She Lost Her Voice. Then She Found Herself. – Greta Morgan

Airdate: May 28, 2025

Julie Rose: What do you do when the thing that you built your life around goes away?

Greta Morgan: In a way, it felt like I was dying because the version of who I had been, the way I showed up in the world, the way I earned my living, the way I received love, it was my main offering to the world.

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And you're probably wondering, "Why would anyone choose to be uncomfortable?" But I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can manage to stay open and curious about it. And that's what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy.

Greta Morgan got her first record deal when she was sixteen with her band The Hush Sound. She's a singer, songwriter, plays a bunch of instruments, including guitar and keyboards. Her solo project, Springtime Carnivore, was a critical success. At one point in her career, she was performing to sold out crowds as a member of the band Vampire Weekend. And then, she lost her voice. "The Lost Voice" is the name of her new memoir, and Greta Morgan is with me now to talk about it. Welcome. Thanks so much for your time today, Greta.

Greta Morgan: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Julie Rose: So, take us back to this really big pivot point in your life, the end of 2019. What was going on with your music career at that point?

Greta Morgan: Yeah, so in the end of 2019, I had kind of summited the peak of my musical experience. I felt like I was at the peak of my musical powers. My voice was stronger than it had ever been. I had been training and cultivating my voice from nothing as a teenager. I was not a natural singer, so I really, I, I cultivated my voice from this very girlish whisper kind of innocent sound from my very first record to a four-octave, belting powerhouse type of voice. And I was in Vampire Weekend and I had committed to do this entire album cycle with them. We were traveling all over the world, playing all of the, kind of the bucket list venues for musicians, so we were headlining Madison Square Garden and Red Rocks and the Hollywood Bowl, and while I was playing in the band, it just lit this fire for me that I wanted to write the most amazing solo record I possibly could. So, I was training my voice, I was writing songs in hotel rooms every free minute, I was archiving demos, I was demoing with producers, and I was gearing up for the album cycle to end to make this kind of very vocally demanding, expansive record.

And then, Vampire Weekend played one last festival in March of 2020 when almost all the other festivals had been canceled. We came back, I became very ill, presumably with COVID, we had been in a hotspot. And soon after the illness, the top half of my vocal range was just gone, and my voice started behaving in very strange ways, tremoring and shaking. When I tried to hold a pitch, it would wobble, and it took about six or seven months to get the proper diagnosis, but I was diagnosed with Spasmodic Dysphonia, which is a neurological voice disorder, disorder with no cure. Uh, they have treatments that work sometimes, and the treatments are Botox injections into your vocal cords, which I have experimented with. I'm not currently getting them at the moment. Um, but I, I have since been, um, I've entered into the Mayo Clinic's Long COVID treatment program for other physical issues related to COVID, and I have learned they have seen tons of people with voice changes.

Julie Rose: Wow, I mean such a, such a loss for anyone, really, but for a professional singer who was making such big plans for her solo career, um, just devastating. Can you, can you take us back to one of those early moments when you realized something was really wrong with your voice, that you weren't able to do what had been so effortless for you?

Greta Morgan: Yeah, I mean, I, I remember my vocal coach, she had me do a "gee" exercise where we went up the scale and it was just like, "Gee, gee, gee." Like, I just, all of a sudden, the sound was like the raptor in Jurassic Park. Like, it was, like, like, the pitch, it was just, like, no tone, just like the pitch pulled apart. And the more I tried to hit it, the more it felt like there was, like, a knot around my throat. Like when I tried to go for it, it, it was the strangest thing. It was the first time in my life where I ever felt like my body had a mind of its own. Like, my body was no longer listening to me. And I was one of these hyper optimistic people who just thought, "Mind over matter," you know? Like, "We can heal anything with our minds." And it was the first time in my life where I was like, "What is happening is beyond my control."

Julie Rose: What did that feel like for you as a, to have so much of your identity, though, wrapped up in your voice and not, not only just your identity, but your professional, like, your money maker?

Greta Morgan: Yeah.

Julie Rose: And to, like, have no control over it or feel like, like, "I can't even, I can't even muster it at this point."

Greta Morgan: Well, for many months, uh, my, my flavor of Uncomfy, my flavor was just like, "Oh, it'll come back." You know, I didn't know, I hadn't yet been given the kind of what felt like the nail in the coffin diagnosis. I just thought, "Oh, I just need to rest my voice. I'll go on silent retreat. Oh, I'll just get, I'll get a factory reset of my voice. Like, it'll come back." And I was meditating and doing visualizations and doing very gentle rehabilatory vocal work, and, and resting. And I just kept thinking, "Oh, it's gonna come back. It's gonna come back. It's gonna come back." And, um, meanwhile in the moment, you know, the whole world was in a state of disarray. Um, Vampire Weekend very generously offered to pay the touring band members for the tours that had been canceled, so you had asked specifically about like my voice and my livelihood. It was, like, a rare moment where I sort of had the protection of a career without the actual responsibility of a career, so I had all the time in the world, but, just, it was filled with this tremendous feeling of disconcerting strangeness. I felt like an alien in my own body, not being able to sing.

Julie Rose: Yeah, which is maybe why you also, um, went to some alien landscape in order to sort of, I mean, there's this whole chunk of your, of your, uh, book where you, in these early months, like, hoping it'll come back, but trying to, like, coax it, you know, and recover, you, you head off into the wilderness, um, on like a vision quest, uh, would you just tell us about when you landed in Zion National Park? So, this is during, like, shutdown, right?

Greta Morgan: Yeah, well, so I will say, I found out my house in LA was full of mold, and I had to move away and throw out everything, so that's, that's part of what kind of launched me, which, of course, I also was like, "Oh, well that's what's wrong with my voice. As soon as I get out of the house, I'll heal," which wound up not being the case. But anyway, that is what launched me into this simplified version of self, this kind of very freewheeling, like, "everything I need to have fun fits in my car" version of Greta. So, at that point, I had been to Zion one time before. I was there for 24 hours, and I just remember my whole spirit completely brightened up, and so I had always wanted to go back, but my schedule had been so busy I hadn't been able to. So, in that moment, in the, in August of 2020, I was like, "It doesn't matter where I am. If I, if I'm isolated, why don't I just go live in a, in a hotel?" And so, yeah, I went to Zion alone, was planning to be there for a month. And, um, uh, on silent retreat there, I just became so greedy for more and more and more silence. It was like it had been the missing ingredient in my life for so many years.

Julie Rose: What, what was happening in that silence then? So, it, let's back up for just one moment 'cause there was a moment where the silence kind of inserted itself on your life, and that is you describe, uh, riding a bike, a tandem bike, no less, but solo. Talk about conspicuously awkward, right? Riding your bike on the loop through Zion, listening to music in your headphones until all of a sudden you're out of range.

Greta Morgan: Mm-hmm.

Julie Rose: And the silence descends.

Greta Morgan: Yeah, yeah, which by the way, the, so the funniest thing about that is that the hotel clerk said, "We, you know, we only have one bike left, and it's a tandem". And I was like, "Well, you know what? I'll take the one bike left." As I'm riding the tandem bike into Zion Canyon, I realized there's tons of bike shops that rent normal bikes. So, it was, like, that point where I was like, "Okay. I'm make, this is what's happening. I'm making a conscious, this is just what's happening today," um,

Julie Rose: yeah, yeah.

Greta Morgan: Um, but yeah, so there was a moment I hadn't yet realized there's no service in the park as one should expect, so I didn't download any music ahead of time. So, I'm biking through the park and taking in these 2000-foot, gorgeous Navajo sandstone cliffs, and all of a sudden the music cuts out. And at that moment, I was kinda like, "I can do, okay, I can do silence." And then I realized while I was biking, I always have music playing, or I'm playing music, or I'm talking to someone, or I'm living in my loud city of Los Angeles where there's sirens and helicopters and all sorts of noise. And it was one of the first moments where I had just been alone and in silence, disconnected from the outside world beyond the park for hours. It was, like, one of the first chapters like that that I had had in a very long time.

Julie Rose: I love how you described a moment ago that you became "greedy" for silence. So, what was it that, what was it fueling or feeding for you?

Greta Morgan: Well, uh, the first thing I realized is that conversation is its own art form. If I'm constantly sort of sending my ideas and feelings and thoughts out into conversation, that reservoir of what was inside me has kind of been expended in some way. And of course, like, you know, we all need conversation. We all need the nourishment and connectivity of it, but considering I had been sort of in overdrive socially and in overdrive conversation-wise, I felt like all of a sudden these thoughts and ideas were collecting in my mind that felt so precious to me.

And, and one of the things that happened was I felt, I started, um, unearthing memories as if for the first time. You know, it's so hard to tell how memory works,but I had all of these images come up where I thought, "Oh my God, I don't think I've thought about that since that happened when I was seven," or, like, "Oh, that? Oh, I, I hadn't thought about that since I was 11." It sort of felt like I was pulling all these gems out of my psyche and that started this process of just reconnecting with a lot of lost parts of myself, a lot of lost versions with myself. The other thing that happened...

Julie Rose: Was, was that a positive thing for you? I mean, it's not like you were remembering terrible, like traumatic things that were sort of resurfacing. This, for you, was connecting in a really, like, a way that was feeding your soul.

Greta Morgan: I think in a way that was feeding my soul and in a way that was, in a way that was actually introducing to myself a storytelling voice. I have never been a writer before. I never thought I would be someone who'd write a book. I journaled every day. I've probably written 500 to 1,000 words every day of my life, but I never thought, "One day I'll publish," you know, or, like, and so when I was alone and in silence, just this little voice came into my mind to entertain myself. Like I, I see that period in Zion as like, that's when I started becoming a storyteller was actually when I was spending all that time by myself.

Julie Rose: So, losing your voice didn't actually lead you to lose your creativity or your connection to that. Uh, was that surprising to you?

Greta Morgan: Um, well, between losing my voice and having new creativity, there was a lot of darkness, anger, resistance, depression, anguish. I really had to go down to the depths and decide that I wanted to climb, climb back up. My friend, Kate, said something to me once she said, um, "Once you go to," or she said, "The more often you go to hell and back, you realize there's always an 'and back.'" But for me, that was kind of my first time of going, really feeling like I was going to my personal version of hell and finding my way back. That was, like, my first big one.

Julie Rose: In a way, it felt like I was dying because the version of who I had been, the way I showed up in the world, the way I earned my living, the way I received love, you know, like, hundreds of thousands of people streamed my music every month. This was like, it, it was everything about, it was my main offering to the world.

Greta Morgan: And I remember actually in one speech therapy session, I broke down. I love my speech therapist, Lori. I broke down, and I said, "Like, how do singers go on living if they can't sing anymore?" Of course, what I was saying is, "How, how am I supposed to, how am I supposed to keep living if this thing is taken away from me?" And, you know, she was just like, "Your voice isn't broken. It's just different." And that was a seed that kind of got planted in me. And then I started writing, and through the process of writing, I began to explore all of these kind of metaphorical aspects of voice. Like, I began to look at all the times that I had silenced myself.

You know, with Spasmodic Dysphonia, my voice was literally caught in my throat, but there were so many times where I couldn't stand up to bullies, or I couldn't speak my truth in relationships, or I couldn't advocate for myself in ways that I needed to. And once I began writing through and looking for all the kind of metaphorical aspects of voice, I just started to love writing and having that spark of creativity, that spark of loving something again, like, it, I don't mean to sound dramatic, but it really kept me alive. Like it brought my, it let my spirit, it made my spirit wanna come back every day. And, and then I also started to just give up the idea of the perfect voice.

You know, like, so much of my life, I have admired singers who have these stunning, perfect. You know, Linda, Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks and Bobbie Gentry and, um, Roberta Flack and Frida Payne and Diana Ross, like, these gorgeous belting, powerful, perfect pitch voices. And now I just, I listen to people with stranger, weirder voices, you know, like, the Lou Reeds, the Leonard Cohens, the Dennis Johnsons, the, um, Karen Daltons. You know, I've been, I've been listening to different types of voices and just reframing. Like, "Okay, I'm working with something very different now, and I wanna commit to keep working with it no matter how weird it is."

Julie Rose: And you have released a couple of things since, since you lost your voice. Um, there's a beautiful song called "Vanishing Path" that you released a couple of years ago, that is actually very melodic and beautiful, but I also gather that it's very symbolic.

Greta Morgan: That was when I was getting the in vocal injections, which are, you have to get them four times a year. They're very expensive. There's a long recovery process, there's a long retraining process. So, to even be able to perform those, the two songs I released, "Vanishing Path" and "Bitter Better," like, that was in a context where I was upkeeping my voice all the time. That was up 'til 2023. Um, I had a, a very strange shot in 2023, and then coincidentally, like, it turned black and blue. Coincidentally, I had this huge thyroid episode a couple weeks later. All the doctors say they're not related, but to me, I just thought, "I'm gonna chill on putting a neurotoxin in my larynx for a while," so I have not been getting the shots, and that's why now my voice does very strange things, which will be in future recordings hopefully I'll release in 2026 or 2027, but that is what I'm, what I'm working with now is just like a very different kind of singing voice.

Julie Rose: What's uncomfortable about what you'll have to embrace in order to put that out into the world, do you think?

Greta Morgan: I spent so long trying to be a technically good singer who could sing in key and who had beautiful tone, and now no matter what I do, I can't really sing in key, my voice wobbles uncontrollably. If I'm nervous, I completely can't do it. On a really good day, maybe I'll get some tone, but what, what is uncomfortable is, um, like, letting it be ugly, uh, traditionally "ugly," I mean by Western standards, not by my standards, but by Western standards.

I think also it's uncomfortable to feel like, um, like I am a, my voice is a representation of the kind of impermanence that will eventually affect everyone and their body. Like, this is one tiny fractal moment of living in a human body, which is fallible and which changes. And I think so many of us are always looking for, like, the thing that will stay certain forever or, like, the thing that will keep me young forever or the thing that will make me safe forever, and it's just like no matter what we do, life is going to create its own force of will at some point. And I think there's a part of me that feels like, uh, "If I can't sing or if I can't sing the way I used to, are my listeners gonna not wanna see that?" Like, that impermanence, that like, you know, quote, "broken" version or something, I don't know.

Julie Rose: Have you, um, broadened or redefined what your voice even is, like, sort of the, the scope of it?

Greta Morgan: There's one portion in the book where I do kind of consciously redefine it, and I, and I said, um, "I decided to redefine my voice as any expression of my heart. The way I listened could become my voice. The way I wrote postcards to friends would become my voice. The way I witnessed the world around me would become my voice. The way I picked up trash on hikes would become my voice. Cooking a meal for someone I loved would become my voice. Any art I made in any medium could become my voice so long as it came from the truth of my heart. By that definition, my creativity was boundless." And, really, the book became my voice. You know, like, the title is "The Lost Voice," but really, I actually feel like, "Oh, this is the first time I've really found my voice was in the book."

My dream would be to inspire people to just make what they wanna make with what they have, where they are right now. Like, one thing I always say when I teach workshops is, "Worthiness is a gift you give yourself, and you can't expect anyone else to see the vision for your project." Like, you just, you have to be the one who decides, "This is worthy because it's the truth of my heart, and I wanna share it right now."

Julie Rose: Greta, I look forward to hearing your voice in all of its future versions. Thank you so much for sharing your story in this book and also for this time today.

Greta Morgan: Oh, thank you so much and thank you for your podcast. It's such a good podcast, and thanks for having me.

Julie Rose: Greta Morgan is a singer-songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist known for her bands, The Hush Sound, Gold Motel, and Springtime Carnivore, and her new memoir, "The Lost Voice," is out now. I really enjoyed speaking with her, and I hope you did, too.

So, thanks for getting Uncomfy with us today. I'd love to hear about a moment when you had to redefine your own sense of self or when you lost something that was especially meaningful to you and had to lean into that discomfort in order to find your way through. Send an email to uncomfy@byu.edu or connect with us on social media to keep the conversation going.

Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Jake Hasleton and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.