Music has been omnipresent in my adult life, the soundtrack flowing and swelling behind important moments, whether they were shared with someone or just felt through my own perspective. I have spent decades telling you how I feel in words, and hopefully my writing has gotten better; I try to be as concise and descriptive as possible, encouraging every distraction and non sequitur. I sincerely hope that the things I write have given you the texture and tone that I have been accused of in the past. On one hand, the girl down the hall in the mid-2000's said it was too raw and overwhelming, but on the other, as a playwright I was once compared to Tennessee Williams.
As cathartic and inconvenient as writing is for me, there is a finality to it, an emptying of the mind. I should be sleeping now, especially on the eve of what should have been a gratitude themed entry into this parade of syllables. Music on the other hand, becomes marinated with the exact feelings I had the moment I heard the song, or paid particular attention to it. What I'm about to do is take you through a few decades of moments, reliving them myself as I describe where and when the song had the impact on me. The song comes first, so you can press play, and then read the section that follows it.
I don't know why this suddenly became a top priority for me as I was about to get in bed. I know what inspired it, and I was going to do it another day. No, I'm feeling the pull and I know I won't be able to get to sleep until I do this.
At the beginning of my senior year in high school, I was in the habit of having vivid dreams every night, and one in particular stood out, because the details were so specific and immersive. Towards the end of the dream, a song played over what I can only assume would have been credits rolling over the scene, and I woke to that song playing on my clock radio. It stuck with me so much that I told friends about it, and a year later, every detail of that dream came true when I took my first love to the Prom, complete with the song, playing from a limo as we were walking out of the Bonaventure in downtown LA. That song was Borderline, by Madonna, and that last section of the song still has me reaching for the girl's hand.
As a first love it was doomed to fail, of course, because I was COMPLETELY unprepared for the feelings and how it was going to affect me. I learned how to draw her from memory and wrote over a hundred songs about her, one of which I played for her on piano. She was actually the reason I started writing a journal, and I can still remember how erratic and physically heavy my writing was back then. Looking back, of course I was smitten. She was a beauty pageant winner, Miss Studio City, and the perfect girl next door. I just didn't know who I was at the time. My various mixtapes that I listened to can be perfectly encapsulated with Chicago's Hard Habit to Break. So cheesy.
I still remember the first night I sat with my first serious girlfriend. We knew each other from our college theater department, and she had worked with wardrobe for a few plays that I was in. We had flirted a little bit, but late one night, we walked out together to my car, and I opened the sunroof so we could stare at the stars. Our hands played together, just feeling how they fit together, and while this song played, we had our first kiss. It was one of the most perfect moments I've ever experienced. Space Oddity by David Bowie will forever be that first kiss.
The absolute tragedy of that relationship was that as much as we were drawn together - magnetic doesn't even begin to describe how much we needed each other - she was determined to run away from it. It was intense and destructive, all consuming, and when it ended it was bad. It was really bad. And I needed to make that ending final, for my own health and sanity. I hadn't cried or tortured myself that much before or since, so despite her reaching out every few months, I did the hardest thing I could ever do. Deny her. It was an abusive relationship. I thought about her for years, and, well, you actually know the rest of the story. She got married, reached out when she was getting divorced, and when we saw each other again, the chemistry was completely gone. Scandalous, though, captures the way we were drawn to suffer for each other. I know she still remembers it that way, too.
I had discovered a pen pal online in some poetry message boards shortly after, and getting messages and phone calls from her really pulled me out of the deep depression I was in. She became a best friend online, and after a few years, I decided to visit her in Sarasota for my birthday. Something about our chemistry in person lit up the creative side of me, and at the time I was obsessed with An American in Paris, specifically the dream sequence. That's what this girl did for me, and in hindsight, the magic was really there for fleeting moments only. The distance made it work. It was confirmed in a second visit to her city a year later, and even more so when she moved to LA. We were very different people. We became very close friends over the years, but this song captures the moment we sat on a beach late at night on a Sarasota shore, with the world a blank slate for us to create on.
One of the pinnacles of my time as a theater director was a play called Three Years From Thirty, where I had to wrangle a group of six actors in a small space at a crucial time in their lives. It was big for all of us; We were experiencing change and growth at a time around our 30s, and I took some risks directing the actors differently and guiding them carefully through the whole process, because this play meant something very personal to me. God, I remember how we all pulled together and felt this play, but it got real when on the last night, I told the actors that it was no longer a play. A play means you can innocently try thing and you'll get a do-over. This was the last time we were doing it together, after so many late night rehearsals and discussions about the story. Tonight it was going to be real life, and whatever happens, happens. I was no longer their director for this last show. I watched each of them have a significant final moment, an exit from the story, and at the end of the play, when one of the characters finally comes full circle and looks for redemption, but is instead rejected and has to leave. As this moment really sinks in for her, this song begins to play, and I still remember taking two quick breaths as my emotion got the best of me on this last night. I told her, after all, that she was essentially Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in this play, but she couldn't come home. Jane Monheit nailed this recording in one take.
One of the deepest and most forbidden relationships I ever had was - and I hope you notice that I'm not using names, because lately I don't feel they have any place in the story - with the girl down the hall at work who inspired plays and poetry, and really took this journal up a notch in creativity. She was the girl whom I wrote about on the moon, and eventually professed a postdated love for me with no solution. I admired her brilliant mind and strength, her goofy sense of humor, and the eloquent, well-spoken way she could engage with me about what was going on between us. A few other people in the office got in the middle and tried to tell her I wasn't worth the time, but we still felt the connection regardless. It ended up being too much for her and she moved back to San Francisco, and this was one of the songs that helped me put things in perspective, with an understanding that ended up being incorrect.
The time came for my final play, and after so many productions and over a decade of work in the theater, I was going to walk away from directing. The play was The Shape of Things, and I really put myself into every detail of this play, directing the actors throughout LA and creating every prop down to the smallest detail myself. I was literally wringing the creative towel to get the last drops out, and part of me knew that once I left, my legacy would begin to fade. I was the central person in this theater company, and once I stopped showing up, people would stop caring. I did continue acting in a play for another five years or so, but that out of sight, out of mind sense of relevance was behind me picking this song to end the play and my time in that theater.
The first death that affected me profoundly came three or four years after the fact; I was running a social media platform for the actors at the school, keeping it going for a while after I had left, and received a message from the mother of a girl I knew. She wanted to know if anyone there knew her. Out of all of the people there, I probably knew her the best. She was a troubled, lost, beautiful soul from a broken home, and for a few years, I was her safe place. She would come over to my place, tell me stories about the things she was going through, even spent the night a few times. It still numbs me with guilt to say that it got to be too much for me to handle, and I think she sensed that, and after I dropped her off at the airport one last time, I never saw her again. She committed suicide back in 2008, and there I was, years later, not knowing how to grieve her. I wrote out a conversation with her here in the blog to help bridge the gap. For some strange reason, this song kept calling to me and I didn't understand why until one night I was driving home from work and I heard her voice speaking some of the lyrics, and I had to pause at the freeway offramp, sobbing because the truth of it hit me. My inability to let this go, to let her death go, was preventing both of us from moving on. I could feel her love me from beyond, and I had to forgive myself for us parting ways. I had one chance to tell Sara Bareilles in person what that song did for me, but just missed it. Someday.
At the beginning of 2016, my cat became very sick and took her to a vet who said that the only thing I could do was just wait for her to die naturally. For a few torturous months, I watched over her and rushed home every day from work to feed her and spend time with her. On the final day with her, the only time she became calm was when I played Blackbird for her on the guitar. I had her for 18 years. I still haven't gotten over it.
I had visions of me playing this song on guitar and singing it in a church at my father's funeral, but the church and funeral never really happened. I never anticipated we would have him cremated, and to be honest, I never could have gotten through playing it. It was one of my father's favorite songs, and ironically it's about a man who's dying and saying goodbye to his friends. We put the song's title on the plaque where his urn rests.
One of the most important relationships of my life ended in early 2018, changing my life in a sudden burst of evolved thought and values. For six years, it was everything I wanted to work for as an adult, a relationship with a deep foundation and understanding, despite the fact that when you really look at the math, we weren't compatible. I have never loved someone the way I loved this girl, and never worked so hard to know another person as completely, while ignoring all of the parts where I fit in. There were so many moments where I looked at her and told myself that I didn't care how she felt, that to me she was my only significant other, and I would run to the end of time as her best friend if nothing else. But again, that small distance between us had no bridge, no way to reach the other side, and no way for me to evolve, so it ended. I do remember a moment, though, when there was potentially a pregnancy in her family, and we met for dinner and talked through it. I, of course, bought books for her on Amazon as if it was going to be her child, and told her that if this pregnancy was going to happen, we would all figure it out together. I knew at that moment I was really committed to doing more, being more, in a way I had never felt before, and on the way home I played this song for her on my car stereo. It was kind of a joke that I would put something like this on, and after catching what I did she laughed, but the song captures that whole hearted love I had for her back then. After two years we're back in touch, but I'm talking to a new version of her, and I'm sure I'm different too. There's a different love for my old friend in place now, but god, I miss some of those moments we had. She is the reason I picked this journal up again.
When my mother passed away, I listened to podcasts because I was already feeling dizzy and disoriented, and just needed to hear people talk. When I realized that I hadn't allowed myself the emotion I was holding back, I listened to this song. I had spent days getting old photos reprinted, and distracted myself from the weight inside me, I had forgotten to let myself feel all of it. This song was medicinal in that respect, and it cut through all of the logic and purpose I attempted to use to get through the week. I don't know why I picked it.
As the world shut down and I found myself dealing with an uncertain future and a past that I had to consider, I turned to Glen Hansard the way I've turned to his music many times in my adult life. He writes and sings with a gravitas that tells me that whatever I'm feeling, he's been through. I think of all of the things I've experienced...all of the loved ones I've lost...all of the times when love was either the right tool for the wrong problem or the out of place instrument in the wrong band...that there's a reason why I've gone through all of this and still have a road ahead of me. That this life, with many bold chapters, has stories yet to be told and overtures still left to be played, underscoring important moments and people. That patience, and trust, and hope, will see it all fit together someday.
I'm so grateful for my life, and how many people I've crossed paths with, and the family members who are still here. I'm proud of these emotions, and creative impulses, and this safe place here to write and give meaning to it all.
Now that I've spilled all of that from my head, I can finally go to sleep.
