Lenny & I

I was scurrying down Prescott Street in late January, caught up in the typical freshman whirlwind of inadequacy and anxiety. Gamely tolerating the icy wind asserting itself under the collar of my coat, I fumbled with my ID, fumbled with my key, and fumbled with my door. I played the same song on repeat, one which had been a life raft in the undertow of my first year of college. I muttered the lyrics absentmindedly under my breath:

I hear the breezes playing

in the trees above

While all the world is saying

you were meant for love

In the few preceding months, I underwent a complete conversion to a genre of music I had neglected up until that point—the jazz standard. For the uninitiated, this is the music your grandparents make you listen to when Thanksgiving dinner is at their house. Maybe jazz provided a gentle counterweight to the competitive atmosphere of Harvard College, or to my first year living alone, or to the social and emotional floundering endemic to freshman fall. But there was no question: I was infatuated with the bourgeois, uncomplicated, everyday love woven into my playlist.

The interest began when my music nerd friend mentioned Chet Baker, and, irritated by my own ignorance, I immediately set out to make myself an expert. Something in the climate of freshman year sparked my interest in a new and more urgent way. My iTunes library came to resemble less that of a freshman in college and more that of a pensioner: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday. I collected them, one great musician after another—Sarah Vaughn, Fats Waller, Coltrane.

Beyond the obvious appeal of their music, there was something about the lyrics that nagged at me, catching my interest across vast gaps of time and space. I developed a habit of reading songs before even listening to them. The lyrics all resembled one another in their strong specificity of time and place, teeming with small details which made it seem as if their grand love stories could happen to anyone, including me. The grandiose expectations of lifelong happiness are grounded in small realities, and these kinds of realities were a part of my life.

Tumbling as I was down the rabbit hole of the last century’s music, there was one song I hated completely. Though typically held up as a poster child for the genre, I found “My Funny Valentine” more cruel than kind. It cut against the sort of sentimental ideas I was daily absorbing through my headphones.

Listening to the song for the first time, I was lulled into a false sense of security by its opening line: “You make me smile with my heart.” Here was the warm, goopy sentimentality I had drunk up over the past year. But things quickly took a sharp turn: “Your looks are laughable, unphotographable.” The warmth had shifted to something infinitely more snarky, far more realistic than I cared to hear.

But one day, late on a March afternoon, I was absentmindedly listening to my playlist when “My Funny Valentine” popped up. Forgetting my own rule, I listened to it once, then again, then again. For someone steeped in the often-restrictive and self-evaluative world of comp, internships, and endless applications, one can hardly underestimate the relief of hearing the frank confrontation with mediocrity:

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak, are you smart?

It was made even better by Chet Baker’s earnest, warm tone, a tone suggesting that answers to those questions were not only known but unimportant. I researched, as I often did, the specific songwriter who had put my subconscious to music and projected my own insecurities so uncannily.

The song is romantic, the songwriter’s life was not. Lorenz Hart, half of the famed Rodgers and Hart songwriting duo, was unmarried, lived with his mother well into adulthood, and died of pneumonia as a result of alcoholism in his late 40s. He considered himself ugly. Hart was a dwarf at less than five feet tall and was even denied enrollment in the US military during World War I as a result of his height. Hart was gay in the 1930s, when homosexuality was not only stigmatized, but also criminalized in most states. Despite his career writing love songs, he never had a long term partner.

Listening to it again, it fell together neatly: I wanted to hear what Hart wanted to hear, and what Hart wanted to hear he poured into the song. “My Funny Valentine” was a clear moment of projection. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked around muttering the words of his songs to myself—whether it’s the wit of “My Funny Valentine” or the accessible sentimentality of “Isn’t it Romantic”?

Hart could easily have created something bitter, resentful, and cutting. He knew this music would become part of the lives of everyday people, that radio listeners would fit his lyrics into their own personal narratives. And with this in mind, he did something generous: He chose to project a sentiment in lyrics like “you were meant for love,” suggesting that you in fact deserve this, rather than pulling from his own personal disappointments.

Even decades on, the tender humor of this song has inspired listeners to take it on as part of their personal narratives—just as it has become part of my own.

— Magazine writer Zoe L. Almeida can be reached at zoe.almeida@thecrimson.com.