Singing For Last Time: What It’s Like to Lose Your Voice—Forever

You never know when it’s the last time. There was a last time that I crawled, a last time I used training wheels on my bike, a last night that my immediate family lived under one roof. There were last kisses in fading relationships, last shows with bands that broke up, last laughs with friends who have died. One day, I’ll climb a mountain for the last time, talk to my parents for the last time, see a sunset for the last time.

My singing voice was as constant as my heartbeat, as unique as my fingerprints, as necessary to my self-recognition as seeing my face in the mirror. Despite this awareness of life’s endings, I somehow never expected that there would be a last time that I would sing with my steady, reliable voice.

In September 2019, Vampire Weekend sold out Madison Square Garden. Since joining the touring band a year earlier, I had played synthesizer, piano, guitar, and percussion, sometimes all of them within one song. Walking onto the stage that night felt like entering a pulsing city made of amps and cables and speakers, electricity sizzling through every wire. The hum of the arena reminded me of summer nights when the air vibrates, just before lightning strikes.

I stood stage left, in the back row, with two keyboards in front of me and a half circle of guitars standing behind me. I was wearing a bright orange tracksuit with shorts and white suede sneakers. Before the show, one of my bandmates joked that I was the missing Spice Girl—Pumpkin Spice. In the middle of the set, we sang “New Dorp. New York” and I played a six-inch cylindrical shaker with my left hand for eleven minutes straight; I called it “the eleven-minute hand job.”

As we hit the dance bridge, MSG lit up like a giant red galaxy; the audience wore light-up wristbands synced to our stage lights. Our drummer pounded the kick drum, thumTHUM thumTHUM, like a heartbeat, my own heart pounding as I anticipated what was coming next. He hit the cymbal crash to end the song and the stage lights went dark.

My legs trembled, but they carried me center stage. The adrenaline running through my body felt like a swarm of bees. My eyes were closed when the spotlight found me, turning my eyelids a peachy pink. The crowd thundered with applause when they noticed that the only woman in the band was now at the microphone. Our guitarist fingerpicked the opening riff and the first phrase of the song came out of my mouth. I know the reason why you think I oughta stay…

My voice rose from a small place inside me and filled the entire arena. The sound surrounded me like a warm bath, my voice the fountain from which it poured. Performing felt effortless, easier than speaking. Ezra, our lead singer, had written the song, but I found an emotional entry into it as if it were one of my own.

I know the reason why you think I oughta stay funny how you’re telling me on my wedding day…

I sang it from the tender spot in my heart that remembered the love that had slipped from my hands. The kind of love that felt like finding a paradise island, but then losing the coordinates forever. I inhabited the words like a method actor, willing them to feel true. Singing that night felt like summiting the highest peak of my voice, after a lifetime of climbing.

Have you ever seen a bird ride a wave of wind, coasting across the whole sky without flapping its wings? That was how this felt. Soaring, but my feet were on the ground. When the last word of the chorus rose from my mouth, the crowd roared with applause, the high-pitched cheers of women’s voices cutting through the most. I opened my eyes, and even though I couldn’t see the exact faces of the thousands and thousands of people out there clearly, I could sense them smiling at me. “Greta Morgan, everyone,” Ezra said into the microphone, then motioned for applause.

*

Just over one year later, the shake in my voice didn’t have a diagnosis, so I had the luxury of deciding what it was, what it meant, and how I’d heal it. I had a sense of control. I’d expected an easy cure. A few singer friends had had to go on steroids briefly for vocal cord inflammation, and I figured it might require a fix like that. I sensed it was more than just acid reflux, more than just mold poisoning, but I had no physical comparison for this specific sensation. The vocal loss still seemed temporary, and I drove to Finnegan Voice Institute feeling confident that I would be given the solution by the end of my appointment.

In the examination room, I read aloud from a sheet of paper into a microphone. “When the sunli-ight strikes ra-indrops in the air, they a-act as a pri-ism and form a raa-inbow.” I tried to smooth out my words, but they caught on every vowel sound, as though an invisible hand were around my throat choking them off.

Dr. Kent Howard, a leading voice disorder specialist, nodded with a look of recognition. He asked me to sing something and I croaked out a wavering verse of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Kiss me and smile for me…

“What do you miss about the way your voice sounded before?” Dr. Howard asked.

It felt like a cruel joke, like asking a person what they miss about their house after it burns down. I missed the whole house.

“The velvety tone, the expressiveness, the ease,” I said. “Anything else?” he asked.

“The thing I miss most is writing songs with my voice. And singing for pleasure.”

What I didn’t say was that I missed singing in bed with a partner, singing at bonfires with friends, singing karaoke in Tokyo, writing joke songs with my nieces, singing at band practice, singing along to the radio in the car. I missed leaving funny song voicemails for my friends. I missed “Happy Birthday.” I missed the way my body hummed along to the resonance of whatever I sang, how melody floated through my room like a silk scarf on the wind.

After a laryngoscopy in which a camera filmed my vocal cords, Dr. Howard typed AD/SD into the “diagnosis” field on his computer. He pointed at the video on his computer screen and told me the good news: my vocal cords were healthy. Then he told me the bad news.

“What you have is actually a neurological issue called spasmodic dysphonia,” he said. The condition results from damage to the basal ganglia, a group of structures in the center of the brain. Normally, vocal cords close between words but with spasmodic dysphonia, the signal between the brain and the vocal cords is disrupted, causing the vocal cords to spasm involuntarily.

“The vocal cords slam shut when you’re not asking them to and that’s what makes it difficult to hold a steady pitch,” he explained.

Never in my life had there been a wider gap between my expectations and reality. I thought he would solve all my problems, but instead, he had diagnosed this horrific condition.

“Spasmodic dysphonia is lifelong…there is no cure…symptoms typically show up in a person’s thirties…”

Tears welled up in my eyes but I couldn’t make a sound. My mind went fuzzy, and as he continued talking, some of his phrases passed by unheard, while others went off like grenades. “The condition is flipped on by one of three triggers,” he said. “Vocal overuse, psychological stress, or a high fever. Have you experienced any of those, Greta?”

The vocal training with my coach Allie, the stress of the pandemic, the fever in March. I felt like I was trapped a mile underwater and couldn’t come up for air. Dr. Howard explained that the only treatment was to inject Botox into the vocal cords to reduce the spasms. He said the Botox shots would require experimentation and flexibility, and that they typically worked better for improving speech than for improving singing.

“If the shots give you access to your high range, then that’s when you can sing Dolly Parton songs,” he said, “and when you have your low range, you can sing Glen Campbell songs.” Dr. Howard must’ve gone to medical school in Tennessee.

My brain performed an inventory of all the songs I’d released, all the Vampire Weekend songs I’d sung backup vocals on, and all the in-progress songs I’d been demoing for my next solo record, which had choruses that soared high up. Having some of my range sometimes was not going to work. Most of the songs I’d written require two octaves or more, and the same was true for the Vampire Weekend backups. Surely, the band would have to replace me if I couldn’t perform the female backing vocals.

In a hopeful tone, Dr. Howard explained that some patients with this condition were responsive to a treatment other than Botox voice shots.

“Thank God,” I said, perking up. “What is it?”

“Alcohol therapy,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “You mean getting drunk?” I asked. “Does that help people forget they have a lifelong neurological disorder?” He explained that two shots of hard liquor or one to three glasses of wine could act as a muscle relaxer to reduce the spasms in some patients.

“You’ll have to experiment to see if you’re alcohol responsive,” he said. My field of vision looked like a windshield in a thunderstorm.

Dr. Howard walked me into a side office and pressed “play” on a thirty-minute informational video about spasmodic dysphonia, an orientation to my worst nightmare. A half dozen patients with speaking voices more impaired than mine told their stories, and I could hear how the tremor in my voice was beginning to resemble theirs.

On my phone, I searched “professional singers with spasmodic dysphonia” only to find a graveyard’s worth of stories about singers forced into early retirement. It felt like a guillotine had severed my old life—one in which I had a perfect health record and knew exactly what my purpose was—from this one—in which I became a person diagnosed with a lifelong neurological condition. I ran my card for $875 and left the office.

*

Frozen with writer’s block since my diagnosis, I signed up for a songwriting workshop about creative bravery with Mary Gauthier. I had discovered Mary’s work seven years before, when I heard her say this in an interview: “If my voice isn’t shaking the first time I play a new song live, I’m not being honest enough.” I immediately read every lyric she’d ever written.

Mary’s songs are full of longing, lost characters—orphans, wanderers who can’t find homes, veterans who can’t end the war in their heads. Her records are raw and unflinching accounts about her struggles with addiction, coming to terms with her sexuality, and the abandonment wounds of being given up for adoption. Mary couldn’t even speak her dream of being a songwriter until she was thirty-two, when a DUI prompted her entry into rehab. Finally clearheaded, she sat in the group therapy circle and named her deepest and most terrifying desire: I want to be a songwriter, she said. She had never even held a guitar.

In the thirty years since that time, she’s released stunning folk records that have been nominated for Grammys and have topped the Americana charts. Her songs have been recorded by Dolly Parton and Jimmy Buffett.

Even if I couldn’t sing, I could try writing song lyrics. If anyone could turn me into a lyricist again, it would be her.

On a cold, clear Sunday morning, I settled myself at the table and logged into the class. Mary welcomed everyone. She had short, silver hair, and when her eyes crinkled up in a smile, she seemed far younger than her fifty-nine years. She wore a button-down shirt with a vest over it, classic troubadour attire. Her partner in life and music, Jaimee Harris, sat beside her in the home where they lived together. Behind them, a rainbow American flag hung from the wall above a shelf of books and records.

“If you’re not afraid when you play a song live for the first time, you’re either insane or you’re not saying anything meaningful,” she said, echoing the statement that made me fall in love with her work in the first place. “If we want to write brave songs, it is necessary to trigger our fear.” Back in our hunter-gatherer days, she explained, if we did anything to alienate ourselves from our social group, it meant death. These days, if we get rejected by the group, we won’t die, but the animal part of our brain still thinks we might.

Rejection was everywhere, she said, especially in the age of anonymous internet haters. So we needed to prepare ourselves to make and share brave art, knowing that it would definitely be rejected, at least by some. Once, when she posted a photo of herself with a baby, the daughter of two of her Canadian fans, a commenter wrote, “What’s the big deal about babies? I don’t like babies.” Mary said, “If there’s a baby-hating contingent out there, you can trust that, no matter what you share, there will always be someone whose knee-jerk reaction is to hate it.”

“So,” Mary said, “what’s on the all-you-can-eat buffet of terror today? What fears keep you from writing and sharing brave songs?” People unmuted themselves to speak: One man felt he should be better after forty years of writing. Another said he was afraid of hurting his parents by naming the painful aspects of his childhood. A woman confessed she was worried that if she actually started writing, she may be forced to realize she is not the secret genius she has always imagined herself to be.

“Who the hell do I think I am to devote this much time to making my own art?” one person said. “Who the hell am I to spend so much time expressing myself and hoping other people will listen?”

Mary’s answer: “You are a humble servant to truth and beauty. It’s the same answer every time.” I loved that idea, as though I were just placing my tiny, glowing candle on the altar of all the songs that had ever existed.

Mary suggested that as fears arose within us during the following week, we should write them down and then respond to them from the wiser part of ourselves. When I signed off from the first class, I still would’ve rather cleaned my shower with a toothbrush than write a song, but I felt more open to the idea.

The next day, I decided to try Mary’s exercise by writing down my fears and entering into conversation with them.

Fear: I’ll never write a great song again without my voice.

Answer to Fear: How do you know if you don’t try?

Fear: I’m afraid my voice will never return.

Answer to Fear: If it doesn’t, you’ll have to find another way to express yourself. Maybe you’ll learn how to paint or how to cook. You will find another outlet.

Fear: I’m afraid I’ll go broke. I can’t earn money without my voice. I have no higher education and no backup plan.

Answer to Fear: You’ve never tried. How do you know until you try?

Fear: What if this is the beginning of something worse? Multiple sclerosis. Parkinson’s. Some neurological issue that will progress quickly.

Answer to Fear: Your neurologist ruled all that out. For now, trust him. And if this were the beginning of something worse, that could be an incentive to live as fully as possible right now.

Fear: I’m afraid that losing my voice will force me into a state of total social isolation. I’ll become depressed. And I’ll never date again because conversation will be too challenging.

Answer to Fear: Oh, sweetie pie, who decided to spend forty days alone in the desert?

I filled pages and pages like this. I wondered how I’d been able to go to the grocery store or brush my teeth while carrying around that much fear. The more I wrote, the more I realized that fear wasn’t me: fear was a parasite clinging to me for survival, a leech sucking the life from my body. I was actually the strong one. The morning after the fear experiment, I woke up with one single lyrical line: the vanishing path.

The poet Paul Valéry says that the first line of a poem is like finding a fruit on the ground, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall. What was the tree of the vanishing path?

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Adapted from The Lost Voice: A Memoir by Greta Morgan. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint from HarperCollins Publishers.