ARTS
6
Thursday, July 18, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
When I find a song to share with
my mom, I always wait until it’s the
two of us in the car. It would be dif-
ficult to trace how many of our shared
obsessions began with this exact
scene, but I imagine the fugitivity
of the moment and ourselves on the
road — minds and bodies alike — are
somehow linked.
It’s something to do with not hav-
ing to watch her face if I don’t want
to, which is something to do with fear
of finding disinterest in it, which is
something to do with how absurdly
high stakes these transactions feel to
me. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m
in the crosshairs; instead, it calls my
understanding of the person sitting
beside me into question.
A folk cover of a Nirvana song
played between those seats, as did my
mom’s first contemporary hip-hop
record, as did the song that initiated
our (neverending) Solange phase.
Once, on a night drive during my new
wave spurt, I queued a sequence that
started with The Replacements’ “I
Will Dare,” probably included a Cars
song I thought she might be able to
pretend wasn’t the Cars (Dad loves,
Mom hates), definitely included Echo
& the Bunnymen and concluded with
Iggy Pop. She told me she hadn’t lis-
tened to those songs since she was
around my age, commuting to college
at U-M Dearborn.
Those moments, identifying, then
translating across a synapse I hadn’t
detected, are the ones I wait for. The
ones that compensate for the face she
made when, say, I tried to convince
her Bob Dylan could sing.
***
I don’t know if I should be writ-
ing about this. I wasn’t there to see
how it began: with the artful labor of
creating a mixtape. I’ve never had a
cassette slipped into my hands, never
consulted someone’s carefully print-
ed, cryptic title to gather a hint as to
what I might hear.
I’ve come of age in the days of Spo-
tify and other digital streaming ser-
vices. I don’t tend to look at the past
in a way that lends itself to longing, so
I quickly adapted to an increasingly
intangible experience with music.
Even after admiring box after box of
vinyl, I rarely make purchases at the
record stores I visit, and I don’t miss
the choreography of extracting a CD
without leaving fingerprints on it.
Does that mean that I have no taste of
that old-school magic?
I don’t think so. I think when I
pull up the Spotify playlist I commis-
sioned from a friend after hearing
his favorite Kendrick Lamar song by
chance and finally admitting that I
had neglected a revolutionary genre
for too long, I know something of its
charms. I don’t think that because the
songs on the digital counterpart of a
mixtape were easier to compile that
less attention and care were devoted
to the act of compiling them. I don’t
think that kind of transaction will
ever depreciate if music is still part
of it.
***
I’ve begun to confuse the absence
of a person with the absence of their
music. I’ve begun to confuse the pres-
ence of a person with the sound of
their music. I’ll give you an example:
It’s not when I visit the house where
my Pa once lived that I perceive his
absence most clearly. That might pro-
ceed in part from my Nana’s refusal
to move anywhere else and curator-
like preservation of the home they
once shared. Regardless, it’s when
I listen to a song and think, I know
exactly who would love this song,
and that person is him, and the music
sharing comes to a sad, jolting halt
that I know what it means for him to
be gone.
It got worse when my Grandma
Laura died. Unlike my Pa’s heart
attack, her death was anticipated,
slowly, painfully ambled toward. At
one point, she gathered her grand-
children around her chair and pre-
sented us with paper butterflies,
glued to adjustable clips so that we
could attach it to something. It was
supposed to be her way of being with
us, even as her mobility slipped away.
I cried in the bathroom: Because of
what it meant, I both wanted and
didn’t want it in the most severe way.
Six years after her death, in the
process of moving in and out of col-
lege dorms, I lost the butterfly. One
of the most fragile, most important
belongings I have ever had, and ever
will have. Telling my mom was much
more shameful, much more distress-
ing than any Catholic sacrament I
had ever been forced to participate
in. How could my grandmother ever
be present if I lost the object in which
she vested that presence?
I don’t know, but I can tell you that
I turned to music.
“Paper Butterfly,” I titled it. The
caption adds, “favorite songs of and
songs inspired by the favorite songs
of my grandma, Laura Leigh Schmidt
(1948-2012).” It’s a playlist on Spo-
tify, with a foundation of Paul Simon
and Queen (her favorites), a few
songs of special significance inter-
spersed (Elton John’s “Your Song”:
the song my mom told me my uncle
and Grandma Laura danced to at
his wedding) and, of course, songs
I wish I could play for her. Yusuf’s
“If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out.”
Paul Simon’s not the only one with
the voice of an angel. Grace Potter &
The Nocturnals’s “Stars.” I can’t look
at the stars / They make me wonder
where you are. Aretha Franklin’s
“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural
Woman.” Tell me what that feels like.
That’s more than translating
across a synapse. It’s the letter I’ll
never send because I can’t. It’s a lan-
guage for grief, a less painful iteration
of the imagined conversation, where
at least the silence, still impervious, is
disturbed.
***
So I’m confessing once and for all:
I’m your Spotify stalker.
I can’t tell you how many essays
and sorrows and
long nights your
playlists and inad-
vertent
recom-
mendations
have
gotten me through,
so what I should say
next is thank you.
Thank you for
luring me into the
worlds of dream
pop and contempo-
rary R&B, worlds I’m not sure I could
have found the entrance to without
you.
Thank you for dismantling the
concept of “guilty pleasure,” for lis-
tening publicly, so I can also listen
publicly to songs I worshipped in
ninth grade, when I need them to
remind me of what that time felt like.
And no, I’m not proud of this one,
but thank you for showing me you’re
alive when sometimes I wonder.
When I haven’t heard from you in a
few days, sometimes I stakeout the
“Friend Activity” sidebar. Then I’ll
see your name and your song and
the speaker with the arcs represent-
ing sound, and I exhale. You’re okay.
It’s post-punk, so you’re probably not
happy. But the music is on, so you are
alright. In adequate hands, for now.
***
I’ve used playlists as the language
of my grief, so, naturally, I’ve also
used them to try to make legible fleet-
ing, off-mark feelings that could have
thickened into something like love.
“Could have” because I should pref-
ace this with another confession, that
I forgot how the story goes. It was the
same promising, blinding boy-meets-
girl, followed by the same violation
of boundaries, the levying of power
dynamics, for which boy expresses
guilt and girl comforts boy. (Who
comforts girl?)
But between points A and B of
course, there was music. There were
songs that said, I’m trying to figure
out my feelings for you. There were
careful recommendations that said,
You might understand this, even
though no one else has. The songs
added up in our minds and told us
what we wanted to believe about one
another. For me, that was that I found
a man who wasn’t just luring me in
with feigned respect for boundar-
ies and limits, who wouldn’t take
advantage. (I was wrong.) For him,
it seemed something more like I was
the antidote to some part of himself,
with involuntary powers of healing.
(He was wrong, too.)
These song statements and mis-
representations were housed in Spo-
tify’s collaborative playlist function.
We had two of them; especially in
the beginning, I would contemplate
my contribution obsessively. I tried
to calculate all the
ways it could mis-
fire, both in terms of
whether he would
actually like it and
whether it would
say what I want-
ed it to say. And
I would wait for
his response song,
check the playlists
obsessively,
listen
the moment he added something.
One day, close to the end, at a time
where I was somewhere between
wanting to see him often and feeling
like I was supposed to want to see
him often, I was walking to work. It
was cold and I’d forgotten the ear-
muffs he’d once complimented. To
make matters worse, my hair was
pulled back, so the wind gnawed
mercilessly at both ears. I inserted an
earbud in each, numbness still blos-
soming, and queued the most recent
songs he added to one of the playlists.
One was about finding a reason to
live in another person, which he had
promised I wasn’t, that he wouldn’t
let one person be that, but the song
still had warmth. Another was about
a couple’s atypical, wonderfully
awkward track to falling in love. I
felt a flood of warmth, starting with
my ears. His songs playing in them,
their lyrics I figured might as well
be his words, warmed me from the
inside out, swirled around my head,
dizzying, almost fashioning a pair
of earmuffs out of thin air and a few
well-sung notes.
Your local Spotify stalker
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JULIANNA MORANO
Summer Managing Arts Editor
But between
points A and B,
of course, there
was music.
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