Pe Lanza reveals injury that affected him throughout the Restart tour: ‘I lost my voice’

THE Restart was still preparing for the first shows of the group’s reunion tour in September 2023, when the singer Father Lanza lost his voice in a casual conversation. There were just a few weeks left until the For You to Remember Tourwhich would mark the group’s reunion and farewell, with tickets for the first performance selling out in less than two hours.

“I went hoarse and lost my voice,” the musician recalled to Rolling Stone Brazilwhere he spoke for the first time about the problem that almost took him off stage. The case, which occurred at a dinner with friends, raised an alarm for him, as he had already noticed differences in his vocal performance in the previous two years – until then, a presumed hoarseness. “I thought I was just getting older.”

The disappearance of his voice was enough for him to seek help from an otolaryngologist. Reinaldo Yazakidirector of Institute of Artistic Voicewith whom the singer had previously worked. Heeded promptly, he remembers the doctor’s expression of astonishment when he performed the imaging tests.

“When I went, I was a little afraid, but I didn’t expect things to be the way they were, especially the size of the injury I was carrying. And then there was a very strong thud”, recalled Father Lanza.

The diagnosis: “a polyp, giant at that time, on the left vocal fold”, recalls Dr. Yazaki. “It is an inflammatory lesion, generally chronic, that grows due to the trauma that one fold causes or infringes on the other.” The ideal solution: surgery. At least in Yazaki’s reading for that moment.

“I asked the doctor, ‘Will I be able to sing?’”, recalls Father Lanza. “And he said: ‘Actually you will, because we will do everything possible and impossible for this, but the idea was for you to operate now’.”

“It was completely unfeasible at that moment”, recalls the doctor. Facing a tour that featured Pe Lanza on stage for dozens of performances the following year, “we had no other opportunity than to undergo clinical treatment, which is the serial monitoring of the condition of the vocal fold, along with vocal rest outside of shows, along with phono exercises to prevent the larynx from becoming tense”, recalls Yazaki.

Confidential treatment and the Restart reaction

The decision for treatment ended up also being accompanied by the option not to go public about his clinical condition. At that moment, Pe Lanza wanted to avoid damage to the confirmed Restart tour and the concern of fans, who had been waiting for that moment for at least eight years.

“I decided to tell very few people. That’s the real thing,” he says. He told his wife, he told his sister, but he didn’t tell his parents: “[Para] I didn’t want to tell my parents, because I think my parents are overzealous about things and could end up messing with my head a little.”

“The people who knew were the people who were working with me on the Restart tour. I couldn’t leave my bandmates especially without knowing about this situation.”

Fr LuRestart’s guitarist, remembers the shock of receiving the news on the eve of the tour: “I think that, at first, we were shocked because we didn’t understand exactly what it would mean. The first conversation we had was a bit like, ‘damn, it’s not a good thing for this guy to sing, because that will, perhaps, harm his condition more’”, he says.

“Afterwards, I think that, in a way, it brought us together even more in terms of caring, of paying attention to others, of understanding each other’s needs, and then I think that Pe’s story awakened this in all of us. The fact that he needed to hydrate more during some moments of the show made us think, ‘well, now I have to extend this speech, because Pe needs to have this micro time there to drink water, to apply an serum, to do a story’. In a way, this became a place of care that reinforced one of the cool things that we developed and evolved from our relationship. Anyway, I became even more of a fan of Pe’s story as a professional”, commented Pe Lu.

Treatment and routine

With the frightening news of an injury just weeks before the tour and extensive treatment ahead, Fr Lanza still had another challenge ahead of him – the psychological one, of staying safe for the performances, despite his condition. “I couldn’t let that problem, my head, speak louder than my desire to deliver, to have 100% delivery”, recalls the musician, for whom the diagnosis was like a “turn of the key”.

In addition to the exercises, accompanied by Doctor Yazaki and a vocal preparation and speech therapy team, Fr Lanza found himself facing a routine of constant inhalations and medication, including corticosteroids, which even affected his weight:

“I ended up getting swollen. Lots of jokes on the internet, I think people will start to connect one thing with another and it will make sense now, right?! Anyway, I’m used to these criticisms. But I gained a lot of weight during these months, during this year of touring because of that, right?! It took a lot of medication so I could get on stage and deliver the thing the way it deserved, the way the band really deserved.”

Now, Father Lanza needed to rest his voice almost every time he was not on stage. And this included the house itself, where tasks such as cleaning or even renovations began to pose a risk to their vocal health. “I want to keep singing. And to continue singing, I will have to radically change my entire behavior.”

His team also warned him about another risk: contact with fans at times like meet & greets, where the band meets the public. That exposure, a hug or a conversation, could be harmful to the singer, who defines himself as a “lightning rod for bacteria”. When he appeared, he was asked about the difference in his voice:

“People stopped me at the meet & greet and said ‘wow, you’re hoarse, you’re tired’. And sometimes I wanted to share that – I preferred not to tell anyone so that no one would be left with the image of a poor thing. And it’s not a poor thing, it’s a matter of overcoming.”

Relearning to sing

With the treatment, Fr Lanza believes that “new doors” have opened for him as a singer. After relearning his own speech – in a way that was less harmful to his vocal folds – he needed to review his singing technique with his team: “I saw that I could present my voice in the same way, but without using my chest as much, for example , so he used a mixed register, using his voice half in his head, half in his chest; I also saw that the medicines were taking effect, so the falsetto that no longer existed sometimes started to appear.”

Of course, in the almost 20 dates of the Restart reunion, the voice was not always 100% at all times. Pe Lanza chose to leave backup recordings – the famous playback – to be used in situations where it could fail (“the haters might like to know that [risos]”). And he had the table team, who accompanied him to each performance. The measure ended up not being necessary: ​​the recordings were never used in the shows.

“There are a lot of young singers, like Pe Lanza, who don’t want to have playback, prior recording, so they have to honor the live, in fact, without any recording, any support, and singing on top of that”, explains the doctor Reinaldo Yazaki. “It is the biggest cause of injury, wounds, insults, injuries to professional vocal folds: the honor, commitment and responsibility of going on stage with a voice that was no longer good, because of a lowly, a simple little infection.”

Infection that, in fact, took him off stage at the final shows of the tour, which had to be rescheduled, still in October 2024, after a diagnosis of bacterial bronchopneumonia and H1N1. Without innocence, Father Lanza knows that, to return to singing as he once did, he will need to undergo surgery. “It’s going to hurt,” he admits.

Still, he defends having delivered the best of himself – if not always in voice, much in energy, which ended up being, for him, the mark of the fans’ return. “At some shows, especially now at the end of the tour – people noticed that I was hoarse and so on.”

“But on the internet, all the feedback I had was from people who, without knowing this clinical condition, valued delivery. And energy doesn’t lie, right?! That was cool: people even without knowing there was a problem there , they saw that there was a delivery, sometimes beyond the ordinary, that made the problem go unnoticed”.

‘I can’t imagine myself off stage’

Less than a month after delivering the last show of Restart’s farewell tour, Pe Lanza looks ahead. When asked about stopping singing, he assures that it is not an option. Still undergoing treatment, he returns to the stage next week, with a show on the 19th, at City Lights Music Hallin São Paulo, where he presents his new single, “I’m waiting for you”.

Composed in 2012 and never released, the song officially comes out on November 18th, now with new arrangements. The proposal, Pe Lanza explains, is to follow the pop punk for which he is known, uniting it with writing influenced by Andy Grammer and with elements of Californian reggae:

“In this first song, in these first singles, I think there is a lot of Sublimefrom Slightly Stoopidare bands from California that speak a lot to this pop style that I do”.

In next week’s show, and in others with no confirmed date yet, his objective is to get closer to the public – a difficult move in Restart’s crowded and huge shows, but which are completely in line with the aspirations of what he defines as a “Pe Lanza 3.0 – now a little grayer”: the desire to sing, which remains stronger than ever. “I will live on music and I will live on art forever. I can’t imagine myself off stage.”