I love touring so much that I sometimes forget how much I love being home, focusing on songwriting. Brooklyn smells incredible in the Spring. Before it’s suffocatingly hot, I always have a few of the greatest days where the espresso tastes better and the breeze is impossibly salty. Yes, when we wrote the line “I can smell the salt in the Brooklyn air” in “Let’s Go” it was about literally smelling salt. It’s a special thing that happens from time to time, so you can never forget you live on the ocean, on a vulnerable island.

So, the salty air is coming through my window and I’m working on 4 songs simultaneously. You know what? Our next album is going to be freaking fantastic. Salty and breezy and heimishe. 

I’ve been playing in bands since I was 12 years old and singing for as long as I can remember. In that time I have tried on a handful of different vocal affects, imitated some of my vocal heroes and berated myself for how I sound. I’ve sung to sound like an 80s pop star, a Broadway child prodigy, a punk girl, and eventually, myself. While I certainly don’t believe there is some singular, authentic “self” or a particular voice that most perfectly embodies it, I do think there comes a time where your focus has to shift from imitation to self-discovery, from trying to sound like something to trying to express yourself as honestly as possible. For me, this has been part of growing up.

Honest emotional expression is not exactly rewarded in this world, most of the time. Sometimes on stage, especially before playing one of our simpler songs, I’ll give a nod to what I consider one of the most important lessons I learned from Riot Grrrl: that there’s no reason to be ashamed of saying cheesy, cliche things that are honest and true. (Which doesn’t mean as an artist you choose to say EVERY cheesy, cliche thing that pops into your head, just that shame shouldn’t preclude it!) It’s become its own cliche, but I’ll say it anyway: things become cliched for a reason. In pop music, that reason lies somewhere between “because it is a quasi-universal feeling” and “because I’m lazy.” I try to navigate that line with integrity… but that’s the subject of a whole different post I should write about songwriting, and what I want to get at here is about singing and performance.

Singing a line that is incredibly simple, incredibly accessible — let’s say “everybody hurts” or “i’m so lonesome i could cry” or “will you still love me tomorrow?” — is so much more terrifying than singing a super obtuse, overly-complicated, metaphor-heavy line. It’s just you and a sentiment that everyone can see, poke holes in, mock. It’s like being in 3rd grade and having a bully read your journal out loud to the class, except you’re doing it to yourself. Sometimes you lose track of who the bully is, and what’s going on and why.

As a performer, even if you choose to bare your soul through your words, you have another option for protecting yourself — obscuring your feelings through your performance style — with vocal affect (why do so many singers adopt bizarre ways of pronouncing words, or basically take on accents not their own when they sing?), by saying “hey look over there, bully!” by creating a persona 10 times bigger than your voice and thus directing attention to your schtick and not your singing, drinking/smoking/whatever on stage…. there are so many ways for performance to hide, rather than expand upon what you’re expressing through your music.

I’ve done my share of weird shit in performance to hide my feelings, my vulnerability, what I actually look and sound like, etc. My experience of performance as a young woman was empowering, but at the same time reinforced my early childhood sense that being a successful singer would require a real sublimation of vulnerability. Even with the relative freedom I allowed myself through riot grrrl, I was constructing new vocal/performance norms to adhere to — albeit screamy ones, instead of prim, teeny bopper ones. It was an exploration I certainly don’t regret, but in each set of norms I embraced as a young person, I was giving up on other options, on emotional range. Most of all I was giving up on letting my honest-to-god need to express myself through voice determine its own path, for that desire to guide me instead of shoving it into boxes.

This tendency to turn your singing into schtick and hide your true feelings is certainly not the unique domain of women, but I’m particularly interested in how the brutality of internalized misogyny affects female singers. Touring for so many years now, I often encounter young women fronting bands that open for us, whose performances leave me halfway between bawling and screaming. Posed on stage, apparently feeling out what it means to be in a body, choosing to stand in front of a crowd, awkwardly making self-deprecating jokes, drinking and smoking, basically taking on the disposition of some disaffected middle schooler in detention — they look both angry at the audience and angry at themselves, like they have no relationship to their bandmates or sense of solidarity there on stage, like they sort of want to die and are going to abuse their voices until they can’t sing anymore.

I don’t mean for this to sound tragic. It’s actually quite annoying, but I’ve been there myself, in my own way, so I can’t just be annoyed. I also have to wonder why we choose to do something we are obviously so terrified to do, and maybe don’t even face our terror about it until we’re up on stage and the horrible contradiction — wanting to share your most significant, private feelings with strangers — becomes a physical reality. Here we are with the option to say ] “hey bully: yeah that’s right, read my fucking journal. sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s embarrassing, sometimes it’s stupid, sometimes it’s beautiful. that’s what feelings look like written down. deal with it.” But we get stifled and start compromising that bold, brave challenge by doing weird shit. Like making our words incomprehensible. Or singing in a voice that sounds like a baby, or a bee, or like we’re British (when we are not).

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing an open letter to young, female singers, but I definitely haven’t figured it out yet. If I wrote it today it would be something like this:

If you like using your voice to let your feelings out, don’t destroy it. go to a place where no one can hear you — the top of a mountain, a soundproof booth, your closet, whatever — and sing in every way you can imagine. Make your voice crack and see that no one dies as a result. Explore your registers and how awkward it can feel to switch between them. Yell. Hum. Whisper. Notice what feels sweet, what feels scary, what hurts. Make a practice of this work and try to incorporate what you learn into your writing and performance. Accept that the more honest your work is, the better it will be. Stand in front of a mirror and sing to yourself without contorting your face and body. Learn what you look and sound like when you’re not trying to look and sound like anything in particular. drink more water on stage than beer. don’t smoke. just don’t. no really, just don’t.

We’re only on week two, but it’s not too soon to declare this our best. tour. ever.

After our action-packed week at SXSW, we headed to San Antonio, where we were greeted by one of the most magnificent thunder storms I’ve seen in ages. As storm-lovers with an amazing sliding window-door thing in our room (I’m a little tipsy, apologies if I lose my words), we got to smell and hear the rain, and watch the lightning over the pool for hours before bed. It was enough to make me fall in love with San Antonio right there.

The next day we had the best fucking vegan breakfast at a restaurant called Green, with the sweetest staff. Seriously their seitan BBQ was better than any I’ve had anywhere else. And I’ve had a fair amount of seitan BBQ in my day! Then we wandered around the San Antonio riverwalk, this pretty amazing 5+ mile stretch of walk/bike-way along the San Antonio river. Once we were away from the super touristy parts, I saw the most beautiful, little flowers. Seriously. Two-tone! What are they? I fucking LOVE them.

That night we played a last-minute show at this venue called Nightrocker Live. The staff was EXTREMELY nice to us, and the devoted crowd patiently waited out myriad tech troubles to see us play. We were brought beer and one fan notably told Eli that, like in the movie Amadeus, “the music comes through you, little man.”

Wednesday morning we slept in (YES!) and drove to Baton Rouge, practicing German on the way. (For those interested in our progress, we can now complete sentences like “I understand only a little bit of German,” “NOT VERY WELL!” and “I am an American.”) Upon arrival, we were greeted by the super nice bartender, Ryan, at the Northgate Tavern, who spent the evening giving us shots of various concoctions he was working out. The show itself FUN. Now, as you may have heard, we’re not big drinkers. In fact we are known as The Most Responsible Band in Rock and Roll (at least to ourselves.) It is hard for us to imagine how bands drink a lot and play shows! But, in Louisiana, it seems we learned. The shots kept coming, including a tropical one we enjoyed ON STAGE.

Our new, incredibly kind fans (mostly students doing what seems to be rad campus organizing at LSU), and Ryan, the aforementioned amazing mixologist, shared this coffee-chocolate-whipped-cream-vodka night cap with us after our encore!

And to top it all off, a late night snack at OMG THE PLACE I SHOULD HAVE BEEN BORN: Louie’s Cafe. It looks like the diner of my dreams, with it’s green-blue/red/black color scheme, and well, my namesake in the font I dream in.

Last but NOT LEAST: we drove to New Orleans yesterday, one of my favorite cities in the world. The first thing we did was to buy the makings for an amazing vegan feast, which we devoured, along with delicious Abita! (Seriously, I almost NEVER drink. THANKS A LOT, LOUISIANA!) Eli cooked up a storm: cajun seitan, garlic kale, and perfectly seasoned rice. YES! (Oh and we managed to stop at Cafe Du Monde on our way from grocery shopping, but I’ll let Temim cover that! We also sampled about a zillion hot sauces.)

What else? Well, the toilet broke at about 2am, but I’ll spare you those details. It’s fixed now thanks to the nicest landlord I’ve ever met, and that’s all that really matters. Fast forward to delicious brunch with old friends — LOVE you, Dix and Mags! — at The Ruby Slipper. Somehow I neglected to take enough pictures of the food, but hopefully Eli’s fried green tomatoes picture summed it up well enough. After a quick and sunny stop-by for an on-air interview at the WTUL fundraiser, we are napping. Sigh.

See you tonight at the Allways Lounge, NOLA!!!

I woke up thinking about gendered vocal expectations, the pressures that are put on singers, and how we get kinda set up to hurt ourselves.

Have you noticed that for every John Mayer vocal rest cancellation, there are like, 5 women canceling shows due to vocal problems? (Kelly Clarkson, Janet Jackson, Celine Dion, etc…) We have all heard tons about Adele’s canceled tour and miracle surgery and I previously mentioned Cyndi Lauper’s troubles in the late 70s. Even I’ve had surgical procedures pushed on me by ENTs in New York. So, I’ve got a pressing question on my mind: WHY DO POWERHOUSE WOMEN SINGERS LOSE THEIR VOICES? 

I think it has to do, in part, with the fact that tolerance for “weird”-sounding female voices is way more limited than it is for men. Think how many iconic male singers sound, well, anywhere from bizarre to mundane/passable to terrible depending on how you look at it: Dylan (undeniably strange, and even “unbearable” at times according to fans!), Neil Young and Tom Petty (thin, often inconsistent), the Boss (you know I adore the man, but his voice itself is so ragged at this point and pitch is totally relative)… I could go on. Now, we do have some iconic women singers whose voices broke the mold in their strangeness, too: Patti Smith, Cyndi Lauper, Nina Simone for sure. But all of those “strange” women vocalists have something else in common — technical ability and power. The same cannot be said for most male singers who achieve superstardom despite their non-traditional voices. So what we seem to have here is yet another area in which the standards for women are higher and trickier to navigate than for our male counterparts.

[Yes, I will acknowledge that particular, quirky sub-breed of “weird” female vocalists that receive critical acclaim and some margin of commercial success, the domain of Regina Spektor, Joanna Newsom, and dozens of girls dubbed “unique” each year on singing reality shows for the inexplicable accents they seem to affect only when singing, making their words incomprehensible and their emotions inscrutible. OH YAY. I consider this an exception worthy of its own analysis on another day!]

To again call out the particularly mindfucking intersection of race and gender, I’d like to ask you to imagine a woman of color achieving critical success with a voice like Bob Dylan’s. Ok, or a man of color. Drawing a blank? White men can perform and succeed (critically and commercially) in almost ANY GENRE with almost ANY VOCAL STYLE. The world is their fucking oyster. Oh, and acceptable vocal styles include WHINING and SCREAMING.

Now, I like a whole lot of different kinds of music and have appreciation for a lot of different kinds of voices and vocal choices. As I’ve mentioned before, my litmus test is: DOES THIS MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING? I have respect and appreciation for any singer who is genuinely using their voice to express something with emotional substance. And I think it’s cool that every human voice is different, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair that Bob Dylan and Billy Corgan can retire and hang out with models, while little weird girls everywhere have to train and try to contort their voices into something legible enough to stand a chance at any success.

So how does this all connect back to vocal damage? When you hit on the vocal style that’s going to work for you, you are suddenly expected to deliver it, and JUST it, over and over and over again. As though you can zero in on the essence of the marketable voice and just bang it out a million times. This isn’t how vocalizing works. It’s dangerous. It’s like saying, “there’s the money note in this song — now we’re going to make an entire song that is all the money note.” But the thing about The Money Note is that there’s ONLY ONE. Ok, maybe a couple. But its rareness is part of what defines it! This is just a weird capitalist, MORE MORE MORE approach to music. There’s plenty to say about how that affects us as listeners and songwriters, but what disturbs me about it right now, is what it means for singers.

We can’t compete with autotuning; we can’t compete with editing that takes a 2 second clip of our voice and pastes it over and over again. I would argue that what we can do, as singers, in our true voices, is BETTER, but that’s neither here nor there. All singers, under capitalism, have to face these unrealistic demands on our voices. Women, for all these impositions I’ve mentioned, have it especially bad, so I think it’s really no wonder that this vocal cord crisis shit keeps happening.

I remember watching Adele sing a year ago and saying “listen to the vocal damage in her voice — she’s going to lose it if she’s not careful,” and she did. Rasp is vocal damage. Yeah, I’m all for embracing how we sound, but we also have to be taught to take care of our voices, to respect them and not to expect them to just work magic. We should hear a voice like Beyonce’s or Adele’s and think — wow, I love listening to that person express their feelings through their amazing ass voice, and not — wow, I want to hear that melisma exactly the same way OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN until the vocal cords that produced it have been stripped of all their texture and dry out and die.

Then, let’s perform surgery on them to make them go again!

Here are my swollen vocal cords. My ENT wants to give me silicon injections into my non-swollen vocal fold to help it properly meet my swollen vocal fold. I said no.

katherinestasaph asked: Hey! Do you mind if I reblog the Christine/Carlotta/Idol thing? It's seriously one of the best pieces of writing I've read all year.

oh geez, of course i don’t mind, and thank you! I doubt it’s really among the best writing you’ve read this year though! xoxoL

SARAH BRIGHTMAN…the vocal virgin! (This post actually has NOTHING to do with Sarah Brightman at all, and only to do with one of her more well known roles — Christine in The Phantom of the Opera. Because the London cast recording is what I grew up with, she’s my Christine.)

Around age 7, the Phantom of the Opera came into my life. By this time I had decided to pursue a “Broadway career,” which meant spending a lot of time reading through industry papers to figure out how one auditions for vocal coaching in New York. My fantasy role was Christine in Phantom. I daydreamed about being pulled out of the audience to “fill in” for a sick actress and wow-ing Broadway in my very own version of Christine’s storyline! (though mine was blessedly free of any masked men pulling me into subterranean vocal/ways-of-the-world training).

Phantom remains fascinating to me and looms large among my adolescent influences, especially when I think about what it taught me about gender, melodrama, and taboo, not to mention how much it lowered the bar in my mind for lyrics making sense. But with regard to voices in particular, it taught me a formative lesson, one that probably worked its way deep into my subconscious, hand-in-hand with Debbie Gibson’s wholesomeness: don’t be a vocal whore!

In Phantom, we learn very early on that there are two great sopranos vying for Super Stardom at the Paris Opera House: the grating, reigning primadonna Carlotta, and the simple, unassuming ingenue Christine. Like the Phantom, the viewer is rooting for chorus girl Christine to unseat the brash Queen. 

Here is my best effort to recreate what I understood about each singer as a kid:

• Carlotta: reigning queen; hated by the Phantom; mean, full-figured; thinks she’s more amazing than she is; demanding egomaniac; show-off; worldly; overwrought, vibrato-heavy voice.
• Christine: underdog; championed by the Phantom; nice; tiny; doesn’t know how amazing she is; expects nothing; extremely naive; unpretentious; virginal; simple, pure voice.

Now I don’t want to make a huge deal out of this particular version of a classic set of dichotomies. But for me this was seminal exposure to it, and to the voice as a site of it. Carlotta and Christine are two very different archetypes, and by extension their two ways of being a singer can’t overlap. As a foil to Christine’s femininity/innocence, all shy and humble and insecure, Carlotta is bold and self-assured and confident, and her voice matches her persona. It’s sad for me to think about internalizing this lesson as a kid — that being and sounding self-confident place you squarely in this unattractive, sexist stereotype. 

Your sound as a singer, both the inescapable parts (your sinus cavities, your vocal folds, etc.) and the put-on, affected, performative parts - signify so much more than you can ever hope to control (The Voice is really interesting in this regard, despite its shticky-ness). And then of course there’s how your sound is interpreted in relation to your identities and appearance: race, gender, spoken voice, etc. Phantom reminds me of the balancing act female singers are supposed to walk with regard to confidence (how much is too much, how much is not enough?)  and how particularly brutal these ideas are for women of color. 

On shows like American Idol, white girls get bonus points for sounding “unexpectedly soulful,” while women of color contestants get voted off week by week (at least the past few years). Dominant racial stereotypes play out in the show’s production without apology — confident women of color are often explicitly portrayed as “too self-confident,” as bitches, while soft-spoken white women who “surprise” audiences with vocal power are rewarded. Seriously. Have you watched this shit?

Idol plays out like gladiator battle of archetypes who must knock each other off in order to stand a chance at being “The Country Pop Girl,” “The Rocker Girl” (who rarely makes it to the top 12 at all) or “The Coy, Weird-Sounding Girl” (who should really be on The Voice instead, where she just might make Top 4). There is only room for ONE of any given archetype, but then, in the end, long after all the women of color are voted off, a white dude will win over the last white woman standing. Does this sound like an oversimplified prediction? It’s really what I’ve watched happen for the past several years.

Back to the vocal part though. Being boxed into a a vocal category is serious business, and the patriarchal drive to circumscribe the possibilities for female vocal expression makes me want to scream. The most amazing singers have the ability to express a huge range of emotions, even in a single line, which in my experience is often undervalued or denied, even steered away from in production. I wonder how much the Christine/Carlotta divide is at play here. Are there 2 sets of expectations we can see mapped onto female singers — the ingenue set and the diva set? Ingenues must always appear surprised at their own skill, and divas must always be ready for a melisma battle? Do singers who can both whisper and scream break people’s brains?  

I think these categories are imposed from so far outside of any singer’s heart/purpose/voice that they mostly interfere when thinking about marketability and production style and all of that. But there is still a little 8 year old part of myself that can’t reconcile the different aspects of my voice because of all this rigid archetypal schooling. It’s hard to want to embrace your confidence when it feels like it means becoming Carlotta. And once you’ve gone that route, it’s hard to feel like it’s safe to sing softly, simply for a minute, as if the second you do you’ll be exposed and someone will try to swoop you up as their ingenue and control you.