I cried for you. As if that revealed anything at all. Who the hell says that in real life? It’s dress-up and playacting. Disingenuous vulnerability. Amanda Palmer has a fantastic verse that touches on this in her song “Grown Man Cry”:
I’m scanning through the stations as the boys declare their feelings
But it doesn’t feel like feelings
It feels like they’re pretending
It’s like they just want blowjobs
And they know these songs will get them
And, sure, it’s fine to cry and it’s fine to write about it, but she’s right. It so often doesn’t feel like feelings. I was highly suspicious of most rock lyrics. It felt like rock bands were selling a brand too hard. What if you risked ruining your brand? I wondered. Wouldn’t it be riskier and more dangerous to admit that I was too shallow or too afraid to show feelings? Honesty like that, that didn’t cast a singer in the most flattering light, seemed more like real-life vulnerability. It seemed sadder. Cultivating my vulnerability, nerdiness, and weakness, all in the key of awkward, is what eventually felt right for me. That was the imaginary record that I wanted to buy, that I would have to make myself. A great leap away from the herd, and toward my voice.
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I learned to embrace lyrics that didn’t match the music, gravitating, for instance, toward major keys (usually considered happy keys) with sad lyrics. You know, lyrics and music don’t have to agree. The music can refute or ridicule what is being said, and I loved playing with that effect. That sort of contradiction reflected the way I felt life worked, and it also felt naughty and off-limits. I called it “breaking the law.” And feeling bolder with each misdemeanor, I began to enjoy words outside the usual rock nomenclature. Even words more commonly found in a physics book, for instance, would probably be more compelling to me than dithering lyrics with lots of baby, baby, baby, I’m so hurt. Staid technical language might even be used to portray a singer who wants to divert attention from his true feelings. Not to mention that it’s a shock to hear obtuse, jagged language in a song. We so rarely hear that, and it can draw you in. That’s the impulse behind the waltz, “Boxing,” that I wrote about Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. I knew it wasn’t cool to couple a sports story with a pretty melody, or to write from the perspective of old men in rock and roll. I just wanted to hear that record and so I would have to make it myself. Since then the times have changed, and it’s not as unusual to project awkwardness anymore—it’s actually become fashionable. But when I was finding my voice, it was by feel, like learning my face with my fingertips in the dark.
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My voice as a pianist had been evolving all along at another pace. Style is often steered by circumstance and necessity. When I was younger, trying to jam with loud guitars and drums on an unamplified upright piano in various neighborhood garage bands, I couldn’t hear myself at all. The guitars could just turn a volume knob and blow me away. But one day when we played “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers, while copying the original piano part I discovered the power of sticking the top of the piano range loudly and repetitively. I could finally be heard. And it wasn’t the velocity alone that made the piano speak above the loud garage band. It was also a matter of what range to play, and when. I was like the runt of a litter who learns to bull in to get food. I can fucking stick it in any loud band and make myself heard.
My training as a percussionist also contributed to my style. Drums are traditionally set up with the highest drums to the left and lowest to the right. That’s the opposite of a piano. But I’m a left-handed drummer and so I lay the drums out like a piano. Lower drums to the left and higher drums to the right. This has allowed me to play drums on the piano. My embellishments on the piano are rarely melodic flurries, which couldn’t be heard in a garage band anyway. They’re more like drum fills that I learned to play left-handed. Style by circumstance.