What is Voice Notes?
Voice Notes is a sometimes-weekly, sometimes-monthly letter of songs and essays, inspired by little moments and big feelings. (And big moments and little feelings too). Some include a rough recording of an original song or a cover. All songs are recorded in my bedroom, over Garageband. Or on my phone. These voice notes are unpolished and raw and closely held, like secrets whispered into your ear.
Aside from music and essays, here are some other things that you'll also find on Voice Notes:
poems
recommendations
playlists
drawings
things I've been reading
things I've been watching
things I’ve been listening to
lists (like this one!)
Most of the time, my personal essays are kind of like diary entries. I write about what I'm thinking, observing, doing, feeling, reading, and watching. Like notes passed to you in class, these letters are written in the spirit of scrappiness, intimacy, and playfulness. If you'd like to pass me a note back, please feel free to leave a comment or respond to the emails.
Why Voice Notes?
Voice notes have a special place in my heart, for a lot of reasons. There's an intimacy that comes with receiving one over a messaging app, a sense of surprise akin to the feeling you get when a parcel arrives in the mail. I enjoy texts as much as the next person, but they aren't always able to capture emotion or meaning in the nuanced ways someone’s actual voice might. With texts, a lot gets lost in translation. But you can't just skim through a voice note to get to the point. You have to put the phone to your ear and listen to the entire thing.
They're not quite like phone calls, either—they're casual, easy. Voice notes have the immediacy of a text and the intimacy of a phone call, but without the urgency or pressure to immediately carve out a chunk of time in which to be present. You get to listen and respond at your own pace.
It also happens to be the app I dip in and out of most frequently on my phone. I used to sit down with my guitar and notebook to write songs, but I don't approach songwriting this way so much anymore. Instead, I've been taking advantage of ideas as they appear, grabbing them out from thin air like I'm catching a ball, or hopping onto the last train just before the doors close. I record tidbits of melodies sporadically over the course of a day, as they come to me. As someone with a truly terrible memory, I have this weird fear of forgetting, and a desire to hold onto as much as I can, lest my (truly limited) mental storage space fail me. My voice memos app has been a godsend. It's where some of my best ideas and favorite songs have been conceived.
Making it work
I admire a sense of resourcefulness in all artists, but in musicians especially, because music is an art form that is often best seen to fruition when created in a community, which also means that putting together a final output usually involves a production of some sort. This makes it more difficult to be efficient and solitary and economical. (It’s not as straightforward to record as compared to, say, writing, which you can do on your own, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a pen and some paper). So there's something to be said about the intimacy of recording an original idea in one take—it makes me feel the way I do when I've finished writing a song and show it to just one friend who I know will listen. You get to capture the seedling of your idea in its purest essence. Some of my favorite songs were recorded on phones—like Jake Bugg's “Fire,” or early versions of Charli XCX's quarantine album How I'm Feeling Now, shared extensively in grainy snippets on her Instagram. There’s something about an entire song in one voice note that's raw and pure in all its imperfect glory.
While writing this little greeting, I came across an article about the producer Steve Lacy, who's worked with artists like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. Lacy primarily uses his smartphone as his studio (or at least he did at the time this article was written, back in 2017). Through a fascinating process of chopping and looping and layering, he's created whole tracks just with his phone.
"He wants to remind people that the performance, the song, the feeling matter more than the gear you use to record it. If you want to make something, Lacy tells me, grab whatever you have and just make it. If it's good, people will notice"
Sometimes you don’t need to make it a whole production. Sometimes capturing the rough, undiluted spirit of something is enough to bring it out into the world.
Elsewhere on the internet
I’m on Instagram and Twitter, and you can listen to my music on all digital platforms (like Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music, and Youtube).
