What's the sound of settling?
The music of lust, longing, and a delightful steadiness.
I started to write this essay in early November 2022, and I finished it on March 12, 2023.
Our youth is fleeting
Old age is just around the bend
And I can't wait to go grey
And I'll sit and wonder of every love that could have been
If I'd only thought of something charming to say
“The Sound of Settling,” Death Cab for Cutie
If our lives flash before our eyes before we die and we get to watch back in a moment that transcends physics and time for a montage of life stuff on film, my teenage chapter will be set to Death Cab for Cutie’s album, Transatlanticism. It encapsulates the angst of my youth just right. Every time I hear it I’m transported back to high school, to the passenger’s seat of my friend Brendan’s blue Toyota, zipping around Woods Hole, driving to the now-shuttered Spinnakers, Old Silver beach, a local punk show, or just finding someone’s house to hang out and listen to more music.
I keep trying to remember what we did back then. What did we do with all our time? But when I close my eyes and bring to my mind’s memory reel all of the great loves of my life — both in friendship and romance — the music is what comes through.
When I think of my first great teenage romance, who marked many of my firsts of primal physical love, I remember Ben Folds, Counting Crows, and The Beatles — staples of the soundtrack to a screenplay he’d written for a college film class in which the main characters’ star-crossed story ends in heartbreak, just like ours would. In hindsight, my twenties are a cacophony of men and music. There was the sweet guitar-playing man who serenaded me with Guster after I missed my ferry back to Seattle from Bainbridge Island, and the guitar-playing man who serenaded me with folk music from his gig downtown after I got snowed in after a work trip in Dallas. There were 9:30 Club shows, and there were drives to wineries in Shenandoah Valley listening to old-school Taking Back Sunday and Something Corporate and in between, there were all the loves that were and never were.
These are moments in time, but there are bigger chapters too with the friends and lovers who helped make me who I am. All of them are set to music. I’ll never listen to The National without thinking of someone. Same goes for Kishi Bashi, Talking Heads, Sufjan Stevens, Phish, Modest Mouse, St. Vincent, Lord Huron, Arctic Monkeys, John Mayer, and probably hundreds of other artists. Mostly any song I’ve heard more than a few times I’ve come to understand better within the context of some relationship in my life.
It can be painful to so closely weave a great love with great music. The song takes on a new meaning, and you’re left with an entirely new story, one you may not always hope to relive every time the song comes on. I felt this deeply with my first high school love, listening to Hard Candy for months. The music was both a curse and a balm: it gave me a narrative to wrap my big emotions around, to cry and journal alongside. When the man I loved wouldn’t talk to me anymore, there was still Adam Duritz. His voice was there for me, trapped in the lyrics I could cast myself within. Over the distance of time, the sharpness of a song’s blow dulls, but it’s my experience that once that harmonic groove is carved, it’s like a scar that never heals. There are echoes of great love in every song that means something to me if I close my eyes and let myself feel it deep in my bones. In the wake of heartbreak, that echo used to bother me. Why do so many beautiful things have to hurt a little as well? Now I appreciate this and carry that sensitivity like the superpower that it is.
In the course of writing this essay, I searched around for answers as to why music has such a deep and lasting impact on our emotional, visceral memory. One BBC article speaks to the idea that music is inherently social: “… Because music is there as part of lives spent with others – often significant others – that helps make it especially meaningful." But not every song that means something to me is one that’s shared with a loved one. Some are sacred sounds that have accompanied me on a road of risk-taking and exploration — some are woven into the fabric of a relationship I have with different parts of myself, or different versions of me from various stages of life. From Florence to Ani, Bon Iver to Buena Vista Social Club, Krishna Das to Marconi Union, Annie Lennox to Fleetwood Mac. These are artists whose music has given me a story to cry with, a rhythm to dance to, a vibration to meditate alongside, or a voice of encouragement to drive with when the passenger’s seat was empty, curving around the waterfalls of Iceland and the mountains of the American west.
A couple of years ago, I dated a man who told me he didn’t like music. I didn’t believe him, and thought there was not a chance in hell a person couldn’t like some kind of music. We took several long road trips in the few months we dated, always listening to podcasts along the way as I kept campaigning for my playlists. Eventually, I tried to make him laugh by singing along to, “Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” on our drive home from White Sands, and saw that his entire aura was one of profound irritation. So let’s just say, I didn’t need to sleep on it, I knew we were incompatible.
It was around this time that I was watching the fruits bear from a course I had taken all about Intentional Dating with my friend Catherine, and embarked on an almost two-year-long dry spell in the romance department. But while it was dry, it was never quiet. There was always music, and it saved me every day. In fact, 2021-2022 was when I embraced that music is a defining element of my yoga/movement offerings: it is so much more than designing a fun playlist, (although it is also that). My approach to teaching is about letting music heal in connection with an experience that’s shared but also individual. I can do my best to feel the music’s message, the story behind it, and encourage a pattern of movement to translate it, but a song to me may mean something very different to a student and that is there’s alone to explore. For me, there is nothing better than this connection when a song hits just right during practice — like the French euphemism for la petite mort it’s like entering another plane of consciousness, an ecstasy best described by Ms. Lauryn Hill: Strumming my pain with his fingers / Singing my life with his words / Killing me softly with his song. When you hear a song like that, you can be seen by it, and you’re no longer alone.
Perhaps I have always been a hopeless romantic, a moody moon-in-Cancer spirit who is trapped in the body of a pragmatic, loyal, down-to-earth, sun-in-Taurus body. So when I started to write this essay it was at the beginning of November, and I was starting to grow weary from that long dry spell but steadfast in my desire for a great romance. No longer was I drawn to a love on the run like what I knew in my teens and twenties and early thirties, or meet-cutes brought by the whims and dramas of the universe, missed boats and snow storms, which explained why more and more of my evenings were spent alone. I had let my body take over and she was looking for something on Earth. Here is a section of what I wrote in my journal on May 4, 2022:
You learned from IID that you’re a tender and loving person with a big heart and an intuitive compass to help you attract men/partners (and friends, too) that really want to spend time with you, desire you, see the real you without you needing to conform our give up parts of yourself or hold back, and who just are smitten with you. You’re even starting to seriously date one man who you met who makes you laugh, and always makes you feel better and feel at ease. Whenever you’re having a bad day, he cheers you up and makes you smile. It’s not a hot steamy romance, and it’s a little boring at times, but it feels steady and you enjoy going on hikes and walks and drives together with your dogs….You spend a lot less time daydreaming about other possible lives and more time just being in your current life.
I wrote that entry and dated it six months in the future to “November 4, 2022.” Two weeks after that date, I met Ben for coffee. It was on our second date that I made sure to ask him if he liked music, which probably sounded like an odd question, but luckily the answer was yes, so there was a third date, and it was then that he shared that he has a regular journaling practice. Like me, he uses journaling to tackle life’s dilemmas and decision-making. Before this, I had never gone out with a man with a journaling practice, and I was quietly drawn to him, a person who was shaped by such intentionality.
A month later he sent me a letter while I was leading a retreat in Virginia. He talked about his meandering route of life, time spent on the road the past couple of years that reminded me of my own experience — a time of being intentionally unsettled in order to do the kind of exploration that eventually led us both back to Tucson, albeit on different timelines. He talked about winding his way back to the desert to find that settled, sturdy feeling. We met a couple weeks after his return.
In his letter he referenced a song I’d never heard called, “There’s So Much Energy in Us,” by Cloud Cult. It was an old, familiar feeling as I read his note, not unlike the fluttery longing I had felt when separated by state lines as a teenager. But it was steadier now because what we were starting to grow was steady, and that steadiness let me surrender to the flutter. I read his letter over and over and listened to the song and knew I wouldn’t ever hear it again and not think of him. The music could hold me in that lovely moment and I resigned myself to the knowledge that it might have to hold me in another more difficult one in the future.
I let Ben read this essay before I shared it. We’ve talked about my being a writer, and how that entails broadcasting personal details of my life on the Internet for public consumption. We decided on the boundaries we both felt good about in that regard. He’s a champion of my writing and goes out of his way to make time and space for me to do it, which is one of the many things that work about our relationship. But like everyone, we each have our insecurities. One of his is that — and I’m roughly paraphrasing — perhaps I will grow bored of him, that I’ll find that I’m more interested in, let’s say, a musician, or some other globe-trotting gent like the ones I dated in D.C. or while traveling. He hears my stories, the ones set to music.
I think what’s changed is that I don’t go looking for muses in my life. As a result, I found a partner who gives me the safety and freedom to be myself.
I have my own insecurities sharing this essay. I worry that it’s too new or too soon, that I’ll sound childish or naive, that I’m being careless. I worry I contradict myself. I worry I betray the part of me that grew stronger and more independent through my many years of being single. But I go back to the music, and I trust. I remember that I would so much rather let it shatter me than never have felt it at all.
This past weekend, we hired a dog sitter to stay with our pups and took a staycation at his house. He asked me what I wanted out of the weekend, and I told him I wanted to be able to do my movement practices at home uninterrupted, and that I wanted to write. When I realized I left my earbuds at home, he brought me his. They are made with some new-fangled technology called bone-conduction. Apparently, the vibration of the music travel to your cochlear through your cheeks, rather than through the air.
He is not a musician, and he gives me just what I need. When he leaves the house, I put them on and cue up my tunes to move around to the music as it travels through my bones.
Love this. And you know how much I love a Ben.
This is so beautiful. Thank you for writing it.