Music as Memory
‘Perfect Places’
When I was a child I knew exactly how my life would turn out. I knew that at 16 I would get a job at Mrs. Murphy’s Donuts. I knew where I would go to college. I knew I would eventually become a surgeon. My parents still poke fun at me for the way I talked to adults like I had it all figured out. Unsurprisingly, only one of my predictions turned out to be true, but I was so desperate to reach the future I meticulously planned that I became bored with the present. The time for these dreams to be realized was fast approaching, but they began to feel farther and farther out of reach. I was just one month into my freshman year of high school, reluctantly confined to the tobacco-farming hilltown I had called home for 15 years, when Lorde released her debut album “Pure Heroine.”
In “Pure Heroine,” I found a roadmap for navigating the collective adolescence that I entered into just as Lorde left it behind. It didn’t matter that I didn’t yet have a car, job, relationship, or any of the other tenets of the typical teenage rebellion — Lorde lent her low, breathy voice to experiences beyond the tropes. In “Ribs” she sings, “This dream isn’t feeling sweet / We’re reeling through the midnight streets / And I’ve never felt more alone / It feels so scary getting old.” She held up a mirror to the exact mix of disillusion with the future and longing for the past that, in my hurry to grow up, I hadn’t allowed myself to feel. Pulsing beneath each song on the album is the heightened awareness that neither she nor I nor any of us have control over our own timeline. Lorde revels in her ambivalence to this truth. Like she sings in “Tennis Court,” “It’s a new art form showing people how little we care.”
‘Movin’ Out’
My father named me, in part, after an Elvis Costello song. I know this both because he tells me and because he shows me, a microphone in one hand and a beer in the other, any time he finds himself within 10 feet of a karaoke machine. On one particular family vacation to New Hampshire, my eight-year-old self knew instantly that when the restaurant host announced karaoke, nothing would stop him from going up at least once. I peered through the cracks between my fingers — hiding my face from the diners who turned to smile at me as I was serenaded — but I wasn’t embarrassed. Nothing made me happier than when my father sang. As soon as he finished “Alison” he waited a requisite few turns before jumping back up to sing Elton John’s “Daniel” for my younger brother.
Long past are the days of family vacations and karaoke lunches. It is too difficult now to plan around work, school, and the unexpected responsibilities that come with adult life. When I return home, the room I sleep in is not my own. That space is my brother’s, and soon it will belong to no one. In my absence I have come to treasure a new tradition, one which takes place on the long drives that transport me from one home to the other along the twists and turns of the Massachusetts Turnpike. My father and I do not travel alone. Through the speaker we are joined by a cast of classic rockers including Bob Dylan, Rick Springfield and, most often, Billy Joel. We sip coffee and slip from conversation to song and back. My father may not know how to use Spotify — or even what Spotify is — but there’s no one I trust more with the aux cord.
Pop-Punk and Powdered Sugar
A few years in time and a two-hour drive away from the bed I sleep in now is a donut shop getting ready to close. As the hands on the clock inch their way toward 6 p.m. there is an unspoken understanding that this time is not for last-minute customer service, but for preparation. My friend empties the cash registers. I grab the trash bags from the back hallway. She puts out the speaker. I run for the key. When the minute hand hits zero I am already at the door. I hear the opening line of “12 Feet Deep” by The Front Bottoms blast from the speaker before the click of the lock. We stop to serenade the end of another shift together. We repeat this ritual each time we close until, one day, neither of us is there to sing.
All I have left of these days are vignettes of our camaraderie and a sweatshirt that, no matter how many times I wash it, still seems to smell like Sunday mornings spent pouring coffee and commiserating. It didn’t matter if the shop was empty at 5 a.m. or packed at noon — we were in constant conversation and, when it came to the subject, everything was on the table. Frequently, it was music. I can’t prove that the hiring process was intentionally designed to indoctrinate me to the music of Blink 182 and The Story So Far, but every one of my coworkers was obsessed with rock music ranging from indie to pop-punk to screamo. I was hired as an awkward, nerdy 15 year-old who had never been to a concert, let alone a mosh pit, and who listened to soundtracks from Broadway musicals on rotation. That any of these people would put up with me long enough to become my friends was a plot twist rivaling “Wicked’s.”
Julien Baker and Singing in Church
I used to doodle on church pamphlets. Each service was a competition between my friends and me. We stifled giggles, drew cartoons, passed notes, mocked the pastor — whatever we could get away with in the few feet of pew space we were allotted. Only the first notes of the organ could move my eyes from my pamphlet to the hymnal, and, without hesitation, I would sing at top volume. I didn’t always know what the words meant, or to whom, if anyone, I was singing, or why, like so many others, I didn’t just stand in silence and leave the singing to the choir. When we prayed I kept one eye open. When we learned about Jesus in Sunday School, I daydreamed about the food waiting downstairs. But when we sang, I felt like someone was listening. I do not know if I believed in God, but I always felt like he could hear me better when I sang.
I walked into the crowd for Julien Baker’s set at the 2018 Boston Calling Music Festival with no context save for a Google search, a quick skim of her music on Spotify, and some second-hand—and by second-hand I mean from Tumblr—knowledge that she was queer and Christian and made music that many described as “healing.” That combination was enough to pique my interest. On a day with a lineup headlined by Eminem, the primary interest of the two friends from home who flanked me on either side, Baker seemed like a bit of an anomaly. She entered to as much applause as the crowd could muster before hands were shoved hastily back into pockets and ponchos — the day was decidedly chilly and rainy — and gave a soft introduction: