In a way, he wasn't wrong. I did need a new singer. I needed the new singer that I became after I started learning how to actually sing, instead of just doing it and hoping for the best. It started with a book: Set Your Voice Free, by Roger Love, a "vocal coach to the stars" kind of guy who had coached the likes of Billy Corgan and Michael Jackson. The book came with a CD, and I was able to do exercises as if guided by a live coach, sort of.
I made noticeable and excellent progress with my voice. The difference is hugely apparent when you compare an older song like one big walking, which predates my exposure to any vocal training of any kind, to i've lived too long, or three days in a hospital, both of which I wrote and recorded after working with the book. The first song is a bit pitchy, definitely screamy, not inherently unappealing, but definitely of a garage aesthetic. If the sound of a clearly untrained singer wailing over washed-out guitars with a high noise floor appeals to you, then it's a shame we didn't know each other back then. In the second two, it's clear that someone has given me a stern finger-wagging about proper breathing, and there's the beginnings of an understanding of middle voice. It's all much stronger, purer, steadier... less pitchy until I get to the very highest chest voice notes when I'm belting.
By the time we get to more recent recordings like resection, which follow two quarters of vocal coaching with a retired professional touring opera singer who had over 30 years of experience, an even bigger improvement is heard. I have more confidence, so any shakiness in delivery can be attributed to the emotive performance, not incapacity to actually hold a note. It becomes a deliberate choice to introduce it (or allow it to be introduced, more accurately) rather than just a quirk of this performer. Harmonies beyond the simplest arrangements are still magical and confusing to me, though. I have been known to drift from track to track, and stumble my way through multiple keys on my way.
But then I had my gender revelation. And I felt so incredibly, indescribably happy.
One of the first things to really bring any kind of melancholy back into my head was realizing that part of why my voice had always bothered me and seemed inadequate was that it was a male-typical voice. I mean. Testosterone will do that. Usually. Anyway, in sort of having become accustomed to my depressive state, I had started to cling to my voice as the one really redeeming quality about me.
I've always loved the sound of the cello. I can't even remember the first time I heard one. I can't remember not knowing and loving that sound. One of the most effective ways for me to try to come to terms with the placement of my chest voice range (about an octave lower than I would feel more natural in) was to tell myself that I was more like a cello, which I adore, than a violin, which I could kind of take or leave.
And then I realized who I was, and without really thinking about it too consciously, I stopped singing. I had gone from constant singing anytime I drove anywhere by myself to sort of humming along in falsetto, maybe. I had gone from bringing my guitar to school and just breaking it out and playing little sets wherever I was, to barely even touching my guitar.
Part of this had to do with writing. A quick pass over my earlier lyrical work reveals a pretty clear and serious trend. Everything I wrote was rooted in self-hatred. I had an endless void of it to draw from, and I wrote pretty prodigiously. The works that are "complete" enough to even share on the web site make up probably less than half of all material I've actually produced. The rest is scattered in 20-second clips on various drives, ideas for later, along with scraps of lyrics in tiny text files with names that make no sense to me until I open them, and remember how that particular play on words worked.
But suddenly, not only did I not hate myself anymore, I loved myself. I liked myself, on top of that. I would still hear music, but not as often, and not the same kind. I had stopped hearing lyrics entirely. My need to share information about myself was channeled elsewhere. I revamped my tumblr, turning it from another run-of-the-mill League of Legends blog into a much more fashion-oriented blog, with much more feminism than I had previously reblogged, as well as shared pictures from my Instagram. The one constant between the two styles was cats. Lots and lots of cats. Okay, and owls. But those are really just flying cats, and you will never convince me otherwise.
Another part of why I had stopped writing, never mind that nothing was really coming to me anymore, was that I felt very acutely how wrong my voice was for me. I wrestled with how to solve that problem for awhile. My preferred course for awhile has been to try to acquire or save up enough money to get Voice Feminization Surgery (VFS). Yes, that is a thing. I had seen some videos, patient testimonials, from a place called Yeson Voice Center. Videos like this one:
This same bit of text was used when I first started going to speech pathology appointments at the VA hospital. It's phonemically balanced, so it provides a good "drone" to get a baseline on someone's vocal properties.
Speaking of speech pathology, that's another possible "solution." I never liked the idea of trying to change my natural vocal habits, because it feels too much like an act. I want to be able to just relax and be myself, not worry about whether I managed to convince enough people that my voice was a cis woman's voice. I've noticed that in interactions with strangers that are going to be very brief, such as with a bus driver (usually), I will pitch up, and try to alter timbre as much as possible, too. Which, you would think, I would consider to be putting on an act. But it's so automatic that I don't think of it that way. But with friends, or on dates, or for more extended interactions, I just relax and talk.
A long time ago, I fell absolutely in love with a band called Crumb. I used to frequent Moby Disc, when I lived in Los Angeles. I would scour the dollar bins, and try to find cool, edgy, unknown bands. Most of them were trash, to be honest. But a few of them were just. Fucking. Amazing.
Crumb was one of those bands. I started going to every Moby Disc location I could find, so I could rifle their dollar bins, and get every copy of Romance is a Slow Dance, to give away to anyone I thought was worthy of it. Not long after that, Seconds Minutes Hours came out, and I happily paid full price for it.
Years later, I started looking for their work again, because my copies had been lost when our storage locker had been robbed, along with all the other CDs I owned, basically. And I thought that Crumb had put out more records, at first, but a closer look showed that it was a different band called Crumb, and still more research showed that my beloved band called Crumb had broken up after their second album. But, I did finally find some old MP3 rips of those albums that had managed to survive, and I started listening to them again.
And somehow, I found good-Crumb lead singer Robby Cronholm on Twitter. And I wrote him a note kind of telling him about how I'd found his band way back when, but didn't know they had broken up, but that I found his new band while I had been looking for his old one. I told him that I was glad to know that he was still making music, and that I looked forward to hearing more. I asked him if he'd listen to some of my music, if he wasn't too busy, and let me know what he thought, because I really respected him as a songwriter, as a singer, as a musician.
And he wrote back.
This blew my fucking mind, at the time. This guy, to me, was really basically in the same league as Billy Corgan or Morrissey. Really, I felt very much as if either of those guys had written me back. I would listen to Crumb, then some Smashing Pumpkins, Morrissey, back to Crumb... it was all professional-quality music with high production values, excellent songcraft, and very, very skilled performance. So, I told him that.
And he wrote back again, gushing that anyone would ever compare him to Morrissey, because Moz is one of his main influences, and a major idol for him. (I will finally confess, here, for the first and last time, that I already knew that before I wrote him and told him that, because I had read it somewhere else. But it was still true. Sorry, Robby. Everything you know is a lie.)
We chatted on and off for awhile, but at one point, he sent me a note asking how I was doing, and I didn't see it for, oh, I don't know, maybe three years? To be fair, it was right around the time Jenn and I had gotten evicted, and were homeless for a fair time, without the best and most constant access to the internet. The first time I saw that note was in September of last year, about a month and a half after I had realized who I was.
So, I told him everything. And, to be honest, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was optimistic. He'd been such an absolute sweetheart before, taking time out of a busy schedule to listen to some random schlep's music and tell them that he thought it was really good, and actually make specific comments about specific songs by name... it felt like he really cared about other people and was a really great guy. But some really great guys have one big problem, and it's hating trans girls.
Robby Cronholm is absolutely not one of those guys.
Seriously, what an absolute sweetheart.
Anyway, part of this went over my head at the time. I didn't know the name Laura Jane Grace. And as this was while I was pounding my way through 21-credit quarters at school, I didn't really give any of this much thought. Partially, I realized later, because I didn't even understand his sentence because of the probable autocorrect error, "translation" for "transition."
Very recently, I saw some interviews with Laura Jane, and some performances, and I thought... wait a second... her voice is like mine.
This gets into everything I was talking about in my last post. I started to think that maybe the reason I felt like my voice was wrong for who I really am was that I was buying into a variation on the myth that femininity is only and absolutely defined by certain sizes, textures, and colors of things. This is really not that different from how most girls feel every day about their entire body, because our media is constantly telling girls that their bodies are okay, I guess... but they could be so much better, if only they bought this and used that.
I'm telling my story because I don't want the next trans girl like me, who figures out, just shy of her 40th fucking birthday, that she's been someone else all along, to feel like there's nobody else out there like her.
So now, I don't know. I don't know what to do about my voice. Before making the whole Laura Jane connection in the first place, I had started singing again, but only in private, because I figured that if I kept up on good vocal health and strengthening/toning techniques, I would recover much more quickly from surgery later. This was also the number one reason I agreed to try the voice feminization program at the VA hospital, with the speech pathologists.
Not long ago, I was in a Live Sound II class, and we needed a singer. So, I got up there and sang. I didn't want to, but I felt like I was the best qualified among those there by a fair margin, even as out-of-practice and self-conscious as I was. I suppose it's sort of ironic that when everything else flipped in my head, the one previous positive, my own view of my own voice, became really one of the only big negatives.
Later on, that instructor approached me outside of class about collaborating musically. He has a degree in music composition from Cornish, and generally knows what he's on about. He's also the drummer who had complimented me at the Up All Night event (in the paragraph by my selfie in the pink dress). I obviously said yes.
That, then, combined with having later found out about Laura Jane Grace, and hearing her sing and speak with confidence, had left me debating just how necessary VFS was, and how good it would be. Not just for me, but for everyone. VFS is not cheap. It has risks. And even if I get my voice pitched where I want it to naturally sit, with the right harmonics, it may impact how well I can sing. There's even a slim chance that something could go wrong, and I could lose my voice entirely, permanently.
Oh, or die. I mean, it is a major surgery with general anesthesia.
When I first realized I was a girl, I considered all of that, and determined that I'd rather try to get a voice that fit my self-understanding, even if it meant I could possibly never sing well again. Even if it meant I might not be able to even sing or speak at all again. Even if it meant I might die. That was a risk I was willing to take, rather than live with this voice. But why?
Because there's no representation. There are no girls out there like me, being shown in a positive light, speaking with their deeper voices. Girls who have cellos for violins.
But now that I've seen some representation, and I look at everything I say I'm trying to accomplish here, I feel like I almost have a responsibility to NOT get VFS. To keep carrying out my mission of living out loud as much as I can, of promoting myself into every possible space, of becoming everyone's trans neighbor that they know and love, or at least don't hate. To show everyone that it's okay to have a voice like this and be a girl, because I'm a girl, and I have a voice like this, and look at me, out there, living life.
While I was mulling all of this over, I messaged a friend that I met through school, another Cornish grad who works professionally now as a musician in Seattle. I asked him about an event going on tomorrow, downtown, and we started talking about similar concepts for the future. I mentioned wanting to cover a whole Radiohead album, because Thom Yorke is an absolute genius, and I love, love, love singing along with him. My friend, Tristan, said he'd always wanted to cover The Cranberries' first album.
It wasn't long before he asked me to send him a demo. I froze. I was terrified. But I mean, come on. I had literally just told him that I could do this. And then he asked, and I was like, Jesus Christ, are you serious? He said, "send me a video of you singing dreams, maybe just the vocal thing after the first chorus when it changes keys." In case you don't remember, he's talking about this part, which I'd completely forgotten about when I told him I could probably sing it.
Merde.
I listened to it through a few times to try to remember how it went, the pacing and cadence, the breaks in and out of falsetto. I had no real warm-ups. I had not really been doing anything for my vocal health or readiness all day besides drinking my requisite daily fuckton of water, and sitting here in relative silence. But then I went ahead and tried anyway.
I still can't believe I sent this to him. In my goddamn pajamas, no shave, no makeup, and no backing music. Solo vocal covers of existing songs that have supporting instrumentation always sound weird as shit to me. Then I sat around for a few minutes trying to pre-emptively console myself. This guy had just graduated Cornish, which has two very prestigious voice programs; one for classical, and one for jazz. And he had literally just said that he needed "a fucking good singer" to pull this off. And I briefly was a fucking good singer, I thought. For a guy. When I was in practice.
But I'm no Dolores O'Riordan. Just like I'm no Kimbra, I'm no Imogen Heap... none of the artists I feel like I ought to sound like, in my own head.
Anyway, he watched the video, and it sounds like he wants to put it together with me and see if we can't pull it off.
So, for now. Um. I guess I'll start trying to sing more, to sing like I used to. More seriously, with warm-ups. With less shame about the fact that I sound, to myself, like a guy. I sound like Jason. But maybe that's not true. Maybe Jason just always sounded like Sera.
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