If you are an avid audiobook listener, it is possible that you have already heard the engaging voice of Bob Souer. In his three-hundred-plus audiobook repertoire, which includes Thomas Nelson’s complete NKJV, he has narrated books from such well-known authors as Scott McKnight, John Shelby Spong, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, David Jeremiah, and many others. Also unique, Bob records on a truly impressive variety of topics—from theology, philosophy, biography, and sports, to math and physics. In the following interview, Bob offers us some lovely insights not only into his personal life, but also tidbits pertaining to the trade of effective narrating. If you listen to the full audio interview you will also notice that Bob thinks deeply about his Christianity. If you go to Bob’s website, you will see that his tagline is “Professional story-teller and the second nicest guy in voiceover.” After talking to him, I can assure you that both of those statements are absolutely true.
[A link to the audio version of the interview is included at the bottom of the page.]
[Radix] What a privilege to talk to you! I am a lover of audiobooks, so this is a real treat. You have been at this for a good part of your life. If someone were to look, you have nearly three hundred audiobooks to your credit. You’ve done voice over work for advertisements. And what really impressed me with the titles is the plurality of subjects that you’ve taken on. You do theology, you do history, you do some sports. I’m assuming this is more than just a job to you. Can you share a bit of your story?
[Souer] First of all, I love telling stories. And so I love that I get to do it as a job. I love to read and I love to learn. When I was a young boy, my grandmother was the town librarian in the little town in North Central Minnesota where I grew up. Once I learned to read I became an avid reader; and maybe avid isn’t quite strong enough a word, because my grandmother actually told my mom that she thought I was reading too much. For a librarian to say somebody is reading too much is pretty remarkable. But I really did read everything I could get my hands on. I have read fiction and non-fiction in every possible category, including the sort of academic books that were in the school library that nobody would ever check out. When I was in high school, I made up my mind that I was going to read every book in the library. And I did, before my senior year was finished. So yeah, I have loved to read widely and extensively. As a result, I grew to have a pretty good-sized vocabulary, which has worked out well for my career. Ultimately, the fact that I love to read means that God, in his Providence, had this job set for me from my very young years. I just didn’t know it until a long time later.
I got into radio by working as a sales manager for a very large record store. You remember the black vinyl discs? Anyway, I worked for one of the biggest record stores in the Chicago area. There were three floors of records. One floor was classical music, and I ran that department. I happened to be into classical music.
Anyway, one of the guys who used to shop at that store pretty regularly sold houses. He thought I was on the ball so he offered me a job selling houses. And one of the first people I sold a house to was the program director of a radio station. He liked me, so hired me part-time at first, and then full-time, and I worked there for a couple of years. Then I went to work for a union station in downtown Chicago. As a result of all that stuff, I ended up being hired by the general manager of a contemporary Christian music station and eventually worked my way up to being program director there. Over the course of all this time God was at work, teaching me how to read effectively out loud. Then I was hired to begin narration of some corporate videos through a company that was brand new to producing corporate videos.
I ended up narrating, essentially, every video they produced for the first four years, as they grew from a company of two guys doing wedding videos to a seven-million-a-year production company. I learned on the job how to narrate and become effective at telling stories. Now, those stories were corporate stories about how to be a good preloader at UPS, or how to do maintenance on lasers for the Chicago Laser Company and so forth. But still, they were stories and they had to be told. And learning to effectively tell those stories, regardless of my level of personal interest, was a big part of learning to do what I do now.
In 2006 I was cast to do my first audiobook. The job was to narrate the entire New King James Version of the Bible. Needless to say, that is jumping into the deep end of the pool in the world of audiobooks, because the Bible is not easy to read, you know, with all of the Hebrew names and items and places and all that. And so, over the course of eleven months, we at Thomas Nelson recorded the New King James Version of the Bible. And that is still available on audible.com and amazon.com. Then I was hired by another company, for whom I’ve narrated more than three hundred audiobooks.
While I was doing the Bible narrating, I took some coaching classes from Pat Fraley and Hillary Huber. And that gave me the background and information I needed in terms of joining the Audio Publishers Association, which is not just for publishers but also for narrators and other people involved in the audiobook world.
In 2012, and directly as the result of a providential move of God— though it looked like chance at the time— I got connected with Blackstone Audio, and I started narrating for them. It didn’t hurt that by that time I had recorded some more Bible reading for Zondervan, so essentially, I narrated the Bible twice. I ended up getting to do John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion, another very large book with lots of Greek and Hebrew words. It helped that I had a background in Latin languages. I don’t think it’s my best narration ever, but if you want an audio version of John Calvin’s Institutes, you have to put up with my voice.
Then the following year, again, providentially, an opportunity came along to read for the folks at Tantor, another audio publishing company. In fact, Tantor is probably the biggest in terms of number of books produced each year. So now I work for several different publishers, narrating nonfiction, exclusively. Topics, as you mentioned, are all over the place: biographies, histories, theology, scientific books, books on mathematics. I also present a variety of different opinions. So for instance, I’ve read books that are strongly pro-evolution and the books that are strongly pro-creationism. My job is to do the best job I can in presenting the author’s point of view as effectively and powerfully as I can. That’s what I try to do, whether I personally agree with it or not is immaterial. So yeah, I mean, it’s endlessly fascinating and there’s always something new to talk about.
[Radix] I really appreciate how you use the word Providence so often. I value that you are a professional who has a name in the field, but that you don’t mind freely using that word.
[Souer] Christ says, “if you acknowledge me before men, I will acknowledge you before the Father.” That’s something pretty serious to take to heart. And, you know, I think what that means, at least the way I unpack it, is that it’s not our job to club people over the head with our Bibles, but to live as Christianly as we can. I’m really not particularly fond of Christian as an adjective, but rather to live out the way Christ lived.
And when you look at him, the people he gave the worst grief to were the religious leaders, the ones who imposed enormous burdens on people. He demonstrated the Gospel most powerfully to those who most needed it, those who were deepest in sin. So, I try to live that out as effectively as I can, probably failing at it miserably at least some of the time, if not most.
But I do want to make clear that I am not in charge of my career. God is. One of my best friends is a man who has been doing voice-overs many years longer than I have. He said to me, when I told him that I was switching over exclusively to voice-over work, “Well, one thing that has been the most beneficial to me in my life is to recognize that Jesus is my agent.” And by that he meant that the work that comes to you is coming through the hands of God in every case. And he said, “Every day I get up and thank God for the work that he sent me. And I pray that he’ll send me more.” I probably don’t do that every single day, but I try to make it a regular practice. Because I love what I’m doing so much, I really don’t want to ever retire. I just want to keep working as long as I can string words together in a coherent fashion.
[Radix] You mentioned on your webpage, and I really appreciate it, that “not one moment of time is wasted for God.” And then you wrote about some of the earlier difficulties. But your point was that every incidence turned out for good. Do you have any stories of those in particular that come to mind?
[Souer] Well, I suppose the one that cuts the deepest and comes first to mind is the following. While I was still in college, I married my first wife. She was actually four years older than me, and if she had not changed majors so many times that she had to take a fifth year to finish college, I wouldn’t have met her. In her fifth year of college, she was twenty-one and I was seventeen. We met at an audition for a play. And my first impressions of her were that she was extraordinarily beautiful, but not nearly as talented as she thought she was as an actress. Her first impressions of me were that I was a young punk who thought way more of myself than I should. She disliked me intensely that year, particularly when I, through a series of weird circumstances, ended up embarrassing her in front of the entire student body. It was not intentional on my part at all, and I was unaware of what I had done until long after, but as a result of that, she frankly hated my guts.
But a few years later, we met again and she came up to me and said, “Bob, I need to ask your forgiveness. I have harbored resentment and hatred for you in my heart for the last several years and I feel very bad about it. I want to ask you to forgive me.” I said, “Well, I didn’t know you felt that way, but of course I forgive you.” In the course of the next couple of months we started dating, and a year after that we got married. We were happily married for quite a few years. But then she began to complain about some back problems, which turned out to be a metastasis of breast cancer that had metastasized in her bones.
By the time we found that she had cancer, it was already stage four. Again, in the Providence of God, she got some really good chemotherapy that helped her to live an extra two and a half years. But on January 29th, 1988 at 1:21 in the afternoon, I was holding her hand in the hospital room when she slipped from here to eternity. I’ve said often that, although I learned a great deal about the sovereignty and grace of God and his care and provision for us, as well as many other things having to do with God’s grace and kindness and mercy, I don’t believe that God killed my wife in order to teach me those lessons.
So that’s probably the starkest example. The beautiful thing is that as we rest in the certainty of God’s sovereignty, we don’t take a fatalistic view; in other words, saying, “God has got it all in control, so I don’t have to do anything.” No, God calls us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, which I don’t think means, by the way, that we work our way to salvation, that’s entirely of God and his grace, but it does mean that he calls us to actively participate in the living of our lives and in the choices that we make, and so forth.
So, God has led and guided and sometimes smacked me over the head, and sometimes gently taken me by the hand, but he has led and worked in my life and in the lives of my family over and over again, and so often. It’s very reassuring.
[Radix] Thank you for sharing that story—that you have experienced something like that in your life but have dealt with it in such a beautiful way is amazing.
[Souer] Yeah. You know, we’re living in a time right now when there are many people who have unexpectedly experienced the death of loved ones because of the pandemic. And, of course, people are dying of other causes at the same time, too. It’s just that the pandemic has heightened our awareness of these things. But we live in a fallen world. People die of all kinds of terrible things. But that doesn’t mean we are abandoned by God, even in the midst of these things that seem like we are left completely on our own.
That’s part of the way Romans 8:28 works out: all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose. It’s easy to tritely paste that Bible verse over any number of things, but the way it actually works out in life is that God demonstrates himself sovereignly, watching over us and caring for us every step along the way. Most of the time we can’t see it until we look back, afterward.
[Radix] You are touching on things of great depth. Knowing the larger picture makes your story all the more meaningful. Do you have anything else to say about pain?
[Souer] Maybe the best answer to that particular question has to do with the fact that we all have painful experiences. In other words, pain is maybe not inevitable, but I would say that it’s close enough to being inevitable. The natural human reaction is to stay away from pain, to shy away from it, to run in the other direction, to do everything we can to avoid it.
Scripture says that Jesus, as he was on his way to Jerusalem and knowing that he was going to be crucified, set his face like flint; he knew where he was going and he embraced the pain. Not because he was a masochist, or because he wanted to experience pain, but because he wanted to get through to the other side. It wasn’t going to be permanent pain. There was something more beyond it. We should remember that the story doesn’t end on Good Friday. It doesn’t end with him saying, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Because three days later, he comes back out of that tomb.
I think the lesson that most of us need to remember is that you have to turn and embrace the pain in order to get to the other side, to the resurrection stuff, whether it’s a tiny hint of resurrection joy in this life, or whether it’s stepping through into death and the ultimate resurrection.
When I was with my wife, after the oncologist delivered the bad news following the two-year remission, we sat there in silence for several minutes and then Kathy turned to me and said, “I don’t want to die, Bob. I want to watch my daughter Karen grow up. I want to live with you. I want to continue together.” Sometimes you have one of those moments where, you know, God reaches into the situation and provides guidance, because I don’t think any of what I said next was anything I could have come up with on my own. I said, “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think what’s going to happen is that you’re going to step through that veil and turn around and Karen and I will be right there behind you. Because the only thing that we know about eternity is that it’s not in time. It doesn’t move in a linear fashion like time does. So, I don’t think you’re going to be aware of the passing of time while you’re waiting for us. We’re just going to be right there.” That’s what came to me.
We don’t have the infinite perspective that God does. Our inability to see everything and understand it all at once would prevent us from being very good at being sovereign. I hope that’s an answer to your question.
[Radix] Yes, it is. Thank you again for sharing that. With all that you have been through, I wonder how this might have, in a way, shaped your own voice, gave you a depth that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.
[Souer] Well, I am a bass baritone. [laughter] Anyway, my goal when I was in college was to become an opera singer. I started both singing and taking voice lessons while I was young. And I was a vocal performance music major in college. Actually, forgive me for running down a quick bunny trail, but it’s another example of the way in which God has led beautifully in my life. In my senior year of college, my vocal coach, a lady named Lois Eve, was good friends with a man who worked as one of the preeminent coaches at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Boris Goldovsky. He was a coach to lots of big opera stars in the classical music world. To make a long story short, Lois set me up an audition to take lessons with Boris. Boris was already advanced in years and didn’t do lessons, hardly. So this was a major opportunity, and I knew it.
And so I began talking with Lois and others about what it would mean – not just if Boris liked me, but if I were to get a future in opera. I quickly learned that I’d have to move to Europe to learn the repertoire and build something of a reputation, so that eventually, when I became a big enough star and established enough performances, I could come back to the States and make a living here.
Well, the idea of living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in Europe for the next twenty years was not terribly appealing. I realized that the price was more than I was willing to pay. So the following week, when I came in for my lesson, I told Louis Eve what I had concluded. And I said, “Cancel the audition.” She reluctantly did so.
I look back on that and see that as one of the watershed moments in my life, because I had spent the previous ten years, beginning in middle school, training for something that I was now turning away from. But God in his sovereignty did not waste a drop of that, because those years of training my voice, learning how to produce the kinds of sounds that I produce and learning how to control, phrase, and breathe had a huge effect on what I do. I use that training every single day.
So I think a lot of the depth that you’re talking about, yes, is colored by the experiences that I’ve had, in the way in which God has moved in my life, moving me through times of pain and sorrow and loss, and also through times of joy and restoration and renewal – all of those kinds of things do influence the way I sound.
[Radix] Do you have any final thoughts for us that you want to end on?
[Souer] You know, I need to be reminded of God’s law and of his grace every single day. Really. I think we all do. When I was a little boy, I grew up in a church context in which the law was way more important than the Gospel. Looking back on it now, I can see that there were rules that had been set up in a very pietistic way, in terms of rules to obey. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need the law. We just don’t need to be overly reminded of the ways in which we fall short, disappoint, and miss the mark. Most of all, we need to be reminded of the Gospel. We need to be reminded that it is from outside of us that our salvation comes.
And then that promise, that certainty, that sacrifice, that propitiation. I love, love that word! It means appeasing the wrath of God. Propitiation was accomplished and it’s been accepted. And we know that because the tomb is empty, there is no body to be found. Christ is in heaven next to the Father.
[Radix] Well said. That’s a good conclusion. This whole thing has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so very much for lending your time, your voice, your thoughts, and the stories. I really, really appreciate it.
[Souer] Thank you, Matthew. It was a pleasure talking with you, truly.