No one hears their voice in the same way others do. If everyone had heard my singing the way I heard it, I wouldn’t be here today.
Ever since I was a little girl, I loved to sing. But I never thought of it as anything special. My voice, to me, sounds kind of nasally. Always off-key or pitchy. People assured me that I sounded lovely, but I thought the things they said were compliments family members always give. See, I never sang in front of anyone but family, so I figured that they just said I sounded good so they wouldn’t hurt my feelings. Sometimes they would ask me to sing, and I would because I love to, not because I thought they enjoyed it. So I didn’t think anything of it when my sister, Adriana, asked me to sing her something. Is she here? There she is. See her, everyone? Wave, Na-na! So everybody go thank her after this for everything she did.
Anyway, I was in my room doing homework and she yelled for me to come into her room. So I did, and she asked me to sing her a song. She said she knew that the first notes of “Centuries” by Fall Out Boy were originally from another song, but she didn’t know what it was. She asked me to sing it, so I did. But I didn’t know that she was recording the entire thing, and then she posted that video of me singing “Tom’s Diner” on YouTube. So that’s how I started!
But what I was getting around to is that even if you think your voice sucks, you have to remember that other people hear you differently. Same for if you think your voice is fantastic. I know a bunch of people comment on music or lyric videos saying things like, “when you try to sing along and sound like a stuck pig,” or “when their bloopers sound a billion times better than me,” and I just want to say that a lot of us artists can’t do that cold. We’ve got to kind of tweak the recordings a bit because it’s hard to just sing for some people. And as long as you love singing, it doesn’t matter if you sound bad; you’re just doing something you love. So you do you, guys, just do what you love!