Timbre Quotes

I tend to (get cast) as dark characters, and I`m more drawn to those characters anyway - they`re usually more interesting. Plus, I got this deep voice from my father, and the combination of the timbre of my voice and my inflections tends to make people feel that there`s some darkness there.

What happened was that I had polyps on my vocal cords for about six years. I had them lasered off each time. But then I had a little twinge of a problem while I was doing Rising Sun (1993). I couldn`t get the timbre of my voice right. I couldn`t get the variation and enunciation as comfortable as I wanted. So I went back to the doctor and he suggested radiation. I went for six weeks and didn`t have any side effects or problems. Then I made the announcement that I had done radiation treatment. The publicists said not to do it, that it would set off an explosion. But I thought, "If you do radiation and it`s a success, why not speak about it?"

My voice has gotten deeper and it`s all down to when I was living in Australia. I could speak and only barely sing. Deep down I knew that something was chronically wrong with my voice. It was polyps. The first thing the doctor said to me, "You smoke a lot of dope, don`t you?" I gasped and said, "How do you know?" The doctor said, "I can tell by the way you`re talking. If you`re a singer, the worse thing you can do is smoke dope." We did the operation in Australia and it lowered the timbre of my voice. It`s deeper, has more resonance and it`s stronger. I used to be a piano player who sang and now I`m a singer who plays piano.

It`s not the timbre but the intonation. You`re a questioner. You don`t have the sense that you know exactly what you`re talking about.