Nails on a Chalkboard

Not-quite-voicing my thoughts on voices. Aka, we should all be singing.

One might think it bold for someone as unnecessarily loud as myself to claim that they don’t like the sound of their own voice. To this I say: I’ve never pretended not to be bold, not to be a walking contradiction. My distaste for my voice has in fact arisen from my efforts as singer and a performance poet, both of which are positions that require a hefty load of audacity in the first place. I’m no stranger to chutzpah. My determination is unrivaled. There are many very good synonyms for boldness.

Thesaurus aside, yes, I like to think I’m a multitude-container. But here I argue that I haven’t actually contradicted myself, as Whitman might deem prerequisite to that position; I don’t think being a singer necessarily entails that you must like the sound of your own voice, just like being a widget maker doesn’t mean that you must enjoy making widgets and/or taking high school economics classes. It is a pretty good motivator, don’t get me wrong— if it brings you joy to listen to your voice, then obviously it makes sense that you’d pursue opportunities to do it more often. That’s just not me.

There has to be some reason I do this, right? I really appreciate the support I’ve received from my loyal YouTube¹ commenters— of which there is one, and it is my grandmother— but I’m not in it for the subscribers. My singing voice, to me, sounds squeaky and uncomfortable, like an old rocking chair with splinters sticking out of it. When I was a kid, I often spoke in this unnerving, low-pitched monotone; I actively disliked hearing it, and I became very intentional and practiced in the way I spoke to cause the least amount of self-annoyance (is that a thing?) that I could. Even doing all that left me with a stilted, presentational quality that I didn’t like listening to, and don’t to this day. What I mean to say is that I do not subject myself to the nails-on-a-chalkboard response lightly. And yet, I continue.

An easy answer is this: humans are irrational when it comes to our own actions and what makes us perform. We follow the laws of social convention when we are pressured to do so even if it goes against our own desires. Ergo if the laws of social convention at some point implied to me that vocal performance was something everyone does or should do, then that’s why I’m sitting here, reading this post aloud to myself as I write it, cringing.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a ridiculous theory. How many hours must I have spent as a kindergartner being told to sound it out when I couldn’t spell a word? How many times did I watch The Swan Princess, memorizing the plot beats that led beautiful, clever, easy-to-aspire-to-be-when-you’re-six-and-like-birds Odette to song? One of my earliest memories of despair involves a beloved Barbie doll in a pink dress, her body separate from her smushed plastic head— but at least in the rampage, my twin hadn’t destroyed the speaker in its chest, which would demonstrate an electrical lifespan far beyond even I had expected. And I was endlessly glad for it. I still know the melody, the words it robotically chirped.²

But for this learned behavior theory to be true, then shouldn’t it apply universally? My twin was raised in the same social convention tempest as me, but Hannah has pursued vocal performance about as enthusiastically as a slug pursues salt. Even being charitable to this argument doesn’t get me very far here— having already considered the possibility that all my proclivities as a person are mere attempts to fit into society’s rules many eons ago (in middle school), my singing and spoken word poetry wouldn’t have survived the mass extinction event that was my tragically irreparable Not Like Other Girls phase. I’m only half joking there. I’m self-aware enough, I believe, to know when something I force myself to do for society’s sake is not something I actually, truly, genuinely enjoy doing.

So, we’re back at the start. I enjoy doing this thing that causes me to experience something unpleasant, which I do not enjoy. Oh, God, the hedonic calculus is chasing me. Someone catch it before I use the word propinquity in regular conversation. But I guess following this logic, the answer would simply be that the benefits of vocal performance outweigh its harms for me. The harms brought upon me by singing or speaking aloud are somewhat straightforward here: an unpleasant auditory sensation, chills, a headache. Nothing groundbreaking. The benefits are more difficult to tease out.

Let’s not ignore the obvious: attention. Oh, how I enjoy attention. I run a blog and a YouTube channel. I am never not posting on Instagram, despite my best attempts. It is (for most people) an enjoyable thing to be seen, and even moreso if that being seen evolves into being understood. You can’t really get to the second thing at all without being perceived, can you? So, yes, I enjoy attention. But that’s not the only reason I continue to sing. If all I wanted was attention, I could take up any number of high-visibility occupations. I could be a meteorologist! Could you imagine?

The key here is in the being understood quality of attention. Those familiar with my particular brand of pretention will recognize this understanding language as something I articulate often in regards to my poetry— not the performance aspect of it, but the written word itself. When asked why I write, my answer is always the same: so that my perspective on the world, unique and transient as I am, can be experienced by others. There is an intrinsic value in preserving our individual worldviews, I firmly believe. Earlier this year, I was interviewed on this topic, and this is what I, quite obnoxiously, had to say:

“…If people can't see through my eyes, then my writing is as close as they're ever going to get. So I sort of have to write if I want people to really see things how I do, and by extension, see me.”³

I may be repetitive, but at least I’m consistent. Words are a window into a new perspective— the more specific you get with it, the better. So it makes sense that I’m inclined to lyrical and poetic writing, both of which make pretty heavy use of detailed imagery and figurative language to communicate truths about the human condition, to the extent that there is a unified human condition. Which I think is quite a limited extent, actually. That we are all so vastly different and yet experience emotions that reflect each other is magical to me, and so my writing is an attempt to foster that kind of resonance. If one other person reads what I write and feels seen by it, I’ve won. That’s the dream.

The act of reading— seeing words arranged intentionally on a page or screen— has specific dimensions that allow us to connect in this way, to resonate with each other, that absorbing ideas auditorily does not. There’s an inherent kind of distance to it, I think. There’s space to process, to breathe around the letters, to trace the constellations between similes and syntax and line breaks. In poetry especially, nuances of capitalization and punctuation can get lost when read aloud; as a poet, I can tell you for certain that a lot of the time, these things have real meaning. If I write a poem without any capitalization, there’s an intention I have in doing that, a feeling I’m trying to communicate. Unquestionably, there are parts of language exclusive to the written word.

And conversely, there are parts of language exclusive to the spoken word. Ideas can have a different kind of power voiced aloud than the kind they have written down. Just like the meaning imparted unto a poem through its capitalization can be lost when spoken, the meaning wrought by inflection and tangible pause can’t come close to being replicated on the page. It can be a completely different experience reading a poem and hearing it— or reading a poem and speaking it.⁴

Naturally, this brings me back to singing. Music adds a whole new layer to the dimensions of speaking, because not only is a singer more intentional with their inflection and pacing than your average business major Joe, but they modify the meaning of the words through melody. Reading lyrics is worlds away from hearing those lyrics put to song, especially if you’re hearing it sung live— ask any concertgoer in your life, and they’ll agree.

I recently had the absolute pleasure of seeing one of my favorite bands, The Weekend Run Club, live in concert with one of my favorite people, Ham.⁵ Leading up to the concert, the two of us memorized many lyrics to many of the band’s songs, but one track that really struck us both in particular was “Always." The opening lines of the song go like this:

I like the lines on your face—

they read like poetry, the kind that keeps me up too late.

Sometimes there’s nothing left to say;

sometimes, there’s just nothing.

If you’ve never heard “Always,” fix that with expediency, please.⁶ But also, I promise there’s something about the melody— the sonic experience of the lifting and descending notes that define the verses of the song like waves on a shore— that is just not captured just by reading the lines on a page. And hearing a recording isn’t as powerful as seeing it live.

Ham and I stood directly at the front of the crowd when TWRC played “Always.” We were some of the only people in the room who knew the words; since TWRC was the opener for another, equally awesome but more well-known band⁷, we stood out as we pointed at each other and waved our hands around in time with the lyrics. We also stood out because Ham has bright green hair and I was one of maybe five people in the room wearing a color other than black. There are plenty of videos from that night, but my favorite has to be one taken by the band, where you can see Ham and I looking directly at each other in front of the stage, singing along to “Always” without any mind for anything else in the world.

We sounded quite bad. Actually, I won’t speak for Ham, but I know I sounded bad. I’ve been a fan of TWRC since high school and I knew the words to all the songs, so I completely lost my voice screaming along to them during the set. I actually ended up taking a few videos where I, completely oblivious at the time to how loud I was, can be heard screeching like a ghoulish eagle over the music. As we’ve established, I don’t like the sound of my own voice; this is a subjective judgment with which many people disagree. Not at the concert, though. Good lord, y’all.

The crucial thing, though, is that it didn’t matter how I sounded. When I shrieked along to the end of “Always”— would you see the glass half full, would you see the glass half full?— I was resonating with the music just like how I hope people do when they read my poetry. I’m pretty sure Ham cried at one point, though she denies this. I mean it when I say sung language is powerful.

The difference between this and written poetry— the layer that most presently varies between them— is the role of the invoker. When I write, the words come out of me and exist separately from me. Yes, yes, they’re engraved on the inside of my skull and my veins flow with them or whatever, but I’m just a part of the process. The poem is the goal. When I sing, the goal involves me, the invoker of the words. The fact that I’m a conduit for what I’m singing transforms the contents and meaning of the words themselves; it allows the resonance I keep bringing up to echo through me while it’s hitting everyone else, and that compounds the effect for everyone involved.

The best possible outcome of my writing is the equivalent of ding-dong-ditching someone on their birthday, leaving a lovely wrapped present on their doorstep that I get to watch them open from far away. When I sing, I hand it to them myself. We’re both excited about it, amplifiers for each other’s joy. Even if the gift is a wonky hand-crocheted cardigan with one arm that’s way longer than the other.

I still don’t like listening to the sound of my own voice. I don’t know if that’ll ever change. So many people have been so kind to me about my singing over these past few years, but I just don’t hear what they hear. I do it anyway, though, because giving voice to the little human condition inside me is a really special thing, no matter how creaky and pitchy and nasal it might sound.

All we can ever hope for is to be understood. Why shouldn’t we project ourselves, then? Why wouldn’t we sing?

A quick pre-concert candid of the friendship bracelets we made for TWRC and the soundtrack Ham & I enjoyed while doing so.

1. I’m working late… ‘cause I’m a singer. No, really. Check out my musical endeavors here.

2. “I feel connected… protected…”

3. I don’t think I’m ethically obligated to provide a citation for an interview with myself, but I will anyway because quite honestly I just think that’s a hilarious thing to do. Here you go: Goldstone, Cara. Soundings Newsletter, 23 February 2024. (Thank you, Elena, for the opportunity! You are a wonderful interviewer. I’m not sure you’ll ever read this, but it had to be said regardless.)

4. The best example of this that I can think of is one of my very favorite poems of all time, “The Orange” by Wendy Cope. It’s popular for a reason, folks. An exercise: read this poem silently. Allow it the space it needs to settle, feel how the words arrange themselves in linear space. Then speak it aloud. Notice what changes. Is it subtle? Is it overwhelming? How is it different than before?

5. Hey bestie. I know you’re reading this. You’re so important to me. Peace and joy.

6. Check it out here!

7. Sarah and the Safe Word. Y’all, they’re amazing. Check them out.