Who Am I Without My Voice?

I had bouts of laryngitis in the past: a few days when I sounded like one of Marge Simpson’s 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’ve probably played a city near you, and you probably didn’t hear about it. Lots of independent musicians operate under the mainstream radar — 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’ve only canceled a handful of times in nearly two decades onstage. It feels awful.