What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature magazine Orion. She called the issue “Queer Planet: A Celebration of Biodiversity,” and it was a wide-ranging celebration of queerness in nature. It featured work by amazing writers like Ocean Vuong, Kristen Arnett, Carmen Maria Machado and adrienne maree brown, among many others. But one piece in particular struck Lulu as something that was really meant to be made into audio, an essay called “Key Changes,” by the writer Sabrina Imbler. If their name sounds familiar, it might be because they’ve been on the show before. In this episode, we bring you Sabrina’s essay – which takes us from the beginning of time, to a field of crickets, to a karaoke bar – read by the phenomenal actor Becca Blackwell, and scored by our director of sound design Dylan Keefe. Stay to the end for a special surprise … from Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls!Special thanks to Jay Gallagher from UC Davis.EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Sabrina ImblerProduced by - Annie McEwen and Pat Walterswith help from - Maria Paz GutiérrezOriginal music from - Dylan KeefeFact-checking by - Kim Schmidtand Edited by - Tajja Isen and Pat WaltersEPISODE CITATIONS:Articles - Check out Queer Planet: A Celebration of Biodiversity, Orion Magazine (Spring 2025)Read Sabrina Imbler’s original essay, “Key Changes,” Orion Magazine (Spring 2025)Read Lulu Miller’s mini-essay, “Astonishing Immobility,” Orion Magazine (Spring 2025)Check out Sabrina Imbler’s Defector column Creaturefector all about animalsAudio - Listen to Amy Ray’s song “Chuck Will’s Widow” from her solo album If It All Goes SouthBooks - How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, by Sabrina ImblerSignup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Chapter 1: What is the introduction to the show about?
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Heads up, today's show does include a couple of curse words. So anyway, here we go.
All right.
Okay. All right.
You're listening to Radiolab.
Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah.
Okay, well, I'll play this, and then I don't think you're going to be able to hear it, Lulu. That's fine. Harness the karaoke vibe. You got the proverbial sweaty beer in your hand?
Yes, I do. Yeah, I'm really feeling it.
Hey, I am Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And we are warming up in the studio with an actor named Becca Blackwell.
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Chapter 2: What can we expect from Sabrina Imbler's essay?
Oh, yeah. I used to do sound.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the first earthly voice?
I'm so excited you're going to read this for us. I am too. I'm just going to. 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 two. Right. Okay.
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. And so we asked Becca, who we've worked with before, if they'd come in and read it. And we asked our sound designer, Dylan Keefe, if he would really bring it to life. And what they made is so beautiful.
And so I am going to get out of the way and let you hear it.
All right, here we go. Key Changes by Sabrina Imbler. The first sound in 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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How do crickets communicate through song?
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. 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'd 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. 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 themselves into gauzy oblivion. The loss of the self with 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.
When we come back, we'll see what happens when a song is lost, not just for Sabrina, but for a whole species.
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So it's no wonder that 6 million men in the U.S. suffer from depression every year, often undiagnosed. And I guess I'm just here to say, well, talking to someone, it can help. I have had some wonderful therapists over the years. They have helped me in many ways to be less reactive, to be more aware, to be a better partner, a better friend.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of singing for trans individuals?
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 come 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. 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'm 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 in 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.
Author, Sabrina Imbler.
Can I just say I loved your essay so much. I thought it was incredible.
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.
Nature's music has been the most grounding thing for me. Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. And we talked a lot about song. Animals sing because they need to find each other. And at one point, Amy Rae started talking about this bird she hears singing at night.
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Chapter 6: How does karaoke reflect personal experiences?
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