Like life itself, there are many twists and turns in Greta Morgan’s memoir, The Lost Voice. It begins with the central hook of her story: literally losing her voice after the COVID-19 virus catalyzed adductor spasmodic dysphonia in her vocal cords. Now unable to sing—her livelihood and passion since she was a teenager in early 2000s Chicago—she has to regroup: how can she continue enjoying music without a seemingly vital part of her sense of self-expression?

In her memoir, Morgan cracks open her world, dissecting the question, “What does it mean to lose my voice?” and comes to some unconventional solutions. There were many moments in her life, she realized, her voice came and went: she fronted a popular emo band at sixteen years old, she dealt with sexism and manipulation in the recording industry, she found friendship in powerful artists like Jenny Lewis, and in the silence of her home and nature, she found perspective and comfort in herself and work. As she writes, life can be turbulent, confusing, and, at times, unfair. It can take away something precious seemingly overnight and force a person to figure out the next steps by themself. But it can also be thrilling, magical, and full of joy: so long as one is open to living a life of unconventionality, then happiness is sure to come.

The Lost Voice is out tomorrow via Harper Collins. Ahead of her memoir’s release, Northern Transmissions spoke with Greta Morgan to learn more about the fascinating journeys she experienced as a lifelong musician. From her days in the early 2000s emo/alt rock scene, to her solo singer-songwriter projects, to her many gigs supporting other bands, to teaching the next generation of writers how to channel themselves in every poem and lyric, she explains how she learned to, in her words, “dance with life.”

Northern Transmissions: In your memoir, The Lost Voice, there are three versions of you that you explored throughout. There’s you as the singer-songwriter, you as the musician, and then you as just the songwriter. You begin the story with singing other people’s music—both at the Vampire Weekend concert and as a child—and then you gradually transition into the musician role by talking about your guitar and that influences your work. How have you seen yourself grow into these roles with the bands you’ve fronted, played with, wrote for, etc.?

Greta Morgan: In my mind, I never really separate them. I’ve never considered them separate acts until I lost my voice and didn’t have access to be able to sing. To me, musicality was always the same thing as songwriting and singing, so I really always thought about them as moving in tandem. I only developed my musicality on certain instruments to be able to express myself in song. I never considered myself as a “musician’s musician” in the sense that I never was learning Thelonious Monk on piano, or like, trying to play Glenn Gould or something like that. I always was approaching instruments from the perspective of a songwriter who wanted to be able to create the emotional textures that I would need to articulate my expressions in song. With The Hush Sound (my first band), Gold Motel, and Springtime Carnivore, I was a songwriter in themband. That was just such a wonderful experience of learning how to express myself, and it was such a great joy to have the experience of playing my songs for audiences and having them sing them back. Like, you know the feeling when you have a really intense emotion, and someone you love can sit with you and say, “Oh yeah, that’s the perfect thing to feel right now! Like I really understand what you’re going through”? When someone you love can validate your experience so beautifully? That, in a way, was what it was like playing songs for a big audience. It was this incredible moment of mutual understanding. I feel really grateful for those experiences.

I started playing other people’s music in 2016. I played with Jessica Pratt, Jenny Lewis, and then I joined Vampire Weekend. Initially, I took these gigs because they were great jobs and financially, I was like, ‘Okay, I need more. I need to subsidize my income, but also, these will be incredible learning experiences for me as a songwriter!’ So, even when I was working as a musician playing other people’s songs, I still thought, ‘Oh, I’m doing this to feed my own songwriting!’ I will say, learning an artist’s entire catalogue is such an incredible exercise. Like, learning all of Jessica Pratt’s songs, all of Jenny Lewis’ songs, all of the Vampire Weekend songs: it’s so fun to learn an artist’s whole catalog because it really shows you what it means to have a  colorful writing voice with a ton of character. All of those artists’ songs are so recognizable. You could probably hear someone else singing their songs and go, “Huh, that sounds like a Jenny Lewis song!” Or, “That turn of phrase has to be from Vampire Weekend.” That was really helpful and positive, just in the sense of understanding what it is to have an artistic voice.

NT: Another interesting thing that I found throughout your book is that you treat your guitar this animated companion in a way. Like, you talk about sleeping next to it; one’s also right there in the corner of your room.

GM: Yeah, I have another one in my bed! I mean, yes, there’s one always in my bed.

NT: I wanted to get into that more and how—especially when it comes to the guitar and how it informs the music making process for you—that itself has become a form of expression that might not require your voice in a way that your past career has done.

GM: Nowadays, I whistle a lot when I’m writing. That was one thing I learned in vocal rehab; it’s supposed to help retrain your brain’s pathways. So, when I can’t hit a pitch, I’ll I’ll whistle it. I still like guitar, and I still play piano as if I have my old voice and can sing, but now I just sing and whistle a lot more in my head.

I will say, to me one of the best things about playing guitar is the tactile feeling of holding something that’s resonating. I played cello in high school; it felt the same way—feeling the vibrations running through my body while I’m playing. I just find that deeply soothing. I really love that aspect of a guitar. With piano, you don’t feel that quite as much; you hear it more and experience getting surrounded by sound. Guitar is more felt.

NT: Right, and it definitely helps because the guitar’s positioned very close to the heart as well. There is that kind of spiritual connection that you don’t really have with other instruments in a way. It’s the same thing with the cello: it’s right there as well.

GM: Yeah, exactly. Exactly! A friend of mine, his mom teaches music therapy to Parkinson’s patients, specifically teaching cello. When these Parkinson’s patients play cello, very often, the tremor will disappear. I think there is something that happens to our brain when we are playing music, where we’re creating this kind of feedback loop with ourselves that can really calm the nervous system.

NT: Talking about your career and how you discuss it in your book, you begin with the formation of The Hush Sound, which was your high school emo band that reached national fame after touring with Fall Out Boy and getting the—well, at the time—the coveted Pete Wentz stamp of approval. Now that there’s been enough distance to look at that era of alt rock retrospectively, could you talk more generally about that scene, especially with its treatment of young women, what it was like being in the center of it at the height of its popularity as a female singer-songwriter?

GM: I definitely had the benefit of my three band mates being really protective and caring. So, I think I was sort of shielded from a lot of the aspects of the touring music life, which could feel threatening to women who were my age of 16-19.

My experience was really, at least for the most part, innocent, silly, and fun. Like, on the last night of our tour with Fall Out Boy: the band always pranked each other on the last night of the tour. On our final night performing at the UC Pavilion in Chicago, Fall Out Boy had arranged to have like, hundreds of ball pit-type plastic balls dropped on us during our last song. For 30 seconds, I genuinely thought the building was falling down, or that there had been like, a terrorist attack or something, and then I saw all these rainbow balls bouncing all over the stage. So that was kind of the spirit of what was happening backstage. I was also doing my homework on the tour because I was trying to graduate high school. So while I was on tour, I was doing my homework in the catering area. And I remember the All-American Rejects, who were all from Oklahoma, would come in and they’d be like, “Hello, Miss Greta! How are you doing, Miss Greta? How’s chemistry, Miss Greta? Hey, Miss Greta, how’s your math doing today? How’d you wind up doing on that?” There was this kind of sweetness and innocence to the type of hijinks that were happening. All in all, I look back on that period of time as one that was both very absurd and that I’m fond of.

NT: There were also moments that you recorded in your memoir that, to me sounded particular tough to remember or relive. Like, for example, the anecdote where Andy Hurley goes up to you and basically says, “Go to prom with me; I’m 26 and you’re not even 18.”

GM: Oh, I was very generous to people in the book. He definitely flirted with me way more than that. But I guess to me, the story is not like a, “Here’s all the bad things men have done to me before!” It’s a story about a woman coming of age and finding her own voice.

NT: I definitely was getting that from the book. I guess what I meant was…On page 50, you wrote a particularly resonant line: “…when women expressed difficult emotions, they were crazy, but when men expressed difficult emotions, they were poetic.” So, my question was more along the lines of: now looking back at it, did you sense this gender bias at the time, as well as, I don’t know, the weirdness of it all?

GM: I mean that’s such a good question. There was not the kind of social awareness that there is now, you know? I started touring before smartphones, before people were on social media, before there was this kind of commentary on culture happening in a way that I was aware of. And I wish that I had been more tuned into like, the Riot Grrrl scene. Like, Bikini Kill would have been great for me; Sleater Kinney would have been great for me. I somehow was just in this teeny pocket in the western suburbs of Chicago, where it was 98% men. It was such a boys’ club, and so I was part of the boys’ club…And yeah, there was this double standard! Men expressed difficult emotions, women worshiped them, and thought they were poetic, whereas when women expressed difficult emotions, people would criticize them or say they were crazy or whatever.

But in our scene, we did have a few really amazing women performers. Hayley [Williams] from Paramore was coming up at the same time as us. I remember when she and I met, we were at The Bamboozle Festival in New Jersey, and she might be like, one year younger than me. She was like, “Do you parents go on tour with you?” And I was like, “No, why? Do yours?” She responded, “Yeah, they won’t let us go on tour without them, and they won’t let us be alone in a room…” (I think she was dating a band member at the time, but I’m not sure.) I remember thinking then, ‘Oh my God, my parents are so wild and crazy to let me go on tour without them! Like, I’m so lucky!’ So, I mean, we were so young to be doing what we were doing.

In that era, the record label taught us essentially what influencers do now. Again, this is pre-smartphone, but I remember that they gave us these little flip cameras, and they would say, “Just film everything. Film backstage scenes, rehearsals, silly hijinks, your day off. Then send us the camera, and we’ll edit together some b-roll that can be shared on blogs.” We were basically being coached how to broadcast our private tour moments into public content, which now so many people in our generation are doing regularly. Now, I’m so much more conscious of what aspects of my life are truly precious, private, and will never be shared publicly, and then what will be shared publicly. But at that age, it was sort of like, “Oh, this is our job. We should just share everything they want us to share.” I think I felt really powerless at the time, not because people were forcing me to do things, but because I was under the impression that I should be grateful to be here. I better play along with whatever game this is.

NT: Right. And that feeling really came across when you shared the anecdote of your third album, and the way that Pete Wentz promoted it. [He restaged the viral nude photo of himself with The Hush Sound’s Goodbye Blues CD covering his crotch.] That, in retrospect, was a little crazy because there fully was a 16-year-old girl on the cover.

Greta Morgan releases her new book The Lost Voice on May 20th. Read Victoria Borlando’s interview with the author and accomplished singer/songwriter and musician

GM: Oh, you’ve seen the photograph? Have you seen the image?

NT: Yeah, it’s…It’s a lot!

GM: Yeah, it’s insane. And again, the band was a democracy. We got to vote on his releasing that photo: three of them voted yes, and I voted no, and I got out voted!

NT: You also recounted a photo shoot for young women in the alt rock scene you appeared in when you were around sixteen. You drew a lot of attention to the people putting a lot of makeup on you and asking you to purse your lips for the camera, making comments like, “She’s like if Britney Spears could write good music!” How did that make you feel at the time? Because it’s a particularly charged statement, especially when pop is dominated by women, and it’s also implicitly devalued compared to rock. It sometimes feels like women’s music is always going to be considered a bit below men’s, even if they do the same thing.

GM: Yeah, gosh, that’s such a good question. You know, I think I would be retroactively creating an opinion for what I had then. Because at that age, that was just the water I was swimming in. It’s sort of like how people imagine whatever their childhood was. Oftentimes we imagine, “Oh, doesn’t everyone else live like this? Doesn’t everyone else’s parents act like this too?” It takes until you get older and spend time in other people’s houses, for you to realize that was a unique experience for you. So at that age, modeling for Teen People and the gender norms around songwriting at the time—I didn’t even think at that age to question it because it just felt like that’s what it is to be a musician. I didn’t know at the time that it was weird for photographers to put completely unnatural makeup on me, put fake eyelashes on, and style my hair in a way that I would never do.

Everyone talks about The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, and Buddy Holly; and like…well, I like Fleetwood Mac because there are women in Fleetwood Mac, you know? I would look for my emblems where I could sort of see myself in them and try to keep that as my North Star. And it’s interesting now because I teach writing workshops, and I encourage people from the very beginning to just be so empowered about the way their voice sounds, about embracing the strangeness of their life, and writing to their skill sets. I want them to make sure that their art really feels authentic and that they present their music in a way that feels true to them.

NT: After this experience with The Hush Sound and this very male dominated space, in alternative rock, there’s a turning point in your memoir where you go into your friendship with Jenny Lewis, as well as a circle of female singer-songwriters and artists in the industry you cultivated. I wanted to get more of your perspective on your friendship with her, the progression from the fan—especially since she was also huge as a part of Rilo Kiley—to collaborator and friend. How have other women in the scene helped you grow into the person you’ve become?

GM: Yeah, totally. When I was mentioning bands like Fleetwood Mac, where there was an amazing woman involved, Rilo Kiley was also one of those bands. It’s the same with Azure Ray—a lot of Saddle Creek artists had women in them who I really looked up to. So, for almost 10 years, I played exclusively with men. And then when I started playing with women, it was just a revelation. I can’t make ups stereotypes because all the men I played with were different, and there were plenty of women I jammed with who didn’t vibe with me. (There were also plenty of men I jammed with where we didn’t vibe, and vice-versa.) So i’m not going to make broad generalizations in that way, but it was just really wonderful to enter this sisterhood—an empowering sisterhood of women supporting each other in music.

I think most of the young female singer-songwriters in LA were aware of Jenny’s work and really admired her, you know? She strikes such a beautiful note in her music where it’s clever, playful, and soulful. She has this tremendous voice, and one of the famous things about meeting her was just that she was so generous, kind, and funny. People say sometimes not to meet your idols, but my experience hanging out with her was just so wonderful, and she has continued to be a really, really generous friend to this day, even while I was in between careers. Like, when I couldn’t tour because of long COVID, and I hadn’t yet sold my book nor finalized the classes I was teaching, Jenny let me live at her house. She now sold it, but she had a house in Nashville during that time when I was trying out the city and also figuring out how to rebuild my livelihood. Jenny has continued to be a really loving and supporting friend from when I met her until now.

NT: Oh, that’s awesome to hear! I mean, to me, she and like, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were my idols. They were the coolest people ever when I was a kid, which is really funny because, you know, not even being ten years old at the time, maybe I shouldn’t have been so tapped into into that scene…But there I was!

GM: I totally get why you would be obsessed with Karen O; she’s so cool! Plus, the outfits, everything she did, the songs—yeah, she is amazing! …Funnily enough, I actually saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play from side stage on The Hush Sound tour with Fall Out Boy, and we played one festival. When I watched her perform, I was just amazed by how free she is. Seeing her freedom on stage made me realize just how timid and self-conscious I was at the time. Like, she was just so wild and beautiful on stage.

NT: I guess this is a neat transition into my next question which is the theme of unconventionality that comes through in The Lost Voice: the way that you find your voice, the way that you go through the different stages throughout your life reaching milestones in ways you didn’t expect. (For instance, you begin the book at Madison Square Garden, only you’re singing songs by a different band, and they instructed you to try to sing like a different singer.) So, while trying to piece together the meaning in in your life as you come to understand it now, how do you see these random moments pieced together and make sense of it?

GM: I have started to believe that life has its own innate intelligence, and that often what we want is not what life actually wants for us. And so, when life takes away our dream, we can either go into a state of resentment, resistance, and victimhood, or we can start to dance with what’s happening. I’m speaking from my own experience with my life; I would never tell anyone else on this planet how to live. But for my own life, when I was in resistance to what was happening with my voice, I felt like my spirit escaped my body. Like I just felt completely empty, and when I did feel full, it was full of anger and pain. Once I started surrendering and realizing that this is what’s happening, I asked myself, ‘How am I going to dance with it? This is what life is giving me; how am I going to say yes to it, even though it’s not what I want?’ That’s my general perspective: to trust that life has its own intelligence and that, although I don’t have control over my destiny, I do have control over how I dance with what’s happening.

NT: As for the structure of your book, you begin your story by singing songs from other people. You sing at the Vampire Weekend concert—that’s the first anecdote—but when you get into your childhood, you say that you’re listening to a lot of singer-songwriters. Then at the end, you conclude your memoir confidently after having found your own voice with your writer’s workshop, notably teaching other people how to write songs and channel their own voices. How has this pathway shaped the way that you perceive your own lyrics? Do you often go back into your childhood and see that unafraid writing style now that you’re teaching other people, especially younger people, and how have these multi-generational relationships that you’ve encountered throughout the years influenced your writing style?

GM: I didn’t even mean to have it be like the book starts where I’m singing other people’s music and ends with me singing my own, like I didn’t even consciously choose that. So that that’s a cool reflection.

One of the biggest things that has happened to me with music is that music is no longer my livelihood. So that has taken off all the pressure. Like, I am no longer a touring musician, I am no longer performing—although I will be doing three book dates and playing some music there. But in general, I’m focused and recovering from long COVID, and I’m not touring. (I get streaming revenue and occasionally music royalties, but it is not paying my rent every month.)

That has given me so much freedom and playfulness with music. For example, I bought one of those five-year diaries where you write about five lines a day, you know? And since the beginning of the year, I’ve just been writing a chorus a day. I’ll sit down and write a song, a title, a chorus, a lyric, and then I’ll do it again the next day. And again, the next day. I’ve been doing it for like…I guess I have 90 song ideas! It brings me so much joy that I’m not sitting there crunching like, ‘Is this going to be a hit? I better book time to do this and that!’ Having no pressure to write, it actually lets me play music.

In the book I often describe it as “playing music,” but so often I forget the “play” part. I do think that, specifically with music, I have disconnected the art from commerce. Worrying about commerce, status, who’s recording what song, professionalism, and all this stuff: that is no longer part of my musical life. Now, I’m more of a listener and a writer—someone who gets to jam alongside people and play others’ songs. And it’s just out of pure love! In a way, that takes me back to 20 years ago when I was 15-16 and just starting to play, and there was no pressure. I’m like, going back to the beginning and uncovering that love again, where there’s love without criticism and pressure.

NT: With your experience participating in the “commerce” of music—you have to write a record every three years, you have to do the press tour, you have to go on tour for months, etc.—for years, what did you take away from it that eventually made you step away and realize that this is not how you want to approach music?

GM: Well, I didn’t choose to step away from it. I really, physically could not do it. Vampire Weekend invited me to rejoin the live band, which I loved doing, but I had just been in the hospital with two major medical emergencies. I had to move home and live with my mom for two months. At the time when they invited me to rejoin the band, I was just like, ‘There is there is no way possible.’ So, it wasn’t an intentional choice. I wasn’t like, ‘I want to take commerce out of music!’ It was just more like, ‘Okay, this is what life is giving me.’ I can’t sing my old catalogue anymore, and I can’t tour. Right now, I believe the body is capable of miracles, and I hope I can play shows again one day, but I just don’t know when that’ll be.

One of the amazing things I will say that happened is that I no longer am fooled by commercialism. Sometimes with songs on the radio, one of the things that makes them so catchy is the production, whereas if you just sat down and played them on the piano, you might notice that not that much is happening there. Like, in my songwriting workshops, there are a lot of people in the group who write songs that, if they were produced the right way, are better than what I’m hearing on the radio. But I think it’s easy sometimes to be tricked by production—by the smoke and mirrors. So, one of the things that’s happened since I have separated commerce from music is that I can hear a song for what it is in a much clearer and better way. And I love a lot of pop songs on the radio, so I will say that, but yeah, there’s just…there’s a different way of listening.

I also feel like I listen without singing about myself as much. Like, I listen more as a person wanting to have an experience as opposed to listening as a person who wants to build their musical legacy. When I was younger, I was much more concerned with “Being Somebody” (in capital letters). I really wanted and needed to be somebody: I think all of that came from a wound of unworthiness. And of course, I love music, and I love being creative, and I always wanted to express myself, but I no longer feel that, even when I’m having prolific periods and writing a lot of songs. I’m going to make another instrumental record [soon]; the attitude with which I’m doing it is just so much simpler and humbler. It’s basically like, ‘Can I just write and record something that I would enjoy listening to?’ And that’s it! I’m not thinking, ‘Is this going to make it on Pitchfork?’ or, ‘Will I get to tour with so-and-so?’ or, ‘Would so-and-so ever record this?’ I’m really just like, ‘Is this something I would listen to?’ If the answer is yes, then I’m proud of it, and it’s a success to me.

NT: I guess part of it is out of necessity to do the instrumental records, but has there also been a liberation and improvement in self- expression through pure music that you’ve noticed when it comes to writing and composing more instrumental work?

GM: Yeah! I haven’t been as prolific in the last three years as I was the three years before. I would say a big part of it is just because I’ve been putting so much of my creative energy toward healing my body and writing the book. But I’m able to write differently now in the sense that…I mean, I talked a lot about dancing with life. One of the things with long COVID is that I now meditate three to five hours a day. Like, I’m just imagining, ‘Okay, I’m on a year-and-a-half-long retreat. I need so much rest, and I need so much recovery time.’ I think because I’m able to access these altered states of awareness that I’m consciously practicing so many hours a day, when I am writing music, it just feels more like channeling. Like, it really does feel like an altered state of consciousness. I know how grand that sounds—I don’t mean for it to sound like I’m pulling the music down from the cosmos! But there is a different kind of consciousness in the way that I play now. I don’t know whether a listener would catch that, or whether it’s just my own experience while I’m playing and writing, so I would say I play and write less now than I did then as far as the hours in the day. But the time doing it is much more highly concentrated and feels much more magical…Sorry, that was like, such a verbal jam!

NT: No, it was great! Honestly, this is the space to work through all of that, which is which is the beauty of a conversation, I think…Another big piece of this puzzle that you put together in The Lost Voice is dealing with spirituality. It also contributes to the unconventionality of your book because you begin going to a Catholic prep school and living a traditional Catholic upbringing, and then as you get older and you become more content with the fact that the world isn’t in anyone’s control, you kind of take on this more general embrace of spiritualism. So, I wanted to know more about this journey and how spiritualism plays a role in your attitude toward life, as well as music-making and writing your memoir.

GM: Yeah, what a wonderful question. Firstly, I respect everyone’s spiritual choices and would never offer a prescription for anyone else. Anything I speak about this topic is just from my own experience. I do feel that spiritualism is anything that makes me feel like I have a spirit in my body—that reminds me it’s alive. So ultimately, the goal of any kind of spiritual practice for me is alive-ness, immediately followed by compassion and service. My spiritual practices are very nature-based. Like, I live in a very wild place in the Catskills: everyday I’m out engaging with the landscape. I’m sitting by the creek, I’m leaning against the trees, I’m hanging out with the deer who sleep in my yard and looking at the fisher cads. I’m also about to move to a house where there are bears that have been living on the property for three and a half years—they have a den on the land. So, communing with the land sounds like it’s a huge part of my social and spiritual life. Like, when I see the deer in the yard almost every morning, it gives me the feeling like I’m seeing a friend at the coffee shop. I’m like, ‘Oh, you’re back!” I do a lot of practices where I use the wild world as a mirror for parts of my own psyche. A lot of times, I’ll bring a question out to the land. If I’m trying to make a decision, I’ll ask, for instance, ‘How should I do this project? How should I repair this relationship? What should I get my mom for Christmas?’ Then I’ll just go for a walk and ask the land, and often an answer will come to me. So, the nature connection is a really big part of it.

And then creativity is a huge part of my spirituality. I mean, I love a lot of the mystic artists! Like, I would say Georgia O’Keefe is a mystic artist; Hilma af Klint is a mystic artist. Alice Coltrane, to me, makes me believe that music is the most mystical art form. I mean, songs are invisible: they live in the air! When a person has Alzheimer’s and cannot remember any details about their life, including their own name, they usually can still remember the lyrics to their favorite song from when they were a kid… Like, there are these ways in which music has this magical and unexplainable effect on the brain, on our bodies, and on our souls. So, I definitely do treat music as a mystic art form.

And then, you know, I think compassion and service are the other elements. Compassion and service are what separates a new age kind of spiritual bypassing from something that is actually grounded and brooded in an interdependent community. Some things I think about are how I relate to my neighbors, how I relate to people in my community, what I choose to donate to, or how I’m preparing a class. I’m just always asking, ‘How can I be of service to this situation?’ And those answers are sometimes big and sometimes small—sometimes very small! Sometimes you can be of service by just shutting up and listening.

NT: I found this particular detail really amusing and interesting, as it breaks almost completely from the prose you’ve written. You’re on one of your spiritual retreats in the desert, and you hallucinate a screenplay-like conversation with Leonard Cohen. What’s your personal relationship with Cohen, and have you done any more reflecting on why you hallucinated this artist and what he means and symbolizes to you?

GM: He is definitely a mythological figure! I think what he symbolizes to me is a highly-concentrated artistic potency that involves both sex and holiness. So like, he lived in the monastery. He was a really disciplined student of Zen and other practices too, I think. (I don’t know his full biography.) But the meditation element, the hunger for pleasure and desire in life, and the concentrated beauty of his work—I find that combination to be really, really inspiring.

And this is so crazy! So, someone I know up here in the Hudson Valley gave me a pin that Leonard Cohen gave him for my birthday. He gave this to my friend 18 years ago when my friend was living in Los Angeles. This pin says, “Thanks for the dance!” I said to my friend, ‘Do you know that’s Leonard Cohen’s posthumous record?’ He said “No, I didn’t know that!” One of the last songs Leonard wrote is called “Thanks For the Dance,” which means that this pin—that phrase—stayed with him for however long he’s had this until he died. And the fact that this came to me so easily and as a gift on my birthday, it made me wonder if I was actually hallucinating Leonard…Like, was like…is he…is it real?! It just felt so absurdly metal to me, truly wild. But yeah…I mean, I talk to friends and family members who are dead like, all the time, you know? In my mind, I’ll walk around, I’ll have conversations with them. But I never knew Leonard Cohen in life, and I’m not going to presume that I actually know him in death, but I do really appreciate and admire his work. And I find things like this to be indications that the universe is magical beyond our wildest dreams.

NT: Yeah, I mean, that’s a crazy story, but one thing I was holding off on mentioning until the end is that I’m having a similar experience right now. You begin your novel with the 2019 Madison Square Garden concert with Vampire Weekend, and crazily enough, that was the first concert I attended when I moved to New York for college. So, getting to talk to you, it’s like, “Wow, it’s so interesting that a new part of my life begins at the same point where a new part of her life begins!” That concert symbolized the beginning of a new chapter in my adult life. Now knowing that there’s someone else whose life also changed at that concert in a way is crazy. And I get to talk to her and tell her how inspiring I found her book.

GM: Well, that’s so sweet and awesome! So you’re still living in New York City now?

NT: Yes! I live in Manhattan, the Upper West Side area.

GM: Oh, I stayed with friends there once! Near Central Park.

NT: Nice! It’s a beautiful area, especially now that it’s spring. On that note, are there any final reflections that you have on your memoir, passing the things you’ve learned along to the next generation of writers and readers, and what you would like to expect from the reception when it finally reaches bookshelves?

GM: I hope that this book finds everyone who is meant to read it. That’s really my only wish. If I could give advice to my 16-year-old self, I would just say to trust your voice. How you want to express yourself is how you should express yourself, and you can trust that! The more you trust it, the stronger that muscle becomes. If I were giving advice to my younger self or up-and-coming writers, I would say worthiness is a gift you give yourself. You can’t expect other people to understand your vision while you’re in the process of making something. It’s really, really important to only share embryonic work with people who you really trust.

Order The Lost Voice by Greta Morgan HERE