I could feel something shift in my voice that winter night when I sang the high chorus of Stevie Wonder’s song, I Wish, “I wish those days could come back once more, why did those days ever have to go.” I was 25 years old and singing in a cover band at a dot com private party in downtown San Francisco, for a tech company that suddenly had more money than they knew what to do with.
That felt weird in my throat, I thought. But the band played on, people danced on, and I kept singing along. Once we finished our set, I snuck a chocolate-covered strawberry from the chocolate fondue fountain, collected my gig paycheck, drove across the Bay Bridge to my place in Oakland, and I did it all over again the next night.
“I think I hurt my voice,” I confessed to my friend a few weeks later. Michelle was a singer who had been in the biz …