In August of 1972, a group named The Main Ingredient released a hit single called “Everybody Plays the Fool.”  (The lead singer, by the way, was Cuba Gooding, Sr. – yes, the actor’s father.)

None of that has anything to do with this week’s tip.

Last time, we talked about really starting to gain understanding and control of your inflection, so you lose the “disc jockey” sound and simply become the one voice in the room people just want to listen to.

Here’s another step.

What all great air talents and great voice actors have in common is that they’re INTERESTING.

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There comes a time in every career when you have to stop being a polished reader of words or some sort of veneer, and just become yourself.  That “self” may be a somewhat invented persona like Larry David’s on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” or it may as revealing of who you really are as possible, given the format.

But you need voice acting chops to accomplish this.  Here’s a three-word exercise that’ll help you both on the air and in commercial voiceover work:

Really

Really

Really

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You hear this every day, if you listen long enough: The same stories, with almost, or nearly almost the exact same wording every newscast. This is a quick way to not stand out at all.

One of radio’s greatest pioneers, Gordon McLendon, even though he primarily did Top 40 (which he and Kansas City’s Todd Storz INVENTED), was known for hiring and training incredibly talented News staffs.  I had the great pleasure of working with two of them, at KNUS in Dallas (which helped change the landscape of FM radio in the early seventies) and KILT, longtime Top 40 giant in Houston.

Both news staffs were incredible – chock full of amazing writers with riveting deliveries, every bit as much “personalities” as the disc jockeys were.  And each of them learned on Day One the McLendon Rule: Rewrite every story for every newscast.

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A morning show host I work with recently found cause to read a poem on the air.  While he meant well, it really stalled out the momentum of the show, and basically just sounded less personal.  Here’s the right technique to use:

Paraphrase it, using your own words to frame the subject, then only directly quote a very SHORT quote or passage from whatever it is you’re bringing to the table – whether it’s a poem, like in this case, or an article about something.

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On Friday, October 13th 2017, Leta Hopwood passed away two months to the day after her 92nd birthday.

Hopwood was her maiden name.  She was my mother.  She taught me to read when I was three years old.  (By the time I entered 1st grade, I was reading at 7th grade level.)

She taught me to sing harmony when I was nine, as we drove from Shreveport, Louisiana to Colorado Springs after my dad was drafted into the Army.  (I later sang in a very popular band, and have sung on dozens of jingles that you might have heard.)

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Millennial Overspeak is a new dialect.  Not every single person in that age group uses it, of course, but it’s an easy (albeit cheap shot) reference for unnecessary glitz, so it’s become a hard-and-fast impression.

Phrases such as “I’m SO going to do that,” or describing something as “Unbelievably, spectacularly good” is overkill.  And like everything served up too often, you actually LOSE impact.  So the words you’re choosing to make something “bigger” or more “dramatic” usually just make whatever you’re talking about come across as pompous, overstated, or simply trying too hard.  These are qualities that push the listener away, rather than bring him or her closer to you.

Let’s try to make our words count.  “He was dead” doesn’t need an adverb or adjective.  “He was SO dead” doesn’t make it more expressive; it just makes you sound like you have to expand everything in order to feel important.  Eww.

Listeners, even if they’re not consciously thinking about it, value their TIME over anything else.

That’s the challenge, and why you really need to work at getting better, smoother, subtler, more animated when necessary, a great voice actor, a friend – the one they look FORWARD to being with.

Ask yourself whether there are “dead spots” in your show, or breaks where you kind of put it on autopilot.  If you’re wasting the listener’s time on any sort of consistent basis, he or she is going to stop giving it to you.

We hear a lot these days about being “transparent” on the air, and I get what the spirit of that is.  But being totally transparent can be too close to the bone.

I always use the term “being open.”

Being open is different, and better.  If you’re unsure where the line is between openness and transparency, just remember this:  Nobody goes to a party to watch a guy fight with his wife.  You’re in the Entertainment business.  Some things SHOULDN’T be revealed.

Get a load of this… my friend Jerry Reynolds, who does “The Car Pro Show” in over 40 markets now, told me that he listens to WBAP in Dallas every morning.  When he gets to work, he turns on their app and listens to the show on his phone as he walks into the building. Once in his office, he plugs his phone into his computer (so the battery won’t run down too much), and continues to listen through his speakers until the show is over.

Now all the statistical evidence today would tell you that this is very untypical…

But I’ll bet it’s not.  I’ll bet it never was.  People find their favorite personalities and they become friends; companions in their lives.  With whatever available time they have, they listen.  It’s just that simple.

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The other day, for about the gazillionth time, I heard a jock who had a phone call thing going use the exact same story he had told to start the whole thing off as he went into a call.

In our session the next day, I told him, “I don’t get why you’d do this.  We just heard that story a few minutes ago.”

His thinking was that if someone just tuned in, they needed a reset to understand the call about it.

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