The first song I ever learned was probably “Frere Jacque” or “The Itsy-bitsy spider”.
The first time I heard a song and felt like it was just for me was “The Rainbow Connection”.
The first time I heard AC/DC’s Back in Black I was ten. My cousin Mike got in trouble for singing the word “bitch” out loud in front of my Aunt Mary during “What Do You Do For Money”.
Linda Ronstadt was belting out “Hurt So Bad” from a car stereo the first time I was moved by someone’s voice. I was sitting in the lap of a friend’s teenage sister in an overcrowded car and she was singing along.
There are memories that only songs can reach. Some events are welded so deeply to a song that it’s easier to sing them.
It’s dark in my room on Saturday night, in the fall of tenth grade year. The wood paneling of my ceiling glows in the light of the digits on my clock as it plays Madonna’s aching voice. “Crazy for You” is a cloud of sound that I float upon, allowing me to turn onto my side and look through the window to the outside world, feeling excluded. Through her words I am able to name my sadness for the first time. Not just aloneness, but loneliness. I have good friends, best friends, with whom I can share pleasures and interests, but no-one yet I feel safe to confide in. I’ve never wanted to be unguarded before. I want love for the first time. Not just a girl’s attention or a kiss or a brush of a boob, or whatever coup I am supposed to count as a teenage boy. I’m not even in love with any one girl. I’m in love with every girl; any girl (editor’s note – of conventional teenage beauty standards). I’ve got a crush on being in love. The singer’s vulnerability shames me. It’s a start. It is the first trade between a boy’s life and a man’s.
I’ve heard “On Eagles Wings” countless times in church. The song is one of the most frequently sung songs at mass my entire life. It’s simple to play and sing, and sing along with. It’s quiet and meditative and until today it’s meaning is limited to knowing that as soon as it ends, communion is over and donuts or bagels are just on the other side of parish announcements. At this moment, it’s being played at Nana’s funeral mass, which is my first funeral mass, and for the first time in my life I need to be borne up by G-d. I’ve made it to seventeen without a meaningful loss, but today I feel the weight of loss, after years of shelter. My own hollowness is enough to tighten my throat, but my family’s grief presses against me in strange ways. The song’s words aren’t quite as trite and cliche, and I can’t push the tears back into my eyes. It might be the first time I pray.
My wife is in residency, and she’s struggling. Her program is jerking her around, and changes the rules of success every time she gets close. The music of Colin Hay, from the eighties band Men at Work has reentered our orbit through an appearance on Scrubs, a show about the struggles of medical residents, laser guided at my wife. On bad days she drives out of the city and listens to music to decompress the screaming she can’t do at work. Today she invites me along. She needs me to hear the song “Waiting For My Real Life to Begin”. It starts with “any minute now…” and he sings her thoughts “soon…soon…oh so very soon” as she cries, aching to be free of these hoops, so she can become the only thing she’s ever wanted to be. Colin accuses me of saying “be still my love” and “be here now” and she is smiling as she cries, because Colin hears her and I do not. He raises up her unimaginable pain in his song, as I beg her to let it go. He has known her all her life; I have only three years as her husband. I don’t understand, but I am at her side as she realizes that she is not alone. That is enough.