Have you tried listening to wail song?
Part of an occasional series - Suffer No More - this week I share an in-depth lifestyle protocol for managing stress I've developed over many years. Perhaps you'd like to try it?
Listen, it’s a weird one this week - but then I’ve had a very stressful week, I’m sure we all have. Only actually I haven’t because I’m writing this on Sunday before the week begins, but that’s because I know it’s about to be a very stressful week, and anyway I was already stressed from the previous week. I think it’s likely I won’t get any time to write Unsavory News in the coming evenings because I’ll be trying to deal with the enormous stressors of the day. Fortunately I’ve developed several very effective ways of dealing with them.
Because I contain such a wealth of untapped knowledge I’ve decided to start an occasional series within Unsavory News called Suffer No More where I impart my best stress-reduction methods. I thought this would be helpful for everyone (also my other idea for a newsletter this week ‘I’ve always hated Neil Gaiman, but its because I think his writing is bad’ didn’t feel appropriate in the circumstances.)
You’re probably wondering how I came to be so excellent at coping (if you aren’t, you will be by the end of the newsletter!) and I suppose really it’s two things - firstly, I’m just constitutionally strong and able, secondly, I fall asleep every single night to chirpy pseudo-new age lifestyle Youtubers who tell me ways to reduce my stress. They’re always Californian women who have videos with titles like Live Slow Through Journaling, or Stop Doomscrolling to Unlock Your Heart Chakra. It’s insane bilge and I hate to think what it’s doing to me subconsciously while I sleep (if that’s even a thing, these women would certainly tell you it is). One of the things I enjoy most in these videos is that they always start with a little slide explaining that what follows is not medical advice - and of course it’s not medical advice! - I didn’t think a three hour video called Manifest with Neville Goddard would be medical advice! But in the spirit of those women the Suffer No More series is also, similarly, not medical advice. Though I do think it’s better than the NHS stress page, which I do not enjoy. To be honest I think what you’re about to read and hear is more medical advice than that medical advice (but once again it isn’t medical advice, although having said that…)
Suffer No More - No.1 - How to Develop, Record and Deploy Your Wail Song
NO! Wrong!
Whale song was developed by whales and has been being deployed by them ever since, it was recorded and introduced to a non-whale audience for the first time by Roger Payne, as part of Greenpeace’s general pro-whale efforts in the 1970s. From there it leaked into the cultural firmament as a stress-busting tool, and for the following thirty or so years it was the soundtrack to countless yoga classes, hypnotherapy sessions, and immersion tank experiments - did we save the whales? Guess we must have done, and we probably did it all very calmly.
In contrast, or perhaps in parallel, I first developed and deployed wail song in 2011 in direct response to being made to write my dissertation. I recorded it the following week straight into my early 2010 model Apple Mac. This newsletter is wail song’s first public outing as a stress-busting tool - but I promise you, it’s extremely effective. I’ve been using and refining it for over a decade, longer actually.
I first found myself making strange quasi-involuntary but extremely expressive noises at 16 years old. While doctors would claim, in their fusty old reductive way, that this was a tick developed in response to stress. What it actually was was the first stirrings of a lifestyle protocol I was consciously workshopping to manage that very same stress, and that would one day reframe the way we think about self-expression.
Flash forward five years, and I, in a state of extreme tension, am trying to write 8,000 words (which doesn’t seem much in new money, but felt, at the time, impossibly and obscenely long). I have four weeks to go until it is due for submission. I’m sat in the living room of three friends, who are also all trying to write 8,000 words. Cups of tea, biscuits, tension… We’ve been at it for about four hours when I look up and say to them…
‘Everyone shut up a second!’
We weren’t talking, we we were all quietly typing.
‘Listen!… Everyone listen… This is how I feel when I’m sad!’
And then I sang a sort of strange song for about 20 seconds. I was just vocalising. Just giving it all free rein. Obviously I can’t tell you how they felt hearing it - but I assume it was quite moving. I assume they knew they were witnessing something profound. And anyway I’d misspoken (or rather misinterpreted - because at that point I didn’t have the intense emotional insight I would later develop via the wail song method!) - I wasn’t sad at all, I was stressed. We all were.
Later one of my friends posted on social media ‘it’s hard to write my dissertation when Anna Savory is making that horrible noise that demonstrates how she feels.’
But, here’s the thing, for me from that moment onward it was EASY to write my dissertation - as long as, while I typed, I kept up a constant wall of terrible expressive sound.
4 weeks, 8,000 words, constant wailing. I would say all my stress vanished overnight, but that isn’t true - it was actually that it never had a chance to settle, it didn’t manifest, I couldn’t feel the stress because it was coming straight out of my face!
I got a First Class degree (take that Lord Curzon!), and was offered a job in the English faculty at graduation. Sadly I hadn’t stopped deploying the method (the graduation ceremony in and of itself being quite stressful) so in response to this offer I wailed into the face of the Dean who turned and walked away. Never the less I credit these successes entirely to the ‘‘‘song’’’.
Of course it’s unreasonable in today’s workaday world to give yourself over to constant performance. Fortunately, with years of experimentation, I’ve found you can achieve similar stress reduction results by recording your song - and then listening back to it in moments of high tension, like you would with whale song - only rather than being a calming process, its more of a cathartic process!
Compelling stuff! So, how can you get started?
The First Tentative Steps towards Self Expression…
Understandably you’re now keen to try out wail song in your own life. To do this you will need to create your own bespoke wail song, I can’t do it for you, and listening to my wail song will have no reductive effect upon your stress levels at all, it may in fact increase them. HOWEVER DO NOT ATTEMPT WAIL SONG UNGUIDED! Follow the steps I have listed below to the letter.
Step 1 - Experience stress.
Step 2 - Go to a quiet place where you cannot be disturbed, or, importantly, overheard.
Step 3 - Now activate the record function on your phone or dictaphone.
Step 4 - Bring to mind what is causing your stress, hold it in the front of your head, clarify it in your thoughts, until you can feel it in your mind, as pressure in the forehead, neck and behind the eyes.
Step 5 - Now bring all of that down into the throat and express it in the form of a prolonged and unchecked wail!
Step 6 - Keep going. Have you heard of jazz noodling? Do that but with the stress.
Some of these steps are more demanding than others, and, yes, this is going to take you a few goes. You may find on the first attempt you lose yourself to wild screaming, you may find you break down completely and cry - TRUST THE PROCESS AND GO AGAIN.
To help you know the sort of thing you are aiming for below is a lovely snatch of my own, current wail song.
Can you believe I did that in one take and its completely unedited?! But then I am a wail song professional and the originator of the method.
Ironically mine does start off a bit whale-y there, expressing my general sadness and the concept of January, you’ll be able to hear I how it was starting to border on the sound dogs make when dying at the beginning - but, you see, my soul doesn’t want to despond, I have a will to live, and I wont let go! - so immediately afterwards it kicks into expressive gear! Friends and coworkers may be able to identify exactly what is being communicated at 0.06 second mark.
With patience and practice you too will reach these levels.
The aim of course is not to become good - it is to make something true. Your song will be as unique as you and your stressors are.
A few directive notes.
Do not scream. You can flirt around the edges of a scream. But don’t outright record yourself screaming - primal scream therapy is a different thing.
While you’re flirting round the edges, don’t accidentally make it sexy. There’s a fine line between a moan and a wail, and listening to your own semi-erotic noises will not reduce your stress (unless it does - no judgement here, but it shouldn’t.)
Do sing, but don’t sing too much. Singing is a trascendent act, however badly its done, it communicates some form of beauty, joy, or the higher instincts, so don’t lean into it too much. Remember you are expressing STRESS. Emphasis on the wail part, not the song part. It should sound like pure pain and pure shite.
Don’t overthink it - its the cardinal rule for all expressive acts. If you think I’m over-thinking, or even really thinking at all about what I’m writing in this newsletter right now, you are clearly wrong! A book is a sneeze, all composition is possession, and your wail song should come straight from your strained autonomic nervous system up out of your throat and into the world - a monstrous and spontaneous birth! Resist the urge to involve any of your critical faculties.
Ok, I’ve Got It, What Do I Do With It?
Congratulations - under my tutelage you’ve got a recording of yourself making an unhinged noise. The possibilities now are endless!
Listen to and learn it!
For best results you would simply perform one long improvised wail song until the stress remitted like I did in 2011. But the next best thing, and a technique I now use about once a month, is to record a few bars, and then expose yourself to it. Pop it on while you shower or wash up. You’ll soon find you know it by heart and are absent-mindedly wailing it under your breath whenever stress increases. This is a very positive sign! Aim to expose yourself to your wail song at least three times a day, for thirty days, or until everything in your life becomes ok again, whichever comes first.
Share it!
Treating people to live snatches of your song in public is a healthy way to communicate to those around you how stressed you are so they won’t give you any more work or responsibilities. Lowly under your breath on the tube is a start - but don’t be afraid, if your boss approaches you, to turn to them with a wide open mouth like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and deploy your wail song at full volume, so they stagger suddenly backwards!
Remember you always have the recording. That peaceful period just before going to sleep or just after waking up is a really lovely time to share it with your partner. Lean over in bed and explain you’ve made an audio file of a ‘song’ that expresses how stressed you are. Don’t break eye contact with them while it plays. They really know you’re under stress now, and they’ll probably be a lot kinder! If they start spontaneously singing along it’s time to marry them!
For the next seven days rather than falling asleep to 9 Rules for Increasing Your Vibrations as it is livestreamed to Youtube from a crystal shop in Pasenda, I’ll instead be falling asleep to the sound of my trusty wail song, and I’m confident it will help me sail (and/or wail) through this terrible week ahead.
I hope you’ve enjoyed being introduced to the life-changing power of wail song. I’ve got a lot more stress reduction protocols inside me - all tried and tested, so there are four additional Suffer No Mores to come including Simulate Your Own Burial and The Power of Cruelty. To make sure you receive them along with the normal Unsavory News newsletters about ghosts, and people from history I fancy, subscribe here.
If you’re thinking ‘fortnightly is nowhere near enough’ then good news - you can pay me for my work (sorry it’s hard to type that when my ‘work’ this week was an embedded audio recording of me making a terrible noise) and get a newsletter every single Friday! It’s not really my place to say, but I recommend paying for the annual subscription because then Substack and Stripe only take a one-off cut, rather than graspingly milking me and you by taking a punishing cut every single month! Also I personally find it easier, psychologically, to spend a moderately large amount of money once and then forget about it - one and done, like ripping off a plaster - after which I can enjoy a year of content almost as if it were all free. You may however be a better economist than me.
Until next time,
WaaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHH-mmmaaa-aa-aaa—aaaaAnna.