Music is my voice. It’s how I say the things I can’t otherwise say, and it’s sometimes how people finally understand me when my own words don’t reach them. I have spent a lot of my life not being heard. Music is the exception. Music is the channel.
It came down to me the way the important things in my family always came down, through the women, quietly, without ceremony. My mother’s parents gave her some money once, and she used it to buy a piano. She
bought it for me. No one else in the house played. I took lessons, and I’d sit at it and work through whatever I was learning, and my mother who never played a note herself would be at the sink washing dishes, humming along. She gave me the instrument, and then she stood in the kitchen and listened. She didn’t need to play. She just liked hearing me. I still attempt the piano now and then. I’m not good, exactly. But my hands remember where to go, and when they do, I picture her.
Years later, after I bought my own condo, my own place, my own walls, no one to answer to, my kids and I had dance parties in the living room. Just us, the music up, all of us being ridiculous. Some of the freest I’ve ever felt was in that room, in a home that was mine, dancing with my children because we could.
And for a stretch, two years or so, I got to be a person who went to shows. Several a month sometimes. Live music, out in the world, no responsibility for anything but being there. The best of them was JD McPherson at the Independent in San Francisco. Front row. I can still call up exactly how it felt: aliveness and butterflies. That specific full-body
electricity of being right there, close enough to feel it, entirely inside the moment and nowhere else. I wasn’t a mother or a patient or a defendant or a provider in that moment. I was just a woman in the front row, completely alive.
Here is the thing about me and music, the thing that might explain me better than anything else I could tell you: I keep people as music – artists or songs. Every person I love has one. It’s not something I decided to do. It’s just how they’re filed in me. My mother is Elvis. Her father is Bing Crosby. My father’s father is the Judds. Three generations, three voices, all of them still singing in me somewhere. Celebration by Kool & the Gang is my mother’s side of the family, my aunt, specifically; you cannot play it without her being in the room. The Grease soundtrack is my oldest friend in the neighborhood. Duran Duran is my oldest friend from school. Def Leppard is my friend June. Heavydirtysoul by Twenty One Pilots is my friend Jason. High Hopes by Panic! at the Disco is my friend Gregory. Barry Manilow, “Looks Like We Made It,” is my friend Christy. Peter Gabriel is a lifetime. He doesn’t belong to one person or one era, he belongs to all of it but for a couple of songs tied to specific people. And my children. Eminem is my son and I nicknamed him Slim Shady very young when his hair was light blonde. Bittersweet Symphony is my middle girl. She danced to it in a ballet recital and it fused to her forever. My youngest couldn’t be held to a single song or artist, so she’s a whole playlist: Taylor Swift, Gregory Alan Isakov, and more. Matt Nathanson is an era unto himself, 2007 to 2016, a decade I can put on and step straight back into. Even my boyfriend has one, Eastside, Benny Blanco. I don’t remember these people and then reach for the songs. It’s the other way around. The songs are the people. Play me three bars and the whole person walks in.
This is why, when I want someone to understand me, I so often just play them a song. I’ve done it my whole life. When the words won’t do it, when I can’t find the way to say what I mean, or when what I mean is too big or too tender for a sentence, I hand someone a piece of music instead. Here. This. This is what I couldn’t say. And sometimes, that’s the thing that lands. People who couldn’t hear me any other way
hear me through what I share.
My mother bought a piano so I could have a voice, while she hummed along at the sink. It’s still how I speak.
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