LULU MILLER: Head's up. Today's show does include a couple of curse words. So anyway, here we go.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ANNIE MCEWEN: Okay. Well, I'll play this, and then—I don't think you're gonna be able to hear it, Lulu.

LULU: That's fine.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Hoo, hoo, honey!

LULU: Harness the karaoke vibe. You got the proverbial sweaty beer in your hand?

BECCA BLACKWELL: Yes, I do.

LULU: Yeah.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Yeah, I'm really feeling it.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: Hey, I am Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And we are warming up in the studio with an actor named Becca Blackwell.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Oh yeah, I used to do sound.

LULU: I'm so—I'm so excited you're gonna read this for us!

BECCA BLACKWELL: I am too. I'm just gonna—I was—I was ...

LULU: Who we brought in to voice a truly gorgeous essay about song in the animal world—from crickets to whales to humans in karaoke bars. We count, too. It's written by the author Sabrina Imbler, who is a friend of the show. We've had them on before. They write about nature and feelings, basically, which is kind of my favorite genre. And this is a brand new essay of theirs, just off the presses. And when I read it, it just screamed at me that it wanted to be freed from the page, that its words wanted to be filled with air, and the spaces between them filled with music and natural sounds.

LULU: And so we asked Becca, who we've worked with before, if they'd come read it, And we asked our sound designer, Dylan Keefe, if he would really bring it to life. And what the two of them made is so beautiful. And so I am going to get out of the way and let you hear it.

BECCA BLACKWELL: All right, here we go. "Key Changes," by Sabrina Imbler.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The first sound the universe is joylessly underwhelming: white noise boring through the taffy stretch of nascent space. The Big Bang is not a bang but a droning robotic purr, galaxies expanding from the hot throat of a cat. Things cool. Atoms whirl into being, then light, scattering in the cosmic fog. Gas clumps to form the first stars, whose huddled masses in turn form the first galaxies. A storm of gas and dust collapses, perhaps T-boned by a nearby supernova, skidding and spinning into a sun—our sun. All of this cacophony, the universe ringing like a cosmic bell, would be brutal for anyone around to hear it.

BECCA BLACKWELL: But there is no one. Not yet. Life remains entirely uninvented. And when it finally appears, likely around 700 million years later, ears remain entirely uninvented too. So no one hears the torrent of the first oceans, the slick of the first big freeze, the jostling of the continents. Life pleats, becomes multicellular. Sponges drink in the ocean, fungi unfurl, worms slither in the murk. Eventually, the first plants extrude from land and insects skitter. As seedlings swell skyward, thundering into forests, insects sprout wings and join them. This living does not happen silently—bodies scraping through brush, whirring of wings, exoskeletons crunched by jaws—but these noises are unintentional. They're not meant for anyone.

BECCA BLACKWELL: This changes 270 million years ago, when an insect akin to a cricket scrapes one ornamented wing over another, veins stiffened like corduroy, creating a rasp. The rasp does not sound like a song, or even a note. You might mistake it for one rock scuffing against another. But however tuneless, the rasp of Permostridulus brongniarti became what biologist David George Haskell calls "The first known earthly voice."

BECCA BLACKWELL: There is no single, agreed-upon definition of animal song. Some biologists reserve the label for the steepled melodies of birds and tapestries of whale song; others apply it more generously to any creature that calls out again and again toward others of its kind. Permostridulus's coarse, guttural call lacked the complex structure of modern cricket songs. But it used the same mechanism. So you might agree that the moment, hundreds of millions of years ago, when a rasp crackled out of two wings and bellowed out into the insect's presence for some unknown reason—escaping a predator? threatening a foe? finding a mate?—marked Permostridulus as the planet's first singer.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The fact that I have never been a skilled singer has never kept me from karaoke. In adolescence, I was a part-time theater kid, a past that left me with a simmering, unquenched desire for some kind of spotlight. I began singing in earnest after college, in matchbox rooms with friends, co-workers, and strangers, in bars where we all thrummed against one another. My voice is loud and clear, but also flat and often tone deaf. I could never command a room as well as a talented singer, a fact I was reminded of whenever I karaoked with certain friends. When they sang, the rooms fell silent. I envied this attention, how it felt alchemic, sublimating into self-worth. I, too, wanted to conjure delight and affection. In this way, I suppose I am no different from any other creature. The evolutionary basis of any animal's song is a bid for a mate. Karaoke is famously an outlet for rage, the rare public place where screaming will be met with applause. But in my experience, the night always ends with love songs: a thinning, bleary crowd, some too many drinks deep, listening to a ballad of the unrequited.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hinder: Honey, why you calling me so late?]

BECCA BLACKWELL: In my 20s, my favorite karaoke ballad was Hinder's "Lips of an Angel," a grungy confession sung by a man to his ex-girlfriend over a whispered phone call—whispered because his new girl's in the next room. "Lips" is so wretchedly self-serious in its generic valorization of cheating that it is transmuted, almost endearingly, into camp.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hinder: Well, my girl's in the next room. Sometimes I wish she was you. I guess we never really moved on.]

BECCA BLACKWELL: I listened to the song in middle school on some torrented copy of Now That's What I Call Music! I was not necessarily drawn to the lyrics—can't cheat on your girlfriend if you don't have one!—but rather its naked emotional core. It's a song about yearning, which was then my favorite pastime. I yearned for everything: a crush, adulthood, a body and self I could love more. My friends and I loved to karaoke to the pop divas we grew up blasting from our boomboxes. But the first time I heard one of them sing "Lips of an Angel"—a song I had not consciously listened to in nearly a decade—I felt a swell of my old adolescent kinship. I started my own surreptitious relationship with it, singing it in rooms and bars full of strangers until it felt as inextricable from my identity as my haircut. I grew to relish the way some people, often men, reacted to my performance: nodding along to the melancholic opening chords before surprise plastered their faces when they saw who held the mic. At the risk of being reductive, "Lips of an Angel" is a "boy song," not a "girl song." When I first began to sing, my face soft and eyebrows painted on, I felt a certain frisson, as if, for just this moment, I was stepping into another body. As an alto, close to a contralto, I had always felt more comfortable singing songs written for men. I wonder now if my singing voice was the first plane on which I could claim to have passed, even briefly, as something other than a woman.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Each time I sang "Lips," I practiced embodying this man, this self-defeating aspirational cheater, too afraid to leave a relationship that rendered him dispassionate. During the chorus, I gripped the sweaty neck of my beer and held it up like a candle—"But girl, you make it hard to be faithful." During the guitar solo, I thrashed my head along. I spat gravel from my throat and sang not to the back of the room but beyond it. The morning after, I'd wake up without a voice.

BECCA BLACKWELL: We never learn if the singer gains the courage to go back to his ex, but it seems unlikely that he moves beyond his comfortable stasis. The song ends with the same line that opens it: "Honey, why you calling me so late?" As a middle schooler, I never questioned the idea that his ex's call came too late to act on. I was obsessed with the idea that my life had already foreclosed certain possibilities, such as becoming a figure skater or speaking Mandarin. Only when I got older would I learn that it is never really too late for anything.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Humans, birds and whales learn their songs over the course of their lives. They practice, learn through mistakes, and even compose new songs together. But crickets, who live only a few months and hatch long after their parents' generation has perished, cannot learn their songs from elders. Rather, each species is born with its own signature song. The composition is genetically encoded and manifests in the specific ridges of the males' wings. Even if a cricket is raised in total isolation, having never met another of its kind, he will know how to sing his own particular song—at least after a few raspy attempts. As soon as the cricket known as the handsome trig molts into an adult, he can rub one wing over another and emit his characteristic rattling trill. A cricket's song is a beacon of connection to his kind; if it were ever lost, he may be doomed to wander alone in the reeds."

LULU: Isn't that fucking cool?

BECCA BLACKWELL: I know, that he just totally—it's like he just wakes up. He's like, "I know my song!"

LULU: "I know my song. I don't learn it!: Like, if we were just like—just wake up with your song.

BECCA BLACKWELL: I know!

LULU: I'm sorry. As you were.

BECCA BLACKWELL: No, it's ...

LULU: Also, can I start calling people—like, "You're a handsome trig!"

BECCA BLACKWELL: [laughs]

LULU: "What a handsome trig.” Okay, sorry. As you were. I just think that part ...

BECCA BLACKWELL: I know. They're gonna be like, "Is that a mathematical equation?"

LULU: So wild. Okay, keep going. As you were.

BECCA BLACKWELL: I think you ...

BECCA BLACKWELL: "Many crickets look identical, at least to us: dark almonds with short wings and elbowed legs. But in the 1950s, researchers trudging into fields with tape recorders discovered many more cricket species than they had identified by eye. Although the first songs of early crickets like the Permostridulus were little more than rasps, modern species have since developed a vast repertoire of songs that feature chirps, trills, rattles and lisps. Carolina ground crickets make an impatient, sloping trill that suddenly catches, as if their wings needed to take a breath. A tinkling ground cricket emits a quick, hushed series of cheeps, like a bird wrapped inside a blanket. The confused ground cricket buzzes two short syllables, again and again, raised like a question.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Some songs, especially those of tree crickets, which often have wings translucent as a sugar crust, sound more beautiful than others. This beauty is human bias—the principles of cricket aesthetics remain a mystery to us—and is also the afterglow of evolution. After all, the first cricket song emerged as a mutation. An insect born with an unusually craggy wing rubbed it against the other to produce a sound so soft that it was only perceptible from nearby, perhaps to a mate. Scientists suspect all the songs in a modern cricket's repertoire arose from this ancient intimacy. They needed to whisper before they could wail. But when they wailed, it was the males who became the first beacons of sound.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Given the animal kingdom's penchant for male flamboyance, perhaps this is unsurprising. Only males make themselves vulnerable with song, screeching out their presence both to potential lovers and potential predators. To protect themselves, males often hide while they sing, nestled within clumps of grass and under rocks and leaves. They have no choice but to sing, even if it means opening themselves up to doom.

BECCA BLACKWELL: I didn't start taking testosterone because I wanted to become a man. Rather, I coveted certain manly flourishes: a wispy mustache, flesh desperate to become muscle, a new mystery of a face. What I wanted most of all was a deeper voice, one that could drop into the abyss and skim the seafloor. As testosterone tilts your larynx and thickens your vocal cords, your voice sinks, stretches and breaks. Mine skipped like a broken record. It fell off cliffs in conversation, only to reappear moments later. It became a shadow I could not pin down. Although I knew others found this pubescence embarrassing, I felt thrilled by the discomfort. I could hardly blame my body, transiting between one voice and another like a blinking satellite, destination unknown. Of course, there would be blips along the way. But eventually, I realized I had lost my urge to karaoke.

BECCA BLACKWELL: If speaking had become a gamble, singing was an impossible hazard. I could no longer handle my old songs. Notes that my voice once wrapped around now dangled out of reach. When I did hit the right notes, a frog stuck in my throat. I ribbetted. I croaked. I tried switching octaves, and often swung too deep. Still, I laughed it off. In the grand scheme of things, it was no big deal. It wasn't like I'd traded some perfect voice for an imperfect one. I mostly felt impatient—excited for the point when my new voice would feel worn in and familiar. I hardly thought about the notes I had lost, instead fixating on the new, deeper ones yet to emerge. Just how low could I go?

BECCA BLACKWELL: No, I never missed my old voice, but I missed the way I used to feel singing "Lips of an Angel," punching each note with confidence, a beer swinging from my hand. I had stopped singing it a few years into testosterone. It's true that the song had become more difficult. It's true that one night at a karaoke work party, I told my co-workers that I had left it behind. But I didn't admit to myself until now, as I write this, that I hadn't quit "Lips of an Angel" as much as I had quit karaoke.

BECCA BLACKWELL: In my most honest understanding, karaoke became hardest not when I could no longer sing but when I could no longer drink. I had a problem like many others have a problem, not as bad as it could have been but bad enough that it had run slipshod through my relationships, my health, and my ability to see myself surviving into old age. I had known this for years, but the only person I felt accountable to was myself. I shrugged off friends and lovers who had pulled me aside to share their fears. I desperately wanted to believe I was someone in control of their life, and quitting drinking felt like an admission that I was not. So I kept drinking, and drinking, and drinking.

BECCA BLACKWELL: But this is the terrifying, miraculous thing about transitioning. Once you imagine a body that might bring you happiness instead of loathing, and once you imagine a version of yourself with less reason to hide, you might dare to imagine a more beautiful life. After I had been on testosterone for a little more than a year, I found myself having more days in which I wished for nothing more than to be present in my body. I realized that quitting would be, in essence, to value my own life and wish myself into the future. So I stopped.

BECCA BLACKWELL: But once I did, I felt far too exposed to strain for those old highs at karaoke. I had never been more aware of myself, my body, my newly raw voice. The dark rooms and bars had lost their sultry twinkle. They made me remember a past self that was freer to abandon themself into gauzy oblivion. The loss of this self was nothing to be mourned; I was glad to have arrived on the other side. But I was too freshly molted, my shell soft and nerve endings still tingling. So in the years following, even as my changed voice began to grow roots, I stayed home.

LULU: When we come back, we'll see what happens when a song is lost—not just for Sabrina, but for a whole species.

LULU: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Today, we are dedicating the whole episode to an essay I read and adored called "Key Changes," all about song in the animal world and beyond. It's by Sabrina Imbler, and it is being read to us by the actor Becca Blackwell.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Almost a year after I stopped drinking, I learned about a population of crickets in Kaua'i. They were Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, and their song was round, bright, and sweet: four loud chirps culminating in a husky trill. Several decades ago, a biologist named Marlene Zuk discovered that the males had suddenly stopped singing. Zuk started studying the crickets in the 1990s, when the insects would bleat together. But one year into the new millennium, she heard only a single male call out in the entire field season—an orchestra replaced by a soloist.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The silence might suggest that the crickets themselves had vanished, or at least absconded. But when Zuk and her team returned to Kaua'i in 2003, they found crickets abounding in the fields. The males still went through all the motions, scraping mute wings together. But their wings had slickened, rid of the corrugations that once allowed them to sing.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The culprit was a mustard-colored fly, Ormia ochracea. Only slightly larger than a pea, the fly cannot attack the cricket like a typical hunter. Instead, it is a parasitoid. The fly listens for the cricket's song with its highly specialized eardrums, which waggle like a teeter-totter to triangulate the insect's location. Then the fly unloads a heap of maggots atop the cricket's back, babies that burrow through the exoskeleton and curl up inside the cricket as if its body were a womb. The maggots develop inside this walking, singing incubator, and when they hatch, they erupt out of the body and eat their way out. In singing their old song, the male crickets had unknowingly condemned themselves to a gruesome death.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The crickets had lost their song and might now survive into the future. For generations, the mute flatwings hopped around the island, freed from the flies but scarcely able to find mates. But in 2018, biologist Robin Tinghitella overheard a population of Pacific field crickets in Hawai'i singing a new song. It sounded nothing like the species' signature chirping but rather like a cat's low, throaty purr. To the careful ears of female crickets, these calls are crude imitations of the old one. The alchemy of the first, crafted by eons of evolution, remains lost. But these new songs, however coarse and tuneless, may be the crickets' ticket to the future.

BECCA BLACKWELL: When I wrote about the Hawaiian crickets for my day job, I recognized what seemed like parallels between us. We were creatures who had traded some original ability to sing for something else—survival and a newfound masculinity. But I am not so obtuse as to conflate our situations. I had no life-threatening predators around to silence me, no flies dumping a litter of maggots on my back to remodel my body into a nightmarish womb. Thinking about our situations side by side only reminded me of my luck. I had simply fallen a little out of love with karaoke. What once had been an outlet for rage, love, and desire had now become a site of discomfort, even fear. It was no longer a place I could go to lose myself. In fact, I was running out of places to lose myself. Perhaps this was the point of stopping drinking, but it did not halt my yearning for times when I could step into a karaoke room, pick up a mic, and become someone else for a few minutes. Now I am much more myself. This is sometimes a relief, sometimes a restriction.

BECCA BLACKWELL: When I used to sing "Lips of an Angel" at karaoke, I often found myself reading the lyrics off a simple blue screen. But the fancier bars would play the actual music video. It opens with Austin John Winkler, the former lead singer of Hinder, a quasi-tatted white guy with dark stringy hair, talking to his old girl on the phone as his new girl's in the next room—the video, like the song, is quite literal. When I dueted "Lips" with the video, I mirrored Winkler's affect as I wailed, holding up my own quasi-tatted arms, nodding my own head of dark stringy hair.

BECCA BLACKWELL: When I revisited the music video for this piece, I came across an interview with Winkler where he talked about reaching three years of sobriety after being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure. He talked about addiction, a string of stints in rehab, and saying goodbye to the person he was. He talked about coming back from the other side, going to therapy, picking up a microphone again, and feeling alive. I was struck, stupidly, by how this man I'd only ever seen lip-syncing in a cinematically jaundiced music video about the romance of cheating on your girlfriend was a real person trying to overcome something unimaginable.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Something I didn't realize before quitting drinking is that sobriety is not a single decision but an ongoing one. I didn't realize that every sober person I know has achieved something close to a miracle by choosing survival. I didn't realize how many of the sober people I know are also trans.

BECCA BLACKWELL: In my early days of testosterone karaoke, I listened to a podcast about a trans singer who had also recently started testosterone. He talked about how he always feared the hormones would ruin his ability to sing and said he feared "killing" his sweet old voice. This framing made me bristle, as does anything that frames transition in the language of death. Even after my worst vocal cracks, I never felt any grief over a voice that was becoming less accessible, less familiar. I didn't see myself as killing anything; puberty, even delayed, is the promise of more life. Instead, I found a better resource: I called my friend Siobhan, a singer early in her own transition, and she coached me through the cracks. She told me to drop the song an octave down, to switch between octaves in a single song. She told me, when in doubt, I could always sing Elvis. But I wonder if I'm being unfair to that singer. Maybe I never thought of my old voice as something I could lose because I could never sing in the first place.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The further I move in my medical transition—a journey that has not been without some regret—the more it has made me rethink what loss means and if it is always something to be mourned. Loss accompanies life in any body, trans or not. Our bodies are always in a state of change—strengthening, crumbling, breaking down and repairing themselves in thousands of ways. Part of the wonder of medical transition is that you know to expect these changes, and yet each manages to astonish you in its particulars. It is a gift to wait with bated breath for your body, which seemed so solid and immutable, to surprise you. To constantly become strange to yourself, re-encountering the wild, slickened animal of yourself each day. And I am even more grateful to be wholly present so that I can experience these changes in their full vibrance.

BECCA BLACKWELL: My voice is still changing, still dropping, still breaking. Singing remains a work in progress, but speaking has become a pleasure. Recently, when my partner heard my voicemail recording from several years ago, they thought they'd gotten the wrong number. I listened to the recording and felt no pang of remembrance, only shock. Surely there was a mistake: Could that really have been me? That old voice was beautiful in its own way. One time, a girl from college referred to me as "that bitch with the This American Life voice," an insult cum compliment that I carried with me like a badge of honor, proof that I had cleared some objective standard of beauty. But isn't survival more astonishing than beauty, especially with someone else's conception of it? Hormones and vocal training may not win you any voice you want, but they'll get you much closer than doing nothing at all.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Perhaps this is the real joy of karaoke: not hitting all the notes or nailing a vocal run but giving yourself permission to be another person, another voice, just for the night. In these rooms, I now workshop future versions of myself. I sing low. I swagger. I am learning how to tame a voice that is still unfamiliar yet, inconceivably, my own. I've started singing pop songs an octave down—Kylie Minogue if she were a baritone—that I have always avoided, scared off by a feminine register that seemed out of reach. I still go back, sometimes the only person in the room without a drink in hand, even if I only manage to sway at the back of a room as someone else wails into the mic. I'll sing along, my voice breaking, croaking, and—if the song is good enough—screaming. I sing until, at the end of the night, I lose my voice. But now I trust it to return.

LULU: Author Sabrina Imbler.

AMY RAY: Can I just say I loved your essay so much? I thought it was incredible.

LULU: All right, now before we end for real, I have just got to play one last very special treat for you, because Sabrina initially wrote that essay for a special issue of Orion Magazine, all about queer ecology that I guest edited. And to celebrate the launch, we had this Zoom event where we brought Sabrina into conversation with this other voice you are hearing.

AMY RAY: Nature's music has been the most grounding thing for me.

LULU: Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. And we talked a lot about song.

SABRINA IMBLER: Animals sing because they need to find each other.

LULU: And at one point, Amy Ray started talking about this bird she hears singing at night.

AMY RAY: Called chuck-will's-widow. This time of year they call all night long, which is kind of—a lot of times I just can't sleep, so what I do is, you know, I'll play guitar, I'll go outside and I'll walk around the woods and I'll sing. And I just— wrote a song about it as a metaphor for, like, my own loneliness.

LULU: And so I had to ask her if she would sing it for us.

AMY RAY: God, I'm not good at singing on Zooms. [laughs] Just put a disclaimer in there.

LULU: We appreciate the adventure!

AMY RAY: [laughs] Okay. [sings] Even a sad song—let me start over. [sings] Even a sad song is better than no song at all. First chuck-will's-widow of a season, I just figured out that lonely bird's reason. Sleeping all day, singing the same song all night long. Poor Will is gone, the sadness is defeatin', that achin' in your heart surely bears repeatin', but it takes all day to gather up the strength to sing this song. But I get lost, sad and lonely, so I count the stars above me. And I sing when I should be sleepin', 'cause that's when the world hears my weepin'.

AMY RAY: [sings] My neighbors been shootin', they can't get еnough, well, maybe I'm just a Billy Goats Gruff. Around midnight, it'll get tough whеn it gets quiet. It's just some old tin cans and a buckshot gun, I should be flyin' down the road in the warmin' sun.

Park my motorcycle when the day is done and say goodnight. But I get lost, sad and lonely, so I count the stars above me. And I sing when I should be sleepin', 'cause that's when the world hears my weepin'.

AMY RAY: [sings] Even a sad song is better than no song at all. Lose your will, lose your destination, voices in your head are keepin' you guessin'. If it all goes south, count it as a blessin' that's where you are. Yeah, that's where, that's where you are.

AMY RAY: [laughs] All right. Messed a couple chords up, but I got it out. [laughs]

LULU: That was so great. Thank you!

AMY RAY: Thanks, thanks. [laughs]

LULU: And that'll do it for today. Big thanks to Amy Ray, big thanks to Sabrina. This episode was produced by Annie McEwen and Pat Walters, with original sound design and scoring by Dylan Keefe. It was fact-checked by Kim Schmidt. Edited by Tajja Isen, and voiced by the spectacular Becca Blackwell. Special thanks to Dr. Jay Gallagher for his cricket sounds—chirp chirp! If you would like to check out that issue of Orion Magazine, it's called "Queer Planet." And you can go to Orion.org, and type in the code RADIOLAB when you subscribe for 20 percent discount. All right, that's all. Peace be unto you night birds, morning birds, songbirds and everything in between. [whistles] Catch you next week!

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Cadian, and I'm from Longmont, Colorado. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, my name is Diana and I'm calling from Madrid, Spain. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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