You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free.

I think it gave me my voice because I learned very quickly there isn’t a lot of help. We learned how to speak up for ourselves and how to identify micro-aggressions.

Your voice is a very powerful weapon. When you are in tune with the cosmic breath of heaven and earth, your voice produces true sounds

I always thought there were going to be things in my life that would go away, like beauty, youth, all of that stuff…But I never thought that my voice would leave me, because it’s so inherent to my nature. It was my identity. So when I couldn’t sing, that was unbearable. There were times I couldn’t even get out of bed – I was so depressed.

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing. A person who had not given up believing that she sang, that music would come to her because she wanted it to come, and it had to come, and she would use everything in her power to encourage it to do so.

I'd always been quite quiet growing up, and singing was a way of having a voice.

The music we are singing has been sung by hundreds of years by boys. I wonder if God expects to hear it rising off the Earth, like the bloom of a perennial flower. Or if it is a standing challenge, for us to come together and sing for him. Eric tells us in the old days of the castrati, elite Italian choristers who gelded themselves to keep their high clear voices. Some boys hold their crotches when that story is told, but I understand. I could want it that badly, to keep a voice.

You could say, more accurately, I had found my voice but I had forgotten that I found it, or I had found my voice but stopped hearing it for a while. I think that happens throughout life. That is maybe why you can write songs about yourself for ever because you cycle through the same things over and over but you’re seeing it a little more clearly every time.

When I was little I would strum an empty tin and blow into a broomstick pretending it was a microphone. I sang in church choirs, I loved singing. I am blessed that I have achieved my destiny, and have been able to accomplish what my father could not.

All I have is a voice.

The Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned . . . Ah, sweet Voice, he said, and filled his lungs with the cool evening breeze of the north, but he did not dare open his arms to it for fear that people might think he was mad.

I used to be a folk singer, but I was... dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog.

There's something really personal about your voice, where if people talk shit on your guitar, "Ugh, he played out of tune," etc., you can, in your head, blame it on something else, but when you fuck up with your singing, that's part of you [...] So I guess I'm an insecure enough dude that I just went back and really studied and tried to sing better.