TRANSCRIPT
I am going to take on a very, very strange topic, and that is the topic of yodeling. Yodel de Yodo Yodo.
Now, I first started yodeling about eight years ago, and I found it very, very hard when I started. I actually couldn’t do it at all. When I tried, I would—oh, I’d go all over the place, and my voice wasn’t controlled, and I couldn’t hit the right notes. I actually didn’t know anybody who could yodel, but I’d heard recordings of it—Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. And I remember when I was a kid, I’d watched The Little Rascals. Alfalfa would try to yodel, oh, and it sounded horrible. So I tried, and what I realized is yodeling is making a very controlled jump between your chest voice, lalala lalala, and your head voice, no no, and controlling that break.
Yodel then yo-yoed along. Now, when I was practicing and trying to learn how to yodel, oh, it sounded awful, and people would laugh if they heard it. Even when I was starting to get good at it, if it wasn’t quite perfect, people would really laugh and think it was ridiculous. Sometimes even people laugh when they hear me do it, and I do a really good job yodeling now.
What is it that makes it so hard? Because I remember when I was trying to learn, I felt such shame, and it was so embarrassing to try and try and try. Now, what it is, was I think about when I was a teenager and I was going into puberty, and my voice was changing. What would happen was, inadvertently, totally beyond my control, occasionally I would be talking, and my voice would crack. My voice was starting to get lower, and sometimes it would break and go back into my high child’s voice, and it was totally humiliating. It was something that I hated, especially since my voice started getting lower when I was older than most of the other kids.
I remember, oh, I would try to keep my voice low and try to control it all the time, and I never wanted it to get high. But oh, it was awful. And I also had a lot of very humiliating memories of having a very high voice when a lot of the other boys had lower voices. I remember answering the phone at home, and I would say hello when I’d answer the phone, and I was like 14, and people would think I was a woman. People would think I was my mom. Telemarketers would also always say, “Are you free to talk, man?” And I’d be like, “Actually, I’m a boy,” and it was shameful.
So for me, learning how to yodel meant going back to that very, very painful and humiliating time in my life and working with it, working with those feelings, and trying to learn how to control it.
Now, something that I’ve seen also, it’s quite interesting, is I have played music with a lot of people who are wonderful singers—people who sing circles around me. They’re so talented. But when they hear me yodel, many of them are curious, and they try it. And what I’ve seen is most people cannot do it. It’s very, very hard to yodel. It takes a lot of practice.
The other thing is, it also requires going against what we all pretty much want to do when we sing, which is not let our voice crack and instead to make very smooth transitions. If we go into our head voice when we’re singing in falsetto and we’re going from our chest voice, we want to make the transition very smooth. Law, well, that was the Odle there. See, now I’ve yodeled so much that for me, it’s very normal when I go between the two registers of my voice.
I love to yodel, yodel then yo yo don’t know. And now that I’ve got it, oh, it’s so much fun. And I think it’s actually helped me resolve some of those painful, shameful, traumatizing feelings I had when I was a teenager and I had no control over my voice. Because now, well, I can control it. Yo yo yo.
[Music]