Open

Music is still the journey not the destination

I was sitting on a train, but I was in a movie of someone else’s life that was so real it felt like my own life.

Suddenly, I realized there was a person standing above me. It was the train conductor, taking tickets. He looked like a child. I started, like I’d been caught doing something untoward, something I shouldn’t be doing. He smiled a patient smile while I fumbled with my phone, trying to find my ticket code to scan. An airpod fell out of one ear, and I blushed, hoping he couldn’t hear what I’d been listening to.

A song called Pussy Palace. Please don’t let him hear me listening to Pussy Palace—and see me for what I am, an older broad on the verge of tears, remembering what it’s like to be a near-middle aged woman.

I doubt he noticed me at all.

When Lily Allen’s album West End Girl came out a month ago, I was like that kid who clamps their hands over their ears going “LA LA LA—I can’t hear you”. I didn’t want to get sucked in. I felt even kind of judgmental from a safe distance, like how could someone expose their raw pain and anger so in the moment — isn’t perspective BETTER? I was just publishing a book that included an abusive relationship from over TWENTY YEARS ago I’d still felt uncomfortable and ashamed working through on the page but also compelled, like if not now when? I think the first mention of West End Girl I saw came via writer Chloe Caldwell, who was all for no perspective, DO IT, feel the pain and betrayal on the page. (If you don’t keep up with stuff, Lily’s open marriage went wrong and she musically exposed the wretched scenario mere months after it played out. It is a work of genius) Without hearing a word or a note, I sat smugly on my mature perch, kind of like when we used to watch Girls back when I was fifty-something and thought “you couldn’t PAY me to be that young again!”

But then I remembered how I’d committed a very similar creative act thirty years before—wrote and recorded a set of songs in part inspired by the failure of my marriage, in the moment. The trying and failing, writing and recording process took a few years, the record came out as the split was happening. In a small way it captured some zeitgeist, on a 90s slacker scale: Diary Of A Mod Housewife. It’s possibly why you’re here —that leap I took that felt like it might kill me gave me life as a solo artist, modest and un-meteoric as it’s been. Speaking, or shaping and singing the truth, is powerful stuff. You do it for yourself, but go hard enough and it speaks for others.

I’d been broken-hearted, more for my family by that point than for myself, but also felt liberated. My disappointment and anger was partly (mostly?) inward-facing and there was no clear villain like the gaslighting, duplicitous husband in Lily Allen’s case. My villains were belief in an institution — my too-young attempt at marriage — and maybe Catholicism, frequent culprit in some if not all of my transgressions as a younger person. And economics—how hard it is to juggle everything and to struggle and nobody is going to save you. Rather than burn it all down, I ended the album with a prayer, “We’re Stronger Than That” with hope and real-life details like diaper pails , not as saucy as Lily’s sex toys and butt plugs, I know. I still believed in love and commitment, even though I deep down knew—had known since I walked through a therapist’s Stuyvesant Town apartment door—that my first marriage wasn’t going to survive.

Last week I finally gave myself permission to listen to West End Girl - first as a sociological excursion, “better see what the fuss is all about” and then again and again as catharsis, sisterhood, appreciation, inspiration, witness, clinical dissection, back around to emotional reaction to a gut punch , and even nostalgia for what it feels like to be THAT YOUNG and the “that young” is not teenage or twenties early love and infatuation and hopeful cheerful youthful joy and lust or torment young, but the dawning self-realization that only comes after you’ve lived nearly four decades.

Did you ever think you’d mourn your messy midlife years? At the same time feel relief they’re in the rearview, smaller and more artfully framed than they could ever appear in real time? I keep hearing grief isn’t linear and I think that’s true of sadness for our old selves, the bravery and even, yes, ignorant part of who we were. Those massive blind spots that allowed us to pull ahead - just like modern cars have all these sensors to keep you in your lane, so does perspective and that’s surely one of the challenging parts of being a mature artist: “ooh, what if this happens.”..” Nope can’t do that, it’s not what I do”…”eh, tried that before, it didn’t work” etc.

I listened through the album again when I reached the beach by train, walking along next to the crazy waves and old and young couples with their dogs. Do people stay together now for the sake of the dogs? Me and Eric make music, we don’t need more responsibility but it’s a way of life out here by the sea. Maybe some day…

Watching the waves

As I listened to West End Girl, I marveled at Lily’s talent and courage, wishing—hoping— it’s possible to come to such a bold statement, capturing the moment, without having your world come crashing down to get there. The music feels effortless, the melodies that at first seem sing-song are shaped to take you up and down, oftentimes lifting at the saddest places. You are inside a person’s head. Even if it took a team of people to get you there. I think they mostly just get out of the artist’s way and let her speak her real and fictional specifics, so we can think about our own.

I stopped into a local coffee place and got talking to the twenty-something barista, she found out from the owner that I played music and said “you’ve got to come to Open Mic night!” She said she was learning to play guitar — “we need women, it’s a boys club. You’ve got to come play!” Is it still a boys club?

She said she’d learned some chords on acoustic guitar, but it hurt her fingers. She marveled at the callouses on the tips of the fingers of my left hand. She said she’d learned her first song and was going to play it at the next Open Mic, and she really hoped I’d come down that Monday and play something.

“What song did you learn?” I asked.

“Pussy Palace.”

See you at the Open Mic.

Girl To Country: A Memoir is out now in the US, 12 March in the UK