Lauren Elkin was “born singing.” She sang before she spoke. Naturally musical, but never a prodigy, she became obsessed with musical theatre after her parents took her to see Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George when she was six. As a theatre kid she mixed with other theatre-loving tragics, attended a performing arts high school, and performed in musicals. Her trajectory seemed set, but there were early signs musical theatre would not be her destiny. During voice lessons, she discovered she had been “breathing wrong all my life.” Try as she might, it was a problem she never overcame. Her vocal break — “where the chest voice meets the head voice” — became “the site of vocal shame, of vulnerability.”
By the end of high school, with a failed audition marking a turning point, Elkin was smart enough to intuit that as good as she was, she lacked the necessary confidence and charisma to make it big on the stage. She became a successful writer and translator instead, though to this day she remains “more attuned to music than to language” and “sometimes worries that I am a fraud as a writer, because I am not essentially a writer; I am a musician who got into writing.”
Elkin’s new book, Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power, has its origins in her widely acclaimed work of non-fiction Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023). She planned a couple of chapters on music in her wider study of feminist art and artists in the 1970s, but she had a more personal story to tell. Elkin’s non-fiction has consistently mixed cultural history and critique with feminist analysis and memoir, but in Vocal Break she is as front and centre as she has ever been — as a fan, as a critic, and as a middle-aged white woman who came of age in the 1990s, the decade “when feminism was back in full force and girls and women were using their voices in explicitly political ways.” Among them was Vocal Break cover star Kathleen Hanna of riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, whose motto “Girls to the Front” could have worked as a title for the book if it wasn’t already taken.
Elkin has come to appreciate Bikini Kill and especially Hanna’s “insistent, sing-song-y, nasal, mocking, uptalking, vocal frying” voice (“everything that men revile about women’s voices”), but she was never a riot grrrl. When Bikini Kill broke through, it wasn’t to her gang of theatre kids in suburban Long Island. Two of the singers she was drawn to back then, Tori Amos and PJ Harvey, are still performing and making new music. What she beautifully captures in Vocal Break is the ascendance of their respective unique talents, told from the perspective of Elkin the high school girl who “needed Tori Amos”: “It was like no pop music I’d ever heard before.” Not long after, she became obsessed with PJ Harvey’s song “Sheela-na-gig” with the charged words “you exhibitionist!” She blends her discovery of their music into a fresh telling of their origin stories, of how they — and she — came to be.
Distinctly imbued with a “90s white girl energy,” Vocal Break makes a weighty companion to a growing genre of memoirs of women singers and musicians who were part of the mainstreaming of alternative music in that decade, among them Hanna, Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and most recently, Melissa Auf der Maur of Hole. Readers of Elkin’s vintage (and I’m one of them) may also share other pop cultural touchstones with her, such as having to pledge allegiance to either Cyndi Lauper or Madonna back in the 1980s. Elkin chose Lauper, and her tender tribute is a highlight. But she makes no claims to being a definitive guide to the music of her youth, offering instead a pleasurably idiosyncratic and thoughtful sojourn through her evolving tastes and curiosities.
She confesses to apathy about the current crop of “young singers you hear on the radio, attractive young women of middling talent singing middling songs.” To atone, she scrutinises Billie Eilish, confronting her own “preconceptions about soft female voices, her own internalised misogyny.” And if at first Elkin considered herself too old to appreciate Charli XCX, repeat listens of the Brat album reveal to her what’s possible with an auto-tuned voice.
Elkin is less hesitant about the power of Beyoncé’s voice, spotlighting the track “Sandcastles” from the celebrated Lemonade album as an exemplary expression of a vocal break, where the “crack makes the song.” Against reductive interpretations of Lemonade as an album “about” Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z’s infidelity, she convincingly argues for it as “autofiction” — an analysis which could also apply to Lily Allen’s sensational 2025 album West End Girl, to name just one obvious candidate.
Stretching back to the “one of history’s great sopranos, Erminia Frezzolini,” born in Italy in 1818, Vocal Break is as wide-ranging as it gets, while stopping short of a “feminist history of music.” Highlights include a chapter pairing Celine Dion and Edith Piaf (Elkin, a Francophile, is an award-winning translator of books in French into English), a reappraisal of Maria Callas, and a layered analysis of the song “Zombie” by Irish band the Cranberries which justly praises the “superlative” songcraft of the lead singer and songwriter, the late Dolores O’Riordan, as well as the song’s political potency. Throughout, Elkin offers invigorating revisionism in service of her stated goal of helping “the reader hear music by women differently, by attending to the body in the voice.”
Perhaps inevitably for a book clocking in at more than 300 pages, and yoked together by a narrator who more than once shares her dreams, Vocal Break does occasionally stretch the reader’s patience. And while boldly and consistently expressed, Elkin’s abiding historical argument that women’s voices have been, and continue to be, dangerous, disciplined and punished, was sometimes more rhetorical than substantiated. As she illustrates, the shocking contemporary example of the Taliban in Afghanistan introducing a law barring women from speaking in public has historical precedents, but the leap from this discussion to such claims as “we need our female singers to be vulnerable and polished, singing sad love songs” is not always persuasive.
What Elkin does best is take women seriously — as artists, as singers, as political actors, as a collective and on their own terms. Vocal Break concludes as an explicit political intervention into a world where violence against women is a constant, “across the planet and across town,” including in the lives of the singers profiled in the book. What lingers more powerfully, however, is not the polemic but the personal. From the vantage point of middle-age — but with her six-year old and teenaged singing selves in the rearview mirror — Elkin steps into the “uncertainty and vulnerability” that is intrinsic to the vocal break, and to life itself. •
Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power
By Lauren Elkin | Chatto and Windus | $65 | 384 pages
