Tems speaks about bullying because of her high-pitched voice while growing up.
Singer, Tems has opened up about her journey into music and how her voice affected her while growing up.
‘The ‘Me &U’ star said this in an exclusive interview with The Cut.
She revealed she didn’t speak until she was 3 years old, but singing came more naturally. She also said she was very reserved as a child.
“I was always in my own little world. I wasn’t very social,” Tems told the magazine. This soon made her the target of bullying.
The 28-year-old says she was also the songwriter in her group in primary school. “When I did make friends, I would try to make them sing my songs,” she says.
By high school, she had become very conscious of her ‘high pitch’ voice“. All the other girls had these sweet, high voices,” she says. “And my voice had bass.”
“She still didn’t speak much, didn’t have much of a social circle, and her status as an outcast made her a target of ridicule,” reads an excerpt from the magazine.
Outside of school, her voice got unsolicited comments and observations from strangers and even family members about her pitch, leading her to believe she sounded like a boy or a frog or that her voice was otherwise ugly.
Things, however, took a turn for her when she was under the tutelage of her high school music teacher, Mr. Sosan.
“He would be like, ‘What are you doing? Sing with your real voice,’” she says. “And I’d say, ‘I don’t know what my real voice is.’”
This approach soon led her to have the courage to sound like herself. She said: “I thought, If you think I sound like a man, I think that’s pretty cool—I’m gonna sound more like a man,” she said. “I started to want that deepness. I wanted to lean into my weirdness.”
