The “First Time” Maybe a 

friend sends it to you with a little text 
saying “thought you’d like this!!” that 
instantly makes your chest balloon. 
Or maybe it comes up on a Spotify 
radio station or playlist. Perhaps it 
intrigues you from the depths of a 
book passage. It’s possible you choose 
it because the album art looked 
interesting. Maybe it means a lot 
instantly. Maybe it takes a second 
to settle in, finding the perfect way 
to inhabit your brain. Whatever the 
case, that song stays with you. For 
some reason, it’s really lodged in 
there. You can’t get it out of your head. 
The two of you are intertwined.

The Three Days Where You 

Play It A Million Times With your 
cell phone, you can take it anywhere. 

The song becomes the thing you most 
consistently spend time with. You’re 
working most of the time, but luckily 
you can concentrate while listening to 
music. You put it on in the background 
when you find time to hang out with 
friends. It accompanies you to the 
grocery store, people staring at you as 
you hum it in the aisles. You write the 
lyrics you like best on the back of your 
hand, and you listen to it seven times 
in a row. And each time, you seem to 
somehow like it better.

You Add It To Playlists What’s 

that emotion you’re feeling right 
now? You can’t quite figure it out. 
Your finger absentmindedly hovers 
on your mouse, as you look over 
your playlists. The song sits on your 
mind, and you decide it’s time to 
give it a home. But which one to 
add it to? These days, it feels like 
everything in your life is constantly 
moving fluidly into the next thing. 

There are no times to stop and 
breathe (except winter break, when 
everything stopped just a little 
too much). All you can do is take 
the things as they come and try to 
process them even as you’re moving 
on to the next. 

But this song, it just seems to fit into 

some niche. It clicks, somehow, God, 
you know that sounds cheesy. It’s 
when you’re adding it to the playlist 
that you usually listen to at 1 a.m. 
that you realize, maybe this is a sad 
song. How strange that this comes 
as a surprise. It’s not immediately 
apparent, you suppose, thinking 
about how maybe the touches of 
trumpets or drifting guitar strings 
hide the impact of the lyrics. This 
tune walks some strange line across 
your mind. You guess that you just 
haven’t really taken the time to figure 
out why that is. Why does the song’s 
balance appeal to you right now? 

What is it you love at the moment 
that makes this blend of notes and 
emotions make sense? What is it you 
need?

You Send It To Loved Ones 

It sounds almost like that song 
that played over and over that 
September when you and your 
best friend were 16 and she had her 
own car and gave you summery, 
open-windowed car rides home 
from school — it has the same bass 
line, maybe. You text it to her, and 
immediately she writes back that 
she misses you. What does quality 
time mean in a pandemic? What 
does it mean when you and your 
best friend go to different colleges? 
Sometimes, the best you can do is 
send a song you think she’d like and 
schedule a FaceTime. 

Jenny Slate (“Gifted”) cries a lot 

in “Obvious Child.” My sister makes 
fun of me because I have a running 
list of the best crying faces in film (at 
the top is Rooney Mara in “The Social 
Network”), and she reminds me that 
the ability to cry on camera doesn’t 
automatically meet the criteria for a 
good actor. 

One of my biggest pet peeves, 

actually, is when actors drool for their 
big crying scene, making a show out 
of the spittle and snot running down 
their face, like they’re silently hoping 
this scene makes the cut for their Best 
Supporting Actor reel. I think it’s the 
pendulum swinging back from when 
vaudeville-era stars would have single 
tears rolling down their faces so as not 
to muddle their makeup or when that 
one director told Jessica Alba to “cry 
pretty.” Either way, it just feels really 
performative — when we’re watching 
a film, we’re not supposed to see the 
actor performing, we’re just supposed 
to see the character existing.

Slate plays the lead Donna in 

Gillian Robespierre’s (“Landline”) 
directorial debut, and she doesn’t ugly 
cry. We follow her as she stumbles her 
way through a new relationship and 
pregnancy after being cheated on by 
her now ex-boyfriend. She cries so 
much — when she’s waiting outside 
her ex’s house, when she’s at an 
abortion clinic, when she’s lying in her 
mother’s bed — and, because of that, 
it’s become as natural as scratching an 
itch or tucking her hair behind her ear.

Donna doesn’t ugly cry because 

she’s grieving her relationship. The 
tears roll down her face easily, with 
no restraint left, because she’s just 
living through these awful things that 
keep happening. She doesn’t have the 
strength anymore to hold back tears 
when she lost her job, got cheated on 
and didn’t know how she was going to 
pay for her abortion.

I love how even though this movie 

is a romantic comedy, at times it feels 
deeply sad. I love how they portray 
the arduous, non-linear process of 
repairing Donna’s life: visiting family, 
drinking, 
performing 
stand-up 

comedy. I love how winter is an integral 
part of the backdrop: Valentine’s Day 
ironically falling on the coldest day 
of the year, running out of a bar into a 
freezing night looking for someone, 

listening to the rattle of your old 
radiator. It’s my comfort movie when 
I’m depressed and miss the sun.

There’s this scene where her boss 

says, “Change is good, Donna.” And 
she says, “Man, that’s like, the rudest 
thing you’ve ever said to me.”

It’s just an iconic quarter-life crisis 

film.

We need more sad romances with 

happy endings. For all the silent crying 
and worrying in this movie, it’s still so, 
so romantic. 

I have this theory that pre-coital 

scenes (and post-coital, like the Magic 
8 Ball scene in “Good Will Hunting”) 
could be better utilized in film, and 
not just a cut to candles as soon as they 
start making out to keep the PG rating 
in a sexless Marvel movie. Donna and 
Max, her one-night stand (Jake Lacy, 
“High Fidelity”), have an impromptu 
drunken dance scene to Paul Simon’s 
“The Obvious Child,” and it’s so 
heartbreakingly beautiful that it 
breaks my heart. They’re goofy and 
visibly sweaty and laughing into each 
kiss — and it’s just so tender it makes 
me insane.

While romantic scenes like when 

Max warms up Donna’s butter for 
her are really incredible, the greatest 
part of “Obvious Child” is its deep 
understanding and appreciation of 
love in all its forms. Platonic, familial, 
self-love — it means so much to me 
to see Donna have a nice dinner with 
her parents or put her head in her 
roommate’s lap. And Richard Kind 
(“Inside Out”) is a treasure as Donna’s 
father. When he says, “Creative energy 
can come from the lowest point in 
your life,” it just makes me wish he 
was my dad. I rewatched it recently, 
and I forgot how funny it is, actually. 
So much of it feels so poignant to 
me, even when Max brings flowers 
to the abortion clinic like some kind 
of Georgia O’Keeffe joke, or their 
conversation about naming blizzards 
because “That’s what it’s gonna be like 
from now on.” 

When I feel really defeatist about 

life, it means a lot to hear Donna’s 
deeply confessional jokes about her 
vagina. I just hold on to the thought 
that you can cry over the low hum 
of medical equipment during a 
procedure, then wrap yourself in a 
blanket, hold your partner’s hand and 
wait to heal.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, February 24, 2021 — 7

We began by talking about our 

dreams in abstraction, the intuition 
that webs our subconscious. Indigo 
Sparke, 
the 
Australian 
singer-

songwriter, expertly builds a world 
of her own in her music — dreamlike, 
filled with coursing energies and 
space to let yourself expand. 

“I think I’ll like, wake up and … I’m 

still living in the motion and some sort 
of dream space,” she mused in a Zoom 
interview with The Daily. Her dreams 
infiltrate every inch of her new record, 
Echo. The beginning of consciousness 
when waking can be so hard to 
pinpoint. Sometimes, upon arising 
from a deep sleep, there is a feeling, 
just for a bit, that you’ve come into a 
very real world that is not your own. 
This otherworldliness is prominent in 
her music.

Sometimes, 
though, 
Sparke’s 

dreams give her a better sense of 
connection with her life. These 
dreams are “psychic,” even as she 
laughs at herself for using the word. 
They give her a sense of what is to 
come, preparing her for a future she 
can face calmly. We discussed why 
this inner sense of prophecy might be 
figuring its delicate way into her sleep. 

“I think actually, everybody has 

the capacity to tune into an energy 
field where the information is existing 
already,” she said quietly. “And I think 
everybody has access to a certain level 
of intuition. And it’s just about refining 
that tool and tuning into something 
that is so inherently what it means to 

be a human being in a world where 
we’re living in subtle energy.” 

This sort of mindfulness requires 

the trifecta of body, mind and 
environment to carefully be in tune. 
Her music walks this line. At the 
best of times, this personal balance 
is difficult to manage; in periods of 
suffering, it can feel like the three are 
falling out of sync in a way that can 
never be repaired.

Oh, these periods of suffering. 

Sparke’s haunting, gentle voice paints 
a fragile veneer over the chasms of 
emotion her new work covers. It 
draws deeply from the spirit of the 
desert. The stretching of skies found 
in such a landscape was a necessity 
for her at the moment of writing. It 
was an environment she could fill 
her lungs with, something she could 
merge with and allow to envelop her. 
She described herself as surrendering 
to her environment, as though this 
was something everyone did, as if 
everyone had as easy of a time letting 
go of the boundaries of their body and 
becoming a part of a whole. It is a gift, 
a way to contribute to the experience 
of everything around you.

This sense of everything, a holistic 

view of the world, falls right in line 
with Sparke’s philosophy. She believes 
that “everything is inherently linked 
and there is a greater energy,” pivoting 
toward a discussion of spirituality 
in her music. An old man named 
God who lives in the clouds is not in 
her periphery. Faith of any kind is 
a tricky thing to capture with your 
own two hands in a definitive way; 
it is something that she thinks of as 
lived, instead of conjured in the mind. 

Your outside reflects your inside, 
both in your actions of living a sacred 
life and in dealing with your own 
traumas. “The Urgency of Change,” a 
book by Jiddu Krishnamurti she told 
me about, handles this subject well, 
addressing, in Sparke’s words, how we 
are “always seeing externally … what 
is unresolved internally.”

“I feel like I’m full of minefields that 

I’m constantly trying to understand,” 
she finished, although not hopelessly. 
This self-searching process is part 
of the privilege of life, and one she 
pursues in so many different ways.

I asked: “When do you feel most 

at peace with yourself and the world 
around you?” She instantly recalled 
the desert and the ocean, open spaces 
that allow room for her to be. Another 
instance, perhaps, of using our 
external and internal environments 
to tap into each other. This sense of 
peace is something that comes and 
goes for her, just like for the rest of us; 
what motivates her music and her life 
are the themes of love and grief. 

“What is it to heal?” she asked, 

a question coming some months 
after the breakup of a meaningful 
relationship. “I feel that you can’t have 
the healing without the breaking in 
some way.” 

Breaking yourself down is a process 

that feels like it must have some 
absolute end, but really, it is a cyclical 
one. These senses of love and grief have 
inhabited her life ever since she was a 
kid, and they take their rightful places 
in her music. The gentle humming of 
guitars and plaintive lilt of her voice 
gives a sweetness to any tears produced 
over the course of her life. 

Tears of love, tears of change. On 

the cover of her new album, her long 
blonde hair blows across her face, with 
her eyes peering out of the shadows 
it creates. This shadow has since 
been removed, as she hacked off her 
hair until it was shoulder-length in a 
cathartic process that included half 
an hour of sobbing. It involved ridding 
herself of the male gaze, as she let go of 
the trait she had been complimented 
on since childhood. 

“It didn’t take away from how I saw 

myself in my beauty at all,” Sparke told 
me. It allowed her to define her beauty 
for herself, instead of having others 
try to do it for her.

“Someone told me that hair holds 

trauma,” she said, building up to a 
laugh. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, 
I’ve got like, 17 years on me.’” 

Not only a physical change, the 

cutting of hair allowed something to 
click between mind and body. All of a 
sudden, there came a connection.

“Once I chopped it off, I actually 

realized that in a place in a home 
deeper in myself than I even knew 
was there, my values were actually 
intact in some way,” Sparke said. 
She described her core values as 
consistency, 
vulnerability 
and 

honesty, pausing between each word, 
turning it over on her tongue and in 
her mind as she checked to make sure 
it truly matched her feelings. 

Consistency is a virtue in love and 

relationships of any kind, she decided. 
This safe harbor of return assuages 
the physical stress she feels upon 
change. That doesn’t mean impulses 
can’t figure their way in, though. 
“Dog Bark Echo,” one of the tracks 
on her new album, was recorded 

spontaneously a while back, when 
living with fellow artists in a castle in 
Italy. There is a magic there that she 
keeps with her. It is magic of a very 
personal kind; Sparke is keenly herself 
at all times, in conversations and in 
songs, even when it bruises and hurts.

Vulnerability 
and 
honesty 

are woven into the fabric of her 
music — her work is a healing scab, 
acknowledging that its recovery is 
impermanent and that the skin will 
eventually be broken again. She lays 
herself bare not only in the words 
she sings but in how she sings them, 
offering them as an expression of her 
truest self. She makes this music for 
what she’s going through, she told 
me, never appeasing the listener. 

An interview with Indigo Sparke, laid bare

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Daily Arts Writer

Adrianne Lenker

A24

The life cycle of a song
A love letter to ‘Obvious Child’

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Daily Arts Writer

MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON

Daily Arts Writer

YOUR WEEKLY

ARIES

Showcase your talents and focus 
on your career, but don’t forget to 
take care of yourself, particularly 
by getting enough sleep.

AQUARIUS

GEMINI

Family relationships comfort and 
sustain you; it’s a great week for 
moving ahead with a domestic 
project.

SAGITTARIUS

CAPRICORN

SCORPIO

CANCER

Your interpersonal skills are front 
and center, and not just in your 
love life – focus too on friendships 
and colleagues.

TAURUS

Mindfulness and meditation will 
help you create an attitude shift 
which will serve you well during 
the coming year.

VIRGO

PISCES

LIBRA
LEO

Your strength and willpower is 
bringing positive results at work, 
and in your financial situation 
too.

Read your weekly horoscopes from astrology.tv

Expect a highly creative week, 
with a boost to your self-confi-
dence; don’t discount wacky ideas.

Being able to resolve and move on 
from past trauma will feel like a 
weight off your shoulders.

An excellent week for love and 
romance, with the sparkle 
returning to a relationship and 
friends being highly supportive.

Developments at work may move 
swiftly, but you’re finding better 
ways to handle the stress. Focus 
on your mental health.

Pursue your hobbies and passions 
in this highly creative week – a 
sense of purpose will drive you 
forwards.

Karmic links and a nostalgic vibe 
see a focus on the past this week, 
with much you can learn from 
where you have been.

A deeply romantic week finds you 
able to communicate better, 
sharing your deepest sentiments 
with your partner.

WHISPER

“It’s all going very well, no 
problems at all.”

“Remember the fact that you 
have ribs.”

“Judas the stray cat, if you’re 
reeading this please come inside 
the house. It’s too cold outside”

