By Lucy Schiller
1.
I was meant to start singing. But I hadn’t done it before. Or, not like this: not professionally (though this was not professional singing). This was for amateurs who wanted to try something on. My adult students, Amanda had said, don’t tend to want to work towards a recital. I sensed this was a preemptive anti-invitation. Generally, I imagined, we adults had no (real) dreams of stardom. We had no need for the marquee lights, as Waylon sang. But then again, I supposed, surely some of us did—thirty-five, forty, forty-five, still thinking we might, somehow, be “discovered” one of these days for the coursing talents held deep within our bodies, coaxed out by chance one day in front of a passing scout. Was I secretly one of these people, I wondered? Was I holding some strange seed in my heart that was simply waiting to grow, with a little of Amanda’s sunlight and water? Did I harbor—I sensed I did—the frankly bizarre belief that my life could make a stunning change of direction, and that a thirty-minute once-a-week vocal lesson in a Lubbock woman’s backyard was simply the first essential step?
I tend to get ahead of myself. I had not even started to sing.
A few weeks before starting with Amanda, I saw a man in Terlingua with his shirt open to his waist and bandanas roped around his slender wrists, like some sort of soft country restraint, singing “Mamas Don’t Let Their Babies…” to a room of excited women. The way he sang and spoke of Terlingua, where he told us he had a cabin that he’d built himself—he said it with a drawl. His posture, his sureness. I suspected,there in the tourists’ cantina, all of us enwrapped in the starry vel- vet night, that he was covering for some element of fakery, like the one I felt enwrapped in all the time, waiting for the truth to shine out suddenly one day. But it was true, I had to notice, that when he sang “Mamas” (as Amanda called that song), the cantina in Terlingua stilled a bit at that one line: He ain’t wrong, he’s just different, but his pride won’t let him do things to make you think he’s right.
Music, like place, can make you start saying things like cantina in earnest. Or in my case, Y’all, a word whose practical uses I of course understand, but which I have never been able to say myself without hearing myself say it.
Hi, a child said that first time, as I passed him on the way in to Amanda’s studio. The child was short. His shortness startled me, because it highlighted the directness, and the confidence, of his gaze. He looked at me as if I were a peer. Hi, I said back. The whole thing felt very weird. Young people, for a while anyway, can express less self-consciously their hopes of stardom, direction, artistic desire. Amanda’s studio, in fact, had little photos of her young self in a gingham dress on some kind of talk show, singing. She looked either like Heidi or like the main character in the Wizard of Oz, I couldn’t remember which, and never figured it out. Hi, that child had said, recognizing something in me. People made note of you here, and who you were, especially if you did not seem to be from here.
That first time singing was scary in the way I knew it likely would be. I sang. I sang of mamas and men: badly, brokenly, shyly, self-consciously, self-hatingly, already over it. “Cowboys ain’t easy to love,” I sang. Amanda nodded her head gamely and whispered along with the words, swaying back and forth behind her desk. She wore a blazer. She always wore a blazer, usually over a band T-shirt. She always end- ed our sessions at exactly thirty minutes. My voice, half expression of self, half something formed by external forces of place and circumstance, eked out of me like blood deciding whether or not to leak out of a papercut. I glanced at Amanda. Her face betrayed nothing. “Cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings,” I sang, croakily, and glanced at her again. Was I right? I wanted to know.
Like this, I began to practice songs by three men: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Terry Allen.
2.
My voice had been formed by an interplay of biography and biology, in the words of Rafael Frumkin. Outside of Amanda’s studio, I heard my singing voice do curlicues and trills; they came from within me, but they also seemed so different from how I knew I was meant to sound. I knew, I thought, that somewhere inside, I held an authentic voice. I had heard it before. It was deep down, like natural gas, and all I had to do was learn from Amanda about how to slam it to and through the surface.
My voice—not the authentic one, which had not yet come out un- der Amanda’s tutelage—was a careening, high, and almost keening voice, bizarrely strong and cutting when I willed it to be, so highly “feminine” that I could barely stand to listen to it later in recordings. Through it the authentic voice surged, in moments. And why did I have recordings of my voice? Because I had briefly been in a band, ten years ago, with two Swedes who idolized the sound of a certain vein of American country music. “You’re our Emmylou Harris,” one of them had told me, and we drunkenly got to very serious work, writing and recording an entire album over the span of four days in a rural Swedish hamlet with the assistance of dill chips and whiskey and a sauna. The songs, I remember now—I will not relisten to them in this moment—involved lusty Swedish ideas of American landmarks. We wrote a song, for instance, about a bar named Joe’s in New Madrid, Illinois, a place none of us had ever been to, and one of my bandmates wrote another song, a kind of 19th-century American ballad, about a particular sort of body of water I’d never heard of called a “tarn” (“Down into the tarn/there goes my baby”). My bandmates told me that while they’d been in many musical groups before—they were taught how to play music in school in their country, and one of them had nearly inked a deal with his band to soundtrack a Volvo commercial—“people here don’t sing like you sing.” They crept into the barn one night as I recorded a solo take, listening secretly in the shadows. I had never felt more flattered: more strangely romanced by something outside of myself, a cumulative endeavor under a rainstorm on an ancient roof. Maybe lives like this were possible in Sweden; maybe it was not too late to be in a band, to tour the country, to sing on stage. I had forfeit- ed that idea long ago in the United States. I had watched time elongate, with regret; remembered how my dad had said to me so many times as we drove to school, you should be in a band. Well, now I was. My Swedish bandmates and I were opposites. I could not “jam” with them on guitar with any real proficiency (D minor!, they shouted), but I could channel something they had not learned to have—something that, when it came out of my throat, my mouth, was, as they said, real. Their voices were growly Dylany gravel trucks meant to convey grit and disguise wide vowels. We made, I think, a good album, and it lives only between the three of us, on Dropbox.
Once, a man told me I had an “affected” voice. “A little high,” said another, at karaoke. “Gorgeous,” another said. Always, I was always hearing my own voice as I sang. The Sweden days were an anomaly, and even then I had struggled to let the real voice out—particularly during the moment in which we performed three of our songs for a silent set of older Swedish relatives who looked more than slightly bewildered at our stomping, our bellowing, our passion. I understood that in order to sing in front of people—something I very much want- ed to do—I would have to stop hearing my own voice and simply be, as we all said now (constantly, at every moment) “in the moment.” But how, I wondered, can you both know your voice and stop hearing it? Is this just being alive?
3.
Having newly moved to Lubbock, Texas, I also, around the same time as starting vocal lessons, embarked upon an exercise habit at a place on the far reaches of town. Each time the mirrored room was full of people. Women, specifically. Many, I soon learned, shared certain sorority backgrounds in common. The exercise consisted of moving extraordinarily slowly on an extremely heavy machine fitted with color-coded springs corresponding to different kinds of resistance. The place had an unusual name that a friend once misremembered to me as “Zou Zou Larue,” and that was how it settled in my mind.
Something seemed to have happened in the last ten years, to me at least. Idealized bodies had become different from how they had been during the other, earlier part of my life. Many idealized female bodies nowadays were incredibly sculpted and strong, whereas in the years of my youth the idea was that female bodies should be thin and weak, like the full stems of soft spring flowers. Idealized faces had changed too. Again and again I met people with shining, hard, protuberant lips, which looked almost as if they’d been carved from granite. And more and more I felt glimmers of that feeling I had not felt since teenagerhood, when catching sight of what was then called a “high pony.” The feeling was that I was surrounded by people who looked and behaved a certain way that I didn’t understand, and that I didn’t even have the first inkling of how I’d begin similar amendments on myself. I didn’t want to begin on myself, I thought. But then again, there I was at Zou Zou Larue, squatting with such extreme slowness that every fiber in my bottom seemed to quake, and my knees, older than many other knees in this room, reminded me that this was not fair.
For a few years, I had held a grudge against my mother—she never taught me things like brushing my hair or washing my face, I complained. I still have no idea how to wear makeup. There were so many things that the women of Zou Zou Larue seemed to know—about tanning and ponies, hair removal and squatting technique, eyeliner and deodorant style, among many others—that were, I sensed, inculcated by other women, their mothers or their sisters. Maybe they were inculcated by the internet, I had no idea. Either way, I felt extraordinarily aware in that room. I was brightly wrong against this background, I felt. A hoary mountain goat amidst fine-pelted ermine. And one spring day I was driving slowly in another part of town, back from Zou Zou Larue, the warm sunlight moving into and over my arm as it rested, cowboy-like, on the rolled-down window. A group of young men sat shirtless, drinking on their front lawn in sagging lawn chairs. I knew suddenly not to look at them. I held my head straight forward, maneuvering the car down the brick street. You FUCKing SLUT, one of them screamed into the car. The words seemed to slap. I did not, and do not understand his message, even though of course I do. Slut was specific; it was meant to shame. It was meant to make me self-conscious, to further separate myself from my immediate background. Ironically, what that word supposedly described could not have been further from my chaste, boyish gallivantings through town at that time in my life, when I quivered at Zou Zou Larue, and practiced Waylon Jennings and other cowboys, trying them on with my voice. Though I suppose that is a kind of sluttishness, if we are to believe what the dictionary tells me of a woman entangling with men with- out any real emotional involvement.
Textile
4.
Since I lived here, and was, therefore, a woman in Lubbock, I began to listen to a Terry Allen song called “Lubbock Woman,” which is centered around a woman who knows how to apply makeup to some degree. Maybe not. “Too much rouge,” Allen sings of his protagonist, who lived, of course, in the same city as I did, although I was for years younger than she was. When she paints “her eyelids blue,” she’s “out to win, but she’s destined to lose.” The song cavalcades towards its crest: We learn that she’s “forty, and lonely, and raw, and raunchy, and she has a good heart.” Yes, most of all, she has a good heart, and Allen follows that line with an- other that develops its strength like a storm spinning up on the edge of town: “She’s a Lubbock woman.” The portrait is of Lubbock Woman’s complicated, proud desperation, and of the affection and even admiration the singer feels for the slightly threadbare obviousness of her desires, the way she does her- self up, self-conscious of making herself attractive. The background is time: how time passes.
Writing of gender, Frumkin, of herself:
“he” who began as a tomboyish she, whose fuckability (and thereby worth as a human being) was frequently in question, whose desires didn’t align with those that men had for and about her, who felt ill at ease in a body that seemed to her almost de- signed to be rendered an object.1
Slut. I had been startled that the boy had even seen me as a woman: I had short hair then, and had been twenty or more feet away. Anyway, what was the difference between the epithet the boy had screamed at me and Allen’s woman, who “makes love with the best,” and is none- theless “destined to lose?”
(She has a… good heart. She has a… good heart.)
I didn’t sing “Lubbock Woman” for Amanda. But I listened to it constantly. In four years, I thought, I could write something about “Lubbock Woman”: something ironic, funny, touching. Something like “Woman in Lubbock Listens to ‘Lubbock Woman.’” It was un- likely, though, that I was on my way to being raw and raunchy, with a good heart. Or that I would be wearing a negligee (I get cold very easily, and do not like the feeling of skin touching skin during sleep, which is why I dress for bed the way my grandmother dressed for the days near the end of her life) and painting my eyelids blue. Lubbock woman: that was me, by combination of biography and biology. And yet I truly couldn’t hear myself in any of the options the men I studied sang to me.
5.
Before I met Amanda, and began my singing lessons, I would some- times read a poem by a musician I liked, David Berman, called “Self-Portrait at 28.” I remember reading this poem when I was 28 and not knowing what to do with it. It ends, almost, with an image of the speaker watching his dog. “When he finally hears me call his name/he looks up and cocks his head./For a single moment/my voice is everything.”
Berman’s voice was everything. Lowly off-key and talky. In one of his songs, David Berman sings that “all my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” Berman couldn’t sing, but his very inability was his perfection: the way he slantingly approached the right note but never made it. I couldn’t even sing like David Berman, I realized. Something seemed to be pressing and shaping and elevating my voice, something invisible and interested in perfection, presentation. In painting it blue, the color of Allen’s woman’s eyelids, the color of Emmylou’s dress that I saw, sometimes, when I watched The Last Waltz, and heard her perfect voice clean and squeeze every feeling out of “Evangeline,” the men in The Band regarding her with amazement.
Perhaps there was something of a theory here: that women are often understood to contain a kernel, an interior truth, an authentic voice that, finally unearthed and shining, floors the men.
Perhaps this was the (wrong) apprehension I was operating under.
But what if I had, simply, an inability? What if my essence was not pure, my heart was not good, my voice was not, in fact, waiting and strong?
Berman’s own “inability” to “sing” underlines a lot of male per- formers: certainly all of the ones I was practicing with Amanda, I realized. Willie Nelson’s was nasal, which I read online made for better delivery of emotion. Terry Allen’s was wild and unconstrained, highly accented by the city where he grew up, and where I now lived. And then there was Waylon, on the other side of things, raised on a dairy farm not forty miles away from me, with an oceanically deep voice that was unmistakably great, almost laughably so. His was not a casual proficiency with singing but a forceful one, stamped, again, by idiosyncrasy, irony, self-knowledge.
Moreover, one writer noted of Lubbock that “they make singers here.”2 The implication was not that Lubbock made one kind of singer, but that it had something to it that brought an authentically imperfect voice out of its residents.
Witness, for instance, Buddy Holly, never too far away in any discussion of Lubbock music history, the Lubbock sound. Buddy was known for his hiccups: the way he forced his voice high, suddenly, then brought it back down, messing up intentionally, diverting his listeners away from the narrative they expected, bringing everyone closer to some kind of hyperawareness of the music’s energy.
Notably, all of these Texans had been branded—a word that has a certain meaning out here among the cows—as, at differing times, cowboys, outlaws, weirdos. One academic writes of Buddy’s voice that it was the “voice of a hick, a yokel, a wailing swain.”3 A voice, in other words, of this place, where trees do not grow naturally, and dust storms bust through, pushing their grit into every corner of the house. You live inside the earth here. As landmarks, oil derricks. Windmills. This is the high plains, the South Plains, West Texas, the name changes depending on who you talk to.
I dropped off a map, once, at the library, asking visitors to draw our region on it, then name the region. Someone drew a penis over the land, and left it unnamed.
The academic continues: Buddy’s yokely yodeling is one half of the foundation of rock and roll, which was, purely, “the crossing of cowboy and dandy… If the outwardness and aggression of the cowboy had a historical counterpart, it was, not surprisingly in retrospect, the inwardness and languor of the dandy.”4 Rock and roll was made of hybridizing “the cowboy’s strength, the dandy’s charm; the cowboy’s rage, the dandy’s melancholia.”5
Where did this leave the female singer? Where did this put the female singer who landed in Lubbock long after the birth, and maybe death, of rock-and-roll, and who was neither cowboy nor dandy, but tinged with both? Constantly, I felt, I was between rough and sweet. Constantly, I felt, I looked rough and mannish, but registered as a woman. “Cowboy”: The longer I lived here, the closer I felt myself getting to the idea. Always, I have had a mean streak in me, a thick streak of something ugly running like the Red River from head to toe. I do not necessarily have the Lubbock Woman’s good heart. At night that streak rested placidly under the cotton clouds, but during the day it could surge, hot. This part of me could easily understand the draw of a gigantic truck with gleaming grates on the front, whose ostensible function was to gently push cattle out of the way of the vehicle. A big Western hat. A gun sitting squarely at the hip. The coolth of a glass of “ranch water.” Once, in a town not far away, where a group of Frenchmen were shooting a Western, I passed a young man lassoing a chair in his front yard, preparing to try out for a part in the filmic rodeo. He knitted his face into a concentrated fury as he threw the rope. I walked past. He did not say anything to me, nor I to him; this, I sensed, was our kind hello.
6.
While practicing for Amanda an old song by Waylon and Willie (and the boys) about another town in Texas—Luckenbach this time—I struck, I struck upon a realization. The feeling I had had for decades now was an itch, an asymptote, a drive, a longing, a yearning. If the feeling had a unit of measurement I might call it a Luckenbach, I realized, as Amanda swayed, her face betraying nothing, her blazer conveying professionalism. And me, swaying back, her mirror-metronome, both of us attempting to feel the song and put the song to the feeling.
Let us say, I thought, that a Luckenbach is a unit of simultaneous yearning and desire not to yearn. Let us say about a hundred Luckenbachs sit inside of a person.
Those silvering opening chords.
The smallest things can spark the full force of those Luckenbachs.
Firm feeling women, I sang to Amanda, making eye contact and smiling archly, but to no response.
Entire months can go by with just the memory of a glimmer of a few Luckenbachs. But certain activities, depending on things you will likely never understand, can reliably bring them out. I felt the Luckenbachs occasionally while driving, but a quiet blue dawn on the couch, candle going, a distant dove cooing outside, could also begin to stoke them. Quiet moments dropping away from the noise of a larger thing. Passing through a wide and respiring ocean of sagebrush. A particularly fluid merge onto the highway. Looking at birds, and in particular a clutch of pigeons, some pied and brown, others dark and usual, wheeling through the air like shingles tossed off by a frustrated roofer. The advent of a cool layer of air. When writing was going well. And most of all while singing.
Ain’t nobody feelin’ no pain.
When I sing by myself, it’s not like it’s some forceful gush of water breaking through a dam. There should be no imagined montage here: no woman loosed from her strictures and belting it out on the high- way. No, it comes through me in snippets, the real voice. Sometimes I forget myself, and that’s when it emerges, as I’m singing along with someone else, particularly Waylon. It is no solo performance—that was what I was attempting to practice in front of Amanda. It’s an expression of something else, a sidling up against the people that I admired but also kind of didn’t. Singing, at its best, is a conversation, a triangulation with me and audience and song. And that was what I realized in that moment with Amanda: that I have always most enjoyed singing with other people. Covering the songs of other people, sometimes with my dad in the car, or my Swedish friends, or whoever. It is not about an expression of self as much as it is an expression of togetherness, of shared self-consciousness and unconsciousness both. A voice finding another, entwining, trying it on, a cat testing out the openness of a door. It was no wonder there was a shift, I realized, from the starry dreams of the young child, enamored by the idea of a solo career, to the longings, the Luckenbachs, of an adult, happy to hear themselves in company. Sometimes I have felt as if even though I know how people see me, understand me, hear me, want to think of me, I send my voice out as an instrument, just to test again.
Textile
7.
I’ve made a habit of finding my voice in conversation with the voices of others, particularly those who I’ve never met. Waylon Jennings. Willie Nelson. Buddy Holly. People on the internet whose written words snag something in me, and who I email, then, slightly covertly: curious about their voice, how their conversational one will stack against their literary one. I’ve spent months of my life in conversation with strangers from the internet, our voices testing something out. They sound good together. They rise and fall and diverge. The vocal courtship dissolves. I’m back alone again. This isn’t a sad thing.
Back to the question: if you need to be very self-conscious, or not self-conscious at all, to produce good art.
If you need to constantly hear the sound of your own voice.
I’ve wondered if the Luckenbachs—the longing and the longing not to long—are taken as embarrassing, emotional, when you’re a woman.
If they’re cowboy-ish, when you’re a man.
I’ve wondered if beyond being for certain places and things, what longing is actually for—what purpose it serves.
Maybe it doesn’t serve a purpose at all, and is simply waste mate- rial—excess, remainder, runoff, from something else, a deeper dissatisfaction, boredom, or inability.
I mean, if you profess an “inability” to sing, and you keep singing, why?
It’s like pursuing someone you’ve never met and will never be with: and yet you test the door. Why?
I wondered, at Zou Zou LaRue, one day, aching, trembling, no men, all women, if Luckenbachs were the oil, the natural gas of art? If they fueled it. If they fueled a voice.
In other words, if you need to be unhappy, in some way, to sing well. Or not well, but in accordance with your sense of self.
I wondered, in that moment, if you could frack a Luckenbach out of you (force it through pressure and “special water” to emerge, as art). Certainly there has been much “special water” in the history of music-and-art-making. And pressure too.
Perhaps, I wondered, exercising at Zou Zou Larue was essentially fracking a Luckenbach out of your body and into a new physique. (All the women at Zou Zou Larue had special water in identical Stanley cups.) Perhaps our bodies now, in some ways, were the thing most commonly understood to be art. The amount of time people seemed to spend in the gym. The statistic, unknown to me, about how little time art got anymore, in school and in life.
There were some days, many days, in fact, at this time, in which I felt the world as I knew it was draining away, and all my special references, all my beloved things, were being replaced by empty facsimiles. Copies, covers. That people were being shuttled into smaller and smaller containers in which they’d go about their days, barely bumping into anyone else. Listening to the car radio began to feel like a small act of rebellion, a small chafe. Until the day when nothing on the radio chafed anymore. It had all become glossy.
Thank God, I thought, I had had a childhood with some degree of unglossiness. I tended to think of the background of my childhood as real and the background of my present adulthood as not real. And myself, long ago, as real and clear, and myself, today, as unreal, vague, not clear at all.
I wondered how much certain places or times lead to more Luckenbachs, and therefore to more art. In other words, I wondered about how much you want to leave a place or a time actually led you towards art. (The definition of art, to Terry Allen: to “get out of town.”)
I wanted to know if a place, or a time, could be built on Luckenbachs.
(“They make singers there.”)
When you think of “making singers” somewhere, I wanted to know if you could think of it in a different way than we have, perhaps, via the early 2000s and beyond, been trained to: the star factories, the Idol competitions, the “industry plants,” the way that at a certain moment in time so many people started to become “good” at karaoke in a very specific way, which was the result, I have often felt, of envi- ably powerful lungs rolling air ceaselessly and with great fundamental mundanity, dressed up as emotion, over a vibrating set of vocal chords? I wanted to know if singers who can’t really sing—can kind of sing, but not like that, not “shower singing,” which was how I maybe unfairly registered what those karaoke stars were doing— could be “made” in a place, and how, and why. I wanted to know what it maybe had to do with the place, or time, being inhospitable to one or several of their sensibilities.
How good to feel, then, Luckenbachs. Thank God for self-consciousness.
How painful.
I wondered how it was possible that I knew something had happened to cause these Luckenbachs, but I didn’t know what it was.
Of course, I knew how it was simply the sense, shared among many people, of not fitting against the background. No one fit against the background unless they were truly soulless. And maybe in my case it was not anything traumatic, but simply a combination of other external factors, biography blending with biology. Small clues included the microplastics blowing in the wind; the way that the natural beauty of the place where I was raised (San Diego) was in fact nearly completely artificial; the ways that near-nude bodies propelled themselves into the ocean without a worry and somehow with a sense almost of arrogant righteousness; the slicing off of mountaintops for new sub- divisions; the constant gap between who I (changingly) thought of myself as being—at age 4, age 8, age 14, age 23, age 30, age 36, etc., not to mention the many minutes inside of each of those years—and who I was repeatedly, ongoingly, received as being (pliable woman); the confusion at needing to be an “I” at all; the desire to mutate and dissolve into other experiences that I would never know; being deeply annoyed at my own tendencies; being “taken” (and I mean this in every way) as a soft thing; cutting my hair off under a yellow cottonwood while conversation coursed gently through the background; driving alone on the highway.
Then there was that weekend in a shitty, fragrant plastic dome in Terlingua, way out in the desert, under the bright thickness of the Milky Way, and local music at the one cantina in town, so full of tourists (myself included), all watching a man trying on another man and inviting the women, through his voice, to find him sexy. How that event filled my body with a chalky despair.
How I watched him from the front, listening to the women in the back crow and caw at him. I saw how he put on his slow, crooked smile, and shifted one of his bandanas, and began to sing. He was good. He was performing “Mamas” the way it was meant to be per- formed. In that moment in Terlingua, I realized that there would never be a time that I could sing “Mamas” and have it be heard without irony. I would always be in conversation with Waylon, and this man would always be a false Waylon. Thank God for that Luckenbach: that yearning not to master, but to sidle up and press.
8.
A few months into my work with Amanda, I was at a party, and karaoke was being projected onto the wall. I found myself drawn to the floor by a force—a Luckenbach?—larger than me. Everyone cheered me kindly. I heard my name. I approached the computer, the micro- phone, the screen with flashing white words on the wall. Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies, I typed with my back to the room, and as I typed it I heard the roar: they were excited, my new friends, they recognized my plan.
The opening chords stunned me. That’s right, I couldn’t sing this song! Or could I? I could try, and immediately knew my first shuddering realization was correct. Yes, no, I could not. The song’s key was in a different plane than I was, it was low and lovely and aslant, like a plain of earth viewed from a nap in the backseat of a car. It was slow and trickling forward, in a way that invited you in, but I couldn’t go in. I was not a part of Waylon’s voice. I was on a different level, a different plane, or plain, and whatever plain I was on was airy and thin. The two planes/plains didn’t merge. One (mine) sat above the other (Waylon’s). I kept trying to make my plain intersect Waylon’s plain. I wanted to crash my plane into his plain but the plane’s auto- pilot—my voice—wasn’t letting that happen. I shifted, tried a higher atmosphere: but my friends were watching me, they didn’t want to hear that, I thought, that high and curly female voice.
My voice cracked and quaked, an adolescent aspen in the wind. What is going on? I thought. Because I did do it, you know. I sang this song all the time. I did it at home all the time, joined my voice to his. It was the volume, I realized then, it was the expectation of actually being heard that was messing me up, splintering my voice and shoving my eyes away from those of my friends who were gamely singing along. Loudly. They were having fun, I realized, they probably couldn’t even hear me singing, but still, I knew how I was singing. I could hear. I raised my arms to pump them up: to get them to sing even louder. I did and did not want to be heard. The room started to feel like a beer garden. There was something very German-contemporary to our boisterous chanting. (I can say this having briefly lived in Germany, in October.) Aren’t Germans obsessed with cowboys? Isn’t that a thing? And then I remembered, struggling to find the note, oscillating high and low and high and low like a plaintive lost bird, almost echolocating, looking in truly every way for a mama—I remembered that no one else in this room was from here. I wasn’t, and neither were they. And here we all were, against this background, singing together about warm puppies, as if we were in on the secret Waylon embodied: that there are cowboys and mamas, and the singer of that song is only one of those things.
9.
Weekly, I returned to Amanda.
I have changed her name, by the way: Amanda, I realize now, with a near-gasp, is of course the title of one of Waylon’s songs.
Amanda, light of my life!
Her tutelage was minor, and haphazard, and mostly involved her “cheering me on.” I learned from Amanda that to successfully sing “Mamas,” or any Waylon Jennings song, I needed to alter the pitch further and further down, further and further, to a register that Aman- da called, in one of her funnier moments, “Demon Waylon.” There, in the depths, Waylon sounded not as menacing as the name might hint, but certainly tortured, as if he had been living for years in a cave and was tired of calling for help. As such he was weakened, and I noticed that my voice seemed to strengthen, slightly, over him, that powerful cowboy made tiny by simply lowering his volume. In fact the more Amanda lowered Waylon, and then eventually quieted him, the more I could successfully, confidently sing, as long as certain cues stayed audible, like “Lonestar belt buckles” and “smoky old pool rooms.” The signifiers of place in the song signified my place in the song, and I waited for them, as you might wait, while sleeping, for thunderclaps, so happy you are, in your foggy state, to know it is raining.
“Open your jaw,” Amanda instructed, in one of her more instructive moments, and I learned that that helped, of course, but more than that, I learned how hard I’d been gritting my teeth together, as if such a constraint might make the sound all the sweeter—which is, more largely, a general theory I have held for far too long.
“What kind of voice do I have?” I asked Amanda one day, bracing to hear, what, soprano, mezzo-soprano, whatever. She paused. “I’m not really very technical,” she said.
This was likely the beginning of the end of our time together; it began to be clear that I was paying not to practice singing, exactly, but to have some unidentifiable thirty-minute experience with a stranger in a room, an experience whose results were unclear, and whose purpose seemed all the more so. But before I left for good, I began to wonder, while swaying to the music emanating out of my open jaw, and making direct eye contact with Amanda, who was swaying opposite me, and mouthing the words along, as if she was my mama, and I was a five year-old at a talent show—I began to wonder about that theory of mine, which had steered me for so very long, and which I had titled, at alternate points, “glitch theory” or “chafe theory.” “Glitch theory,” or “chafe theory” (I no longer remembered the difference) held that I needed to give myself certain obstacles, or constraints, in order to proceed through life. Constraints, basically, that led to Luckenbachs, which led, I thought, to art, and to me as an 85 year-old who had lived a very full life. Constraints like moving all the time and refusing to be understood in the way people always seemed to want to understand me (sweet, feminine, happy, pleasing, lovely, kind, generous).
No one I told about the theory liked it. It was off-putting, I understood, and juvenile. The older I got, the more I saw their point. But there was still something to it, I believed, and I still believe: the levying of inability and glitch against increasing smoothness.
Perhaps this was what I was practicing—not just here but in the course of daily life.
Perhaps this was why I sometimes (often) caught a glimpse of my soft face in a reflective surface and felt a surge of hatred for its open- ness. I felt, in those moments, that it was no wonder certain people saw me as a soft and easy mark. I wanted to be a rough cowboy, glitching through time.
I remembered something my own mama had said, offhandedly, as I had attempted to play “Mamas” on my guitar many years before: your voice fits well with his, she said. (She also said, at some point, naming it as a problem, as I drove through the sagebrush of West Texas and had her on speaker, you have so much longing.) (She also loved the song “Luckenbach, Texas,” which is all about longing, in a mild, slightly cheesy kind of way.) (We liked to sing that song together, though she was frankly off-key, always, in a kind of ridiculously careening way that made me laugh with terrified joy and horror. Oh my god! I can hear it now, and smile.) (At some point, she heard me say, weirdly, to a radio host who was interviewing me about some- thing, I don’t know why, but he said something like “you must be scared, sometimes, traveling and going around and interviewing people as a young woman,” and she was listening days after the fact to the podcast episode, to my voice—my voice!—over her car radio, and she heard me as I said something in mild rebuke to the interviewer like “I’ve never felt like a woman.” And then my mom texted me and she said “I never have either.”) (What did we mean by this: that we truly didn’t feel like women, or that we didn’t feel like the image-of- a-woman that this man, and many others, clearly have?) (Or that we resented being understood in such terms? The interviewer would not have asked a man about being scared sometimes traveling around as a young man.) (When I called her after a bad thing happened to me one time there was a long silence that slowly filled with pleasantries and things unsaid.) (And one time on the internet, for she is an avid Poster on the Internet, if not a particularly share-y person in real life, she posted something about breaking a man’s foot when she was younger, the context implying that she was trying to get him off of her.) (She was, indubitably, indisputably, insanely beautiful.) (She did not have one of those soft, open faces when she was my age.) (People are afraid of her.) (She’s always just done her own thing.) (Which is weird for a daughter, who also wants to do her own thing, but also wants a mom to share things with and ask questions of, particularly around certain difficult experiences—how to make sense of them, etc. Because you kind of want her to just go do her own thing. And you also want her here with you.) (You want her to be a cowboy and also a mama.) (You want her to be soft and hard at once.) (You want to be the same way: a good person and your own person.) (“I’m my own person!” I have heard my voice say, many times, upon feeling cramped by the desires of others.) (But I didn’t want to make too big a deal of this kind of thing. What I’m getting at, I think, is that my mom and I had a similar set of Luckenbachs.) (And we both loved that song.) (And I loved Waylon Jennings more than she did, but she liked to hear me sing him.) (But he was the “only daddy that’ll walk the line,” and a “rambling man,” he was a cowboy and an outlaw, and I was what?) (A girl.) (A woman?) (What was the difference?) (“Girl” was cowboy code, in these songs, for lover. “Woman” seemed to imply someone hard-bitten and mature. And then there was the murky category of “Mamas,” who were both mothers, obviously, and also, simultaneously, lovers. Mamas were protective of their men. My mama was protective of me, but she also recognized me as fundamentally a cowboy like her.) (I was protective of my male singers, whose songs I sang weekly for Amanda, attempting, always, to get closer to them, but for mysterious reasons of my own, not theirs.)
10.
One day, almost out of nowhere, another performance occurred. It was a reading, and of my own literary work. I have never enjoyed these types of things. The confidence that exists in the act of writing, and maybe sometimes in the finished product, is something different during a reading. A reading isn’t simply presenting the writing to someone, it is moving through it with your voice, a voice that has nothing to do with the writing itself. Though we use the same term for the two, spoken voice is very different than written voice.
Of course, poets—and, more broadly, writers of songs—think constantly about how their words will be carried on the current of the hu- man voice. Everyone else at that reading was a poet. Of course. There was a good microphone, not the horrible spatula-plastic kind. And the others, who were reading pieces of such brevity they could simply stand there and deliver, performed with confidence. I felt, watching and listening to them, the first signs of anxiety, that slight minimization to the edges of the vision, that slight uptick in perception. The slightest rumple to my heartbeat. But then I stood up and walked to the front and began to read a section of my essay, which was about the Day the Music Died, and Buddy Holly. I had written it before I ever came to Lubbock. Weird how things work like that, sometimes. Your voice precedes you. And for the first time ever, though my leg still quaked, I stilled it, and I paused to slow time down, to show the listeners where to especially listen. Never, I have to say, have I read like this before. I was actually relishing it, not blacking out, not feeling like you do when you’re swimming, sometimes, and not quite timing your breath right, and you’re starting to hyperventilate in the water. And while I heard my esses and my pees rasp against the microphone, and winced, slightly, I returned, always, to the text inside which my old brain still ran. My old brain. Which I still had. My mouth formed the words. When it was over, I heard applause, and looked up to see faces liking me, actually liking me, and I walked back to my table, suddenly, ecstatic.
So doomed I expect to feel during a reading that you might be able to imagine, then, how I felt while I was reading from my essay—I heard laughter at the right moments, and small gasps of pleasure, almost like the little suckings of the koi fish at the surface of the water. I was looking up from my copy of the magazine I was reading from, making eye contact, smiling, returning to the text without missing my place. Someone took a photo of me then that I’d return to later: I looked impossibly happy, erect, eyes alight. I looked like a meerkat.
How had I accessed this new and transcendent state? Maybe Demon Waylon had unlocked my jaw. Maybe my practice with Amanda, my personal cheerleader who I paid a sizeable sum to sway back and forth in front of my voice in her repurposed garage for half an hour each week. Both those things. And also: On the plane to the reading, I had returned to my essay, which I’d written years before, to select which five minute-chunk of it I planned to read later that night. I set a timer and whispered it to myself, over and over, the plane noise rushing over top of me. I was my own koi fish then, I knew, but I didn’t care—there was something neutral about being back in my own writing from how- ever many years earlier. I remembered it, but I didn’t. I liked it and was bored by it. I could find some familiar rhythm there, something of me that I had not found before, in recent years, and something I had not seen, either, at the time of my writing it. It was like finding a pace you used to unthinkingly set for yourself on a walk, done a million times, around the neighborhood. Oh my god, I thought. I recognize myself. My old voice, my old Luckenbachs pressing the words up. They were unfolding like a queasy, joyous accordion, the longer I went on, hearing them outside of me, from a stool in a dark bar, the noise emerging, I was stunned to realize, from my very own throat.
Textile
FOOTNOTES
- Rafael Frumkiin, “Performance Trouble: Gender and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Feb-
ruary 4, 2025, The Point. ↩︎ - Terry Allen, as quoted in Jim Lewis, “You Better Keep It on Your Mind,” April, 1993,
Artforum. ↩︎ - The Cowboy and the Dandy, Perry Meisel, Oxford University Press, 1999. ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LUCY SHILLER is an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Texas Tech and also a contributing writer to the Columbia Journalism Review. Her book on older age in the United States is forthcoming from Flatiron Books in 2026, and her essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Adroit Review, The Cleveland Review of Books, Off Assignment, the Paris Review Daily, West Branch, DIAGRAM, Speculative Nonfiction, Popula, the Iowa Review, Lit Hub, The New Yorker Online, and elsewhere.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
JULIET KARELSEN is a multimedia artist and curator who received her MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Though she was trained as a painter and painted for many years, after two workshops at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, she calls herself a mixed media fiber artist who sometimes makes 3-D sculptures. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, Boston, Ohio, Maine, New Hampshire, Montana and abroad in Switzerland, Norway, Argentina and Spain.
