From October 22, 2013
Last night I listened to the interview I did on the Steel on Steel radio program. I’ll try to post it here tomorrow; my Tech Support staff isn’t available on weekends.
I fielded all the questions quickly, never said “uh” or “um” or “y’know,” generated a few bone-tickling witticisms, and did the best I could.
But I don’t know what to do about my voice. It’s horrible. I sound like I’m 110 years old. Even my wife said I sounded “like an old man”–and a little old man, to boot.
I’ve always had this problem. Many years ago, when I was still just thirtysomething, I was trying to get something done on the phone, and it just wasn’t happening. After quite a while, the operator said she’d have to hand me off to someone else. The next thing I heard was this:
“Samantha, I have an elderly gentleman here who needs help.”
“I wasn’t elderly when we started this!” I cried.
What am I gonna do? I need to do every radio appearance I can, because I need the exposure for my books. But my voice! The horror, the horror! And I don’t know ahead of time what the questions are going to be, so I can’t write the answers and hire somebody else to pretend to be me.
Squawk, squawk, creak… Your screen door doesn’t need oiling: that’s only me.
Lee
Out of the huge receipts yiur books are generating for you, why not spend a few dollars on a speech therapist? It will be money well spent
Just a thought! LOL
The thing is, I don’t sound so awful in person. In fact, I’ve always been an excellent public speaker. It’s just that, as soon as my voice gets involved with electronic transmissions, it turns sour.
If you would compel your friends and family to buy my books, then I just might get big enough royalties to be able to afford some kind of doodad that would correct what the other gizmos do to my voice.
I actually have a similar problem. I have a good, strong voice, have done some public speaking and have been told that I sounded somewhat like Rex Allen, but when I was interviewed on the radio, I sounded terrible. Here’s the thing, I wasn’t nervous about being on the radio. I think, at least in my case, it’s the absence of a visible audience and the lack of audience feedback that caused the problem.
There are two things I don’t believe I could ever do: be a stand-up comedian, or be a TV/Radio personality.
In the first case, standing alone and retaining an audience with only humorous stories sounds terrifying. If there was a serious subject; no problem, I could speak with ease and confidence, but just telling jokes isn’t something I could do. I have great admiration for Garrison Keillor’s talent, which is more story telling, with some humor and irony thrown in. How does someone attain that skill?
But TV and/or Radio strikes me as almost impossible. All younare doing is staring into a camera or talking into a microphone, with zero real-time feedback from the viewers/listeners. I can’t even conceive of how this works.
Lee’s problem was just his voice. He was not at all nervous or apprehensive and he always had command of his subject matter. But his voice just sounded not-so-hot. He often sounded very elderly or perhaps ill or both. Just a physical thing.
I wouldn’t say that I have a great voice, there’s an edge, a relic of having spent my early years in a northern tier state, but fifty-plus years of life in the West has mitigated that “edge” considerably, so I do ok. But that radio interview was horrid. i know that I wouldn’t have listened to it. 🙂
I heard a man on the radio one time. He would ask a person to say 3 or 4 words. He would then tell the person where he had lived and for just about how long, including moves to other places. He was amazing.
After more than ten years living in Colorado, I was talking to someone and out of the blue, they asked me where in the state of Minnesota I had come from. Busted! 🙂
I’ve actually done a milder version of the same thing, to others. In most cases, the person turned out to be from Minnesota, Wisconsin or Michigan.
That’s funny. The husband of a woman I worked with was born in West Virginia. When he was about 13 his family moved to Brooklyn, NY. He had weirdest accent you could ever imagine.
That would be strange. Kind of like the singer, Johnny Rivers, a New York boy raised in Louisiana.
That sounds like a good one, too.
Quite unique, bit I love his stuff.
I have never heard him.
He did the definitive version of Memphis in the mid ‘60s and had a string of hits that went on for years. Fairly mellow Rock n’ Roll with a twist of Southern sound.
I will check him out.
Memphis, Poor Side of Town, Slow Dancing (make sure to include his name on the search for that one) and Mountain of Love come to mind as good examples. He also wrote, and performed Secret Agent Man. The band I used to play in did a lot of Johnny Rivers. i found it easy to sing.
Thanks, will check out.