\n<\/p>\n
The serious trouble started on Christmas Eve, upstate with family. The Puerto Rican side does not alternate talking and listening \u2014 each is done in spirited unison. I was speaking too loudly over other stories and my own glass of wine, fighting a head cold and getting gravelly. My boyfriend, Benjamin, caught my eye across the room, touched his hand to his throat and made his face into a question mark, What\u2019s wrong with your voice?<\/em> But we\u2019d brought a homemade cake \u2014 he baked, I decorated \u2014 that people were freaking out about, and I didn\u2019t want to leave before the compliments were over. I\u2019m a professional touring musician, so I miss a fair share of the holiday gatherings, and this was the first meeting between the boyfriend and most of the assembled relatives. He\u2019s 10 years older but boyish \u2014 tousled hair, slender, animated, a mess of bad tattoos \u2014 and I wanted to spin him around for all to see how clever and how kind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n My voice degraded in the couple of hours between family goodbyes and bedtime. Usually, I\u2019m an expressive, flexible alto. But the pitch started sinking, the volume dimmed and syllables began to drop out like a radio not quite tuned to frequency.<\/p>\n I had bouts of laryngitis in the past: a few days when I sounded like one of Marge Simpson\u2019s sisters and pantomimed smoking cigarettes with both hands to entertain friends. But my voice had been uncharacteristically unreliable in recent months. Before a gig in Seattle last October, it got so raspy that I had trouble holding a tune. For a singer and rapper performing her own material, there is no understudy. (If you live in the continental United States, I\u2019ve probably played a city near you, and you probably didn\u2019t hear about it. Lots of independent musicians operate under the mainstream radar \u2014 itinerant bards sharing rooms at the Ramada.) Hoping to save the show, I found a service online that dispatched a nurse to my hotel room to administer an IV drip marketed as a restorative cocktail of B vitamins. I felt pretty sure this was nonsense, but panic dissolves your commitment to empiricism. I also got a prescription for prednisone, a steroid that tamps down inflammation quickly, sometimes within hours, allowing irritated throat tissue to function smoothly. Neither the prednisone nor the infusion saved the day, and I had to call off the performance, a decision that sent shock waves of disappointment in all directions. Band members, bartenders, sound techs, openers and the merch seller had all been expecting a night of work. Fans already had tickets and babysitters. The venue had already spent promotional dollars. I\u2019ve only canceled a handful of times in nearly two decades onstage. It feels awful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Christmas morning my voice was worse than at any time I could remember \u2014 as if it had been lit on fire and left to burn down to powder-fine ash. My next tour was scheduled to begin in three weeks: an important run along the West Coast to support my most recent record, \u201cBury the Lede.\u201d Scrapping a whole tour would mean losing tens of thousands of dollars in earnings, much of which was already spent on flights and hotel rooms or promised to other people. At my level, a serious hit.<\/p>\n I committed to strict vocal rest: no talking, no singing, no whispering (which is hard on the voice), no vocalization at all. I was eager to observe it dutifully \u2014 desperate to recover and perform \u2014 and would have been hard-pressed not to: I could generate very little sound at all. I communicated with Benjamin chiefly via charades, a little American Sign Language that I learned as a kid and an app called BuzzCards that I saw a deaf Lyft driver use to type his side of conversation. I drank lakes of tea and swallowed a few tablets of leftover prednisone, hoping every morning to wake up healed.<\/p>\n Healthy, my singing voice is lower than most women\u2019s. Fiona Apple used to be a go-to at karaoke. It has dropped in register further as I\u2019ve aged. I like the way my voice has seasoned; a little more texture has made for better handling, like tread for tight corners. At 43, I sing better than I did at 25, I think. My voice has become more nuanced; I\u2019ve learned to let it drift into speaking tones in the service of an intimate moment, <\/strong>let it catch in my throat before sending it into breathy background harmonies. I haven\u2019t had more than a few hours of formal vocal instruction, but I\u2019ve trained for years in the way that most pop performers do: We mimic along with the radio; practice in our bedrooms; write to our strengths; and \u2014 maybe most important \u2014 we were born with good voices. A lot of people insist that anyone can learn to sing, and I don\u2019t argue otherwise. But I think having a genuinely impressive voice is a lot like having impressive cheekbones \u2014 you can\u2019t rehearse your way into the asset.<\/p>\n I tried to resist the temptation to test my voice, like looking beneath a Band-Aid. But when I did, it remained ragged.<\/strong> Big anxiety was seeping in. Voices don\u2019t last forever. What if it never fully came back? As we get old, vocal cords stiffen, muscles begin to waste and the voice gets less flexible, less agile. Listening to my grandmother sing used to scare me because I was told she had a beautiful voice in her youth, but to me, her singing sounded like any of the old church ladies: wavering, thin, not particularly musical.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The sound of our voices is born of our anatomy, the way we\u2019re shaped inside \u2014 not just a skill but part of the physical self. The prospect of not being able to sing anymore felt like contemplating an amputation. Plus, the sensation inside my throat felt scary: raw, abraded. I pictured pink, mangled tissue. I decided to fly to Minneapolis, where my label was based and where I still had health insurance, to see an ear, nose and throat specialist and find out exactly what was wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The worst-case<\/strong> scenarios were almost too frightening to consider. Vocal cords can hemorrhage. Their blood vessels can rupture. They can form cysts or polyps or callus-like growths called nodules that limit range and damage tone. Just over a decade ago, Frank Ocean tore a vocal cord, canceling a string of sold-out shows in Australia at the last minute. To treat a lesion, John Mayer had surgery, took a two-year hiatus and still reported that his voice returned altered \u2014 even his laugh changed. One of the most horrific stories is Julie Andrews\u2019s. She sued the doctors who performed a procedure to remove nodules from her vocal cords, asserting it destroyed her four-octave range. Many singers have undergone vocal operations and returned to top-of-game performance \u2014 Miley Cyrus and Justin Timberlake among them \u2014 though long periods of postoperative vocal rest are obviously more financially tolerable for people who spent their junior-high years on Disney\u2019s payroll.<\/p>\n The best way to keep a voice healthy is to care for the whole organism: rest, eat well, stay hydrated. The mandate is simple, but it\u2019s also the opposite of the reality of touring, when sleep is interrupted by late nights and long day drives, meals are sourced during fuel stops and even drinking too much water can delay the van\u2019s progress with frequent bathroom breaks. Vocal experts advise against singing too much or straining to talk in loud environments \u2014 precisely what is<\/em> asked of a touring musician doing preshow interviews, nightly sets and post-show conversations with fans at the merch table. It\u2019s easy to suspect that the best way to care for your voice is to secure any job other than vocalist.<\/p>\n Without a foolproof regimen to maintain vocal health on the road, singers become superstitious \u2014 about particular warm-up routines and types of tea. We are sensitive to haze, temperature and bad vibes from the monitor tech. On a band\u2019s hospitality rider, you\u2019ll see booze, chips, maybe lunch meat and a fruit tray, then hit something like \u201c1 bulb ginger root, 1 jar minced garlic (organic), 1 bottle single-source local honey, 9 ripe lemons.\u201d Anybody in the band can make a sandwich before the show, but only singers make potions.<\/p>\n As a vocalist, heading in to see an ear, nose and throat specialist for a busted voice feels a lot like heading into the community clinic for an S.T.D. test. The news might be real bad. And if it is, it might be my fault. (I\u2019ve probably been pushing too hard lately. And I shouldn\u2019t be drinking late, holding court at loud parties. I know better, just get careless in the heat of the moment.<\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the exam room, a physician assistant pushed a thin tube mounted with a camera up my nostril then snaked it down my throat, scanning for any visible causes of my symptoms. When it was pulled out a minute later, I shuddered \u2014 improbably, the sensation was like having a piece of myself removed, a shrimp being deveined.<\/p>\n Immediately, the physician assistant reported that there were no nodules. My shoulders dropped with relief. The vocal cords themselves looked healthy, but the surrounding tissue was acutely inflamed. My laryngitis was possibly the product of a sinus infection, which was probably still active. I was prescribed a course of treatment that began with 13 pills a day. There were antibiotics to knock out the sinusitis, a high-dose course of prednisone, an expectorant to help drain the mush out of my face and famotidine to prevent any reflux from further irritating the vocal anatomy.<\/p>\n There were only four days until the first show. I got the green light to try performing, presuming I felt capable. Offstage I was to remain totally silent. I was privately anxious that I didn\u2019t know exactly where the line was: How healthy should my voice feel before I could stop worrying about causing a bleed or damaging it permanently onstage?<\/p>\n Heading home, I noted that the physician assistant had not seemed particularly charmed by me. On mute, I was just less likable<\/em>. I had made being the center of attention my life\u2019s work; relegation to a nonspeaking role was isolating, almost punitive. Words are how I connect to the world and the people in it. Without the ability to voice them, I started to sense a partition descending between me and the scenes of my life, as if they were unfolding at a remove.<\/p>\n The night before I left for Minneapolis, Benjamin propped himself over me in bed. I hadn\u2019t spoken in two weeks \u2014 the longest I\u2019d gone without a real conversation since learning how to have one. \u201cWhen you can\u2019t talk, only half of you is here,\u201d he said. My throat tightened, not because he was correct that I was diminished but because I was glad he missed the absent part. He searched my eyes. When my voice first gave out, I emoted constantly with exaggerated facial expressions to compensate, but it had been exhausting and too easily misread. So I just lay there blank-faced, looking back. It was a foreign kind of togetherness \u2014 company without communication. We had sex, and it was strange that he was the only one making noise.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019d been dating only a little more than a year but had already talked big commitments. I wasn\u2019t acclimated to the tandem operations of coupledom, though. Apart, he would sometimes ask me to text when I got in safely, and I bristled \u2014 I\u2019d been making my way at all hours of the night all over the world for years. I operated solo just fine, working through weekends and holidays, already planning the next tour from the front seat of a rented van. I felt uncomfortable being expected to check in with someone about my feelings and fears too. Self-sufficiency was a point of personal pride, a professional achievement, a badge of feminism, even part of the brand. Sometimes when I was especially defiant, jaw high like a racehorse, he would just quietly quote from my bio, \u201cfiercely independent.\u201d Then, \u201cAnd I love you for it.\u201d<\/p>\n But my imposed vow of silence was changing our dynamic, dissolving some of my resistance. I wasn\u2019t quite so self-sufficient voiceless. Grocery shopping together one afternoon, I startled the cashier by reaching too quickly as I was bagging, essentially pulling an item out of her hand. I smiled, trying to repair this little social rift, but her expression remained alarmed until Benjamin said, \u201cShe can\u2019t talk.\u201d Her face softened into kindness. Leaving, I mouthed, \u201cYou loved that.\u201d I needed his help, at least a little. When we went out for dinner, he ordered for me \u2014 a gesture that would make me uncomfortable under normal circumstances. But it felt good to lean on someone. And maybe I liked playing house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Thirty-nine hours<\/strong> before I was supposed to leave for tour, the meds seemed to be kicking in. High notes were unsustainable, pitch was iffy, but I had recovered some usable midrange to rap with. When I sang, however, air sometimes came out where music should be, <\/strong>like writing with a spent ballpoint pen. I recorded a clip of my voice to send to Becky, my manager. We had seven club gigs and several sold-out meet-and-greets. I wasn\u2019t sure what to do. Becky replied that we should get on planes and go \u2014 we could cancel shows last-minute if we had to. I cut my set from 75 minutes to 55 and packed my bag.<\/p>\n The first show in Portland, Ore., sold out in advance. My younger brother, Max, and my dad flew in to catch the concert \u2014 I was touched when I learned they would be coming but now worried about performing poorly in front of them. Max had even agreed to sing backup on a song. Related vocalists sometimes have what\u2019s called \u201cblood harmony\u201d: a special vocal blend that emerges from similar timbres. When he and my dad arrived, I led them on a wordless tour of the venue. Aside with Max, I broke the silence for a moment. \u201cThis is how my voice sounds.\u201d Max looked down and said: \u201cI hate it. I\u2019m so sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While the band set up, my dad and I were in the greenroom alone. I began to hum a few warm-up notes. My voice sounded so broken. He offered to leave, and I felt irrationally ashamed, as if I had revealed a bad scar.<\/p>\n Standing behind a microphone to soundcheck in my condition felt ridiculous. The voice that came out didn\u2019t handle like mine \u2014 it was a rental bucking around the parking lot while I fumbled with the clutch. The sound tech turned my volume as high as it would go.<\/p>\n The audience arrived. After our first song, I explained the situation, and my obvious hoarseness. They were forgiving, rallied in the way that crowds do behind an underdog. When I couldn\u2019t hit the high notes, they sang them for me, and my heart bobbed inside my chest, rafted by gratitude. At the end of the set, they clapped me offstage to return to my silence.<\/p>\n We made it through our show in Seattle, went on to California. My voice gained strength each day, and I would spend down a bit of it performing at night. The stress and the side effects of the medication were mounting, though. I was losing weight in a way that was not beautiful; turning sideways I could see my ribs in the hotel mirror. Prednisone made sleeping difficult; the fatigue made me lightheaded. When I finished the prescription, I broke out in full-body hives.<\/p>\n Our last night, we played the Independent in San Francisco. As had become routine, I explained to the crowd that I hadn\u2019t spoken since Christmas and that this next hour would be my parole from silence. I reached for some high notes and hit them, sweated in my show clothes, left it all onstage. At the end of the last song, I zipped my mouth shut before walking out of the spotlight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Right after tour, I got sick again. Follow-up medical visits involved a CT scan, more meds and the suggestion that I speak with a surgeon. My sinuses, which serve as resonating chambers for the voice, were still a mess. On the phone, the surgeon, who has operated on opera singers with symptoms like mine, described a possible course of treatment: a procedure to punch small holes in the paper-thin bones of my sinuses to widen the passageways. I didn\u2019t even know I had paper-thin bones in my face \u2014 the thought of punching holes in them sounded terrifying. The doctor assured me that the surgery only rarely changes the timbre of the voice in a perceptible way.<\/p>\n The shows go on, however: In May I traveled with my bandmates Aviva and Joshua to play three concerts in Europe. I can hear a lingering vocal fry, an imprecision when my voice starts to tire, but so far I don\u2019t think the audience is docking points; in both London and Prague we were encored twice.<\/p>\n