No one will steal music from me again

I lost music for nearly ten years. I let someone take it. But never again. | Reflections after the Peter Gabriel i/o concert.

Two nights ago, I left elated after the Peter Gabriel i/o concert at Madison Square Garden. It was artful. It was moving. It was transcendent.

Yes, I have photos.

But I have to tell this story first.

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Sometimes I think about the myth of Zeus stealing fire from humans, creating great misery on earth because he didn’t feel amply worshipped. (Pfft, insecure gods really are the worst gods, aren’t they?)

Well thank the Titans for Prometheus, who was like, no Zeus, that was SO not cool. He stole back a spark of flame and returned it to earth so we could get on with progress and invention, leading us to create such essential technologies of modern civilization as electricity, steam turbines, the calendar system, and that gum with the weird liquid center that squirted when you bit into it.

My ex—my kids’ dad—he never stole fire from me (unless you count him keeping me out of the kitchen, for good reason at times), but he did take music.

For those of us who have ever been in a significant relationship that didn’t work: One day you find yourself on the other side of that breakup, hopefully healthy and whole, and it will strike you that that were a lot of things you had given up during the course of that relationship—things you had conceded, big and small.

Guilty pleasure television. That one dress. The framed artwork you had thrifted in college that used hang on your bedroom wall. That one friend. That brand of orange juice you always preferred. The living room on Sundays during football season.

The music you love.

It started with sarcastic little zingers like “don’t you like anything recorded after 1992?” and “this was your prom song? Well I was in fifth grade.” (He was eight years younger as he reminded me frequently.) Eventually it was “wait…you actually like her?” And “aren’t you embarrassed to be listening to this?”

Soon he stopped commenting and just turned off my music in the car mid-song while I was driving to pop in his own CD. Or cassette tape. (It was an old car.)

No asking. No discussion. Goodbye Annie Lennox and Ella Fitzgerald and Yaz, goodbye to the Sliding Doors soundtrack and The Best of Sugar Hill Records—it was time for Tripping Daisy.

Again.

Photo: Tobias Tullius

He joked that I listened to grandma music.

I joked that he only listened to one genre, and I called it Brooding Young White Guys With Far Too Many Complaints

You know the scene in the Barbie Movie where all the Kens take over and mansplain Steve Malkmus and The Godfather? No one laughed harder in our packed theater on opening weekend than I did. I swear Greta Gerwig wrote that line just for me.

I even used to tease him that we could never get married, because we didn’t have a single song that was “our song” like every other normal couple in the world.

That should have been a sign.

We of course did find a few mutual likes for road trips—The Cure, U2, R.E.M., Green Day, The Smiths, They Might Be Giants, Echo & the Bunnymen (evidently Pavement had once cited them as an inspiration so they squeaked onto the list)—but not a whole lot more. Any suggestion of mine was met with resistance. So I let “my” music go, little by little, until one day he was yelling at my third-trimester pregnant belly, “don’t listen to Mommy’s bad music! Ignore this crap! I’ll come save you soon!”

At some point, the joke stops being funny. The sarcasm that was once endearing gets a little sharp around the edges. Condescension enters the chat.

It starts to feel mean, and it starts to hurt.

So you put on your emotional armor and carry on.

You can’t imagine the number of strong, successful, confident, truly admirable women who have confessed similar stories to me in hushed tones, by the way. I don’t judge. When you’re in a tempestuous relationship with an unpredictable partner, especially when there are kids involved, you make certain choices to keep the peace.

As for me, I chose to surrender the Sirius/XM presets in the car, give up any claim to the party playlists, and stick my massive collection of CDs down in our basement storage.

Was music actually stolen from me or did I hand it over willingly? I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

You convince yourself that’s what people do in relationships: A few trade-offs, a little give-and-take. But then suddenly an entire ten years have passed and you couldn’t say whether that’s Sara Bareilles or Katy Perry singing that one big song, and you’re learning about the Lumineers only because your children are practicing Hey Ho for Glee club, and now you kind of have become that person who knows no new music, recognizes no one at the Grammy’s, hasn’t been to a live concert in forever.

Some of that was about having young kids, absolutely. But some of it wasn’t.

Making choices.

Keeping the peace.

It took me the better part of the last decade with a open-minded, music-loving (and overall loving) partner to get back in the habit of doing those basic things we do when we love music.

Like, listening to it.

Isn’t that strange? That I could actually forget that I had the option to hit the button for Ch 33/1st Wave instead of driving up the FDR drive in silence? Or that I could listen to a happy morning playlist instead of a podcast in the shower? That I could sing a goofy one-hit-wonder song out loud and it was now charming (if terribly off-tune) instead of annoying?

Or that I could buy concert tickets? And like…see a band I enjoy? Live and in person?

I can do that! I can learn about a concert tour and maybe even…go! That’s not just a thing that kids do, right?

There are some artists who represent the soundtrack of your youth and for me, Peter Gabriel is one of them. So this past spring, the very day I learned that his i/o tour was coming to New York, I snatched up the two best tickets I could afford.

Oh, was it worth it.

Peter Gabriel i/o tour NYC 2023 | all photos © Liz Gumbinner

Those three wonderful hours were made even more extraordinary by the nature of our wildly indulgent 7th row center seats on the floor of Madison Square Garden.

I found myself overcome by a huge range of emotions.

That’s what your music is supposed to do for you.

Because the music you love isn’t just music. It’s memories. It’s connections. It’s the story of you.

It’s lying on your stomach on your best friend’s floor in middle school, eating peanut butter and ice cream right out of the containers while listening to Solsbury Hill over and over.

It’s a date long ago with a boy whose name you forget, but you still remember that Red Rain played on the radio in his car.

It’s sitting up straight in your sticky red movie theater seat when John Cusack’s character starts blasting one of your favorite songs out of a boombox to court the girl he loves.

It’s a late Friday night in high school with Hally and Nancy and Terre and Heather, watching MTV for hours just hoping to catch the Sledgehammer video.

It’s the day you first heard a call to teenage activism, a flurry of lighters illuminating the stadium crowd of 55,000 in June of 1986. Redemption Song. Invisible Sun. Sun City. Peter Gabriel leads us through the chorus of Biko, 55,000 people chanting Yihla Moja, 55,000 fists raised.

We left that 11-hour concert believing our generation really was going to make all of this better.

Some of us are still trying.

Honoring Steven Biko in 2023

This week in New York, we made new memories to new songs, and new memories to old songs. We danced to Big Time like no one was watching. (They weren’t.) I wept through a spectacular duet of Don’t Give Up with Ayanna Witter-Johnson, and Jon put his arm around me and kissed me on the head. We sang happy birthday to President Carter. We sang in honor of Steven Biko. We were moved by the art projected on screens around the stage, and we cheered for each musician as if they were the headliner.

The 11-minute rendition of In Your Eyes though, that’s really what got us good; we squeezed our hands together, swaying, singing, letting ourselves feel everything.

I have music back.

I have music back.

I didn’t need a Prometheus to bring it to me. But I admit, I am so grateful for the company of a fellow middle-aged mortal who makes it all that much more fun to rediscover.

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