This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. If Darwin correctly identifies the “animal” origins of singing’s primal emotional appeal, he cannot account for its peculiarly human dimension, that part of singing that expresses our sense of belonging to a community of interdependent, empathetic, and cooperative human beings. For the congregation at that Charleston church, Obama’s singing voice was more than an atavistic cry of pain or sorrow, or “mental reversion” to some more primitive expression of those inner states. When Aretha sings “Amazing Grace,” or Paul McCartney sings “Hey Jude,” or Pavorotti sings “Nessun Dorma,” they shape the voice signal in very particular ways, to create a sense of beauty, to appeal to our higher aesthetic sense, to aid the heart’s “ascent to Heaven,” as the creators of Gregorian chant put it.
I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that, of any activity I have engaged in, singing is the one that came closest to convincing me of the existence of the “soul”—if only because I lack any better term for whatever very private, but vital and essential, part of myself I seemed to be accessing, and releasing into the air, through the act of singing. When thinking about why projecting my voice into a melody should have been so pleasurable, cathartic, aesthetically pleasing, rewarding, and restorative, I am thrown back on what Julie Andrews said about the “ecstasy” of singing over a full orchestra, or what the middle-aged opera tenor said to me before undergoing microsurgery with Dr. Zeitels to remove the scarring on his vocal cords: “I’ve grown a little tired of just talking about it. I mean, when you sing, you’re giving voice to your soul.” I’m not sure I ever would have made such grand-sounding claims for my own singing, back when I could actually do it—before I injured my voice with Jann’s band. Now, I feel differently. As the 1980s hair metal band Cinderella (and Joni Mitchell, in a very different context) sang: you “don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”
I. See Chapter Three: Emotion
CODA
The truth, of course, is that we all lose our voice, sooner or later. Like everything else in nature, it has a life cycle. After its birth in a scream and the big hormone-driven changes of puberty, the voice settles into a long period of stability that can last forty, fifty years. But ultimately, it gives over to old age. The time of onset is different for every individual, depending on genetic and environmental factors, but it arrives eventually, the result of a cascade of changes throughout the body as it ages. In men, reduced testosterone production causes the vocal cords to thin and shrink, making them more like those of women, which is why comedians, in imitating crotchety old men, often speak in a scratchy falsetto. Women, meanwhile, undergo their own hormonal changes later in life, with menopause, a flood of extra estrogen that actually causes the vocal cords to swell, lowering the vocal pitch, bringing it closer to the male voice. In short, with the passing of sexual potency and reproductive power, the dimorphism of the human voice, so crucial to the propagation of the species, vanishes. Men and women grow to sound the same.
The voice also takes on a creaking, rickety sound that is the result of what voice specialists call “presbyphonia,” the natural deterioration and decay of the vocal cord tissue itself. The muscles that run through the vocal cords stiffen like the hamstrings on an aging runner, the soft collagen layer over top of the muscle breaks down, the protective layer of mucus membrane hardens—so that the vocal cords no longer perform the sinuous, liquid rippling motion characteristic of their vibration in young people, and that lends healthy youthful voices their rich complexity, depth, and nuance. Aged voices grow brittle-sounding. Couple this with the natural weakening of the muscles that move the laryngeal cartilages, to say nothing of the deterioration of the nerves that signal to those muscles, and you get voices that are increasingly robbed of prosody, stuck in a perpetual emphatic shout (worsened by the deterioration of the speaker’s own hearing), or a mumbling half whisper. Professional singers who have spent their lives effortlessly hitting the pitches they want suddenly find it difficult in their late sixties (or before) to stay in tune. Meanwhile, the speed and clarity of the speaking and singing voice vanishes as the articulatory muscles of the face and tongue weaken. Speech slows, grows blurry and filled with pauses.
The decrease in volume and power of the voice in the elderly is thanks to the deterioration of other muscles throughout the body including the diaphragm and the intercostal muscles between each rib. The torso itself shrinks, the lungs become smaller, stiffer, less pliable. With a weakened bellows, the voice emerges increasingly as a whisper, a condition made more acute by the tendency of older people, owing to the curvature of the spine, to lean forward, further constricting the action of the lungs.
Environmental factors aggravate the voice’s decline. Smoking gives rise to emphysema and other respiratory ailments. Drinking bathes the delicate vocal cords in abrasive alcohol and promotes reflux disease, when scouring acids from the stomach travel up the esophagus and scorch the vocal membranes. The vocal tract itself, meanwhile, changes, altering the voice’s resonance, as the nose falls backward into the face, reducing the size of the nasal resonators and as fat collects in the neck, squeezing the resonance chamber of the throat, changing the voice’s overtone structure, and thus timbre, to the point where even loved ones might not, over the phone, recognize you anymore.
Science and medicine can do only so much to arrest the voice’s natural decline. For a biological function dependent on so many diverse parts of the body, the war against the aging voice has to be fought on many fronts simultaneously. Aerobic exercise and strength training can arrest some of the diminishment related to the muscular atrophy that reduces lung power; changes in diet can stem some of the deterioration associated with acid reflux. But by far the stiffening and thinning and atrophying of the vocal tissue is what makes us sound old. Which is why, when I interviewed Dr. Zeitels back in 2012, he said that a therapy for restoring the youthful pliability of the vocal cords was the Holy Grail of voice science.1 Inspired by cosmetic surgeons who transfer fat from the buttocks into areas of the face to plump out wrinkles, some surgeons had tried injecting fat cells into the vocal cords in a bid to restore their natural pliability. But in rare cases, the fat turns to scar tissue—making things worse. In his quest for an “artificial vocal cord,” Zeitels was developing an injectable biogel, a water-based polymer that, when sitting in a lump on a work bench in his lab, could very closely reproduce the liquid ripple of an actual vocal cord, and which Zeitels hoped could be injected under the thin layer of mucus membrane to replace the vibratory layers that gradually stiffen and wither with age. Zeitels had actually come up with the idea when treating Julie Andrews after her disastrous surgery at Mount Sinai, in the late 1990s, as a way to put back the tissue that had accidentally been lost. At the time of our interviews, Zeitels had not yet put the therapy into human trials, but he was already dreaming big about the gel as a vocal Fountain of Youth—a therapy that would make eighty-year-olds sound like they are young again, and which would make the aging rockers whom Zeitels treated, like The Who’s Roger Daltrey and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, sound as they did in their thirties. Tyler and Daltrey, then in their fifties, were experiencing a kind of accelerated aging of the voice through the sheer wear-and-tear of their decades-long careers. Teachers and lecturers and others whose jobs require heavy use of the voice experience a similar deterioration. “It’s not senescent tissue,” Zeitels told me, “it’s tissue that has been hit more times,” as the vocal cords slam together trillions of times over dozens of years, in phonation. Zeitels was boundlessly optimistic about the powers of medical science to turn back the clock on the voice. “It’s not ‘Is it going to happen?’ ” he told me. “It’s when it’s going to happen.” Perhaps. But almost a decade later, it hasn’t happened yet.
* * *
When I learned about the psychosocial factors associated with the aging voice—the withdrawal from social life, the self-recusal from forme
rly enjoyable activities like singing in church, or joining family and friends at too-noisy restaurants—and as I read about how these actions increase loneliness and give rise to depression and poorer overall health, I was brought up short. This cascade of symptoms in the elderly is a little too close to the changes I noted in my own life, after age forty, because of my vocal polyp. Which perhaps explains why, in my midfifties, I threw all caution to the wind and, when invited by a fellow New Yorker staff writer, John Seabrook, to join his amateur rock band, the Sequoias, I jumped at the chance (just as I had with Jann all those years before). At the time, the Sequoias were a motley assemblage that included New York magazine senior editor John Homans, on lead guitar, and an inevitable rotating cast of bass players (NPR producer Charlie Foster, musician-ringer Rowlie Stebbins) and drummers. For the latter, we finally settled on Elle senior editor Ben Dickinson who also, fortunately, possesses a high, clear singing voice that made possible our covering songs by the young Paul McCartney, like “I Saw Her Standing There.” Otherwise, musical ability was in short supply. The chief criterion for membership in the group was being taller than six feet (hence, the band’s name). I played keyboards and was, at first, determined not to sing, since I knew that this could only further damage my voice. But soon enough, I found myself grabbing the mic and wailing away with my usual incautiousness—and why not? If all of our voices are scheduled, eventually, to be silenced, why not go out singing?
This “swan song” for my voice proved to be a bigger deal than any of us could have anticipated when, in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, New Yorker editor David Remnick (six-foot-two) joined the Sequoias as a guitarist. (“Sequoias?” he quipped, upon being told the band’s name. “As in, tall, old, and dead inside?”) The glow of his fame and power led to an invitation to play at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—not the main event itself, I hasten to add, but one of the many scheduled parties and jamborees that took place across the capital during those weekends: in our case, an annual party held in a ballroom at the Fairmont Hotel, and run by the Rolling Stones’ touring keyboardist, Chuck Leavell, and his environmental charity, the Mother Nature Network.2 Like every boomer-heavy Dad Band, we played the usual collection of Beatles and Stones numbers, but also the Clash cover “Brand New Cadillac,” which featured me on lead vocals, if what I did onstage that night can be dignified with the term. My voice sounded like sheet metal being torn by some massive machine, all roar and growl and shearing overtones, doubtful in its pitch, one-dimensional in its dynamics (a gasping shout), and I messed up some lyrics. I was hoarse and growling for weeks afterward and I am not at all sure that my time with the Sequoias did not further damage what remains of my voice. But I don’t regret a thing.
Nor do I any longer contemplate having my vocal polyp removed. I did think about it in the immediate wake of writing my story about Dr. Zeitels. And I thought about it again when I signed on to write this book. I believed it might make a nice ending—my Lazarus-like rebirth as a singer and occasional public speaker. But I ultimately declined to go under the knife. Which might seem nonsensical, given what working on this book has taught me about the incalculable importance of the voice to us as individuals and as a species. In defense of my decision, I can offer only a paraphrase of the great fashion designer Coco Chanel, who said that “at fifty, you get the face you deserve.” I turned sixty-one during the writing of this book. And my voice, with its nicks and scars and telltale rasp, tells its own history of my life, just like yours does.
Earlier, I said that this book serves no self-help function, does not purport to dispense tips on how to achieve a more powerful, or sincere, or persuasive voice. But in these closing remarks, I find myself reflecting on the fact that the most effective and expressive voices—those that connect with listeners in ways that change behavior or habits or ideas—are those that form the most direct channel between the speaker’s interior life and the sounds that emerge from the mouth. Language is only one layer of that complex acoustic signal and, arguably, not the most important one. Language that does not sing, that does not acknowledge the stirring melody and movement of thought, that is not animated by the dancelike syncopations of rhythm, of linguistic and emotional prosody, is dead language. The finest of Shakespearean sonnets cannot move a listener when spoken in dull monotone. Which is why the most emotionally rousing and intellectually stimulating speech, whether dispensed in private conversation or at the podium, revels in the full orchestration of the voice, from the bellows of the lungs, to the fluid pitch shifts of the vocal cords, to the rhythmic and percussive articulations of the tongue and lips. Speech and song are equally an assertion of our existence against the void, a means for animating the air with news of our presence, however ephemeral, and thus should be performed with confidence in the Self, and with an awareness of the music from which our linguistic capability arose. So project your voice without fear or favor, weaponize it should the legitimate need arise, soften it when the mood calls for it, but be aware of its full, fantastic range of expression, and revel in it. That, in any case, is what I intend to do with what remains of my scarred and aging voice. The voice I deserve.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In this book’s Introduction, I said that it was “suggested” to me, by a reader of my Dr. Zeitels article, that there might be a book on the subject of the voice. Here, in the less formal confines of the Acknowledgments, I feel comfortable divulging that the suggestion came from Jonathan Karp, the President and CEO of Simon & Schuster, when we were blue-skying book ideas in his office. So my first thanks are owed to Jonathan—and also one of his senior editors, Karyn Marcus, whom he called in to powwow about the idea. That I overcame my initial trepidation and doubt about actually attempting such a book (“It’s simultaneously too narrow and too wide a subject!” as I was given to telling anyone who would listen) is thanks to my agent of thirty years, Lisa Bankoff, who pushed me to finish the proposal.
Because I never really stopped feeling daunted by the book’s ever-widening scope, even after inking the book deal and starting to write, my loudest hosannas of thanks and praise are for this book’s editor, Eamon Dolan—who also happened to be the first to acquire it (when he was working for a completely different publisher: long story). That Eamon is himself a singer and (uncannily) also performed Yeats’s “Second Coming” in a high school public-speaking competition in part explains why he, too, “heard” a book on the subject of the voice. But it’s what he did to make that book actually come into existence that I feel compelled to celebrate here. It is difficult to describe what makes a great editor, but for this writer (at least) it has something to do with the almost mystical way that they impart confidence, how they make you feel as if you are (or can become) the authority on a given subject. I won’t bore the reader (or embarrass myself) by describing the condition of the early drafts that I showed to Eamon, but let’s just say that tact, patience, supreme confidence, and nerves of steel are also key attributes of a great editor—how else to explain his not actually yelling at me that I was insane to imagine that a reader would wade through a detailed discourse on auditory physics in the first chapter? If only I could claim that this was the sole instance when I sailed serenely into the weeds. But Eamon’s skills are by no means limited to hacking a clear path through trees that have utterly obscured the forest. For instance, he suggested that the book could bear a whole section on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. As a Canadian, I had (I’m embarrassed to admit) limited knowledge of the debates—and besides, a whole section? Well, suffice to say that when I began to dig into the history, I was thrilled to see how beautifully that episode of one-on-one vocal combat illuminated the larger theme that had been taking shape under my pen: the centrality of the human voice in the unending struggle between freedom and enslavement. This addition, along with Eamon’s cogent suggestions about the singing voice, oratory and rhetoric, the voice and religion, to say nothing of a big breathtaking structural change that he floated as a “modest prop
osal” late in the game, made this book not only immeasurably better, but actually (I hope) readable. Meanwhile, any slow, overly wonky sections that persist (the ones you skimmed or skipped altogether) represent moments when, out of ego or stupidity or stubbornness, I defied Eamon’s constant reminder that “You’re not writing this for scientists.”
I did, however, rely on a lot of scientists. Philip Lieberman granted me two long phone interviews that proved indispensable, but that did not lend themselves to direct quotation. The same goes for conversations I had with Johan Sundberg, Krzysztof Izdebski, William Labov, Ingo Titze, Branka Zei-Pollermann, as well as some nonscience authorities, including Audrey Morrissey (the executive producer of the hit TV show The Voice) and Rachelle Fleming (sister to Renée and herself a gifted singer). Klaus Scherer, Björn Schuller, John Baugh, and John McWhorter were all very generous with their time, as was my neighbor Andrea Haring, whose brain I ruthlessly picked every time we ran into each other in the laundry room or elevator. Her boss, the legendary Kristin Linklater, who died in June 2020 at age eighty-four as I was writing these closing remarks, also graciously shared thoughts on the voice with me over email from her redoubt in Orkney, Scotland. Daniel Everett, field linguist extraordinaire, and my host in the Amazon, kindly sent me the relevant chapters on the evolution of the human voice from his then book-in-progress, How Language Began (2017).
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