April 22, 2020 • 49 mins
Samara chats with the acclaimed audiobook narrator about how to lift words from a page and turn them into something that feels alive, what sexy actually sounds like (she miiiight also narrate erotica under a pseudonym), some handy over-the-counter cure-alls when you wake up with a sore throat, and the holy grail: how to actually *like* the sound of your own voice.
Host: Samara Bay
Executive producers: Catherine Burt Cantin & Mark Cantin, Double Vision doublevisionprojects.com
Producers: Samara Bay, Sophie Lichterman and the iHeart team
Theme music: Mark Cantin
To check out the books Amy's narrated: audible.com/search?keywords=Amy+landon&ref=a_hp_t1_header_searchGlennon Doyle’s book “Untamed”: indiebound.org/book/9781984801258
Jane Goodall’s 2002 TED talk: ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_what_separates_us_from_chimpanzees?language=en
More on Jane Goodall (recent article about coronavirus): thehill.com/homenews/coronavirus-report/492357-jane-goodall-blames-disregard-for-nature-for-coronavirus-pandemic
More on ASMR: vox.com/2015/7/15/8965393/asmr-video-youtube-autonomous-sensory-meridian-response
More on quercetin: verywellhealth.com/the-benefits-of-quercetin-89071
To read more about the study suggesting we like the sound of our own voice: sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130912112733.htm
To read more about the messages we get when we’re small that can influence our voices in the long term, check out Carol Gilligan’s “Joining the Resistance”: indiebound.org/book/9780745651705
To read Tara Westover’s book “Educated”: indiebound.org/book/9780399590504
More info on honoring native lands: usdac.us/nativeland
****What’s going on with YOUR voice? Send Samara a question for our next mailbag episode at PermissiontoSpeakPod.com or on Instagram @permissiontospeakpod****
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is from Glenn and Doyle's Untamed. I burned the
memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood. But
first I forgave myself for believing that lie. For so
long I had abandoned myself out of love. They had
convinced me those memos. They'd convinced me that the best
way for a woman to love her partner, family, and
(00:21):
community was to lose herself in service to them. In
my desire to be of service, I did myself in
the world a great disservice. I've seen what happens out
in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet,
and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society, but
(00:41):
not a beautiful, true or just one. Welcome to the podcast.
That's all about the voice, which means it's all about power.
Who has it, how we get it, how we say
sound when we have it. I'm your host, Samarave, and
(01:03):
this is permission to speak, where we can throw all
our best ideas about how to get ourselves heard into
the pot and start. Today's guest is Amy Landon. She
(01:23):
is a dear friend of mine, and she's also an
acclaimed audiobook narrator in super high demand. She's narrated, among
other things, White Fragility by Robin d' angelo, which I
mentioned last week, Ted Chang's exhilaration Verity by Colleen Hoover,
and a huge amount of well loved fantasy series as
(01:46):
well as erotica. I wanted to have Amy on because
as an audiobook narrator and a voice actor, she thinks
all day, every day about the voice as an instrument,
how to get across store and character and tone and
point of view when all you have is the voice.
And I love our chat about what it means to
(02:08):
sound sexy, which I mean she's got a surprising take on,
and also the practical side of taking care of our voices,
which is my way of saying she's got all the
goods on the over the counter cure alls when you've
woken up with a sore throat and you know the
show must go on. We also talk about that comment
from her past for many of our pasts about our
(02:30):
voice that we wish hadn't stuck with us, and yet
it did and really affected our relationship with our voice.
And also um what it is to not necessarily fall
in love with the sound of your own voice, but
maybe fallen alike with it. Anyway, this is Amy Landon.
(02:52):
How do you find your books? How did the How
does the book find the perfect narrator for it? Oh? Well,
there's a couple of different ways at this point in
my career. Usually publishers just match me up because they
know my voice, and so most big publishers have producers
that kind of do the whole kitten caboodle if they
(03:14):
cast it, they decide who they want to do their
perfect voices. They get it all lined up and they
take you through the whole and how do they differ,
Like how do they describe those voices? Like do you
end up seeing like an actual breakdown that's like we
want a voice that is low and calm, or like
how do they know? That's all on their end? I
have no idea. They just see whatever the descriptions are
(03:35):
and they think, Amy Landon, They read the book and
then they go, Okay, what do I hear? What do
I hear in my head? Whose? Whose voice? You know?
And you're usually matching to your lead character obviously, so
you're matching gender and age and that kind of thing.
Generally to the lead character of the book if it's fiction,
and if it's nonfiction, you're often matching to the author. Oh,
(03:59):
not to the desired audience, but maybe it's related related,
But usually if a guy writes a nonfiction book, a guy,
generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking. And why do
people pick you? Do you think because I'm amazing? I
mean obviously, but you know what do you what do
you think you're known for? Maybe it's an impossible question,
that's solid question. Um, I do a lot of thriller, mystery,
(04:22):
horror kind of stuff I would have. I don't know
if that's just because I have a dark, dark soul
or because I have a dark, dark voice could go
in EA. Do you feel like when when it's that genre, Um,
you infuse in an element of drama to it? Or
do you think that you're uh even about it? And
it's not really you know that it's that you like
(04:44):
the content, not that you like manipulate the I think
it depends on every single book. So when I prep
the book, when I read the book, the whole point
is you're trying to find the author's rhythm, the author's voice,
the authors how they would do it. And some authors
are very like standing outside the story. It's very third person.
It's like this happened, and then this happened, and then
(05:04):
this happened, and all the dramas happening in the dialogue.
And some authors everything is very like heightened and it
and it doesn't matter genres, genre by genre, every book
is different. So this is partly why I wanted to
have you in because you know, when we're talking about
audiobook narrating, obviously what we're talking about is spending time
in a booth and making your voice breathe life into
something that you didn't write. But inherent in that is
(05:28):
the element of like, how does language work? How do
you personally like put your feelers into a text and say, ah,
this is the rhythm or this is the spirit of
how this person writes. And it probably doesn't happen on
an intellectual level, But what does your prep look like?
Do you read it and do you think, oh, this
makes me think of this other thing or does it
(05:48):
feel like music or does it feel like like what's
what is that? I am an experiential trial and error
kind of girl, so I usually do my prep. I
read the book ahead of time, so I know what
this structure is the shape, that kind of what's happening,
who the main characters are. Take notes? Why you're doing that?
Are you just like take it in. It's usually just
at this point kind of sucked into my brain, unless
it's you know, there's a bunch of pronunciation things, and
(06:10):
then I've got notes on everything going on the side. Yeah.
Nonfiction you're like, I don't know that God from the
second century BC, sumeria, no idea how to say that? Um.
And then I usually just get in and I will
do the first chapter until I've found the rhythm and
do it meaning over and over and over and over
until I found the rhythm. And some books you're just like,
oh great, this author they write like I talk. I
(06:31):
can do this falling off a log, by the way,
that's not that is definitely how I talk to all
the type guys. UM. And then some authors I really
like it is a battle. I'm just like i'm and I'm.
I will get stuck on sentences and I'll go back
and I'll get stuck on sets that I'll go back
and I'll just do the first chapter until I'm finally like, Okay,
(06:53):
that's how this person talks. That's how this person writes,
and some people you can tell do not write to
have anything read aloud, and you're like, all right, here
we go, right yeah, and that's literally your problem to solve.
The biggest challenge for audio books overall, it doesn't really
matter what audio book you're doing is it's it's the
marathon of voice acting. So most voice acting you go
(07:13):
in and you're like, I'm gonna do this commercial. It's
two lines, it's three words, whatever it is that has
zone challenges, but it's super short pieces of text where
you're doing video games and you're just doing a bunch
of dialogue and then grunts and hits and blowing things up.
And so if you have maybe not great like voice form,
like you're not breathing or you're you know, hurting aspects
(07:34):
of your vocal apparatus, it doesn't really bite you because
it's so short. Right, you can go blow your voice
out for one day of video games and you're fine.
But if you're doing audio books, it's a marathon. You're
doing usually six to eight hours a day in a
booth talking a new microphone, and if you're doing it
full time, you're doing that five days a week and
(07:55):
how does the eight hour feel. It's usually pretty brutal. Vocally,
you're tired and you can just hear it. But the
harder part is actually the mental So that's where finding
the language and the rhythm is. By hours six, especially
with complex sentence structure, your brain is tired, and staying
engaged becomes some of the bigger challenge sometimes when you're
(08:16):
that tired and you have to kind of I'll stop
and just go back and I'm like, all right, why
is this important? Right? Okay, what does this mean? Again? Okay, wait,
you just read an entire paragraph and you have no
idea what you said. Go back to the top and
do it again, because you're getting tired and right right
right your brain. And on a really really technical level,
like what we're talking about in certain ways is actually
like what word you lift to make sense of a thought,
(08:39):
which obviously is a lot of the stuff that I do,
especially when I'm working with English as a second language actors.
You know what word gets lifted if you're comparing two things,
for example, um matters to English. Years if we're gonna
actually understand sometimes a complex thoughts, sometimes a relatively simple one.
I mean, even if We're just saying, like, you know,
(09:01):
are you going to leave now or you're gonna leave later?
But if now and later are not being held in
opposition with each other in this thing that people call antithesis,
if you can background, then you know, I mean, if
you say you're gonna leave now or you're gonna leave later,
people don't understand why they don't understand it. And then
add into that that it's not TV and film. I
can't see their face. I have no context visually. They
(09:25):
can't your face or yes, they can't see my face.
Either way, you can't see a face. There's no face.
There's a disembodied voice coming through your earbuds or coming
over your car radio. And so that is the only
way to make sense of what's going on is getting
that language right. And unlike working on a script like
a theater person, where you usually have worked on this
script for months and you have gone through and everything.
(09:45):
I've got a book and going through and marking up
every single sentence is just not practical, So you really
are It is about staying on top of it and saying, wait,
did that make sense to me? Okay, we're having a
direc actor who's on the outside. They're listening like like
our lovely producers here are and they would be out
there and they would just stop and be like, Um,
(10:07):
you know, I don't understand what you just said. Can
we go major percentage of the work you do? You
do not have a director around. You're doing this alone
in your own and you're producing and directing your own Yeah,
so you're wearing all the hats at once. So here's
a fun fact about today's guest. Everything you've talked about
thus far is probably relevant to what I'm about to say.
(10:27):
But you secretly, relatively secretly, also do erotica. Oh yes,
relatively secret Um. So I wanted to talk to you
about sexy voice. What does that mean to you? I
think that's such a fun thing to ask about because
(10:48):
I think most women, when you when they see the
words sexy, have a very distinctive idea of what that is,
and I think it's often wrong, wrong meaning it doesn't
actually make other people turned on. Yeah, I think that
we have preconceived notions of this, like sexy voice thing.
I taught a workshop at an undergrad school for voice
(11:10):
over recently, and I deliberately picked uh, commercial audition copy
for the girls that, like almost every commercial audition, it's
going to be like, here's the breakdown, we need twenties
to thirties, blah blah, blast, straightforward read and somewhere in there.
At least for women, it almost always says sexy. And
that means that almost every woman is going to come
in and get on the mic and be like, I
really like this pig Mac. Oh my god, this pig Mac,
(11:33):
and I'm going to get like down here and I
get a little husky, and every single person that is
there like sexy voice, and it almost never works because
it's almost always put on. You're almost trying too hard,
unless you have a voice that is naturally kind of
husky and low, which minus, thank you very much, But
unless that's how you really sound, you sound like you're pushing,
(11:54):
you sound like you're trying, and then it's not sexy.
It just sounds like your cartoon character. Then it sounds
kind of awful. And so what I was trying to
teach these people is that what's actually sexy is your
natural voice coming through you. Having fun. Fun is sexy.
Confidence is sexy. It's less about a timbre and a
certain idea of sexy, and it's more just actually sounding
(12:16):
confident on the mic, having fun with the text, putting
a little bit of a wink and like a laugh
in it. Literally smiling while you're talking really helps. And
for erotica audiobooks it's the same thing. Sexy is actually
like you're in on the joke or you're in secret,
and if you're funny, that's that's so much sexier. And
even like in the sex scenes, it's not about like
I'm gonna get all sexy time now, it's about being
(12:37):
engaged and being confident and telling the story and engaging
with the idea of falling in love with someone. It
seems like a metaphor for literally the female experience that
we think there's a box that we should be fitting into,
and there are signs that that's right. But if we
all try to fit into that same box, we all
(12:58):
become so generic that are we know, we leave ourselves
at the door, and we can't actually, you know, become
self actualized humans until we figure out what makes us happy, Yeah,
and what makes you unique and lean into that vocally, Yeah,
I don't know if I can talk about everything else,
but vocally you can By the way, what makes someone
(13:19):
sexy on the mic is them sounding like them. It's
the weird, like quirky people that you're hearing commercials. You're like, Oh,
that's a weird voice. I really want to meet that person.
So okay, But I'm going to challenge you a little
bit on this because I also I think that ring
is so true, right, and we all understand that. You know,
we're living in a world where authentic is king or queen.
I mean, we all hate that word because it's overused.
It's overused, but it does mean what you're talking about,
(13:41):
that we find within ourselves something that feels real, not
something outside of ourselves that we're trying to play at
a and then be. But we all have a range
of us nous, So you know, one could mistake this
for like, well, then I should just come in whatever
voice comes out of my mouth is the only one
I have, and I shouldn't try to sort of find range.
(14:04):
But you work on so many different projects, from you know,
erotica to White Fragility and extremely serious book about social justice,
that you obviously do have various voices that are all
equally authentically you, but that you bring out different aspects
of yourself for different projects. Does that feel right? It does?
But I rarely am thinking about it technically, And it
(14:27):
really is more about what is the story. What is
the point I'm trying to make. If I'm narrating white fragility,
I'm not thinking like, oh, I have to make sure
that I sound like this when I'm talking about sex, right,
or I have to sound very strong. I'm just like, Okay,
I'm talking about this thing, and I have to make
this thought clear. And so I'm probably going to slow
it down and really think about it. But that's because
I'm dealing with complex language. It it's not about me
(14:50):
technically choosing. So the choices that we make about how
to sound in a moment, what tools from within us
we bring are should not be arbitrarily made. They should
be made based exclusively on the actual content that we're
working on. Yeah, and if you're really connected to the content,
I would say nine times out of ten that that
whatever comes out of your mouth is what it should
be coming out of your mouth, right, if you're really kind.
(15:12):
And there's and there's a there's an analogy here for
anybody who's thinking, I don't know how I sound because
I sound different in different situations. I mean, code switching
is real, and I talked about it in in last
week's episode. But all of us, all humans, have some
aspect of changing the way we sound based on the
environment that we're in. And so to think of that
(15:34):
not as like, oh God, I'm so inconsistent with myself,
but really just that we're bringing the authentic version of
ourselves to the moment at hand. And that actually sounds
like what you're doing professionally. Yes, if I'm doing it right,
and when it feels icky, you do the chapter again,
then you do the chet. You just go do it
until you get it right. I asked my husband for
(15:54):
if you had any questions for you, and what he
asked was, um, something like, um, do you make big
decisions about what characters what a character's voice is and
then you end up being like super wrong and you
realize like a way too late in yes, and it's awful.
It usually happens when you're doing book series because the
first book series you're like, oh, these are my leads,
(16:15):
it's gonna be great, and like Joe Schmo number three,
who has two lines, who you're like, I'm gonna make
him like a dude, and he's gonna what right, because
he's had two lines. He's the lead the next book
and no one told you that. And you're like, um,
so what do you do? What do you do? What
have you done? You? You slightly adjust him, you make
him sound a little less BROI, and you pitch him
up a bit, but you're like, I'm I'm lean towards that,
(16:35):
and then I'm also going to make him listenable. You
do do accents I do. And I've also had like
I recently did this. I have this lovely author who
writes a million characters in these fantasy series, and she'll
just give me general notes of like, oh, she's like
a sexy, strong woman. She'll be great, and I'm like great,
and I made her breath And then book three she's
like she's from Florida and I'm like, wait, but you
made her British well because it's set in Scotland and
(16:58):
there's wizards and there's like sure, there's people from all
over the world. You just make choices. It's not like
in a book. I mean, obviously, it's not like all
of us in a book reading where we're like God's
some sort of general sense of foreign Yeah, it was.
She made her britt and I was like, oh, she's
from Florida. So I just hit the author up. I'm like,
all right, so here's your choices. I can make her
(17:19):
American in this book and we can just pretend she
wasn't there in the first book, or you can change
where she's from. What do you want to do? She's like,
just make her American? And I was like, all right,
this is your call. And in real life, even if
we're not doing an accent, right, if I'm in a
really emotional moment of my life, weird sounds come out
of you, you know what I mean, Like you say
words and ways that you would never say them normally
(17:41):
because your your heart and your brain and there's you're
just a mess, and sh it just comes out and
you don't you don't always sound like yourself, And all
of a sudden, you have this devil voice that comes
out of me because you're so angry, or you get
really hype, Like all of a sudden, I'm like high
pitched in ways that I never am. And like part
of what's gorgeous about how human communication works. We think
(18:03):
about words as being these discreete. You know, units of meaning,
and we pull the right one out at the right
time and we throw it to people, and then if
the right one doesn't come out, we feel really bad
about ourselves because we were inarticulate at that moment. But
I'm a huge fan of like the human experience is.
We're having all the stuff going on on the inside.
We're trying to make connections with human beings outside of us,
(18:25):
and all we have are like whatever word comes out
at the moment based on all of the stimulus that's
like moving around in our body. And all we can
do is just have like grace around that. And we
use words. We humans use words in weird ways. I mean,
sounds uh can shift, and the way that we'll say,
(18:45):
you know, I'm not sounds different in eight different scenarios,
eight hundred different scenarios, which obviously comes up when I'm
working with um, you know, actors who are trying to
be perfect and get it right, and it's like, you know,
at the end of the day, right can mean so
manyferent things, and we're inconsistent. Isn't it beautiful? I say either,
I say either, I say I don't know. Words just
(19:06):
come out. I'm inconsistent with how I pronounced words in
my daily life, so why would I not be inconsistent
in an accent? All right, we're gonna take a break.
We'll be right back. We're back with Amy. So, um,
(19:27):
how is work being affected right now? Well, it's a
It's interesting. I've been talking to the narrator community a
lot because we weirdly have been weathering this whole coronavirus
thing fairly well for most of us because we already
had home studios. Um, there are a few who didn't
have had to really make shift home studios. It's pretty impressive.
I've seen pictures of narrators who have built a studio
(19:48):
in their parents car, in their garage, and they have
a full set up in the back seat of a car,
and they're spending six to eight hours a day the
back seat of a car. I mean, I get, I won't.
I did some pickups in the in my car and
then Kat was in hers. Uh for our last week's episode.
We feel we're all joking. We're like, oh, we've been
(20:09):
training for We've been training for Lockdown for years. We narrators, right,
we work from home anyway, we have a full setup.
We're kind of an isolated industry and all the people
doing post tend to work from home, so a lot
of it hasn't changed. And I was talking to a
fellow narrator and he's like, you know what, it's like,
It's like weird fish in a fish tank, just watching
(20:30):
while the house is getting robbed. And I was like,
oh my god, that's perfect because our life hasn't changed.
We're just like doing our little thing and everything's fine.
And meanwhile you look out the glass and you're just like, oh,
the world is exploding, and so you it's a weird
disconnect of my life is sort of fine and very
little has changed work wise, but you're looking out at
(20:52):
the world that is completely different happening around you. You're
watching the house getting robbed as you're just like floating
around doing your thing. Yeah. Well, and also people seem
to want books now. Yes, audiobooks sales are going up.
The cleaning of commuting for many people. I think, I
think podcasts maybe you're going down, but I don't know
(21:13):
how much. Obviously, just because there's a lack of like,
you know, I'm bored on my drive and I need
something to listen to. And yet you know, obviously people
have some time, especially people without children. It must be nice. Uh.
And and are you know, looking for an escape or
for something that feels like it's a it's a heightened
version of storytelling that isn't just like the news every day. Yeah.
(21:36):
And I think we're all getting tired of watching too
much TV, watching too much you know, binging Netflix, and
we're watching the news, and so long form narration is
it's actually sales are up, it's doing well. Amy. This
was really like, um, the promise of the premise, Like,
what a long con we've been. We've been prepping for
this for years. Guys. That's also funny because I feel
(21:59):
like you're you come from like a prepper family. It's
like a whole different kind of prepping. Oh yeah, no,
my parents have like a years to ply of food
in the basement. I was like, Oh, you guys were
ready for this. You've been You've been waiting your whole life.
Did you plan? Oh my god, Amy, Bill Gates and
I we've had we've had a plan in the whole time.
Oh god, Well, I'm really glad that. Um, you know,
(22:22):
I didn't think of this podcast as being like hard
hitting journalism where I was really going to cover the
truth about coronavirus, and yet here we are, and yet
here we are. It's my master plan, guys, it's my
master plan. It's working wonders. That's truly tack too soon. Okay. Actually,
speaking of your upbringing, how did how you grew up
(22:43):
inform how you think about your voice? Oh? Fun, fun question.
I have a couple of different weird things. I grew
up Mormon. It's very exciting group in a very uh
religious community with traditional patriarch case out of order, very
very traditional gender roles, um in the entire community, small town.
(23:07):
And I remember very distinctly when I was four or five,
I was at church and I was singing. We were
singing a little you know, church hymns or whatever for kids,
and I was belting it at us, having a blast whatever,
having a good time, and this little boy in front
of me turned around. He looked at me and he
just said, you sing like a boy. And I shut down,
just completely shut down and stopped singing for years. I
(23:29):
was so uncomfortable with it. And by the time I
decided I wanted to sing again, I think i'd like
completely messed up. My own brain about it, and I've
never really been a singer since, even though I paid
for lessons, I really wanted to sing. I really wanted
to be that, And I think that moment, in a
deeply shaming way for a little, tiny kid like got
(23:51):
in my brain about what I was supposed to sound like.
Do you think it was about them the actual tone
of the voice, or do you think is about taking
up space? I think both. I grew up in a
world where obviously you're supposed to be, especially girls, quiet,
and I'm not a quiet person. I read educated. There
(24:14):
you go, there you go. It's a little bit like
what I mean. My my family was quite that intense,
but certainly that's the community, and uh, I am not
by naturing quiet person. I've definitely been the girl in
the theater who people turn to look at me because
I'm laughing too loudly. It's upsetting for them, and I'm like, ohink,
it's funny. It's funny. I called myself a laugh leader,
(24:36):
like I'm helping. I don't know, I thought I was
funny guys. I think I was singing loudly, and I
think I have a naturally alto voice, so I think
it was a combination of like, I didn't sound feminine
to this little boy, didn't sound like a little girl
because I was not a high and I was loud
and I was having a good time. And I think
both of those things were not acceptable. So how did you?
(24:59):
I mean, then you ended up using your voice for
your life, for your livelihood. Have you thought about like
how that got reconciled or or how you embraced whatever
that thing was that that boy was, you know, felt
was transgressive. Yeah, I mean I definitely have. I don't
know if it's fully been reconciled. I still like a
mad that I'm not a singer. I'm still I'm still
(25:20):
like heartbroken about that little part of me that got
shut down years ago and got put in under under
a shelf somewhere. But I clearly don't have a high voice.
And now I just talked like this all the time,
and I'm much better about being loud and taking up
space and phone calls and in public arenas, and I
just have stopped caring so much and I own it now.
(25:41):
But I don't know if I don't know, I remember
that moment you and it really messed me up. I
have no idea who that little boy is. Thanks dude,
thanks for hurting my child brain. Should we name him?
If only I knew what was his name? Let's let's
make it up, some good Mormon name. Hiram. Oh god, wow,
(26:07):
this is not the cultural group. It's not the top,
not on the tip of my tongue. It's a good
woman name. All right, well, Hiram, Thanks m I mean, seriously,
a lot of us have high ROMs in our life. Yeah.
I think a lot of girls have been told to
And obviously that was part of a larger, you know
(26:28):
story that you were being indoctrinated into, probably around that age,
in terms of how girls are supposed to be. Yeah,
this also makes me think of when you went back
relatively recently and taught college kids did a workshop. What
was coming up for them in terms of the voice stuff.
We talked about sexy voice and sort of misunderstandings about
(26:48):
how to you know, fit ourselves into a box that
other people have for us. But what really resonated for them?
What were they thinking about boys and girls in terms
of their you know, what was really freeing for a
lot of them. As these were all theater students, so
they're all doing plays and they're all in you know,
classes with their voice teacher who is wonderful and she's great,
(27:08):
but the whole you know, they're all learning how to
like support themselves and get to the back of the
room and play all these certain parts in plays. And
I was like, voiceover is really really more about sounding
like yourself. Yes, having range within that, but it's okay
to sound like you. So it was fun to do that.
It was interesting to see what people felt like they
had permission to do when I was like, oh, you
(27:29):
sound you sound like an eighteen year old gay guy.
Let's find the right role for you. I don't need
you to sound like you're a twenty five year old
buff soldier. I don't care. Do you think that's also
actually true in terms of having the range to get paid? Yeah? Actually,
I think the way the business is moving for on
(27:51):
camera too, it's actually more about you figuring out what
you do really well and doing that really well. And
I think, yes, there is range with in that, but
I think we are maybe getting away from doing the
disservice of telling actors that they all can do everything
and they have to and they'll have to. I think
casting and voices are changing in in the voice over world.
(28:12):
In video games and in animation. We're seeing a lot
of that, and we are starting to see it more
in TV and film, and hopefully we'll lean more into
that when we all get back to on camera work,
which hasn't happened for a while, but it will. It
will again, and I think that we're starting to see
different faces and hear different voices, and that is just
(28:33):
it's going to change the world. Is actually going to
change the world. Okay, I want to talk about some
very specific advice. You are my person I go to
for a number of things, but one of them is
over the counter medicine. Cocktails that solve body ailments. That
sounds so you just pick up some cocaine everyone, I
(28:59):
was very clear to over the counter I mean, and
look at some cocaine everyone from the old drug store.
So like, as somebody who relies on their voice, obviously
on a daily basis and for money, what do you
do if you wake up in your voice feels off. Oh,
there's so many different things. I'm a big fan of
(29:20):
throat coat, which I know it tastes disgusting, but it
does amazing. Thanks everyone lost that sponsorship if you just
have to like get the vocal chords moving if you're
dealing with postnasal drip and or uh any kind of congestion,
which will just like postnasal drip is like the enemy,
(29:40):
the massive enemy on vocal cords. I think it's actually
the one thing that people are like, I don't know
why my voice sounds on him like it's postnasal trip.
Does that in this context really just mean like it's
left your nose, The mucasy stuff is left your nose
and is now dripping down. And that's correct. Usually happens
the most when you're sleeping. But so you elevate and
will wake up in the morning and you're like, why
is everything and it's gonna take me two hours to talk.
I'm like, yeah, because you got clear cords up. Um,
(30:02):
you try to sleep elevated. You're like, I can't sweep.
That is never going to I mean, I do try
to give myself time to warm up and talk in
the morning before I get in front of a mic
for that very reason. But if it's happening because you
have a cold or allergies throughout the day, will also
keep keep happening and destroy you. So I think if
you're going herbal, you go get this stuff called queer satin. Everyone.
(30:24):
It's like nature's version of musinis, kind of queer sittin
q U E R C I T E N. I
believe um. I pick it up at a Whole Foods,
but you can probably find it any herbally place and
you pop a couple of those and it will help
clear you out. And if you're doing the I don't
care if it's herbal, advil, Colton Sinus will like get
(30:46):
me through anything. And how many don't you? Don't you
take like four or something crazy like that. I'll usually
take two if I really have to clear out, and
then I'll take one every four hours after that or
something great. Great, Yeah, but it really is like my
miracle drug. I go coldon sinus. Guys so good. And
do you sleep with a humidifier? And I mean, like,
do you know do a Nettie pot through your nose?
(31:06):
Tell me all. I hate them with a burning passion.
I've tried, and I'm terrible at them. But I do
have a personal steamer. So the little like you put
your face on it and just steams your cords and
gets you moving if you're really dried out. My old
trick from the opera singers is hot pineapple juice. Yeah,
you hate it up like you would tea, and you
(31:27):
sip pineapple juice. That is an opera singer stand by.
They love it great. What does it feel like to
listen back to your own voice? It's something you do
so regularly. A lot of people hate listening to their voice.
How do you solve that? You just make yourself do it?
You just you just do. Do you hate listening to
your own voice? Or have you moved to a really
(31:48):
different relationship with your voice. I think I've mostly moved
beyond that, But every once in a while I'll still
hear something and I'm like, oh, really that's what I saw? What? Man?
Do you think of those moments? Or when you sound
the most like yourself or the least like yourself? Solid question,
Probably probably the most like myself. It's usually like some
video that someone made on an iPhone camera and I'm like, oh, wow,
(32:11):
that's brutal. I sound terrible. I mean, higher on would
have an opinion, but I do think you if you
can force yourself to listen to yourself objectively, if you
can just let it go that you're like listening to
me and I'm just listening to an audiobook narrator or
I'm listening to a politician, and you take yourself out
of the equation and what you're listening for is is
(32:32):
it effective? Is it effective? That's all I'm listening for,
Like listening for sense? Does it make sense? Is the
thing that I'm hearing? Like can I follow the thought?
That's what I'm listening for? And then I'm like, oh,
is it fun and engaging? Great, I'm gonna do a
listen for that. I'm going to do a listen for
I think it's awful the first couple times you do it,
and then if you really can like separate yourself, you
just go, oh, okay, I'm just gonna listen to this
(32:55):
politician or this narrator or what happens. This reminds me
of is I actually can across a study where if
somebody listens within um, you know, within the context of
a study where they're like listening in a booth and
somebody's you know, given them herror phones, if they hear
a bunch of snippets of people's voices and their own
voice is thrown into that mix and they're asked to,
(33:18):
you know, judge in some sort of quantitative way, which
voice they like best. People like their own voice best
when they don't know it's their voice. I'm going to
link to that study. I was like blown because obviously
our instincts is that's not possible. It also feels like
it's not possible to not recognize their own voice, like
(33:40):
they must have set up some I'll go back to
the study and see fascinating because most people do, they
say they hate to me that also if we believe it,
if we just decide to believe it for a second,
it should give us a sense of permission that our
voices actually great, and we with our judgment like it. Yeah,
there's a subset this is making me think of, and
I'm just getting aculative, but there's an aspect of hearing
(34:02):
our own voice that isn't actually just about the tone
of our voice. And boy does it sound different than
it does me inside, because that's of course what's what's
really happening there. But also when we hear ourselves back,
we may be hearing some of the ways in which
we undermine ourselves, whether it's up speak or vocal fry
or whatever that in the moment, you really did seem
like that is the mode that we're in, it's who
(34:23):
we're talking to, it's how we're going to get what
we want. And then we hear it back and we
realize m may be miscalculator or maybe just have some
bad habits. So it can be a moment of reckoning
if we listen back to our voice. And that's how
you learn, right, That's how you also learned from your
That's why you listen to yourself is to get better.
I don't know I have I have an interesting moment
when I listened to my siblings. I don't know if
(34:45):
you don't have siblings, so you don't get to have
this moment. But if you have siblings, I think it's
fun to listen to them objectively because then I have
moments of like do I do that? Because all of
my siblings, but the girls in particular, my sisters in particular,
do these things, and I'm like, your insecurity is in
your vocality and it comes out in these like weird
(35:06):
twists vowels or the way that they phrase, and it
makes me really aware of what I do and how
that I just think it's interesting to your family. I mean,
I like to say that our voice reflects our life experience.
So obviously when we look at our siblings, it's a
fantastic way to take out some of the variables and
be like, these people had a similar life experience to
(35:27):
me up to a point. But then of course there's
huge variations that happen once we leave home, and you know,
have different ambitions than them and have different you know,
people that we date and have different places we live,
and have different educations and you know, different things and
have different proclivities and yeah, and sometimes get accents beaten
out of us humans humans. Okay, how do you think
(35:49):
about breath when you're working in when you're not working? Oh,
big question for me. So I had nodules, vocal nodules
when I was living in New York for a while.
It was a combination of doing theater whilst bar attending
whilst not sleeping enough because I was speaking over music
and a a lot of people at a bar, and then
going and doing plays and the Hashteck twenties twenties in
(36:10):
New York. So I had nodules and I went to
this voice teacher, a wonderful voice teacher at and why
you to try to figure out how to get rid
of them because this e nt that I saw. I
was like, oh, well, I mean there's sure probably to
surgery and you're probably and I was like, oh, manly,
I don't want to start there. So I went to
this voice teacher and he sat and just talked to
(36:31):
me for the first fifteen minutes about my life, like
we're just going to talk. At the end of fifteen minutes,
he looked at me and said, well, I know why
you have nodules and we could fix it. And I said, okay, great,
Why and he said your breath And I was like,
I have nodules because of my breath. He's like, yeah,
here's the thing. I just listen everything you told me.
You're the fourth of five children, which means you probably
learned at the dinner table that the only way to
(36:52):
be heard someone's talking along you want to say something,
you jump in immediately, and like that's how you get
a statement out. So you He's like, you, you have
a tendency to interrupt, which is something I've worked on
personally having learned that from him. So you have a
tendency to interrupt because that's what you learned. And what
you're also doing is you're never taking a full breath
before you speak, because you hear a moment, you do
a catch breath, you jump out and you go and
(37:14):
you're grinding your vocal cords because you don't have enough breath.
He's like, you have to relearn to breathe. So I
spent a bunch of time with him learning to take
full breath before a thought and to do that in
my regular life. And it was like the worst six
months of my life. It was awful. I was trying
all the time. I was a mess because it was
(37:34):
so much about how I just literally functioned and had
since I was this big, and I had to retrain
my entire thought process and body process. And I did
get rid of my nodules. It did fix it and
fixed it, but it was so much of my own
psychology was wrapped up in it. How I interacted with people.
(37:55):
I had to really learn not to interrupt, really learned
to take a full, deep breath before I started talking,
so that like, on a personal level, breath is incredibly
important to me, incredibly important. And then when I'm working
on a mic, it's a weird thing. There's a lot
of people who don't love hearing breaths in audiobooks, so
sometimes they'll cut them out. I hate that. I think
(38:16):
it makes it sound like you're listening to a robot.
I like hearing breaths, but you also don't want to
overhear it, right, So I don't want to be blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I think
of breath in that context, or when you hear um,
you know, a public speaker, politician something. I think of
breath as somebody who coaches people in those moments, as
another unit of communication. Yeah, and so if you're taking
(38:39):
a breath that feels very over dramatic and unnecessary, then
that is telling a story which is I'm about to
be very dramatic and unnecessary, right. But if you're taking
the breath that goes along with the thought, or if
you're actually taking a breath because you're literally breathing in
and out, and then it's an entire cycle of breath
because the moment is large and there are no words,
(38:59):
that is an important thing for listeners to hear. It
says as much as the words would have if not
more and taking the time to breathe. I've also had
to learn that, like right, because sometimes it's it's loud
because we're trying to go so fast, and there are
moments when I'm narrating them like this, we're going to
get through this as an action sequence, and it has
to be slow enough the listener can follow it, but
you are keeping the energy up and some of the
(39:21):
breaths are going to happen a little more audibly, and
it's okay because it feels like it's part of the rhythm.
But then there are times where you're like, I'm gonna
take a full breath. And what it also does is
lets listeners go, oh, I can breathe with you. And
now we'll go into this new thought. Because listeners breathe
along with you, you're also telling them when to take
(39:42):
a breath. And when I made a joke early on
about a SMR. But like, my understanding of the whole
you know trend is that it's a way of acknowledging
that when we are listening to people's voices, it has
a direct effect on our nervous system, which is what
you have the power to do when you are in
(40:02):
people's ears telling a story. Okay, we're gonna find out
whose voice you brought in for us to listen to
after this. Okay, we're back with Amy, and who have
you brought in for us? I have brought in a
(40:25):
childhood hero slash obsession, Jane Goodall. So it's it was
really fun to go back and listen to her as
an adult and sort of put into context what I
loved about her as a kid now as an adult
and where her voice fits into that spectrum. Do you
have an answer to that? Well? As a kid, I
mean I was I was obsessed with I really wanted
(40:46):
to be Indiana Jones, Right, He's a guy and he
was an archaeote, Like, that's what I wanted to be,
able with these archaeologist running around the world doing all
these crazy things. And Jane Goodall was the closest real
person I could find to that who was a woman,
and she was off an Africa, and she was this
well respected scientist who ended up I mean, she is
I think the kind of the premier expert on chimpanzees
(41:07):
in the world, and she built this whole life for
herself in a very adventurous way. And I think what
I Also love about her is that she's done it
in such a way that feels so, for lack of
a better word, feminine. Like all of her work is
about empathy and understanding and connection, and so it's science
that is, it's definitely science as research based, but it
(41:30):
always felt like it was she saw the bigger picture,
she saw macro. She works from a place of empathy
and she's this scientific expert, but she's also like the warmest,
softest spoken. She's a really interesting mix of what I
think we think of contradictory things personally. Oh that brought
here is my eyes so yeah, yeah, and it actually
(41:52):
ties in pretty well to the little bit I picked
for us to listen to. This is from her Ted
talk in two thousand two, which feels like, you know,
half my life ago, and yet what she's talking about
is pretty relevant unfortunately. So let's dive in. Yes, there
is hope, and where is the hope? Is it out
(42:14):
there with the politicians. It's in our hands. It's in
your hands and my hands and those of our children.
It's really up to us. We're the ones who can
make a difference if we lead lives where we consciously
leave the lightest possible ecological footprints. If we buy the
(42:34):
things that are ethical for us to buy and don't
buy the things that are not, we can change the
world overnight. Thank you, eighteen years ago and so relevant
today and something that we have epically failed to do. Amazing.
I mean, I did happen upon an article quoting her
(42:58):
from like two days ago that literally said, coronavirus is
you know, our fault and here's why, having to do
with you know, just erosion of the distinction between the
environment and our own lives and the erosion of the
environment period. Um. I'll link to it because everybody needs
to read it. But yeah, yeah, So, first of all,
(43:20):
she's very British. She is, she's very British. She she
feels very proper and yet and yet there's a there's
a bit of a relaxation that suggests she's not trying
to put on. You know, there's something I love about
her and you can certainly see it just by looking
at her in this in this Ted talk. Also is
she's just not interested in being glamorous like you just
(43:42):
so get that she's lived among chimpanzees and what works
for them works for her. You know, you can tell
there's um, there's a degree of careful I think about
how she talks, like she's really trying to be as
clear as possible, which suggests the lifetime of trying to communicate. Yeah,
she spent her lifetime studying how to communicate, right, and
(44:04):
and and you know, across species is obviously like the
most massive version of what we what we are always
talking about, which is, you know, trying to be understood
by somebody who's not like us. And there's also an
element of sort of complete lack of strain in her voice,
like she's just not pushing, She's saying exactly what she's
come to say. She knows it's true. It's speaking with authority,
(44:27):
but without trying to sound like you're authoritative. She just
she just knows what she's saying is true. I think
it's also interesting listening to that clip, in particular the
Brits versus how Americans speak. I think Americans were always
talking about up speak at the end for women, or
we're talking about I'm going to finish the thought and
so I go down, and Americans do this a lot
blah blah bah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah
blah blah, and the Brits are so good at keeping
(44:50):
thoughts floating and they kind of land right in the middle.
And I think she does that beautifully in that clip
where she's gonna she speaks and she's talking along and
she gets to the end of a thought and it's
the end of a on but it doesn't really like
end of a thought or end of a thought. It's
like she just drives all the way through in a
really easy way. I do an exercise with clients sometimes
(45:12):
along these lines, because people do have habitual you know,
up or down at the end of thoughts, stuff that
they do for all kinds of reasons having to do
with you know, just habit or habit based on on
um social cues that like it's better to sort of
lose power at the end of your thought in case
somebody disagrees with you. You know, there's all kinds of
like multi level things going on there. But the super simple,
(45:35):
sort of comical exercise that I've done with a lot
of people is like throwing a fake ball in the
air and trying to have your voice match what the
curve of the ball is doing. So if you're throwing
the ball from like low to high while just saying like,
my name is Samara, just seeing if you can actually
do like my name is Samara, just to see like
it does that feel normal? Maybe it does for some
people totally does right, And then to do the dropping
(45:57):
the ball thing and feeling what it feels like to
have what you know, what you're from saying, which is
sort of this American concept of front loading, where we
put all of our energy into the front of the
thought and by the end we're sort of like whatever.
So then in that case it would be like my
name is Samara, which often is connected with vocal fry, right.
And then the hardest one is the third one, obviously,
the final option, which is to throw that ball until
(46:18):
it actually hits the wall opposite you. Not harder than that,
but to actually hit the wall. And what does that
sound like my name is Samara. It feels scary, It
feels weirdly scary, but it is something to practice, and
you know, it becomes obviously less scary, and it feels
vulnerable at the same time, which that's Jane Goodall always
(46:39):
sounds to me like someone who owns her vulnerability. She
feels so open, she feels like she walks through the
world just like heart open, mind open, empathy open. But
she's again also a premier scientist and researcher, which is
such an interesting thing that I don't think we often
put together. And you hear it in her voice. I
(47:01):
think you hear she's not afraid of being emotional. She's
not afraid of expressing things emotionally in scientific turns. Hope.
You know, hope is it's way cooler to be cynical. Yeah,
And she's like, I'm finding my own kind of cool. Yeah.
Instead of hating your after all of these years of researching,
(47:24):
instead of being angry at humanity, she's still focusing on hope.
And when I saw that article from just a few
days ago, which is obviously almost twenty years after this
thing that we just listened to, and she's saying the
same thing, I was like, Oh my god, the amount
of energy it takes to maintain that kind of hope.
I mean, it's what a lot of us are trying
to sort of navigate right now. But just to think
(47:46):
about the decades and decades of it and saying, guys,
where the problem We can do this overnight? Wait, Okay,
but how about tomorrow night. But okay, but we can
still do tomorrow night. But really, but really, guys, but really,
Thank you so much to Amy Landon for joining me.
You can find out more about her in the show
(48:06):
notes or on our website Permission to Speak pod dot com.
Please also go to the site if you have any
awesome quotes or any questions you want to submit for
my next mail dig episode. What is getting in the
way of your voice? I always want to know? Also
feel free to send d M s or voicemailmos to
our instagram at Permission to Speak Pod, where we're posting
a bunch and join the community. Thanks as well to
(48:28):
Sophie Lichterman and the team at I Heart Radio, my
family and cohort and all of you. We're recording this
podcast at various locations around Los Angeles on land that
used to belong to the Tongva indigenous tribe, and you
can visit us D A C dot us to learn
more about honoring native land. Permission to Speak is a
(48:49):
production of I Heart Radio and Double Vision Executive produced
by Katherine Burt Canton and Mark Canton. For more podcasts
from My Heart Radio, listen on the I Heart radio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. H
This is from Glenn and Doyle's Untamed. I burned the
memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood. But
first I forgave myself for believing that lie. For so
long I had abandoned myself out of love. They had
convinced me those memos. They'd convinced me that the best
way for a woman to love her partner, family, and
(00:21):
community was to lose herself in service to them. In
my desire to be of service, I did myself in
the world a great disservice. I've seen what happens out
in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet,
and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society, but
(00:41):
not a beautiful, true or just one. Welcome to the podcast.
That's all about the voice, which means it's all about power.
Who has it, how we get it, how we say
sound when we have it. I'm your host, Samarave, and
(01:03):
this is permission to speak, where we can throw all
our best ideas about how to get ourselves heard into
the pot and start. Today's guest is Amy Landon. She
(01:23):
is a dear friend of mine, and she's also an
acclaimed audiobook narrator in super high demand. She's narrated, among
other things, White Fragility by Robin d' angelo, which I
mentioned last week, Ted Chang's exhilaration Verity by Colleen Hoover,
and a huge amount of well loved fantasy series as
(01:46):
well as erotica. I wanted to have Amy on because
as an audiobook narrator and a voice actor, she thinks
all day, every day about the voice as an instrument,
how to get across store and character and tone and
point of view when all you have is the voice.
And I love our chat about what it means to
(02:08):
sound sexy, which I mean she's got a surprising take on,
and also the practical side of taking care of our voices,
which is my way of saying she's got all the
goods on the over the counter cure alls when you've
woken up with a sore throat and you know the
show must go on. We also talk about that comment
from her past for many of our pasts about our
(02:30):
voice that we wish hadn't stuck with us, and yet
it did and really affected our relationship with our voice.
And also um what it is to not necessarily fall
in love with the sound of your own voice, but
maybe fallen alike with it. Anyway, this is Amy Landon.
(02:52):
How do you find your books? How did the How
does the book find the perfect narrator for it? Oh? Well,
there's a couple of different ways at this point in
my career. Usually publishers just match me up because they
know my voice, and so most big publishers have producers
that kind of do the whole kitten caboodle if they
(03:14):
cast it, they decide who they want to do their
perfect voices. They get it all lined up and they
take you through the whole and how do they differ,
Like how do they describe those voices? Like do you
end up seeing like an actual breakdown that's like we
want a voice that is low and calm, or like
how do they know? That's all on their end? I
have no idea. They just see whatever the descriptions are
(03:35):
and they think, Amy Landon, They read the book and
then they go, Okay, what do I hear? What do
I hear in my head? Whose? Whose voice? You know?
And you're usually matching to your lead character obviously, so
you're matching gender and age and that kind of thing.
Generally to the lead character of the book if it's fiction,
and if it's nonfiction, you're often matching to the author. Oh,
(03:59):
not to the desired audience, but maybe it's related related,
But usually if a guy writes a nonfiction book, a guy,
generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking. And why do
people pick you? Do you think because I'm amazing? I
mean obviously, but you know what do you what do
you think you're known for? Maybe it's an impossible question,
that's solid question. Um, I do a lot of thriller, mystery,
(04:22):
horror kind of stuff I would have. I don't know
if that's just because I have a dark, dark soul
or because I have a dark, dark voice could go
in EA. Do you feel like when when it's that genre, Um,
you infuse in an element of drama to it? Or
do you think that you're uh even about it? And
it's not really you know that it's that you like
(04:44):
the content, not that you like manipulate the I think
it depends on every single book. So when I prep
the book, when I read the book, the whole point
is you're trying to find the author's rhythm, the author's voice,
the authors how they would do it. And some authors
are very like standing outside the story. It's very third person.
It's like this happened, and then this happened, and then
(05:04):
this happened, and all the dramas happening in the dialogue.
And some authors everything is very like heightened and it
and it doesn't matter genres, genre by genre, every book
is different. So this is partly why I wanted to
have you in because you know, when we're talking about
audiobook narrating, obviously what we're talking about is spending time
in a booth and making your voice breathe life into
something that you didn't write. But inherent in that is
(05:28):
the element of like, how does language work? How do
you personally like put your feelers into a text and say, ah,
this is the rhythm or this is the spirit of
how this person writes. And it probably doesn't happen on
an intellectual level, But what does your prep look like?
Do you read it and do you think, oh, this
makes me think of this other thing or does it
(05:48):
feel like music or does it feel like like what's
what is that? I am an experiential trial and error
kind of girl, so I usually do my prep. I
read the book ahead of time, so I know what
this structure is the shape, that kind of what's happening,
who the main characters are. Take notes? Why you're doing that?
Are you just like take it in. It's usually just
at this point kind of sucked into my brain, unless
it's you know, there's a bunch of pronunciation things, and
(06:10):
then I've got notes on everything going on the side. Yeah.
Nonfiction you're like, I don't know that God from the
second century BC, sumeria, no idea how to say that? Um.
And then I usually just get in and I will
do the first chapter until I've found the rhythm and
do it meaning over and over and over and over
until I found the rhythm. And some books you're just like,
oh great, this author they write like I talk. I
(06:31):
can do this falling off a log, by the way,
that's not that is definitely how I talk to all
the type guys. UM. And then some authors I really
like it is a battle. I'm just like i'm and I'm.
I will get stuck on sentences and I'll go back
and I'll get stuck on sets that I'll go back
and I'll just do the first chapter until I'm finally like, Okay,
(06:53):
that's how this person talks. That's how this person writes,
and some people you can tell do not write to
have anything read aloud, and you're like, all right, here
we go, right yeah, and that's literally your problem to solve.
The biggest challenge for audio books overall, it doesn't really
matter what audio book you're doing is it's it's the
marathon of voice acting. So most voice acting you go
(07:13):
in and you're like, I'm gonna do this commercial. It's
two lines, it's three words, whatever it is that has
zone challenges, but it's super short pieces of text where
you're doing video games and you're just doing a bunch
of dialogue and then grunts and hits and blowing things up.
And so if you have maybe not great like voice form,
like you're not breathing or you're you know, hurting aspects
(07:34):
of your vocal apparatus, it doesn't really bite you because
it's so short. Right, you can go blow your voice
out for one day of video games and you're fine.
But if you're doing audio books, it's a marathon. You're
doing usually six to eight hours a day in a
booth talking a new microphone, and if you're doing it
full time, you're doing that five days a week and
(07:55):
how does the eight hour feel. It's usually pretty brutal. Vocally,
you're tired and you can just hear it. But the
harder part is actually the mental So that's where finding
the language and the rhythm is. By hours six, especially
with complex sentence structure, your brain is tired, and staying
engaged becomes some of the bigger challenge sometimes when you're
(08:16):
that tired and you have to kind of I'll stop
and just go back and I'm like, all right, why
is this important? Right? Okay, what does this mean? Again? Okay, wait,
you just read an entire paragraph and you have no
idea what you said. Go back to the top and
do it again, because you're getting tired and right right
right your brain. And on a really really technical level,
like what we're talking about in certain ways is actually
like what word you lift to make sense of a thought,
(08:39):
which obviously is a lot of the stuff that I do,
especially when I'm working with English as a second language actors.
You know what word gets lifted if you're comparing two things,
for example, um matters to English. Years if we're gonna
actually understand sometimes a complex thoughts, sometimes a relatively simple one.
I mean, even if We're just saying, like, you know,
(09:01):
are you going to leave now or you're gonna leave later?
But if now and later are not being held in
opposition with each other in this thing that people call antithesis,
if you can background, then you know, I mean, if
you say you're gonna leave now or you're gonna leave later,
people don't understand why they don't understand it. And then
add into that that it's not TV and film. I
can't see their face. I have no context visually. They
(09:25):
can't your face or yes, they can't see my face.
Either way, you can't see a face. There's no face.
There's a disembodied voice coming through your earbuds or coming
over your car radio. And so that is the only
way to make sense of what's going on is getting
that language right. And unlike working on a script like
a theater person, where you usually have worked on this
script for months and you have gone through and everything.
(09:45):
I've got a book and going through and marking up
every single sentence is just not practical, So you really
are It is about staying on top of it and saying, wait,
did that make sense to me? Okay, we're having a
direc actor who's on the outside. They're listening like like
our lovely producers here are and they would be out
there and they would just stop and be like, Um,
(10:07):
you know, I don't understand what you just said. Can
we go major percentage of the work you do? You
do not have a director around. You're doing this alone
in your own and you're producing and directing your own Yeah,
so you're wearing all the hats at once. So here's
a fun fact about today's guest. Everything you've talked about
thus far is probably relevant to what I'm about to say.
(10:27):
But you secretly, relatively secretly, also do erotica. Oh yes,
relatively secret Um. So I wanted to talk to you
about sexy voice. What does that mean to you? I
think that's such a fun thing to ask about because
(10:48):
I think most women, when you when they see the
words sexy, have a very distinctive idea of what that is,
and I think it's often wrong, wrong meaning it doesn't
actually make other people turned on. Yeah, I think that
we have preconceived notions of this, like sexy voice thing.
I taught a workshop at an undergrad school for voice
(11:10):
over recently, and I deliberately picked uh, commercial audition copy
for the girls that, like almost every commercial audition, it's
going to be like, here's the breakdown, we need twenties
to thirties, blah blah, blast, straightforward read and somewhere in there.
At least for women, it almost always says sexy. And
that means that almost every woman is going to come
in and get on the mic and be like, I
really like this pig Mac. Oh my god, this pig Mac,
(11:33):
and I'm going to get like down here and I
get a little husky, and every single person that is
there like sexy voice, and it almost never works because
it's almost always put on. You're almost trying too hard,
unless you have a voice that is naturally kind of
husky and low, which minus, thank you very much, But
unless that's how you really sound, you sound like you're pushing,
(11:54):
you sound like you're trying, and then it's not sexy.
It just sounds like your cartoon character. Then it sounds
kind of awful. And so what I was trying to
teach these people is that what's actually sexy is your
natural voice coming through you. Having fun. Fun is sexy.
Confidence is sexy. It's less about a timbre and a
certain idea of sexy, and it's more just actually sounding
(12:16):
confident on the mic, having fun with the text, putting
a little bit of a wink and like a laugh
in it. Literally smiling while you're talking really helps. And
for erotica audiobooks it's the same thing. Sexy is actually
like you're in on the joke or you're in secret,
and if you're funny, that's that's so much sexier. And
even like in the sex scenes, it's not about like
I'm gonna get all sexy time now, it's about being
(12:37):
engaged and being confident and telling the story and engaging
with the idea of falling in love with someone. It
seems like a metaphor for literally the female experience that
we think there's a box that we should be fitting into,
and there are signs that that's right. But if we
all try to fit into that same box, we all
(12:58):
become so generic that are we know, we leave ourselves
at the door, and we can't actually, you know, become
self actualized humans until we figure out what makes us happy, Yeah,
and what makes you unique and lean into that vocally, Yeah,
I don't know if I can talk about everything else,
but vocally you can By the way, what makes someone
(13:19):
sexy on the mic is them sounding like them. It's
the weird, like quirky people that you're hearing commercials. You're like, Oh,
that's a weird voice. I really want to meet that person.
So okay, But I'm going to challenge you a little
bit on this because I also I think that ring
is so true, right, and we all understand that. You know,
we're living in a world where authentic is king or queen.
I mean, we all hate that word because it's overused.
It's overused, but it does mean what you're talking about,
(13:41):
that we find within ourselves something that feels real, not
something outside of ourselves that we're trying to play at
a and then be. But we all have a range
of us nous, So you know, one could mistake this
for like, well, then I should just come in whatever
voice comes out of my mouth is the only one
I have, and I shouldn't try to sort of find range.
(14:04):
But you work on so many different projects, from you know,
erotica to White Fragility and extremely serious book about social justice,
that you obviously do have various voices that are all
equally authentically you, but that you bring out different aspects
of yourself for different projects. Does that feel right? It does?
But I rarely am thinking about it technically, And it
(14:27):
really is more about what is the story. What is
the point I'm trying to make. If I'm narrating white fragility,
I'm not thinking like, oh, I have to make sure
that I sound like this when I'm talking about sex, right,
or I have to sound very strong. I'm just like, Okay,
I'm talking about this thing, and I have to make
this thought clear. And so I'm probably going to slow
it down and really think about it. But that's because
I'm dealing with complex language. It it's not about me
(14:50):
technically choosing. So the choices that we make about how
to sound in a moment, what tools from within us
we bring are should not be arbitrarily made. They should
be made based exclusively on the actual content that we're
working on. Yeah, and if you're really connected to the content,
I would say nine times out of ten that that
whatever comes out of your mouth is what it should
be coming out of your mouth, right, if you're really kind.
(15:12):
And there's and there's a there's an analogy here for
anybody who's thinking, I don't know how I sound because
I sound different in different situations. I mean, code switching
is real, and I talked about it in in last
week's episode. But all of us, all humans, have some
aspect of changing the way we sound based on the
environment that we're in. And so to think of that
(15:34):
not as like, oh God, I'm so inconsistent with myself,
but really just that we're bringing the authentic version of
ourselves to the moment at hand. And that actually sounds
like what you're doing professionally. Yes, if I'm doing it right,
and when it feels icky, you do the chapter again,
then you do the chet. You just go do it
until you get it right. I asked my husband for
(15:54):
if you had any questions for you, and what he
asked was, um, something like, um, do you make big
decisions about what characters what a character's voice is and
then you end up being like super wrong and you
realize like a way too late in yes, and it's awful.
It usually happens when you're doing book series because the
first book series you're like, oh, these are my leads,
(16:15):
it's gonna be great, and like Joe Schmo number three,
who has two lines, who you're like, I'm gonna make
him like a dude, and he's gonna what right, because
he's had two lines. He's the lead the next book
and no one told you that. And you're like, um,
so what do you do? What do you do? What
have you done? You? You slightly adjust him, you make
him sound a little less BROI, and you pitch him
up a bit, but you're like, I'm I'm lean towards that,
(16:35):
and then I'm also going to make him listenable. You
do do accents I do. And I've also had like
I recently did this. I have this lovely author who
writes a million characters in these fantasy series, and she'll
just give me general notes of like, oh, she's like
a sexy, strong woman. She'll be great, and I'm like great,
and I made her breath And then book three she's
like she's from Florida and I'm like, wait, but you
made her British well because it's set in Scotland and
(16:58):
there's wizards and there's like sure, there's people from all
over the world. You just make choices. It's not like
in a book. I mean, obviously, it's not like all
of us in a book reading where we're like God's
some sort of general sense of foreign Yeah, it was.
She made her britt and I was like, oh, she's
from Florida. So I just hit the author up. I'm like,
all right, so here's your choices. I can make her
(17:19):
American in this book and we can just pretend she
wasn't there in the first book, or you can change
where she's from. What do you want to do? She's like,
just make her American? And I was like, all right,
this is your call. And in real life, even if
we're not doing an accent, right, if I'm in a
really emotional moment of my life, weird sounds come out
of you, you know what I mean, Like you say
words and ways that you would never say them normally
(17:41):
because your your heart and your brain and there's you're
just a mess, and sh it just comes out and
you don't you don't always sound like yourself, And all
of a sudden, you have this devil voice that comes
out of me because you're so angry, or you get
really hype, Like all of a sudden, I'm like high
pitched in ways that I never am. And like part
of what's gorgeous about how human communication works. We think
(18:03):
about words as being these discreete. You know, units of meaning,
and we pull the right one out at the right
time and we throw it to people, and then if
the right one doesn't come out, we feel really bad
about ourselves because we were inarticulate at that moment. But
I'm a huge fan of like the human experience is.
We're having all the stuff going on on the inside.
We're trying to make connections with human beings outside of us,
(18:25):
and all we have are like whatever word comes out
at the moment based on all of the stimulus that's
like moving around in our body. And all we can
do is just have like grace around that. And we
use words. We humans use words in weird ways. I mean,
sounds uh can shift, and the way that we'll say,
(18:45):
you know, I'm not sounds different in eight different scenarios,
eight hundred different scenarios, which obviously comes up when I'm
working with um, you know, actors who are trying to
be perfect and get it right, and it's like, you know,
at the end of the day, right can mean so
manyferent things, and we're inconsistent. Isn't it beautiful? I say either,
I say either, I say I don't know. Words just
(19:06):
come out. I'm inconsistent with how I pronounced words in
my daily life, so why would I not be inconsistent
in an accent? All right, we're gonna take a break.
We'll be right back. We're back with Amy. So, um,
(19:27):
how is work being affected right now? Well, it's a
It's interesting. I've been talking to the narrator community a
lot because we weirdly have been weathering this whole coronavirus
thing fairly well for most of us because we already
had home studios. Um, there are a few who didn't
have had to really make shift home studios. It's pretty impressive.
I've seen pictures of narrators who have built a studio
(19:48):
in their parents car, in their garage, and they have
a full set up in the back seat of a car,
and they're spending six to eight hours a day the
back seat of a car. I mean, I get, I won't.
I did some pickups in the in my car and
then Kat was in hers. Uh for our last week's episode.
We feel we're all joking. We're like, oh, we've been
(20:09):
training for We've been training for Lockdown for years. We narrators, right,
we work from home anyway, we have a full setup.
We're kind of an isolated industry and all the people
doing post tend to work from home, so a lot
of it hasn't changed. And I was talking to a
fellow narrator and he's like, you know what, it's like,
It's like weird fish in a fish tank, just watching
(20:30):
while the house is getting robbed. And I was like,
oh my god, that's perfect because our life hasn't changed.
We're just like doing our little thing and everything's fine.
And meanwhile you look out the glass and you're just like, oh,
the world is exploding, and so you it's a weird
disconnect of my life is sort of fine and very
little has changed work wise, but you're looking out at
(20:52):
the world that is completely different happening around you. You're
watching the house getting robbed as you're just like floating
around doing your thing. Yeah. Well, and also people seem
to want books now. Yes, audiobooks sales are going up.
The cleaning of commuting for many people. I think, I
think podcasts maybe you're going down, but I don't know
(21:13):
how much. Obviously, just because there's a lack of like,
you know, I'm bored on my drive and I need
something to listen to. And yet you know, obviously people
have some time, especially people without children. It must be nice. Uh.
And and are you know, looking for an escape or
for something that feels like it's a it's a heightened
version of storytelling that isn't just like the news every day. Yeah.
(21:36):
And I think we're all getting tired of watching too
much TV, watching too much you know, binging Netflix, and
we're watching the news, and so long form narration is
it's actually sales are up, it's doing well. Amy. This
was really like, um, the promise of the premise, Like,
what a long con we've been. We've been prepping for
this for years. Guys. That's also funny because I feel
(21:59):
like you're you come from like a prepper family. It's
like a whole different kind of prepping. Oh yeah, no,
my parents have like a years to ply of food
in the basement. I was like, Oh, you guys were
ready for this. You've been You've been waiting your whole life.
Did you plan? Oh my god, Amy, Bill Gates and
I we've had we've had a plan in the whole time.
Oh god, Well, I'm really glad that. Um, you know,
(22:22):
I didn't think of this podcast as being like hard
hitting journalism where I was really going to cover the
truth about coronavirus, and yet here we are, and yet
here we are. It's my master plan, guys, it's my
master plan. It's working wonders. That's truly tack too soon. Okay. Actually,
speaking of your upbringing, how did how you grew up
(22:43):
inform how you think about your voice? Oh? Fun, fun question.
I have a couple of different weird things. I grew
up Mormon. It's very exciting group in a very uh
religious community with traditional patriarch case out of order, very
very traditional gender roles, um in the entire community, small town.
(23:07):
And I remember very distinctly when I was four or five,
I was at church and I was singing. We were
singing a little you know, church hymns or whatever for kids,
and I was belting it at us, having a blast whatever,
having a good time, and this little boy in front
of me turned around. He looked at me and he
just said, you sing like a boy. And I shut down,
just completely shut down and stopped singing for years. I
(23:29):
was so uncomfortable with it. And by the time I
decided I wanted to sing again, I think i'd like
completely messed up. My own brain about it, and I've
never really been a singer since, even though I paid
for lessons, I really wanted to sing. I really wanted
to be that, And I think that moment, in a
deeply shaming way for a little, tiny kid like got
(23:51):
in my brain about what I was supposed to sound like.
Do you think it was about them the actual tone
of the voice, or do you think is about taking
up space? I think both. I grew up in a
world where obviously you're supposed to be, especially girls, quiet,
and I'm not a quiet person. I read educated. There
(24:14):
you go, there you go. It's a little bit like
what I mean. My my family was quite that intense,
but certainly that's the community, and uh, I am not
by naturing quiet person. I've definitely been the girl in
the theater who people turn to look at me because
I'm laughing too loudly. It's upsetting for them, and I'm like, ohink,
it's funny. It's funny. I called myself a laugh leader,
(24:36):
like I'm helping. I don't know, I thought I was
funny guys. I think I was singing loudly, and I
think I have a naturally alto voice, so I think
it was a combination of like, I didn't sound feminine
to this little boy, didn't sound like a little girl
because I was not a high and I was loud
and I was having a good time. And I think
both of those things were not acceptable. So how did you?
(24:59):
I mean, then you ended up using your voice for
your life, for your livelihood. Have you thought about like
how that got reconciled or or how you embraced whatever
that thing was that that boy was, you know, felt
was transgressive. Yeah, I mean I definitely have. I don't
know if it's fully been reconciled. I still like a
mad that I'm not a singer. I'm still I'm still
(25:20):
like heartbroken about that little part of me that got
shut down years ago and got put in under under
a shelf somewhere. But I clearly don't have a high voice.
And now I just talked like this all the time,
and I'm much better about being loud and taking up
space and phone calls and in public arenas, and I
just have stopped caring so much and I own it now.
(25:41):
But I don't know if I don't know, I remember
that moment you and it really messed me up. I
have no idea who that little boy is. Thanks dude,
thanks for hurting my child brain. Should we name him?
If only I knew what was his name? Let's let's
make it up, some good Mormon name. Hiram. Oh god, wow,
(26:07):
this is not the cultural group. It's not the top,
not on the tip of my tongue. It's a good
woman name. All right, well, Hiram, Thanks m I mean, seriously,
a lot of us have high ROMs in our life. Yeah.
I think a lot of girls have been told to
And obviously that was part of a larger, you know
(26:28):
story that you were being indoctrinated into, probably around that age,
in terms of how girls are supposed to be. Yeah,
this also makes me think of when you went back
relatively recently and taught college kids did a workshop. What
was coming up for them in terms of the voice stuff.
We talked about sexy voice and sort of misunderstandings about
(26:48):
how to you know, fit ourselves into a box that
other people have for us. But what really resonated for them?
What were they thinking about boys and girls in terms
of their you know, what was really freeing for a
lot of them. As these were all theater students, so
they're all doing plays and they're all in you know,
classes with their voice teacher who is wonderful and she's great,
(27:08):
but the whole you know, they're all learning how to
like support themselves and get to the back of the
room and play all these certain parts in plays. And
I was like, voiceover is really really more about sounding
like yourself. Yes, having range within that, but it's okay
to sound like you. So it was fun to do that.
It was interesting to see what people felt like they
had permission to do when I was like, oh, you
(27:29):
sound you sound like an eighteen year old gay guy.
Let's find the right role for you. I don't need
you to sound like you're a twenty five year old
buff soldier. I don't care. Do you think that's also
actually true in terms of having the range to get paid? Yeah? Actually,
I think the way the business is moving for on
(27:51):
camera too, it's actually more about you figuring out what
you do really well and doing that really well. And
I think, yes, there is range with in that, but
I think we are maybe getting away from doing the
disservice of telling actors that they all can do everything
and they have to and they'll have to. I think
casting and voices are changing in in the voice over world.
(28:12):
In video games and in animation. We're seeing a lot
of that, and we are starting to see it more
in TV and film, and hopefully we'll lean more into
that when we all get back to on camera work,
which hasn't happened for a while, but it will. It
will again, and I think that we're starting to see
different faces and hear different voices, and that is just
(28:33):
it's going to change the world. Is actually going to
change the world. Okay, I want to talk about some
very specific advice. You are my person I go to
for a number of things, but one of them is
over the counter medicine. Cocktails that solve body ailments. That
sounds so you just pick up some cocaine everyone, I
(28:59):
was very clear to over the counter I mean, and
look at some cocaine everyone from the old drug store.
So like, as somebody who relies on their voice, obviously
on a daily basis and for money, what do you
do if you wake up in your voice feels off. Oh,
there's so many different things. I'm a big fan of
(29:20):
throat coat, which I know it tastes disgusting, but it
does amazing. Thanks everyone lost that sponsorship if you just
have to like get the vocal chords moving if you're
dealing with postnasal drip and or uh any kind of congestion,
which will just like postnasal drip is like the enemy,
(29:40):
the massive enemy on vocal cords. I think it's actually
the one thing that people are like, I don't know
why my voice sounds on him like it's postnasal trip.
Does that in this context really just mean like it's
left your nose, The mucasy stuff is left your nose
and is now dripping down. And that's correct. Usually happens
the most when you're sleeping. But so you elevate and
will wake up in the morning and you're like, why
is everything and it's gonna take me two hours to talk.
I'm like, yeah, because you got clear cords up. Um,
(30:02):
you try to sleep elevated. You're like, I can't sweep.
That is never going to I mean, I do try
to give myself time to warm up and talk in
the morning before I get in front of a mic
for that very reason. But if it's happening because you
have a cold or allergies throughout the day, will also
keep keep happening and destroy you. So I think if
you're going herbal, you go get this stuff called queer satin. Everyone.
(30:24):
It's like nature's version of musinis, kind of queer sittin
q U E R C I T E N. I
believe um. I pick it up at a Whole Foods,
but you can probably find it any herbally place and
you pop a couple of those and it will help
clear you out. And if you're doing the I don't
care if it's herbal, advil, Colton Sinus will like get
(30:46):
me through anything. And how many don't you? Don't you
take like four or something crazy like that. I'll usually
take two if I really have to clear out, and
then I'll take one every four hours after that or
something great. Great, Yeah, but it really is like my
miracle drug. I go coldon sinus. Guys so good. And
do you sleep with a humidifier? And I mean, like,
do you know do a Nettie pot through your nose?
(31:06):
Tell me all. I hate them with a burning passion.
I've tried, and I'm terrible at them. But I do
have a personal steamer. So the little like you put
your face on it and just steams your cords and
gets you moving if you're really dried out. My old
trick from the opera singers is hot pineapple juice. Yeah,
you hate it up like you would tea, and you
(31:27):
sip pineapple juice. That is an opera singer stand by.
They love it great. What does it feel like to
listen back to your own voice? It's something you do
so regularly. A lot of people hate listening to their voice.
How do you solve that? You just make yourself do it?
You just you just do. Do you hate listening to
your own voice? Or have you moved to a really
(31:48):
different relationship with your voice. I think I've mostly moved
beyond that, But every once in a while I'll still
hear something and I'm like, oh, really that's what I saw? What? Man?
Do you think of those moments? Or when you sound
the most like yourself or the least like yourself? Solid question,
Probably probably the most like myself. It's usually like some
video that someone made on an iPhone camera and I'm like, oh, wow,
(32:11):
that's brutal. I sound terrible. I mean, higher on would
have an opinion, but I do think you if you
can force yourself to listen to yourself objectively, if you
can just let it go that you're like listening to
me and I'm just listening to an audiobook narrator or
I'm listening to a politician, and you take yourself out
of the equation and what you're listening for is is
(32:32):
it effective? Is it effective? That's all I'm listening for,
Like listening for sense? Does it make sense? Is the
thing that I'm hearing? Like can I follow the thought?
That's what I'm listening for? And then I'm like, oh,
is it fun and engaging? Great, I'm gonna do a
listen for that. I'm going to do a listen for
I think it's awful the first couple times you do it,
and then if you really can like separate yourself, you
just go, oh, okay, I'm just gonna listen to this
(32:55):
politician or this narrator or what happens. This reminds me
of is I actually can across a study where if
somebody listens within um, you know, within the context of
a study where they're like listening in a booth and
somebody's you know, given them herror phones, if they hear
a bunch of snippets of people's voices and their own
voice is thrown into that mix and they're asked to,
(33:18):
you know, judge in some sort of quantitative way, which
voice they like best. People like their own voice best
when they don't know it's their voice. I'm going to
link to that study. I was like blown because obviously
our instincts is that's not possible. It also feels like
it's not possible to not recognize their own voice, like
(33:40):
they must have set up some I'll go back to
the study and see fascinating because most people do, they
say they hate to me that also if we believe it,
if we just decide to believe it for a second,
it should give us a sense of permission that our
voices actually great, and we with our judgment like it. Yeah,
there's a subset this is making me think of, and
I'm just getting aculative, but there's an aspect of hearing
(34:02):
our own voice that isn't actually just about the tone
of our voice. And boy does it sound different than
it does me inside, because that's of course what's what's
really happening there. But also when we hear ourselves back,
we may be hearing some of the ways in which
we undermine ourselves, whether it's up speak or vocal fry
or whatever that in the moment, you really did seem
like that is the mode that we're in, it's who
(34:23):
we're talking to, it's how we're going to get what
we want. And then we hear it back and we
realize m may be miscalculator or maybe just have some
bad habits. So it can be a moment of reckoning
if we listen back to our voice. And that's how
you learn, right, That's how you also learned from your
That's why you listen to yourself is to get better.
I don't know I have I have an interesting moment
when I listened to my siblings. I don't know if
(34:45):
you don't have siblings, so you don't get to have
this moment. But if you have siblings, I think it's
fun to listen to them objectively because then I have
moments of like do I do that? Because all of
my siblings, but the girls in particular, my sisters in particular,
do these things, and I'm like, your insecurity is in
your vocality and it comes out in these like weird
(35:06):
twists vowels or the way that they phrase, and it
makes me really aware of what I do and how
that I just think it's interesting to your family. I mean,
I like to say that our voice reflects our life experience.
So obviously when we look at our siblings, it's a
fantastic way to take out some of the variables and
be like, these people had a similar life experience to
(35:27):
me up to a point. But then of course there's
huge variations that happen once we leave home, and you know,
have different ambitions than them and have different you know,
people that we date and have different places we live,
and have different educations and you know, different things and
have different proclivities and yeah, and sometimes get accents beaten
out of us humans humans. Okay, how do you think
(35:49):
about breath when you're working in when you're not working? Oh,
big question for me. So I had nodules, vocal nodules
when I was living in New York for a while.
It was a combination of doing theater whilst bar attending
whilst not sleeping enough because I was speaking over music
and a a lot of people at a bar, and then
going and doing plays and the Hashteck twenties twenties in
(36:10):
New York. So I had nodules and I went to
this voice teacher, a wonderful voice teacher at and why
you to try to figure out how to get rid
of them because this e nt that I saw. I
was like, oh, well, I mean there's sure probably to
surgery and you're probably and I was like, oh, manly,
I don't want to start there. So I went to
this voice teacher and he sat and just talked to
(36:31):
me for the first fifteen minutes about my life, like
we're just going to talk. At the end of fifteen minutes,
he looked at me and said, well, I know why
you have nodules and we could fix it. And I said, okay, great,
Why and he said your breath And I was like,
I have nodules because of my breath. He's like, yeah,
here's the thing. I just listen everything you told me.
You're the fourth of five children, which means you probably
learned at the dinner table that the only way to
(36:52):
be heard someone's talking along you want to say something,
you jump in immediately, and like that's how you get
a statement out. So you He's like, you, you have
a tendency to interrupt, which is something I've worked on
personally having learned that from him. So you have a
tendency to interrupt because that's what you learned. And what
you're also doing is you're never taking a full breath
before you speak, because you hear a moment, you do
a catch breath, you jump out and you go and
(37:14):
you're grinding your vocal cords because you don't have enough breath.
He's like, you have to relearn to breathe. So I
spent a bunch of time with him learning to take
full breath before a thought and to do that in
my regular life. And it was like the worst six
months of my life. It was awful. I was trying
all the time. I was a mess because it was
(37:34):
so much about how I just literally functioned and had
since I was this big, and I had to retrain
my entire thought process and body process. And I did
get rid of my nodules. It did fix it and
fixed it, but it was so much of my own
psychology was wrapped up in it. How I interacted with people.
(37:55):
I had to really learn not to interrupt, really learned
to take a full, deep breath before I started talking,
so that like, on a personal level, breath is incredibly
important to me, incredibly important. And then when I'm working
on a mic, it's a weird thing. There's a lot
of people who don't love hearing breaths in audiobooks, so
sometimes they'll cut them out. I hate that. I think
(38:16):
it makes it sound like you're listening to a robot.
I like hearing breaths, but you also don't want to
overhear it, right, So I don't want to be blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I think
of breath in that context, or when you hear um,
you know, a public speaker, politician something. I think of
breath as somebody who coaches people in those moments, as
another unit of communication. Yeah, and so if you're taking
(38:39):
a breath that feels very over dramatic and unnecessary, then
that is telling a story which is I'm about to
be very dramatic and unnecessary, right. But if you're taking
the breath that goes along with the thought, or if
you're actually taking a breath because you're literally breathing in
and out, and then it's an entire cycle of breath
because the moment is large and there are no words,
(38:59):
that is an important thing for listeners to hear. It
says as much as the words would have if not
more and taking the time to breathe. I've also had
to learn that, like right, because sometimes it's it's loud
because we're trying to go so fast, and there are
moments when I'm narrating them like this, we're going to
get through this as an action sequence, and it has
to be slow enough the listener can follow it, but
you are keeping the energy up and some of the
(39:21):
breaths are going to happen a little more audibly, and
it's okay because it feels like it's part of the rhythm.
But then there are times where you're like, I'm gonna
take a full breath. And what it also does is
lets listeners go, oh, I can breathe with you. And
now we'll go into this new thought. Because listeners breathe
along with you, you're also telling them when to take
(39:42):
a breath. And when I made a joke early on
about a SMR. But like, my understanding of the whole
you know trend is that it's a way of acknowledging
that when we are listening to people's voices, it has
a direct effect on our nervous system, which is what
you have the power to do when you are in
(40:02):
people's ears telling a story. Okay, we're gonna find out
whose voice you brought in for us to listen to
after this. Okay, we're back with Amy, and who have
you brought in for us? I have brought in a
(40:25):
childhood hero slash obsession, Jane Goodall. So it's it was
really fun to go back and listen to her as
an adult and sort of put into context what I
loved about her as a kid now as an adult
and where her voice fits into that spectrum. Do you
have an answer to that? Well? As a kid, I
mean I was I was obsessed with I really wanted
(40:46):
to be Indiana Jones, Right, He's a guy and he
was an archaeote, Like, that's what I wanted to be,
able with these archaeologist running around the world doing all
these crazy things. And Jane Goodall was the closest real
person I could find to that who was a woman,
and she was off an Africa, and she was this
well respected scientist who ended up I mean, she is
I think the kind of the premier expert on chimpanzees
(41:07):
in the world, and she built this whole life for
herself in a very adventurous way. And I think what
I Also love about her is that she's done it
in such a way that feels so, for lack of
a better word, feminine. Like all of her work is
about empathy and understanding and connection, and so it's science
that is, it's definitely science as research based, but it
(41:30):
always felt like it was she saw the bigger picture,
she saw macro. She works from a place of empathy
and she's this scientific expert, but she's also like the warmest,
softest spoken. She's a really interesting mix of what I
think we think of contradictory things personally. Oh that brought
here is my eyes so yeah, yeah, and it actually
(41:52):
ties in pretty well to the little bit I picked
for us to listen to. This is from her Ted
talk in two thousand two, which feels like, you know,
half my life ago, and yet what she's talking about
is pretty relevant unfortunately. So let's dive in. Yes, there
is hope, and where is the hope? Is it out
(42:14):
there with the politicians. It's in our hands. It's in
your hands and my hands and those of our children.
It's really up to us. We're the ones who can
make a difference if we lead lives where we consciously
leave the lightest possible ecological footprints. If we buy the
(42:34):
things that are ethical for us to buy and don't
buy the things that are not, we can change the
world overnight. Thank you, eighteen years ago and so relevant
today and something that we have epically failed to do. Amazing.
I mean, I did happen upon an article quoting her
(42:58):
from like two days ago that literally said, coronavirus is
you know, our fault and here's why, having to do
with you know, just erosion of the distinction between the
environment and our own lives and the erosion of the
environment period. Um. I'll link to it because everybody needs
to read it. But yeah, yeah, So, first of all,
(43:20):
she's very British. She is, she's very British. She she
feels very proper and yet and yet there's a there's
a bit of a relaxation that suggests she's not trying
to put on. You know, there's something I love about
her and you can certainly see it just by looking
at her in this in this Ted talk. Also is
she's just not interested in being glamorous like you just
(43:42):
so get that she's lived among chimpanzees and what works
for them works for her. You know, you can tell
there's um, there's a degree of careful I think about
how she talks, like she's really trying to be as
clear as possible, which suggests the lifetime of trying to communicate. Yeah,
she spent her lifetime studying how to communicate, right, and
(44:04):
and and you know, across species is obviously like the
most massive version of what we what we are always
talking about, which is, you know, trying to be understood
by somebody who's not like us. And there's also an
element of sort of complete lack of strain in her voice,
like she's just not pushing, She's saying exactly what she's
come to say. She knows it's true. It's speaking with authority,
(44:27):
but without trying to sound like you're authoritative. She just
she just knows what she's saying is true. I think
it's also interesting listening to that clip, in particular the
Brits versus how Americans speak. I think Americans were always
talking about up speak at the end for women, or
we're talking about I'm going to finish the thought and
so I go down, and Americans do this a lot
blah blah bah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah
blah blah, and the Brits are so good at keeping
(44:50):
thoughts floating and they kind of land right in the middle.
And I think she does that beautifully in that clip
where she's gonna she speaks and she's talking along and
she gets to the end of a thought and it's
the end of a on but it doesn't really like
end of a thought or end of a thought. It's
like she just drives all the way through in a
really easy way. I do an exercise with clients sometimes
(45:12):
along these lines, because people do have habitual you know,
up or down at the end of thoughts, stuff that
they do for all kinds of reasons having to do
with you know, just habit or habit based on on
um social cues that like it's better to sort of
lose power at the end of your thought in case
somebody disagrees with you. You know, there's all kinds of
like multi level things going on there. But the super simple,
(45:35):
sort of comical exercise that I've done with a lot
of people is like throwing a fake ball in the
air and trying to have your voice match what the
curve of the ball is doing. So if you're throwing
the ball from like low to high while just saying like,
my name is Samara, just seeing if you can actually
do like my name is Samara, just to see like
it does that feel normal? Maybe it does for some
people totally does right, And then to do the dropping
(45:57):
the ball thing and feeling what it feels like to
have what you know, what you're from saying, which is
sort of this American concept of front loading, where we
put all of our energy into the front of the
thought and by the end we're sort of like whatever.
So then in that case it would be like my
name is Samara, which often is connected with vocal fry, right.
And then the hardest one is the third one, obviously,
the final option, which is to throw that ball until
(46:18):
it actually hits the wall opposite you. Not harder than that,
but to actually hit the wall. And what does that
sound like my name is Samara. It feels scary, It
feels weirdly scary, but it is something to practice, and
you know, it becomes obviously less scary, and it feels
vulnerable at the same time, which that's Jane Goodall always
(46:39):
sounds to me like someone who owns her vulnerability. She
feels so open, she feels like she walks through the
world just like heart open, mind open, empathy open. But
she's again also a premier scientist and researcher, which is
such an interesting thing that I don't think we often
put together. And you hear it in her voice. I
(47:01):
think you hear she's not afraid of being emotional. She's
not afraid of expressing things emotionally in scientific turns. Hope.
You know, hope is it's way cooler to be cynical. Yeah,
And she's like, I'm finding my own kind of cool. Yeah.
Instead of hating your after all of these years of researching,
(47:24):
instead of being angry at humanity, she's still focusing on hope.
And when I saw that article from just a few
days ago, which is obviously almost twenty years after this
thing that we just listened to, and she's saying the
same thing, I was like, Oh my god, the amount
of energy it takes to maintain that kind of hope.
I mean, it's what a lot of us are trying
to sort of navigate right now. But just to think
(47:46):
about the decades and decades of it and saying, guys,
where the problem We can do this overnight? Wait, Okay,
but how about tomorrow night. But okay, but we can
still do tomorrow night. But really, but really, guys, but really,
Thank you so much to Amy Landon for joining me.
You can find out more about her in the show
(48:06):
notes or on our website Permission to Speak pod dot com.
Please also go to the site if you have any
awesome quotes or any questions you want to submit for
my next mail dig episode. What is getting in the
way of your voice? I always want to know? Also
feel free to send d M s or voicemailmos to
our instagram at Permission to Speak Pod, where we're posting
a bunch and join the community. Thanks as well to
(48:28):
Sophie Lichterman and the team at I Heart Radio, my
family and cohort and all of you. We're recording this
podcast at various locations around Los Angeles on land that
used to belong to the Tongva indigenous tribe, and you
can visit us D A C dot us to learn
more about honoring native land. Permission to Speak is a
(48:49):
production of I Heart Radio and Double Vision Executive produced
by Katherine Burt Canton and Mark Canton. For more podcasts
from My Heart Radio, listen on the I Heart radio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. H
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