Love Me Introduces: Voice Lessons from Signal Hill

March 30, 2026·37 min·3 clips

At age 12, Amelia's father learned that his grandmother had survived the Holocaust, losing her first husband, her son, and her parents — a revelation he describes as 'a crack in the fabric of everything.'

The documentary opens with Love Me host Lou introducing Signal Hill, a twice-yearly audio journal, and a piece from their latest issue called Voice Lessons by Amelia Schoenbeck. Amelia begins working with a voice teacher, not for skill but to explore a silence she senses in her family. Her father describes being a late and careful speaker in childhood and recounts a vivid dream at age nine of a blue-skinned man behind a furnace, which his grandfather dismissed rather than engaged with. He describes learning at age 12, alongside his sister Eileen, that their grandmother had survived a Nazi concentration camp — losing her first husband, her young son, and her parents — and had only later met and married their grandfather. He describes the revelation as 'a crack in the fabric of everything,' followed by a single conversation and then total silence on the subject. Finnish scholar Laura Joviala explains the tradition of lamenting in Karelian and eastern Finnish culture: older women skilled in lamenting were called to guide the dead through transformation and to give communities permission to grieve openly. The voice, Joviala explains, is unlike a limb — it connects a person's interior world to the outside while also reaching back inward. Amelia continues her voice lessons, struggling to stop monitoring herself. Her teacher sets exercises in which Amelia is asked to produce sounds that arise from imagined situations: defending a baby from a lion, or releasing whatever the body needs to express. Amelia describes learning a song about dying because it feels like a bridge to her grandmother and to dead people more generally. She tells her teacher that singing it feels true in the moment, but that listening back to herself she hates the sound. Her teacher names this as a split between her capacity for integrity and her tendency toward perfection. Amelia's father recalls the grandmother as physically fast, emotionally controlled, and terrified of thunderstorms — so terrified that their grandfather would take the children outside to watch the storm so the grandmother's fear would not contaminate them. He notes how different his grandmother was from his grandfather in terms of emotional availability; the grandfather was the patient one who sat with fears. Amelia describes how explosive anger and loneliness thread through the family across generations, and her father expresses surprise at hearing she cried every day at kindergarten drop-off — something he says he never saw. In the final section, Amelia's father recalls the grandmother's deathbed disclosure: asked about her first son, she gave his Czech name, Yerji — George — said she had not wanted children because of what had happened to him, and then said that she was glad she had had them after all.

As heard by us

A tender documentary about family silence, voice, and the effort it takes to sound oneself out.

An old family silence opens into a careful study of voice, fear, and the effort to say what has stayed buried. Amelia Schoenbeck keeps it grounded in small, physical details: open sounds, hesitation, and the strain of a voice trying to push past fear and self-doubt.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When a family silence needs a song to open it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Love Me