How Many Voices Do You Have?

More than one, less than 50?

Do you have a voice that you hear inside your head? 

How is it different from the voice you hear when you’re talking to your spouse? To a salesman at your door? To a neighbor’s child? 

It’s something so intimate to our experience, and yet so little discussed in daily life. 

Every few months a post goes viral bringing up the phenomenon of people who do not have a running internal monologue. (I am one of them.) 

While my headspace is typically quiet, when I concentrate on writing, an internal voice begins to speak. The voice is different from the one I use when I talk aloud. If I’m writing fiction, it is more animated than my external voice, more theatrical. If I’m writing an essay, it’s subdued and slow.

When I am speaking aloud, I am aware of having perhaps 5 different voices: different ones for when I speak to my wife, my older son, my younger sons, my neighbor, my staff. If I speak Chinese, that’s another voice.  

And when I am writing on behalf of a client for the new business, one of the great pleasures is learning to acquire—and sometimes to co-create—a voice that is authentic to each person. Sometimes that voice already exists. More often, it needs to be crafted to match the flavor of his personality, like an infusion of spice in gin. 

Altogether, each person has many different voices that change to suit the medium and the listener.

No single voice is the “real” one. If even God speaks with many “foreign lips and strange tongues” to his people, how could we be any different?

Read

In 1921, a young poet and bank clerk named Thomas shared a long poem he had been working on with a friend. The poem had the title: “He do the police in different voices.” 

The title was appropriate; the poem was a pastiche of many styles and voices.  

The title was also ugly. 

The friend, Ezra Pound, struck out the name and gave it a new one: “The Waste Land.” 

As an editor, and in a sense the ghostwriter or co-author of the work, Ezra Pound helped bring out the voice of the poet, T.S. Eliot. He did this by cutting dozens of lines, sharpening the voice like a blade. 

You can see the evolution in the manuscript here, in a fascinating post showing the creation of a modern classic in the interplay between two writers with very different styles, temperaments, and (yes) voices.

Watch 

Last week the world lost a great musician and producer, Steve Albini, at the age of 61. He was famous for his puritanical devotion to capturing what he believed to be the true, living voice of the band he was recording. 

In a famous four-page letter he sent to Nirvana before producing their record In Utero (for which he refused royalties), Albini wrote that his job was to serve as a mirror of the band’s personality. 

I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.

Albini sat down last year for an interview on a project I helped produce. He appears in the episode below at the 10:45 mark. The whole thing—featuring director Godfrey Reggio and comedian Fred Armisen—is one of my favorites from the series we made.

Listen 

It’s a rite of passage for composers to channel the voice of Bach

In the centuries since his death, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Schumann, Reger, and Arvo Pärt all wrote compositions paying tribute to the master. 

One of my favorite homages to Bach is by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. His 24 Preludes and Fugues are a revisiting of the concept Bach explored in the two books of his Well-Tempered Clavier. 

Listen to this gem of a fugue in A major: 

What I’m Working On

After wrapping one large project at Alembic Partners, we are starting on another big one on a subject I care about. (Wish I could share more specifics, but that will have to wait.)  

But I can share that my partner Geoff Cain had a nice rundown on how to land a publisher for a non-fiction book proposal. I added a few thoughts on how to get Elon Musk (or someone like him) to share your writing, if you’re ready for an avalanche of attention. (It’s intense, but worth it.)

Hope you’re enjoying this strangely cool Spring.

Until the next time, 

Ben