LOVE SONGS

Go. Open your Spotify or your Apple Music or YouTube or wherever you listen to music. Find a song, or a few songs, or a playlist that reminds you of someone important––a person you didn’t tell everything you wanted to. Think of a memory you have with them. Wait, before you play the music: forget where you are, close your eyes, hold your thoughts. This is the only thing that exists. Now, hit play.  Listen to the song the whole way through. When you’re done, I’ll show you my songs.

What are the things you didn’t say to them?

“Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin 

            My dad was ten years old when this song was released. “It makes me feel young again,” he said. The first time he played it for me, I was twelve, in the car on the way home from sixth grade—a hot day in September, one of those afternoons when the sky is solid white with clouds. His pre-owned Subaru Outback smelled like new car scent gone stale. I had the A/C on high, chilling my shoulders. “Listen to this song,” said my dad. “I think you’ll like it.” 

            Notes on a bass crept downward menacingly. An electric guitar joined in and screeched, wavering and woozy. The singer’s voice was a hoarse shout: “Been dazed and confused for so long, it’s not true.” As always, he was right: I did like it. 

            My dad and I share music like messages in a bottle, floating across the space between our different generations, across quiet car rides and silences filled with  things we don’t say. He doesn’t tell me that he’s taking anxiety medication because of his job. I don’t tell him that I cried three times this week alone in my room. But he introduced me to the Talking Heads and the Breeders, and with them came stories about college roommates, part-time jobs––I hear what his youth sounded like. I play him Courtney Barnett and Big Star, and he hears mine.  

            Three and a half minutes into the song, the guitar was a frantic falsetto, and the drums were shaking the car. We headbanged, laughing. My dad air-guitared at stoplights. “Oh no, am I embarrassing you?” he joked. 

            I’m the one who usually drives now. When I play “Dazed and Confused,” my dad grins from the passenger seat and turns up the volume. We roll down the windows and dance in our seats. My favorite part of the song is close to the end, but my dad’s favorite is a little before that, when the drums and guitar accelerate, tripping over riffs and thrashing and shaking the world of the song apart. It starts at about the four-minute mark––once you get to that place in the song, turn the volume up at least two notches and imagine that you’re in a car with the windows down, your face hot from the sun and your eyes watering from the wind because you’re going about seven over the speed limit. Headbang just a little bit, even if you’re in public. 

            “That’s true rock & roll,” says my dad, “when the song descends into chaos and gets almost completely out of control. When it lets go.” 

What did it mean to be with them?

“Gloria: In Excelsis Deo” by Patti Smith       

            It was early in January and the streets were still crisp and sparkling with leftover Christmas. We tore through Midtown in her car, trying to find somewhere to park, hyped up on high-school romance and the sixteen-year-old thrill of driving at night. Think about your first car, or your friend’s first car—picture it. What leftover cups lived in its crannies? What CDs were strewn like huge pieces of confetti in the backseat? In this car, it was old Otherlands iced Americanos and Beastie Boys CDs.

            A Patti Smith song started to play as we pulled into the dark parking lot of a Catholic church: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” 

            I looked over at her, framed against the blue window. She looked back. Her cheekbones glowed with the moon, and I couldn’t read her eyes. I could feel my blood under the skin of my chest. See my breath in front of my face in the cooling car. And she reached out and took my hand and touched my knuckles with her fingertips (and I didn’t know that feeling sparks was a real thing) and rested her finger in each soft well of skin between my knucklebones like she wanted to feel me there, and suddenly I was so grateful for the nerves of my hands. I shivered.  

            Patti Smith’s voice was like a fuck-you and so was being gay in the South and so was making out with my girlfriend in a church parking lot. “I’m gonna tell the world that I just uh-uh made her mine,” Patti Smith sang to us. In the night, in the dark world of her car, it was just us, creating each other. Her mouth was a rebellion and a revelation. “My sins, my own / they belong to me.”

How did you change together?

“You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift

            When those twangy guitars start strumming—I would recognize those notes anywhere—we grab hands. Our hands used to be smaller and pudgier, with shorter fingers, wearing clumsy woven friendship bracelets that we gave each other during some sleepover. Now her fingers are long and her nails are slender and elegant and pointy, and my cuticles are ragged from picking around my red nail polish. Look at your hands. What did they look like when you were ten years old? Would you recognize them in a photograph? Would you recognize your best friend’s hands? 

            “You’re on the phone with your girlfriend she’s upset! She’s goin’ off about something that you said!!” we would shout, voices thrown up, gleeful, as if in worship. In the hallways of our middle school, in our blue-and-purple bedrooms while having a dance party, and later in our cars with the windows rolled down. 

            The song was old even back when we started singing it in fifth grade, and not cool, not one of the songs that would play at a school dance. Taylor Swift was too country, too girly, too romantic. We didn’t outgrow the song, though—age only allowed us more earnestness. More longing for the innocent youth it used to represent—when love and jealousy were too far away for us to understand. 

            The first time my heart was broken, her pillow caught my hot tears, and she pulled me by the hand across the street to buy me two chocolate fudge cookies that became salty in my mouth. Then we drove around aimlessly in her car, the blurring streets filling my mind with a soothing static. Singing together like we used to. “You Belong With Me,” and I sang it to her, not to the person I no longer belonged with, who wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. 

What questions do they leave behind?        

“Chemical Fire” by Van Duren

            This is not a song I shared with him. There was very little I shared with him. In my head, I burned for him, and in my head he also burned for me. He told me I was sweet like a mango and asked me to be his valentine. I mistook the anxiety of my uncertainty for butterflies and the frantic need of his attention for a deepening crush. “Feels so empty when a day goes by / and I can’t see you / and then I find I’m spending too much time / watching the ceiling,” sings Van Duren, as if he could see me lying in bed and obsessively checking my texts. Open your messages app. Who has texted you recently? Whose name are you waiting for, hoping it will pop up on your screen?

            He left me turned on and lit up, still leaning, flowerlike, toward his burning lips, toward his hands warm on my sides, stupid-drunk against the door. “Good night,” I say, giving him my pleading eyes of seduction-desperation, hoping he knows what they mean. “Sleep tight,” but I will not sleep, staring into the cold light of my phone messy with need for him. Too much floating on his leftover heat and bobbing, drifting, blowing in the not knowing.

            Later, he faded away as the days grew longer and warmer, as if he were a fantasy of my imagination in the dark cold days of early spring. I held on too long and grasped for him, texting him every weekend and feeling nauseous when he turned down offers to hang out. Abasing myself, because I liked who I was when I was around him, and I didn’t like that the negative space he left behind swelled and made me feel smaller. I didn’t like what he pulled out of me in his absence. 

            It, whatever it was, ended with no finality, just an impotent fizzling-out. I deleted the playlist of songs that reminded me of him, ashamed. The hurt I felt didn’t seem to match what actually happened. I joked with friends that he was just another gross guy, a dick with issues. But that didn’t answer the still-itching question: why was I so into him? Why did I let a boy hurt me with no good reason? He only left behind more uncertainties.

What answers are you finding?

“Cheap Queen” by King Princess 

            In Boston my hair is still wet and frizzing from the rain, but I’ve already forgotten the hour spent waiting in line to get inside the concert hall. On the train ride here, I listened to King Princess’s album Cheap Queen on repeat: “I’ve been alright / I’ve just been doing the same shit I’ve always liked.” The songs didn’t remind me of anyone but myself and this moment and maybe the future that the train seemed to be heading into. 

            My Spotify account has seen playlists come and go and come back again, set from public to private to public again. Songs have said for me the things I didn’t know how to say, and still, when I listen, they do something for me that words can’t. Now my playlists are all for me. I count down the days and mark an excited purple reminder on my Google calendar, waiting for the new Harry Styles album to come out. I wouldn’t have put a Harry Styles song on a playlist for any of the people whose texts I have waited, breath bated, for—but Harry introduced me to King Princess and I love him with the easy Sunday-night-alone version of myself. I don’t care what these songs say to anyone but me. 

            At the concert, queer women are everywhere, glittering and abundantly beautiful and pressed together, their coconut hair in my face, their tank-top-strapped shoulders digging into my back. I hold hands with my friends and sing without hearing my own voice, losing it inside all the others. 

AUTHOR: Victoria Beale is a sophomore at Brown from the South. She loves to write creative nonfiction, especially about music, cool people, and (you guessed it) love and sex! Outside of writing, she enjoys learning history, cooking (badly), and making very specific Spotify playlists that she will never listen to again.

ARTWORK: Elon Collins