I do not have the best singing voice.
That is not false modesty, and it is not an invitation for reassurance. I hear the rough notes. I hear the places where my breath runs short and where a trained singer might have delivered a cleaner performance. I know the difference between what I can do and what a professional vocalist could do.
But Writ & Rust was never supposed to be a demonstration of vocal perfection.
These songs are about consequence, confinement, accountability, and the damage that remains after the sentence ends. They come from things I did, things I witnessed, people I harmed, years I lost, and truths I spent far too long refusing to face. The value of these songs is not found in whether I hit every note perfectly. It is found in whether I tell the truth when I get there.
In many places, my voice cracks because I am emotional. I am not acting. I am not adding a trembling voice because I think it will make the performance more dramatic. I am literally trying to sing while tears are running down my face.
That changes the sound of a person’s voice. It changes breathing. It tightens the throat. It makes certain words difficult to finish. Sometimes the crack in the recording is not evidence that I failed to sing the line correctly. It is evidence of what it took for me to sing the line at all.
You can hear that in “The Empty Chair.”
By the final lines of that song, I am literally in tears. The emotion in my voice is not a production effect, a performance choice, or something added later to make the ending hit harder. It is what happened when I reached those words and understood the full weight of what I was singing.
I could have stopped and recorded those lines again after I regained control. I could have repeated them until the breathing was steady, the notes were cleaner, and nobody could hear me struggling.
But why would I remove the most truthful part of the recording?
I had other options.
I could have used an artificial voice capable of delivering every word flawlessly. I could have handed the songs to a polished vocalist with better range, better control, and years of training. I could have sold them to someone else and let that person turn them into something easier to market.
The songs might sound better.
They would not be more honest.
There is a difference between singing a story and having lived inside it. A hired voice could perform the words, but it could not carry the memories underneath them. It would not know which lines were hardest to write. It would not know which names were deliberately left out, which details were softened to avoid causing more harm, or why certain words can still reduce me to tears decades later.
An artificial voice could reproduce sadness. It could imitate regret. It could be instructed to add a crack, a breath, or a tremble in exactly the right place.
But it would still be an imitation.
For many kinds of music, using another vocalist is perfectly legitimate. This is not an argument that every songwriter must sing every song personally. But for this project—for these particular songs—handing the microphone to someone else would create distance precisely where distance would be most convenient.
That would be the easy way out.
Writ & Rust is not supposed to give me an easy way out.
If I am going to write about accountability, then I cannot hide behind a voice selected because it sounds more marketable. If I am going to ask listeners to sit with uncomfortable truths, I have to be willing to stand inside those truths myself. That includes letting people hear an imperfect voice struggling to continue because the person singing understands exactly what the words mean.
There are already enough things in this world polished until every rough edge—and every trace of truth—has been removed. There are enough products assembled by committee, bought and paid for, focus-tested, cleaned up, and sold as authenticity. I refuse to do that with something this personal.
These songs are not inventory. They are not costumes. They are not stories I purchased from someone else and learned well enough to perform convincingly.
They are mine to answer for.
So yes, another singer might make them prettier. An artificial voice might make them technically flawless. Either choice might make Writ & Rust easier to promote.
But perfection is not the point.
The point is that when the voice says, “I did this,” it belongs to the person who did.
When it says, “I was wrong,” nobody was paid to sound sorry on my behalf.
And when my voice breaks during the final lines of “The Empty Chair,” it breaks because I am crying over the truth contained in those words.
I will not replace that truth with a cleaner performance just because the cleaner performance is easier to sell.
I am not asking anyone to admire my voice.
I am asking them to hear what it is saying.
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