But what really gave me a voice on the piano was my songs, which were a product of my imagination. My songs taught me to play piano. What I learned and practiced at the piano was driven by my desire to play what I heard in my head, and my piano-playing became its own thing once my tunes fell into place.
I now had words, songs, and a pianist, but that wasn’t enough. I needed to find a singer who could bring it all out. At first, I looked everywhere. Everywhere but under my own nose.
Where oh where is my voice…
my voice…my…
Ah! My voice! My physical voice? That damn buzzy thing?
It made sense for me to sing these songs I was writing, but I had one problem. I was a terrible singer. So I sought real singers to bring my songs to life.
To be fair, it’s not that I had a terrible vocal apparatus. It’s just that this God-given vocal instrument was not what I wanted to hear. It was too…me. Too scary to reveal. I made things worse by trying to disguise it, which resulted in my singing badly. I harbored a grave misconception that singing involved some herculean effort and strain in order to force it into something interesting. I thought this is what all the real Singers™ did. It turns out, singing does require effort, just not the kind I imagined.
I didn’t understand singing at all, because I hadn’t grown up doing it. It was like trying to learn to ride a bike in your twenties. I was ashamed to be seen trying. And so, as an adult, I contorted and distorted all the elements of phonation, from overbreathing to pushing my larynx up into my jaw. It was quite a feat turning an otherwise unique instrument into a distorted, airy squeak-box. There must be some magic trick to singing, I thought. It couldn’t possibly be as simple as hitting the notes and telling the story…Could it?
I would nervously step up to the mic, choke out a few overwrought whisper screams, lose my voice, and walk away frustrated.
Where oh where is my voice? I squeaked to the heavens!
The first clue came from the cassettes I made for the singers in Majosha. Demonstrating a new song into a tape recorder, without feeling pressure to be a Singer™, I felt safe singing the melodies plaintively, in a way that simply elucidated the words and the intent. I was actually singing, but I didn’t realize it because it seemed too easy, too obvious. It didn’t hurt. Doesn’t it hurt to feel? Those tapes were just meant to get the point across. They didn’t count. But they sounded right.
Here’s how the song goes. See?
“Pitched mouth noises,” Frank Zappa once called them. Words with notes. I recalled how impressed my piano teacher, Robert Darnell, had been with Eric Clapton, who simply spoke the notes. But even as I began to discover I didn’t need all that strain, I still couldn’t always relax on command. As soon as it counted, I would get anxious and involuntarily revert to my old habits. It was an impossible nervous tick. It was my soul hiding behind a rock. It took a while.
I like to say I suffered from a vocalizing disorder—something akin to an eating disorder, only applied to the voice. I suffered from a case of extremely low voice self-esteem, driven into me from youth. You know how you can hear that one awful comment about your body, at exactly the wrong time, and it can plant a seed in the center of your soul? That was what had happened to me with my voice. I guess feelings of inadequacy, like old habits, die hard.
You see, my father, with absolutely no mal-intent whatsoever, had always proudly insisted I had a weak and unlistenable voice. It was actually a compliment from his perspective. Raised poor in the macho South, he learned that real men don’t go around singing. So Papa boasted that he also had a useless set of vocal cords, and the same went for my brother and me. We were all real men. Papa liked rock music just fine but considered rock singers “sissies” and “fruitcakes,” mostly. Sometimes he gave them a pass because he figured they were laughing all the way to the bank. “Shit, I’d put on mascara and shake my ass in leather tights like a little girl for that kind of money!” he might say. So sure, I had to dig out of a little insecurity hole vocally, but I don’t blame my parents for this. We are all a work in progress.
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It was when I heard myself singing on the demo cassettes that I realized I had no choice. I had to be the singer. Now I could suddenly creatively visualize my songs making their way in the world. But I would have to grow a pair, lose a pair, whatever—it’s all so confusing—and just sing. I learned to state the facts and nothing but the facts vocally. That’s the way I shed the strained affectation. Pitched mouth noises, speaking the lyrics, letting the songwriting do the heavy lifting. I would be myself. A non-singer sort of singer.
There’s an immediacy to hearing a non-singer singer deliver a song. It draws our attention, because we suspect the non-singer singer must really have something to say. Why else would they bother? Certainly not to show off their vocal gymnastics. We trust somehow that they’re telling the truth. They’ve cut out all the sugar coating and they’re telling us the way it is.
The non-singer singer was a sort of unmentioned genre. There were loads of them, only I didn’t quite fit in there either. Non-singer singers always had a character voice. But my voice wasn’t gravelly or odd like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Tom Waits. I had a boy-next-door sound I hadn’t heard much on records. One who definitely doesn’t wear sunglasses and smoke cigarettes. I figured I had to just go for it, belly flop and all. I began to push this boy-next-door quality front and center. No apologies, no disclaimer, no effects to hide behind or defensiveness that would indicate fear. I was tired of being afraid. I embraced my fear so I could get my songs out there. I still do.
I began to record my new songs on a four-track cassette machine in my bedroom. I had one track for drums, one for bass, one for piano, and one for my newly discovered non-singing voice. I sang into the mic, almost in a whisper, so nobody outside the room would hear me. I locked myself away, wrote and recorded the songs “Jackson Cannery,” “Silver Street,” and “Underground” in one week, sometime in 1988.
This was, I thought, the real deal. It felt like a significant step forward.
After hundreds of forgotten songs, and humiliating adenoidal attempts at singing, I had found the first hint of my voice. And it was so much easier than I had imagined.
NASHVILLE—THE BEST (PREFERRED) WAY TO FAIL
MY FIRST GIG SINGING MY songs at the piano fell in my lap. A local pop and soul singer by the name of Marc Silvey hired me to play bass for him on what is known as a “showcase” gig, which is basically a publicly attended audition for record labels. A chemist by trade, Silvey had made a home demo tape that grabbed the attention of record companies and music-publishing execs, who would be flying in from L.A., Nashville, and New York just to hear him play a few songs. If they liked what they saw, then he would become a signed recording artist. This being Marc’s first gig, he didn’t have many songs, so he casually asked if I might play a few of mine on piano as the opener. I didn’t put enough thought into it to be nervous. I said, “Sure thing.”