The Voice Belongs to the Night

In the late 1960s, those who traveled with Roy Orbison noticed something strange. Between soundcheck and showtime, Orbison barely spoke. Not shy — deliberate. He would sit in his hotel room with warm tea and a book, and if anyone came in, he would nod or gesture rather than answer. His band and crew learned the rule without it ever being said out loud. The voice belongs to the night. The day is not rehearsal for it. The day is protection of it.

The voice is not like a guitar. A guitar spends the day cold in its case, its wood swelling and settling on its own, and at eight o'clock it will still play whatever you ask of it. A voice has been in you all day. Laughing, arguing, ordering coffee, thanking a driver, doing an interview. Every one of those things was training. Every one of those things spent something. When you walk onstage at eight, you sing with whatever you have not yet used.

The great singers have known this for a century. Caruso avoided drafts and cold drinks. Sinatra kept his throat warm all day and would not raise his voice. Pavarotti sometimes went a full day without speaking on the day of a performance. Bonnie Raitt keeps warm water at her side and does not hold long conversations backstage. Everyone in the room who has ever toured hard learned the same thing: the voice is a room you have to keep swept.

What this actually looks like in practice is boring. Sleep the night before, and, if you can, the afternoon of. Warm liquids only. No caffeine after noon. No cold air. No shouting across a green room to a friend. No long phone calls. When you do speak, speak low and easy, the way you would if you were trying not to wake a baby in the next room. It is not romantic. It is not what the eighteen-year-old in the fourth row will notice.

But at fifty, at sixty, at seventy-six — like Bonnie Raitt still hitting the notes she wrote at twenty-five — this is what stands between an artist who lasts and an artist who tours until the voice quits and then stops.

There is a deeper thing under it. The voice, more than any other instrument, is a life. It is fed by sleep and water and quiet. It is drained by things that do not feel like singing — a shouted joke at a bar, a raised voice on the phone, a late night with old friends who came to see the show. To have a long career as a singer is to arrange your life around one small delicate muscle in your throat. You have to love it enough to be boring about it.

The young singer wants to believe the voice is invincible, that discipline is for people whose talent is not enough on its own. The old singer knows the opposite. The talent gave you the door. The discipline is what lets you walk through it, night after night, for forty years.

Roy Orbison died in December 1988, at fifty-two, of a heart attack — not the voice. When the last recordings came out, the ones he cut with the Traveling Wilburys and the solo tracks he was finishing for what would become Mystery Girl, the voice was still there, still floating in that impossible upper register, still sounding like it had been kept somewhere cool and dry and out of the sun.

You could have stood two feet from him at showtime and never known he had spent the whole afternoon in silence. That was the point.