My parents told me the first time they ever heard me sing was in the backseat of our 1986 AMC Eagle. We were living in Virginia Beach and I was maybe two, my tongue folding its way around an american accent to the chorus of R.E.M’s “Shiny Happy People”. They tell me that I was absentmindedly staring out the window, strapped to a carseat and swaying my tiny pigtails from side-to-side. As my eyes tried to keep up with the blur of trees racing by, my mouth released “chynn app ee poopleeees!”
My pathway into music is of course, not extraordinary; my father, born in Waycross, Georgia, favoured artists that sparkled with a Southern dexterity, all dirt roads and longterm loves. My mother, born just outside of Birmingham, UK, liked the kind of music that could make your voice swell: INXS, The Beatles, Sheryl Crow and Queen. There is a VHS tape somewhere in their attic or basement, I’m not sure, that shows us anticipating the drop in “Bohemian Rhapsody” – me in just a pair of socks, and my mother, one hand holding mine, the other releasing the late-80s scrunchie from her long blonde hair to propel it around my eager, dribbling smile. As those riffs danced around Mercury’s fervent, four-octave vocals, time stood still. I remember the smell of my mother’s hair, and the lion’s mane Mercury’s music had conjured. I remember screeching, desperate to reach his falsetto. I remember our collapse as the gong rang throughout our living room. What was this magical portal that had transformed my mother?
As a military family, we tried to anchor our consistent upheavals with the music we brought with us. In Izmir, Turkey, “All I Wanna Do” meandered through our apartment, while the call to prayer from the local mosque echoed outside. “Born to Run'' rang from the speakers, as my mother closed the blinds at midday, deterring the 40 degree sun from piercing its way through the windows. When we moved to the UK, I found myself at a family Christmas party, eye level with my grandmother’s piano keys. A cousin's fingers effortlessly swayed across the ivories as countless aunts and uncles drunkenly bellowed along to “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be”; Lennon and Ono’s “Happy Xmas”; Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”. It seemed like hours went by as I sat next to the piano, crossed-legged, watching these strange, foreign giants.
We soon settled in a grey, industrial East Midlands(ish) town, my accent tightening to a casual British tone in less than a month. A few years passed, and it seemed as though the anchor had cemented itself in our Victorian terraced house. Stillness. As soon as the dust settled, my father was stationed abroad again but my mother, intent on keeping us afloat in one place, decided to stay behind with me and my brother. But the strain of striving to stitch together a home began to permeate the walls — cracks too large to cover up caused one rupture after another: a silence too loud to bear, too many empty bottles in the trash, closed bedroom doors, solo walks to school.
Most afternoons, I sat crossed-legged in front of a TV screen, inhaling a too-hot pita bread filled with microwave-melted cheese and ham. There were music videos, and soon “All The Small Things,” over and over again. For a Backstreet Boys-obsessed tween, this felt like the sky had cracked open, revealing a new horizon; one where the glossy-exterior of the perfect pop star was turned on its head, urging the exhale, the unclenching of a girl who would no longer be obsessed with her too-small breasts, or the braces that made her gums bleed. It was a place I could belong, be myself, in a sea of trying to keep steady with each move and every new classroom. It was a sound that could fill the silence that blanketed every room in the house.
I began fiddling with my mum’s acoustic guitar. The strap was a kaleidoscope of woven purple, green and red. It was itchy and it smelt strange, an artefact from a time before I existed. The strings were old and rigid from collecting dust, and my soft adolescent grip could feel the many fingers that had touched them before. While I awkwardly strummed along to the chorus of “What’s My Age Again?”, I was never allowed to take it out of the living room. It felt precious and important – not something a 12-year-old could shred.
Two weeks before my 14th birthday, my father returned from his time in the Middle East, his body sculpted by lonely gym visits and meals for one. In the basement, I used up all the ink on his printer, later thrusting an extremely pixelated still of Tom Delonge into the hands of my parents. It flopped with the weight of the ink as they squinted at the instrument hanging just above his knees. This one? they pointed at the page, peering up at my persistent nodding.
They tracked down a mint green Fender knock-off via the boyfriend of my old babysitter, and as I sat on my living room floor that morning and pried open the case, it glowed with punk rock potential. I stayed in my pyjamas all day, strumming it with inexperience and unwavering attention. I made a home for it there in my bedroom, where it would wait for me to get back from school and patiently put up with the slow, tentative repetition of G, D, C. I bought Blink 182, Linkin Park and Incubus sheet music books with money from my Saturday job and flipped through the pages adoringly, fantasising about the day I’d be able to read what was written inside.
At 16, I inherited a second hand acoustic guitar. I wrote songs about getting my period, and the pressure in picking the right subjects at school. I recorded them in the basement of my best friend’s house, in between stealing just the right amount of tiny European beers from his parent’s kitchen so they wouldn’t notice. I proudly coined the stage name ‘Made From Clouds’ and carefully decorated my EP sleeves using cotton balls, glitter-glue and gel pens. I entered talent shows at school and played gigs at pubs that turned a blind eye to my age. The guitar had taken on a different force, one that I could utilise to tell my own stories.
When I moved to a new city for university, my guitar was a tool for making friends among another batch of unfamiliar faces. It picked up the familiarity of house shows and crappy beer from my hometown and put it in a new place, with new faces. Somewhere comfortable yet stirringly new. I had found where I belonged during a daunting and uncertain period. It was a time of playing characters, of searching for a self untethered from my parents, and everything I thought I knew. I was exposed.
Soon, a new boyfriend: he made me forget my limbs and tangled my thoughts into knots. He spoke without thinking, wildly gesturing his hands in command of the room and the people within it. He winked at me without irony and I found myself bending to his essence, like a seedling following the sun. It was exhilarating to feel chosen, to feel like his grand prize. After those first few months, there was a shift, a gentle trickle of changes in his behaviour. There was no catalyst or momentous occasion but a stream of prodding phrases creeping into my day to day.
“Stop being so sensitive”
“You always overreact”
“I remember when you could take a joke”
“If you listened to me once in a while…”
I remember how my childhood friend looked at me when I told her I couldn’t stay out for her birthday because he needed me back at his place. He’s feeling unwell, I said. He says his headaches ease when we’re together. Her eyes searched for mine as I said goodbye.
He told me I couldn’t sing love songs. It made him upset to hear me talk of love about someone else, even if that person didn’t exist. I’ll strike those from my setlist, I said, I want you to enjoy my shows. During one gig, I forgot the words to one of my songs, awkwardly fumbling through my brain until the chords stopped ringing. My friend and his girlfriend looked away, awkwardly sipping their pints as he told me that maybe it was a sign it was a bad song. I was cringing, he said. I think you should take a break from gigging for a while.
Without shows, my weekends became blank. He told me he needed help taking money at the door where he worked. I sat alone upstairs with my coat on, stamping hands and chain-smoking rollies while he partied for hours. Searching for another can of cider to pass the time, I ventured downstairs to find him with a woman I had never seen before. I watched as their forms moulded together, how he held the back of her head and the arch of her back as their tongues danced as one. I don’t know how you come up with this stuff, he roared, back at home. You’re being completely mental. He punched a hole in the wall next to my head.
I stopped seeing friends. Eventually, they stopped texting me. I would make him and his friends dinner while they got stoned and played Xbox in his front room. Not your best, he grimaced, slowly pushing the pasta out of his mouth and onto the plate as his friends bowed their heads, laughing under their breath.
I felt my sense of self slipping through my fingers, with nothing there to catch it. A nebulous existence centred around his approval and his happiness. I was deflated, insignificant. My guitar gathered dust and gained a sun stain. I don’t know why you even bothered to play it in the first place, he said, his arm loosely hanging around my shoulder as we watched TV. I mean, you can only play like, four chords.
I stopped singing in the shower. My body became too heavy to bear. I fantasised about leaving it behind, under the wheels of a car passing me by.
Eventually, friends began to reappear, concerned, vigorously shaking my shoulders and pulling me into focus. Like a live wire snapped, I regained my reality. Walking out of his house with my small bag of belongings, he screamed that he couldn’t live without me. Those tears quickly turned to anger, as he tried to kick my door down. No one will ever love you, you fucking bitch. His housemates crossed the street when they saw me.
Eventually, the world went quiet and he was back with an ex-girlfriend. Alone, I heard the sigh of my breath returning. My guitar gained a new spot by the window but the strings still gathered so much dust that you could barely see them anymore. The sun stain echoed his taunts every time I picked it up. It told me I couldn’t sing; that my songs made my friends cringe.
It stood silent for nine years.
In April of 2019, I moved 4,000 miles across the ocean back to America, leaving my guitar behind. In the new city, the concrete felt soft, the signs appeared in a jumbled discourse and even the dogs seemed to bark with an accent. But I could regenerate here, I thought. I had picked up a guitar here and there, strumming the G, C, D chords I once had in my childhood bedroom, but nothing like the connection I once had to the instrument. My fingers felt too tentative.
Then I found myself tethered to a new face, a new hand, one I was certain would be my future. The face helped me to navigate the new place, etching out spaces we called our own, a cartographic dance. We found a home among the trees, witnessing the moon from our living room window, leaving the bathroom door open so we could keep talking, reading aloud to help the other fall asleep. When moving in, I remember putting a sharpie-marked box down on the concrete driveway to pick up a penny. A lucky omen, I said, later sellotaping it inside an anniversary card. On one of our night walks, a blazing shooting star propelled itself across the sky.
The face bought me a used guitar with a ¾ size neck, so my fingers could stretch across the fret boards with ease. We played covers of The Beatles, our favourite Green Day songs, and passionately reinterpretted Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” cry-laughing in a basement. My heart, energised with familiar melodies, and the safety of this face, soon swelled with a musicality I hadn’t felt since head-banging to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” This was home: settling our books together on the same shelf, entwining our clothes in one closet, stretching across cold sheets to reach each other.
But the certainty of that future cracked when the face left abruptly, after dinner and a laptop-screen movie, on the first day of the new year. The only sounds I could make were sounds I had never heard myself make before: the kind of crying that could break teeth. Burst blood vessels.
Now unmoored from the home we had together, the future I had fought for, I find myself adrift again, like that little girl walking into another new school, tugging at clothes that always felt too tight. The pathways we had formed felt unbearingly haunted with the fog of memory. For the first couple of weeks, I could barely listen to music. Everything pointed towards him. In the shower I attempt to listen to The Beatles, but quickly find myself collapsed on the ceramic base of the bathtub, the water rushing across my belly as it rises and falls with the ache of a broken heart.
The new friends in the new city soon swell around me, opening up guest bedrooms and bottles of wine. I had moved to America with just one suitcase and now that same suitcase, hastily filled with socks that don’t match, crinkled t-shirts that aren’t warm enough and a half-empty tube of toothpaste, follows me from place-to-place, taunting me with yet another new beginning.
This heartbreak feels like a thousand tiny deaths, folding into each other and filling my body with a weight it cannot carry. It’s a small hand hastily guiding me through fluorescent grocery store aisles, past shelves of past selves, pointing at the boxes of memories it cannot reach. Who does this small hand belong to? And why must they keep pulling me?
In her book Composing A Life, Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson says, “part of the task of composing a life is the artist’s need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design.” Heartbreak certainly can’t be described as “simple” but it can most definitely be described as “ugly,” as in: perilous, alarming, unpleasant. Perhaps it can be described as simple in its peril. I know, or I hope, that I will one day see it as something beautiful, a stretched portal to a new frame, a seed underneath the concrete, waiting for a small crack to bloom.
That small crack appears in songs that seem as though they’re lifting me from the floor by my armpits. Holding my face, soft, affirming: Bon Iver’s “Blood Bank,” Radiohead’s “Let Down,” Big Thief’s “Change.” I can feel each word in my chest, filling my mouth with something tangible. Although it felt as though I was trying to escape my reality, these songs urged me deeper into it – a melody navigating something unimaginable. I walk by the guitar case once, twice, three times a day, its ghosts taunting me to keep it closed. We do this dance with each other for what feels like years, until one morning, its insults peel me from the sofa, my feet hot and my fists clenched. The anger, that heartache-anger, surges through my arms and I pry open the guitar case, ready to scream at its strings.
Instead I find an exhale, and as I hold it in my hands, a surge of comfort ripples through my fingers. I play the soft songs that have been holding me, and record voice notes on my phone, the strums shaky but true. The soft tips of my fingers, sore and peeling. If we cannot face the ghosts of our past, they’ll only serve to frighten us when we’re half asleep.
A certain song finds me again. I remember the swell of voices in my grandmother’s living room, red wine spilling on the carpet as they swayed their glasses along to the chorus. “All Things Must Pass”: a song about change, evolution, transition, death. I remember feeling the weight of my small life, scattered across continents: my feet once again feeling the carpet of another new house, my face sticky with the scent of foreign kisses. Everything felt so unmoored, so alien, all the time.
I didn’t know it then, but George offered me a home amidst the uncertainty of constant upheaval. Here is a song that celebrates uncertainty, urging me to believe in the beautiful shifting, the wonderful unknown. With yet another new beginning beckoning my tired mind, I listen over and over, a mantra for each morning: something concrete, something to hold. I think that’s why we return to the songs that we do. They are the homes we have always longed for, cemented in a memory or a face, that will answer us when we feel like no one else is listening. They fill the side of the bed left empty. They comb through the mirage of grief and navigate a map for tomorrow.
On a drive, a sunset squints behind the Catskill mountains, flooding the horizon with deep rusty oranges, pale pinks, lavenders, and a gash of indigo blue. It’s too much to swallow. Virginia Woolf once described an evening “too beautiful for one pair of eyes. Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure.” I wanted this feeling in my chest to pour over onto the passenger seat, to the face, but the seat contained only empty seltzer cans and a letter I had yet to open. And so, with a lump in my throat, I let out a breath, and remembered that George was there, ready to catch the beauty. Pressing play, I kept driving.
When I arrive at a friend’s house in the middle of the woods, I sit in a baby-blue bathtub. There are candles, music for plants, and dried rose petals. Some of these dried roses are still whole, tiny but whole, and as I hold them under water, I release them from my palm and watch as they rise to the top again, and again, and again.
In the morning, the house is surrounded by heavy snow and the weight of January. The friend and I sit in a sun-dappled room upstairs. There’s a tape machine, and a computer, and speakers and more cords than I can count. I’m really nervous, I laugh, my hands shaking above the strings. You’re doing great, the friend says, positioning the microphone. Just one take at a time.
Moving from place-to-place had me looking for a home in all the wrong places. When everything feels temporary, I hold on too tight to the people that could be permanent. That I crave to be permanent. I hold on for so long that the earth beneath my feet turns to air, and I no longer know where to anchor myself. I become lost in the fantasy of permanence that I look beyond the cruelty, and the disregard, and the coldness of a closed door.
Now I’m learning that we can return to the permanence of change, to every new carpet under anxious toes, and every strange, new face. Home was never an anchor, or a face half-turned. It was here, in this song, and in every song we return to. It’s singing too loud with the windows down, winter air rushing into our lungs. It’s here, in the sunset outside the bathroom window, and the promise of a morning. It’s in the faces of my friends, and the first bird call of the year. It’s here in my fingers, returning to chord shapes my hands somehow still remember. It’s here, in a song I’m yet to write.
backing vocals: liz ibarra
recorded & mixed: dylan nowik
You have made these words on the page sing! Poetry shares much with music, and your poetry is ringing loud! I wish I could float like a cloud through all these “ugly” memories and reach for your hand. George Harrison has a special place in my heart, as you know, and I’m so deeply touched by the connect to him that you describe. You are resilient and strong. To witness you coming back into yourself and your passions has been an honor. A beautiful essay, thank you.
An incredible read and such an evocative recording. Thank you sharing both Sammy.