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

NEW MEDIA NOTEBOOK

BAM COMMUNICATIONS

JULIANNA MORANO 

Summer Managing Arts Editor

But between 

points A and B, 
of course, there 

was music.

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