It is a fairly common experience for people to be shocked the first time they hear the sound of their own voices as recorded and played back on an audio device. “Is that really what I sound like?!” we ask, because hearing our voices in an embodied and familiar way is very different from hearing those same voices in a disembodied and unfamiliar way. It’s like holding a new, harshly accurate, and very large mirror up to ourselves, repeatedly, perhaps forever. It is hard not to be embarrassed at first.
Even more difficult can be the first time we hear ourselves amplified through a PA system, hearing our voices projected with several hundred watts of power behind them, having every imperfection of our very personal, intimate sound/self magnified to a jet engine volume that can be heard by thousands of people perhaps hundreds of yards away. It is a very vulnerable kind of visibility, so to speak.
Musicians, of course, have to work through both of these performance problems — the endlessly repeatable archive of recording and the massively oversized presence of amplification. And some really struggle with these matters. My mother’s singing voice, for instance, was strangely tortured and untrue as she struggled to hide her Texas drawl, which she never really lost (an artifice you can hear in the Video section). It has taken me a very, very long time to get OK with the sound of my own singing voice: it feels nasal, thin, etc. I could pile up the negative adjectives here, but I won’t.
Instead, I want to thank Rodney Crowell for helping me learn to embrace my instrument, such as it is, exactly the way it is. Some years back on the CBS Sunday Morning television program, Crowell talked about moving from writing songs for others to performing his songs himself, how it had taken him his whole life to get OK with the sound of his own voice, to actually *hear* his voice for the first time. For good or for ill, then, this is the voice that I’ve been given. I am relieved that I can finally embrace it, learn to hear it.