Category: All (-ish)

 I grew up singing.  Not in a choir, or formally, but just whenever. Around the house, walking down the street, driving, in the shower, doing the dishes, all of those are good times for a song. Whenever a song hits me, I usually sing it.  One of the best compliments I ever received was a friend who mused, “I always thought musicals were unreal, all those people bursting into song at every moment.  Then I met you.”  My singing voice isn’t particularly good, but it’s fairly on pitch, plus I can remember a lot of words and I’m very enthusiastic.  My friends in high school were wonderful in so many ways, but I think my favorite thing about them was that they too burst into song at random moments.  One sunny afternoon we were just sitting around downstairs when suddenly Cindy started beating out a rhythm on her leg.  Enough of us recognized it as the intro to “Cathy’s Clown” and we hit our first note and were off and running.  “Don’t want your luh-uh-uh-uh-ove, any-more…”  We sang through the song, with Cindy taking a guitar arpeggio here and there.  Our rendition was good enough to bring my mother from the laundry room, smiling at our crazy youthful theatrics.  We were smiling too.

My parents bought me a car to drive about a year after I got my driver’s license.  It wasn’t fancy, a Mustang II with an AM radio and a penchant for leaking oil and breaking down.  When my brother got his license, my parents upgraded us to a green ’79 Mustang with tires too big for the wheel wells.  They would scrape every time we went over a big bump or a dip.  For a period of time, it had no radio.  This was more maddening than only being restricted to the AM band, but some good came out of it.  Before everyone had their licenses, we all piled in the cars of the few who could drive in order to get from here to there.  We were smashed together, chattering all the way, laughing and gossiping.  In other cars, music was the background or the foreground of our ride, but in my car we filled the silence ourselves.  Driving a dark road to somewhere one night we fell silent until Eric burst into the opening notes of Gun’s and Roses Mr. Brownstone.  We were all GnR fans, and knew every word, so we rode into the night, our drug-free bodies singing with great gusto about addition and touring and a life that nearly all of us would never lead.

In my mid-twenties I lived in my version of Shangri-La:  a five bedroom house with two bathrooms and four other female roommates. One of my roommates was dating one of our neighbors, a late-20s PhD who spent his days doing some sort of scientific research I didn’t understand.  He lived alone, but his younger brother was often over and we saw a lot of the two of them. We called them the James Brothers.  His brother, in the fashion of younger brothers the world over, was the hipper, freer James Brother, working in a job I don’t remember, but more importantly, painting his car with chalkboard paint and playing the guitar here and there.  He was pretty darn attractive, and even more so when he played his guitar for us in our house.   One evening he launched in to the song “Hallelujah” and I knew from the first verse this was a song that needed to become a part of me.  After he finished playing and we clapped I made inquires.  The younger James brother lent me his Jeff Buckley tape so I could spend the next few weeks rewinding and hitting play. Much like the experience of my twenties, the song is both simple and complex, hopeful and melancholy, wrapping angry words in a poetry that hits an incredible range of emotions.  I’ve heard other versions, but I come back to Jeff Buckley,* because the fact that  he was a talented artist who died too soon adds yet another layer to what is already a complex and beautiful song.

*Although I shut off the song when he gets to his “general wailing” part at the end.