“You can never publish my love,” 
Rogue Wave chants, in the song that 
the title of this series riffs on. Maybe 
that’s true, and we can never quite 
account for our love on paper or in 
print, but we sure can try. That’s 
what this series is devoted to: pub-
lishing our love. Us, the Arts section 
of The Michigan Daily, talking about 
artists, some of the people we love 
the most. Perhaps these are futile 
approximations of love for the poet 
who told us we deserve to be heard, 
the director who changed the way 
we see the world, the singer we see 
as an old friend. But who ever said 
futile can’t still be beautiful?
Last summer, I spent a lot of 
time wandering around Boston 
listening to music. I wasn’t lonely, 
exactly — I was living with my 
best friend — but we both worked, 
and I was often alone, on the bus 
to a catering gig or entering data 
into a spreadsheet at my intern-
ship. Every week, I walked from 
our third-floor bedroom in Mis-
sion Hill to the main branch of the 
downtown library, which was a 
two-mile straight shot down Hun-
tington Avenue, and I listened to 
The Be Good Tanyas.
I first heard The Be Good Tan-
yas when my mom checked out one 
of their CDs from our local library 
in Philadelphia. I was in elemen-
tary school, six or seven years old, 
and I listened to what she listened 
to: Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, a 
rotating mix of folk singers and 

women whose voices sounded like 
bird calls. The album from the 
library was Blue Horse, The Be 
Good Tanyas’ 2001 debut, and we 
listened to it on the orange wooden 
stereo system my parents kept in 
the living room alcove. 
When I rediscovered The Be 
Good Tanyas in high school, I liked 
Blue Horse for its nostalgic power. 
Still, their music was like an arti-
cle of clothing I was holding onto 
until it fit. Each one of their songs 
was a meditation on emotions I 
hadn’t experienced yet — the real, 
grown-up variations on the fledg-
ling feelings of adolescence. The 
Be Good Tanyas seem to inhabit 
the kind of fullness that is created 
by acknowledging it, by wanting it. 
Their music made me want to be 
the kind of person who would look 
for this largesse. 
During sophomore year of col-
lege, I got back into the Tanyas 
— not just Blue Horse, but also 
Chinatown 
(2003) 
and 
Hello 
Love (2006). That spring, I played 
“Draft Daughter’s Blues” for a guy 
I liked. I wanted to impress him 
with my obscure music taste (ugh), 
and I also thought the way he 
might understand me through the 
song was the way I wanted to be 
understood: “Impossible to keep a 
straight line / Too young to keep 
these bitter hearts / And all around 
me, somebody’s singin’ / Get back, 
get back.”
But even as we listened to it, I 

was already imagining him into 
the mythology of my own life, 
wondering how future-me would 
explain to someone else what our 
relationship had been. I was think-
ing about how he would fade into 
a character who only mattered for 
the ways he exposed something 
truthful about me, my desires, my 
selfishness, my tendency to refuse 
to cede the moral high ground 
even when maintaining my posi-
tion meant hurting the people I 
cared about. As much as I didn’t 
like thinking this way, there was 
something good about it, too, 
knowing I was figuring out unflat-
tering truths about myself. I left 
for Boston as soon as school ended, 
ready to find out if the person I’d 
become in college was a product 
of my influences or something less 
malleable.
When I listened to The Be 
Good Tanyas in Boston last sum-
mer, I finally felt they were sing-
ing to me, about things I was old 
enough to understand. “Keep it 
light enough to travel / Don’t let it 
all unravel,” vocalist Frazey Ford 
sings on “Light Enough to Trav-
el.” This was what I was after in 
Boston: an impossible balance, a 
mixture of freedom and security 
with equal portions of each. More 
concrete lyrics struck me, too: 
“Promise me we won’t go into the 
nightclub / I really think that it’s 
obscene / What kind of people go 
to meet people / Where they can’t 

be heard or seen.” I like how the 
Be Good Tanyas sing about finding 
a nightclub obscene without com-
ing across as frumpy. This became 
something I want to say: “Don’t 
you think nightclubs are obscene?” 
Obscene.
That summer, I wrote in my 
journal that I worried my person-
ality was a “mish-mash of everyone 
I’ve ever admired and that I have 
no original ideas or interests.” It’s 
ironic, then, that The Be Good Tan-
yas have joined the conglomerate 
of people whose personalities and 
interests I have pawned and emu-
lated. I stumbled on my version of 
the anxiety of influence last sum-
mer — a set of fears which is itself 
derivative, proving my point that 
nothing exists outside of its cir-
cumstances. It’s true that I spent 
a month crafting detailed, snarky 
diary entries after I read David 
Sedaris’s “Theft by Finding,” and 
it’s true that I bought my black car-
penter pants because I saw them 
on Man Repeller. Whatever!
The Be Good Tanyas are a 
part of this, giving me something 
less concrete to steal: a mindset, 
a way of walking around while 
I’m listening to their music in my 
headphones. I’ve decided to stop 
feeling uncomfortable about this, 
because cribbing from the people 
I admire is just the way life works 

— and it’s even better to give credit 
to everyone I’ve copied some-
thing from. A non-exhaustive list: 
Caroline’s Swedish clogs, Claire’s 
razor brand, Nora Ephron’s motto 
(everything is copy!), Summer’s 
obsession with the eye makeup in 
“Euphoria,” the star-shaped hoops 
on that girl in my English class. 
Sally’s middle-school cell phone 
and Rory Gilmore’s journalism 
aspirations. Also, a million other 
things. 
In an editorially satisfying twist, 
The Be Good Tanyas are notorious 
for covering other people’s songs. 
“The Lakes of Pontchartrain” 
dates to the 19th century. “For the 
Turnstiles” is a Neil Young song. 
They’ve covered Prince and Blind 
Willie Johnson, and a version of 
“House of the Rising Sun” fits 
nicely into an album of their origi-
nal songs. The Be Good Tanyas 
aren’t shy about reworking other 
people’s material, which seems to 
support my theory that the most 
interesting people have forgotten 
all about the anxiety of influence. 
What I want — what the Tanyas 
have embraced — is the serenity of 
influence, the confidence of influ-
ence, the creative thrill of turn-
ing someone else’s thing into your 
thing and forgetting to be embar-
rassed that someone else always 
did it first.

7
ARTS

Thursday, August 15, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

My time with the Tanyas

DESIGN BY KATHRYN HALVERSON

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