Lake Bell teaches us how to find our true voice

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly

Kat Johnson: I'm Audible Editor Kat Johnson and today I'm chatting with acclaimed actor, writer, director, and producer Lake Bell. Lake is the author of the new audiobook Inside Voice: My Obsession with How We Sound [Editor’s note: Inside Voice just topped our editors’ Best of the Year list in Nonfiction!]. We are so with you on this topic here at Audible, Lake, so I've been dying to talk to you about it. And it's an honor to have you here with us today. Thanks for joining us.

Lake Bell: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Obviously, I'm vocally obsessed, so I'm glad to be among comrades.

KJ: Yes, absolutely. And as I talk to you, and having just listened to Inside Voice myself, I'm now feeling very conscious of my own voice. But you have been not just conscious but intentional and, as you say, obsessed with voice for a long time. How did that obsession start for you, if you can remember?

LB: Well, first of all, I'm so glad that you enjoyed the book, and the experience, I should say. I think my very intentional and loving, playful passion about voice started really young. I was really attuned to the fact that I had what big grownups would say, "Oh, you know, you've got a good ear, kid." That was because I was always mimicking people and doing accents and dialects and kind of collecting them from a very young age. And it really started from a place of interesting characterizations through vocal quirks and whatnot. It was really a passion that just—it's like a precocious kid who, sure, ends up being an actor and whatnot, or a storyteller in some way. But I really thought, "Gosh, what a power to wield. I can create so much character with just manipulating my vocal tools."

Obviously, the complexity of it and the subject of it was sort of simple at the time, when I was a kid. But then as I grew up, it stuck with me. I grew up in Manhattan. And in Manhattan you are privy to the most extraordinary kaleidoscope of sounds and dialects and accents and vocal qualities, languages even. You could be on that crosstown bus to go to my tutor’s, going from the East Side to the West Side, and I could hear every continent represented. And not only that, but there could be comedic-sounding, there could be emotional-sounding voices. And I think I was enamored of it, and it stuck. I started thinking, "Gosh, I want to learn how to do all those sounds. I want to emulate those vocal qualities." It was really from a place of, like, collecting stamps, you know?

KJ: That's so interesting. Yeah, I think about your film, In a World…, where your character, Carol, is recording someone at the laundromat who she's listening to.

LB: That's real. I have a collection of tape-recorded conversations with people that I just enjoy their accents and dialects. I just had a habit of doing that, and then it was exacerbated when I went to drama school and I was encouraged to do it. And then it just kind of got out of hand [laughs].

KJ: We’ll get into the content of the book a little bit more, but there is definitely an audio scrapbook of incredible voices that we're going to be hearing from. But I wanted to just stick with In a World… for a minute, because I think a lot of our listeners would be very familiar with that film, which you wrote, directed, and starred in. That came out in 2013. And I know your character was a vocal coach who was kind of fighting against sexist stereotypes in the voiceover industry. That shares definitely some themes with Inside Voice. So, I'm curious how that experience brought you to Inside Voice and how the story evolved?

LB: I think of Inside Voice as kind of an extension of my sort of vocal academia, as it were. It's a lifelong practice of being really intentional, thoughtful, curious about our vocal tools and how it connects us, how it separates us. In a World… was definitely a playful look at kind of Trojan horsing some feminist issues, which I really enjoyed doing. And this, I think, in Inside Voice, I'm a little more unabashed with certain intellectual discussions about sociological and cultural bias that we have. And bias is interesting. Profiling is interesting. I'm curious about why we judge certain people based off of just the pitch of their sound, just if they speak higher than you, if they speak really low. Whether it's Elizabeth Holmes or Paris Hilton, you have such a wide range of what a female voice sounds like. And then to boot, men, women, all genders, even in transition, voice becomes integral to not just communication but identity and community. And that's what I was interested in discussing, because I think we all can relate to it.

"I think that it's not about pitch. It's about connectivity. It's about, 'Do you believe in your voice?' Do you take care of it? Does it sound like it's connected to the thoughts that you're sharing? I think that becomes integral to feeling trustworthy."

KJ: Absolutely. And I think one of the thread-throughs between the two projects, as you said, is there's a lot of “What's the difference between male and female voice patterns, and why do certain female voice patterns get sort of devalued?” And specifically, the concept of the sexy baby voice, which has recently made a resurgence. I don't know if you know that Taylor Swift's new album has this sexy baby lyric.

LB: I've become very aware of this in this press tour [laughs]. In the past few days, people are like, "You know that Taylor Swift references sexy baby?" Which is, of course, it makes me feel like, "Oh, wow. It really folded into the cultural lexicon." Because it started, obviously, in 2013, with In a World... and just this idea of a sexy baby, which is the sexy baby voice. Again, I'm not a linguist or a pathologist, but the idea is, it's a kind of a cocktail of three things, I'd say. It's pitch, so it's just high; that the pitch is athletically higher than maybe most women's voices. And then, on top of it, it's got some fry, which I think we all know about. I have some fry sometimes that sprinkles in there. And that's kind of a trend. And then you've got uptalk. So that's pitch, fry, and uptalk. And so that turns into, “That's really cute” [speaking in sexy baby voice]. And so that kind of a thing, which, when you see a 40-something-year-old woman doing that, you're kind of like, "Oh, that's interesting."

KJ: [Laughs]

LB: That feels like a choice. I don’t know, you know. And then you're like, "Am I judging this person because of how they sound? That's ridiculous." And then let's extend it to who else is judging other people by this, just the way they sound? Is that a me problem?

KJ: Right.

LB: Like, why do I give a shit, you know? I like to feel like we're really deep in a messy conversation sometimes about it. And the book enjoys the scientific discussion that is kind of safe. So, we get to ask questions that perhaps feel like you're not really supposed to talk about that. When it comes to gender, for instance, gender transitioning, trying to kind of really unpack mechanics of vocal musculature, how if you were born sounding a certain way and you go through hormonal changes that perhaps change the musculature of your vocal tools, and then, darn it, but you would like to sound how you envision yourself sounding or can hear yourself sounding as a different gender. I mean, that's a really interesting and complex discussion that I was lucky enough to have.

Voice is, it's underrated, you know? We take it for granted. We get up. We think about what we're wearing. We think about what kind of makeup, we think about our hair. God, do we think about our hair. We think about what car we drive much more than we think about what we sound like. We just don't do it. And frankly, we're in denial about what we actually sound like, because when we hear our voice played back to us: "Oh God. Please don't. Oh God, don't. Is that me? Is that me?" I mean, there's such a disassociative kind of connection, or lack of connection, rather, with our sound, and frankly, sometimes, self-loathing.

So, I think that the book is very much trying to encourage that generosity of spirit, but then also, maybe we can just accept our voices and find our real voices and lean into them. And if they aren't what you thought you'd sound like, then perhaps that's okay. And maybe you're being a bit hard on yourself. And frankly, as listeners, maybe we're being a little hard on others too.

KJ: You just said so many things that I want to respond to. But one of them is, yes, I learned a lot about the mechanics of voice, and when it comes to sexy baby, of course, we all have complicated feelings around it. But I was really interested in what John Colapinto was saying about, actually, men and women have the greatest vocal range of any other animal. Like, they have a whole octave of difference, so there's real differences there. And then there's another thing you said that I thought was really interesting, where you said, "We should put more thought into how we receive voice rather than being so hung up on how we transmit it." So, can you say more about that?

LB: I think my biggest takeaway was, "Hey, Lake, be a better listener. Be less caught up in how people are sounding, and who cares if someone sounds like a sexy baby or doesn't. If someone wants to take on a vocal quirk or quality because it reminds them of X, Y, or Z, or they're not even aware of it, why is that your problem?”

KJ: Right.

LB: So, I do think that how we receive, how we ingest, and interact with other people's voices is a real responsibility. But I think, concurrently, it's important to take care of your vocal tools. I know that seems like, "What? I got another thing to take care of?" But my argument would be, it is your main source of communication with all those around you, the people you love, the people you look up to, the people you're inspiring, right? Like, when I think about my daughter looking up to me and how I sound, how I express myself. Do I apologize? Do I make everything a question mark? You know, do I stand strong with my words? Do I show her that? Do I show my son that I'm a woman who speaks in a certain way? And it's not just about subject and it's not about performance. It's about the vocal quality. I'm very grateful that my voice is something I'm aware of now. So, I know that my children can hear my voice in that connected way. And they can feel like there's emotion.

Remember in the book that whole idea of connected voice versus a voice that is lacking connection. When we're not aware of our voices, it's hard to believe anyone who's going to push and be in this. That feels like, "Oh God, what anxiety I feel when I hear this person's voice." When we think about electability, I'm like, if we want a woman to take on a power position, I think that it's not about pitch. It's about connectivity. It's about, "Do you believe in your voice?" Do you take care of it? Does it sound like it's connected to the thoughts that you're sharing? I think that becomes integral to feeling trustworthy. I mean, it really expands much wider than what kind of pants you're wearing.

KJ: That's super interesting. You yourself, you have a beautiful voice. It's cool. It's effortless. It sounds powerful. But you're very intentional about it, right? Can you talk a little bit about how you said that you've lowered your voice a little bit over time? How did you do that exactly?

LB: I think a woman's voice does kind of naturally lower after having children. I've sort of leant into it. But I do admit in the book that, yes—even now I'm speaking a bit lower, because I, for whatever reason, it makes me feel like I can crystallize my thoughts a little bit better and I'm used to it. I've gotten used to speaking like, "Hello, I'm arriving for you right now. I've arrived at my speaking voice for interviews for my audiobook." Right? Like, that's where I am with you right now.

But you know, I think my natural sound is a bit higher [speaks slightly higher]. It's about this, and it's probably a little more quintessentially female or something. I don't know, like, it's younger. But I would argue this is almost like athletic for me to be up here. And I know it's not a big change, but I feel much more connected when I come back down here [speaking lower]. I feel resonant and that makes me go, "Hmm." As a vocal enthusiast, I go, "Oh, okay, so maybe your real voice actually is lower now." We are pliable, right, in our vocal tools.

"If you can be bold enough to sound as you are meant to sound, then I think you have a stronger chance in connectivity with others. The human experience is so linked to relating to other humans, if there's something that you can sort of bolster in your communicative efforts, then why not?"

When I spoke to Samantha Allen, for instance, in her transition, she's very open about her vocal mechanics. She's had to train her voice to change. And she did, and she does, and it's remarkable. But she has a sense of this relationship with her voice that is ever-evolving, where she can say, "Oh, hey." She can arrive at a more sort of quintessentially female sound, female-facing sound, or she can relax into something that's a little bit deeper. And as we said, what Colapinto was saying, we have such a range. And so, in a way, she has access to all of those things. But she has a beautiful deep speaking voice. And she totally talks about in the book how she, just to make matters easier, sometimes when she uses her speaking voice on the telephone, how she takes that on versus being with her friends and family in a looser setting. It's really interesting. We have a sense of arrival when it comes to the voice.

KJ: Right. And speaking of Samantha Allen, one of the things I love so much about Inside Voice is it weaves together your own experience with voice work and accents, but also bringing in some really iconic voices and guests. Every time you would bring up a topic and I would think, like, "Oh, Elizabeth Holmes," then we'd hear Elizabeth Holmes, or Margaret Thatcher, we'd hear Margaret Thatcher. I loved that you included Tracey Ullman, Pam Grier, Jeff Goldblum. There are just so many. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what it was like just kind of wrangling all this together. Were there people you knew you had to have right off the bat, or was there anyone that really surprised you?

LB: I definitely had people that I knew off the bat that I wanted to include in the book, including Jeff Goldblum because I think his voice is just a roller coaster of fun. And Drew Barrymore, because I feel like she's one of my friends that even if you put her in a head-to-toe costume, if she opened up her mouth, people would know who she is immediately. And she has a really interesting shape. Her musculature around her mouth and her lips really create quite an iconic sound.

Tracey Ullman was 100 percent on my list. I didn't know her personally, but I had to court her. And she was incredible and obviously amazing in the book. Susie Essman was someone that I adore and I feel like her whole career is really, I mean, her voice is just so infused in how she takes on her characters. And I mean, you know, "What the f—?” [speaking in Susie Essman voice].

KJ: [Laughs]

LB: She has this incredible quality and it's not just the words. It's how she says them. It's her dialect. It's her Bronx. It's that kind of flavor. Those flavors and those seasonings are what I find so fun.

KJ: I get so distracted by her outfits on Curb Your Enthusiasm. That's all I can say. I love how she dresses. Just getting to hear her, I was like, "Wow, I'm really hearing how hilarious she is."

LB: Oh, she's so great and—

KJ: Incredible.

LB: Yeah, Kunal Nayyar is in the book. He's born in India and his accent and dialect has been so fused into the fabric of his career. And he's so honest and generous with his experience, from just the vocal point of view. His dialect and the complexities of what that is on a cultural stage, him utilizing his own accent in his career, and then talking about it.

KJ: Yeah. One of the things I think where it extends beyond In a World… is like it becomes more intersectional. And it's not just about feminism, but we hear a lot about other groups and how they can be othered and discriminated against just on the basis of their voice. So, I thought that was really an interesting inclusion.

LB: Yeah, Professor John Baugh is an incredible just linguist who dedicated his entire life to vocal profiling within the AAVE, African American Vernacular English. And how we have unconscious bias or have flagrant bias against certain vocal qualities. He's an African American and yet he sort of vacillates between this code switching, or he would say "style shifting." Talking to him was just a wealth of education in and around even just the origin story of what AAVE is and where it came from and how it is a deeply rooted historical dialect that is very much about American history. His point of view was phenomenal in kind of navigating how we can legitimately profile against someone based off of not what they look like but how they sound.

KJ: Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah, I feel like there's so many directions and threads, and it definitely deals with some heavy topics, including trauma. But what I really love about the book is it really is pretty funny throughout. I was laughing a lot, so kudos for that.

I want to talk to you about the audiobook itself a little bit, of course, because this is Audible and it's so meta for me. It's such a joy to be listening to something that's all about listening, and that you made an audiobook about audio. I just wanted to know, what was that like for you? Was there an extra level of pressure knowing that this was made to be heard or were you just so excited to tell your story in audio?

LB: Really, the inception of the idea came from a conversation I had with Malcolm Gladwell, who is a really dear friend of mine. And Malcolm knows my deep-rooted obsession about voice. And I kind of came to him and was like, "Look, what if I did an audiobook that just lets me finally express and navigate and investigate and feed my curiosity and learning in the subject?" And because I've got too much to say about it, he's like, "Absolutely." He said, "100 percent."

And I was like, "Yeah, right?" He's like, "Right." He's like, "I've been waiting for you to say that." So, anyway, once Malcolm and I started chatting on it, that night I went home and just started writing a manuscript. And it is so cathartic and so—it felt so good. I love this subject.

When you have certain subjects, you just think, "Oh, yeah." Thinking about the audio template and medium, part of what Malcolm said, he's like, "It's the only place that can exist." It's the perfect medium for it because it can't exist as a book-book. It can't exist even as a documentary. It doesn't work in the same way. It's about shutting down whatever imagery that you're gonna—you know, you don't get to look at anything. You get to listen in to it. And it tunes in your tuning fork into just, "What am I getting from this person's voice?" I was very conscious of my own voice in the recording of it. My goal was really just clarity and consistency. And allowing myself to still be me so that it wasn't clinical, because that's boring. So, anyway, that was the key.

I think that once I realized that it could only live in audio, in this audio medium, I was just really motivated to think about it and build it, build an architecture that could work for that medium. I could understand it enough about story structure, narrative. And honestly, Pushkin, my producers, were amazing. Kerri Kolen, Julia Scott, we really connected in building out the world. And then expansion and expansion, you know. It started to get—because for me, it was also important, it's got to be playful. It's got to be, you know, the voice is hilarious. The voice is weird, the voice is strange, and also moving. Gosh, it's just, when you tell someone you love them, what does your voice sound like? Bad news, good news. It's this vessel that is constantly giving and evolving and it's just important. It's very important.

KJ: I love it. It only exists in audio, but it does feel like a book. Like, I don't think it's a podcast. This really feels like its own story and its own thing, so I love the way that it's done. And now you're a book author, which is amazing.

LB: Thank you. Thank you.

KJ: So, congrats on that. I was going to ask you, you're super intentional about your voice, so performing the book or reading the book, however you would think about it, what was your process like? Was it different from doing voiceover work? How did you prepare? What did you think about it? Would you do it again?

LB: I mean, yeah, I would do it again. But I do think in this particular book, given that it is about voice, I understood my task of being the captain that was going to pull you through this experience. I try to be pretty meta about it and talk about it in real time in the book. But I'm acutely aware that, you know, I thought, "Oh gosh, is my voice going to get tiresome after a while?" Or what can I do to keep that roundness, you know? Because it's like someone who’s a sommelier and they're talking on wine, you're like, "What are they smelling? What are they tasting? Really? There's notes of cacao? What the hell?" For me, I'm like that with the voices.

So, I'm listening to people's voices, and I am self-aware enough to not feel cringy about it, but to be kind of like a director to myself. And so I just would have to reset sometimes and drop my breath and make sure that I'm arriving for myself in the audio portion of things. When I interview people, I think that was where I was most conscious of it, because I have to be more off-the-cuff. And then sometimes I would have friends get me or some contributors would get me off the rails a little bit. And you'll see that my voice tool becomes a bit loose and like, "Ah, ah" [in silly voice]. You know, I get a little silly and I stray out of my kind of academia voice.

KJ: Right. So, speaking of, you did this sigh and I'm curious. Actually, Melissa, my producer, brought this up yesterday when we were talking about this chat. She showed me this TikTok video of this woman who tells people how to find their natural voice. I don't know if you've seen it. But how she does it is she does this very deep inhale and then an audible exhale. And that, she says, is your natural pitch, so I don't know if you agree with that.

LB: How we used to do it in my vocal work, there is a sigh thing, but also if you press against a wall, you put your hands against a wall, and you get your feet just so, so that you're really supported, and then you press against the wall and you keep your breath like really deep-seated in your belly. But you press really hard, you count to 10, and then you breathe kind of like—this is so crazy—you breathe from the back of your lower back. So, you're really thinking about that breath dropping down to that lower back little pocket there. And there is something in the breath really dropping down into the lower back while you're getting your body connected and alive that kind of can get you there. But another really quick way to get there is dropping the voice and [makes low moaning sound]. Some crying. Like, if you can sob a bit. And you connect through your breath, and you start to kind of find sobbing. Sobbing is the most connected animal-call-like sound we make.

KJ: Wow.

LB: But it’s not like [makes whiney crying sound], not fake crying. Like actual [deep moaning, sobbing sound]. You know, that kind of sobbing and wailing that’s also connected.

KJ: And I'll spare you from doing it now. But you do it in the book and you make yourself sad.

LB: I make myself sad. You know, it's funny because with acting sometimes people are like, "Oh my God, how do you cry? How do you laugh?” Because laughing is also really hard to kind of just happen on the spot. But if you fake it, you can kind of, like for laughing, I'm just like [laughs]. So, you see the first few were kind of like fake-y, but then I got the real one at the end. And for me, crying is all breath, it's all breath. So, that means connected language, connected speech, connected voice is also breath because, remember, that's tied to what sobbing is.

KJ: Absolutely. It all comes back to breath, right?

LB: It is, guys. We’ve got to take deep breaths and keep hydrated.

KJ: That's right. I'll drink to that. Yeah.

LB: Excellent. Everybody needs to be drinking water.

KJ: I guess, it's a very different thing, acting or maybe even doing this kind of thing versus reading someone else's book. People who are used to acting will do audiobook narration, and it's not quite the same. But I feel like you're a great narrator of your own work. Would you ever be interested in doing that?

LB: You know, it's so interesting. There's two folds to that because I would say, me writing an audiobook and then narrating it is very in line with kind of who I am because I write and direct and produce and star in things that I make in film and in TV. And then, of course, when it comes to books, I write and perform or narrate as well. So that made sense to me. But yeah, in general, I tend to be a real sucker for voiceover work. I tend to usually say yes, because I really enjoy wielding the tool, the vocal tool.

In my book I talk about my most proud vocal moment was being the omniscient voice of the iPhone 6S at the time. And that was just very cool, because they'd never had a woman do the voiceover and it was just a very, very sexy kind of victory there. But in general, yeah, I think it would be really cool to narrate a book. If my voice fit with the narrative and made sense to only bolster and kind of support the story, you know. Because you don't want to feel taken out of it.

KJ: Right. Absolutely. That's really cool. I guess my last question for you would just be for us to sort of zoom out, and you've kind of alluded to this, but what do you really think the benefits are for people if we really learn to use our individual voices to their peak potential, what can that do for us?

LB: Well, I think there's a real generosity of spirit when you are speaking to someone and you're giving them your true sound. When we hide behind a multitude of affectations and costumes and wardrobe of things that we're layering on our voice that are not allowing us to communicate lucidly, I think that it just muddies the waters. You're going to be more accountable for your words if you're speaking with your true voice. So, I think it comes down to, there's massive benefits in finding your own voice. It's not just for others. It's also for yourself. You feel more connected to the words you're saying and, frankly, that's linked to self-confidence. If you can be bold enough to sound as you are meant to sound, then I think you have a stronger chance in connectivity with others. The human experience is so linked to relating to other humans, if there's something that you can sort of bolster in your communicative efforts, then why not?

KJ: I just got chills because that was beautiful what you said. And then I was also thinking about, I listened to this book this year, Bittersweet. I don't know if you've heard of it, by Susan Cain. The idea of sadness as something that connects us all. And it's such an underrated emotion, because it actually is so necessary and it's how we connect. And I just thought about how the crying brings you to your connected voice. It's so interesting.

LB: Yeah, I mean, that's beautiful.

KJ: And then I was also thinking, I was going to ask you about authenticity and if we're improving our voice and how we can layer on these things, how do we balance that with being authentic. But you've just explained so beautifully that it's really about finding your true voice and having the confidence to kind of believe in it and connect to it, so I love it.

LB: It's the same way that we think about body image, you know? When you think about like, okay, I'm going to look in the mirror and I'm going to decide whether or not today I'm going to accept myself as who I really am in that reflection, or am I going to try to layer it, try to hide behind some multiple—you know, we can all do that. It's okay, but am I going to try to hide behind something. Sometimes when you enjoy and confidently walk through the planet as you look in that reflection, and you own it, those are your strongest moments. And those are the moments that you can really be proud of, right? I mean, I struggle with it too. We all do. But I think the same goes for voice, you know?

KJ: Yeah. That's a beautiful note to end on. I really appreciate that. Lake Bell, thank you so much for talking to us today. I want everyone to go check out Inside Voice. It's written and narrated by Lake Bell. It's out now. Thank you so much.

LB: Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate this one.