My Year In Art Part II: Music

Here’s what happened after I posted the first installment of my year in art: a painful shock ran through me and I thought, “HOW DID I FORGET TO INCLUDE MUSIC?” I almost sent out a panicked addendum to you, my subscribers, but sense kicked in, and I had to reflect on how, in an entry where I remembered to include video games and architecture, I had left out an art form as essential to my life as vital nutrients.

The most memorable music-moments of 2022 were, for me, live, at outdoor concerts, and it took me some time to face the fact that, even though they were highlights of my life, it’s not easy to share them right now. That was such a comparatively light time, that summer: almost nothing was weighted in the way it would become weighted later and still is. By that I mean, I wasn’t alone for these concerts, just the way I wasn’t alone when I saw The Woman King or Nope, but somehow, I could write like I was without feeling like I was lying to you or betraying myself. Seeing films in an audience is a powerful collective experience, certainly, but maybe because the art itself is recorded, it didn’t feel like a lie to stay with my sole reactions, leaving out the moments of squeezing anyone’s hand during jump scares. Whatever personal dynamics I’m a part of walking into a movie theater has nothing to do with Jordan Peele’s genius or Gina Prince-Bythewood’s vision.

But it does have something to do with why seeing Cat Power at the Stern Grove Festival altered me the way it did. Of course, no one other than Cat Power herself is responsible for her iridecent lyrics or her soulful expansive voice or the fact that when she wants to howl, truly howl in the manner of a wolf, she turns into a werewolf the likes of which I can only hope to capture in my lesbian werewolf novel-in-progress. The way she moves on stage when she wants to, the way she unleashes when she wants to — none of that has anything to do with me or you or whomever might have been by my side that afternoon, but there would’ve been no one to recieve what it all meant to me if I’d had only that crowd to rely on.

Because one of the funniest things about that day was that I didn’t even arrive as a Cat Power fan. I went to that concert because it was free, it was a comfortable walk from my apartment, and because Stern Grove is one of the most enchanting outdoor venues in the country, on the same scale as Red Rocks in Colarado, though endlessly lush and green and reportedly containing one of the oldest sequoias in the country. I knew one Cat Power song that I liked back in college and I couldn’t even tell you what the title was.

She didn’t play it. But that was more than okay. What she did play was an exact sonic landscape of the book I’ve been working on for four years. And I had no idea that Cat Power, who hides behinds her long dark bangs and comes across as terminally shy on stage, could howl, really howl. From the enraptured Note I had open at the time, I wrote down some of her lyrics:

do you look for home in other people’s eyes

so drunk to hell I leave this place, sometimes falling, sometimes flying

roving we go for the pair of brown eyes, for those ancestral lines

We could live for a thousand years, if I hurt you I made wine from your tears

I left completely in love with her. In my daze I wondered aloud why I had missed her in college, and the unlabel-able being with whom I shared the experience suggested that the Cat Power who’d just lifted us off the ground was someone who had matured, who had lived beyond the adorable singer that my college friends were so enamored of and become this…well, I don’t want to get hyperbolic here but become this werewolf-goddess chanteuse of darkness and light. Or something.

***

The life-changer I’ll never find a label for wasn’t with me at the next concert that changed my life in 2022, but he was the only one who didn’t treat me like I was being incredulous when I told him I’d grown up with a fondness for country music. Both Ian and my ex said the same thing when I told them I was going to see LeAnn Rimes: “You don’t listen to country.” What neither of them realized, what I hadn’t even realized, was that I’d known how they’d react, respectively, if I’d ever mentioned that I did, so I learned not to. I hate admitting that I’m wired like this because not giving a fuck what people think is kinda my whole thing. I’m the nonbinary offspring of a musician by whose blood I sprang from the South: do you know how much molecular defiance it would take for me to not to grow up with an abiding respect for that most American of genres?

Still, in fairness to both Ian and my ex, I did initially think I was joking with myself making plans to go to that show. Once again, it was free and it was at Stearn Grove: there was no more beautiful place to spend an afternoon, no matter who was on stage. And, though I hadn’t kept up with her work since I had last seen her perform (as a fan, when she and I were both teenagers), I certainly knew the lady could sing.

What I didn’t know was that when I heard “One Way Ticket” for the first time in decades — my favorite song of hers, how could I have forgotten? — I would bawl openly, on the spot, uncontrollably, so that the woman next to me thought something might be seriously wrong, and I explained between sobs, “no—it’s—it’s—okay—I—I’m fine—I just love this song—and—I—haven’t—heard—it—since—since—”

Since before my father died, since before Katrina, since before my shattering turn away from the New Age religion I grew up with and the subsequent shunning by my mother’s entire expansive family, since before I ever got depressed, since before since before since before since before, Yes, Virginia, there was life before, and it sounded like this.

That was the concert I never sat down for, I spent the show dancing barefoot on the grass like, ultimately, you’re supposed to. And LeAnn Rimes, at 40, looked transcendentally beautiful, real and alive and also like something out of a dream. She wore a translucent white dress that performed the dual task of looking ethereally elegant and showing off her to-die-for figure torturously. When she stood up and turned around, my reactions vascillated between a truly primal Daaaaaaaamn, and, “Wow, what’s her glute regimen, I wonder?” Her new work, by the way, blew my mind. I haven’t gone back to purchase her new album, which wasn’t released at the time of the show, but I remember singing like my throat had been blown open by a thousand meterorites during the choruses that she invited us to share the new words. She’s a force, that LeAnn Rimes, and she’s always been.

This all feels weirdly vulnerable to share. But what am I supposed to do, wait until it feels less raw? The year is less than 48 hours from being over. Yes, time is a lie, but we need something to mark out potential turns or existence or we’ll all go ‘round the bend to the point of no return, as opposed to just on it and off it and around it and right through it like I’ve been doing all year. Music is some of the best medicine available to living-anythings.

Hell, it might be the best medicine available to the dead. Who knows if we need medicine after all this. Being free from everything doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve processed it all, does it?

And, for the curious, here’s LeAnn Rimes at Stern Grove, 2022. If I happen to be in this video, please please please don’t tell me.