It Was Nina Simone

Who gave me my voice

I must have been sixteen when I first discovered her, or when I bought one of her records, at least. The first one I bought was Silk & Soul, a cd that was packaged perfectly like a vinyl. How could I resist? Unbelievably beautiful artwork.

But it was probably Thomas Crown Affair (the second one with Pierce Brosnan, and I like the first one just because I love me some Faye Dunaway), and however many times I had heard the songs echoed somewhere or other.

But probably around the time that Jeff Buckley’s Live at Sin-é or whatever was very much a thing, so this was maybe early junior year or something, the songs I loved were obviously both Leonard Cohen’s and, of course, his almost to the T nearly replications of Nina Simone’s work. I dug and I dug and then realized, oh…there it is. It being it.

So around the time that my voice had just begun to really stop being weird, quite literally, so the very tail-end of puberty, is when I discovered my voice, and throughout the many years leading up to whatever it is that I do now, I don’t know why I never really got the chance to ever really discuss how deeply and thoroughly I and my band members back in high school studied her work. Colin Pratt and I used to literally watch her performance on CBS, a DVD I found, over and over again. The one where she performs “I Loves You Porgy” in such a devastating, nuanced way…

Many years later, I would learn more and more about her, and when the Netflix documentary came out, it actually took me maybe a year or so to watch it. I just couldn’t—didn’t know why, but I did when I watched it. I just knew—we had a lot in common in certain ways and I mean this in terms of things I’ve talked a bit about on here already.

But she gave me my voice, and my work today that you will be hearing—live and so forth—occurred to me just the other day to in fact be pretty much somehow 90% Nina Simone-influenced and 10% Glenn Gould. I am quite certain that of the two, Nina was probably the better pianist, but that’s my own opinion.

Here I am, finally breaking into my super-head voice, in my parents bathroom with my father’s old metronome, singing into my Fostex MR-8 built-in microphone, a cover of her interpretation of “Turn Me On.”

Thank you, Nina—forever and a day.

Taking myself very seriously, maybe a year or so after this recording was made

Here’s the recording: