I just about fell out of my chair when I heard the voice behind me – Willie Nelson! I was sitting at the front desk of the Naugas Resort, but turned away from the counter. I swung around to see…not Willie, but a short, potbellied guy with a bald head. What a shock!
When he spoke, he sounded just like Willie. In fact, he said he uses his voice professionally to do voice-overs for radio commercials. In other words, he sits down at a microphone and reads aloud what somebody else has written…and gets paid for it. He said he does TV and radio commercials mostly, and has narrated a few TV programs.
The one thing he is careful to avoid is pretending to be Willie…he said that can get you into legal trouble.
He said his latest job is an independently-filmed movie promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah discovered America in about 4000 B.C. The idea is simple: Noah had to catch two of every animal on earth and put them in the Ark, and that means that he had to come to North and South America because some animal species only live here. The movie uses a lot of animation to show how this happened, and how big the Ark had to be to hold all those pairs of animals.
Before his Noah, the Ark and America movie, he said he worked on a documentary about biocrude oil. I had never heard of biocrude, and asked him what it is…the same thing as ethanol, or biomass? No, he explained that biocrude oil is a liquid made from plants (like ethanol) but in a different manner. He said that the chemical makeup is a lot like crude oil…it’s thick and dark, like sweet crude. He said the advantage of biocrude is that it can be refined into gasoline and diesel in regular petroleum refineries, so there is no need for large capital expenditures of new refining capacity.
I was impressed that being a voice-over artist could get you an education in such a variety of fields.