If you were mine
If you were mine
I wouldn’t want to go…
to heaven.

-Sade “Cherish The Day”

I was born with a love for the human voice. Sound thrills and delights me, especially the divine phenomenon we call music, and above all else when expressed by a vocalist. Each of us is dialed in to specific aspects of the divine, and that’s where our joy is, that’s where we shine.

I’m tuned in to tone quality, especially the human voice. If you have the TV playing and I walk by I might call out a name: Annabelle Sciorra, Joe Morton, Keith David, Ted Levine, Charles S. Dutton, Debra Winger. I will catch them, quickly.

A voice has tone and inflection, but it also has character. It’s as if I’m recognizing someone I know. Then there’s the voice-over crowd; these people have very distinctive vocal quality. In documentaries and nature programs you often hear a guy named Peter Coyote. You might know Coyote as the wheelchair bound hellraiser in a Polanski film called Bitter Moon. Great voice: slightly gritty with a certain warmth, a storytelling presence, and that’s why they use him. Keith David, also. Powerful screen presence; great for voice-overs.

Annabelle Sciorra has one of the silkiest voices on this planet. If an angel materialized on earth as a tiger, woke up and stretched after a long nap and started to speak, it would sound like Annabelle Sciorra.

When you take that extraordinary instrument and make music, I feel the most intense kind of ecstasy. I mean every cell stands up, worships and receives. I can’t dance, because I’m immobilized by the rush of feeling. I’m sure this is one of the primary things I came down here to experience. This is how I experience my world: I hear, then I feel about it.

When I work with a singer, writing and recording, I am basically in a room with a divine being who intrinsically manufactures my drug of choice. As you can imagine, I get excited. The reality of us in that room together, her at a microphone and me at the keyboard, not only high on my drug of choice but with the potential to create our own and bring that to the world… it’s a privilege.

Movies combine sound design, speech, and music, so as you might imagine, I can reach quite a peak with that. In a scene with music there’s a potential to reduce me to a shuddering mass of ecstasy.

In a movie called MirrorMask you’ll find a fascinating remake of the Burt Bacharache written, Karen Carpenter classic “Close To You.” The arrangement is striking and unusual, a voice manipulated, slightly robotic yet still vulnerable and human rendition that wakes you up and delivers the narcotic at the same time.

Another example is a sci-fi movie called Mimic. I don’t have a lot to say about the movie, excepting one scene: A man named Charles S. Dutton stars in the film, and there’s a scene where he descends with a scientist named Mann into an abandoned subway, dark and subterranean, and he sings, shouts out a vocal phrase to comfort himself. “Yeah, yeah… got a telegram this morning. Sayin’ my wife was dead…” It is pure blues, my favorite music in the world, and as often happens with the genre it takes something painful and makes it into the most beautiful expression of humanity on earth.

Mr. Dutton is what we would call a “Blues Shouter,” someone who sounds best when he’s belting it out. He just nails it. It’s a wonderful little musical interlude, one he may not have thought much of… but I recommend you rent the movie just to hear it. It really gets to me. I don’t know if Dutton takes singing gigs or not but I want to hire him, record a phrase like that and compose a moody, filtered, funk inflected piece for it… Dutton’s voice belting out over the top, looped so it repeats again and again, the groove and harmony pulsating support underneath. This is how I worship.

Tristan L. Sullivan

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