Music: why, who cares why, thank you

Tonight I am alone in WV. Jack flies home from Miami tomorrow, and Tom is home working, and Oliver is at camp, and after many days of extreme gardening and goats and five cats and guinea pigs and code red heat, I’m on a couch (was in a patio Lafuma) listening to favorite songs. I have, over many hours, enjoyed a bottle of French red, and in real time I’m honing my final-island playlist.

I grew up on my mom’s mixed-tape in-car casettes. Tina Turner, The Turtles, Beatles, Righteous Brothers, Temptations, Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Simon & Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, Linda Ronstadt, and Looking Glass’s one-hit-wonder Brandy. To this day, if I hear a song from one of Mom’s tapes, my brain immediately joins a singalong and then moves onto the next recorded tune. We were on Common St, Ryan, Prien Lake, at Tasty Donuts. The tapes kept rolling, Mom crooning, Elia and I ingesting the chords and lyrics and the emotions behind and wrapped in every song.

Growing up, Elia and I heard “Girls, I met your mom when I admired her legs, and she agreed to dance.” “Girls, your father was so quiet, but boy could he dance.”

“If there’s a reason that I’m by her side…I’m willing to wait for it.” -Leslie Odom, Hamilton

It was clear they connected, deeply, on the dance floor. Both loved music and dancing and sweating and spinning and singing and twirling towards and against all the strictures within which they’d been raised. And then they married, and just last week we celebrated their 50th anniversary, a feat that seems both Herculean and obvious.

If I had any superpower it would be voice. A voice of range and power and expression, the sort that comes from both talent and pain, desire and desperation, joy and relentless “I must.” To share, vent, express, scream in profoundly gorgeous and able octaves that move and ensorcel others. That render them begging the bottle to last through another few songs on a humidity-minimal summer night with a spot of breeze. To inspire them to pilgrimage, costume, come out or be out or just, unabashedly, be. Music, its lyrics, its momentum and centrifugal pull, is utterly life-changing.

Take a walk on the wild side, urges a young Lou Reed.

I don’t have no use, for what you loosely call the truth, avers Tina. (And she sure as shit shouldn’t.)

Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? asks Freddie. (You better be, or you’ll probably bite the dust.)

Peter, Paul, and Mary are leaving, Diana and her sisters reminding us to think about, reflect on and embrace love while also knowing that it can go, you need to have someone to come see about you, and ultimately, you’re your own ladder, symphony, and source of strength.

Paul Simon is in Central Park thanking the various civic groups who’ve enabled the live concert (he and Art are still ok). Taylor draws the cat’s eye sharp enough to kill a man, and a surprise playlist cameo by The Samples rockets me to freshman year of Northwestern faster than I can take a breath. John is playing that fiddle to beat sixty; he is the happiest country boy.

I still listen to Happy Together and Windy and Turn, Turn, Turn, and Eve of Destruction. It’s fascinating to consider the somewhat goofy, cis-normative simple croonings of The Turtles and The Association while concurrently vibing to, on many levels, the impending doom of The Byrds and Barry McGuire and the fem-assertive words of Janis, Joan, Joni, Linda, and Carly.

Linda (Ronstadt) is as a go-to for romantic angst and female let-me-be as is any modern woman artist: “ I ain’t saying you ain’t pretty. All I’m saying is I’m not ready for any person, place, or thing, to try and pull the reins in on me.”

And Sam Cooke? Don’t even get me going on A Change is Gonna Come, Bring It On Home, Wonderful World, Cupid…

I could go on forever, but the point, to me, is that many musicians who resonate deeply and across generations and cross-sections of culture and society, thereby changing the world, thankfully, and altering its trajectory, go big and call out what their places are versus should be.

Tony Bennett died yesterday. He was 97 and lived such a full life. Born to Italian immigrant parents and into poverty, Tony was performing by the age of 10. In 1965, at the invitation of Harry Belafonte, he joined the march from Selma to Montgomery in support of Voting Rights, performing along the way under the threat of violence. He’d been supported early on by Black artists, and I’m thankful he had the courage and moral righteousness to pay it back. My Nanny loved Tony Bennett, and I grew up listening to him, too, along with Frank, Dean, Sammy, and so on.

It’s a worthy way to spend a quiet night: listening to favorite songs from the 50s through the present. That’s nearly 85 years of music, a diary of desire, stagnation, change, courage, fury, love, hope, and resignation. It makes you think about life and how you’re living it. Are you living it as if you only have one? Because each of does, just have one, and I think we’d all be well-served to act as such.

“So if you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces. For a taste of your whiskey, I’ll give you some advice…
If you’re gonna play that game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right.” Kenny knows. Hold, fold, walk away, run. The secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

Here’s my boyfriend Clyde.

He’s a keeper.