I grew up in unquiet households. In more ways than one, but we’re focusing on the literal today. My father, my mother, my stepmother and pretty much my entire family were noisy people. Loud talkers, big laughers, and constantly surrounded by sound. They lived in surround sound. There was always a TV playing, a radio on, someone talking, someone banging around in some closet, someone practicing a musical instrument somewhere. Often, all at the same time.
It’s little wonder that I’m much the same as an adult. I have music playing in my house, close to 24 hours a day. When I leave my house, I make sure I have my headphones or earbuds with me. I sleep with music on. When I write, I often have the TV on. Being in the midst of noise is, at this point, my natural state.
Ironically, I don’t listen to podcasts. I attribute this to my childhood war with my parents over the radio in the car. They always wanted to listen to NPR or WBAI (NY’s most liberal station; you could practically smell the pot wafting through the speakers), boring people droning on about boring things like war, famine and death. I always wanted to listen to pop music. I almost never got to. The radio in the car was the province of the adult at the wheel. Maybe they’d take pity on a poor passenger and put on WBLS, the R&B station. Maybe they’d endure Z100, the king of pop music, for fifteen minutes. But you were at their mercy and, as soon as their patience ran out, it was back to All Things Considered.
So my rebellion was to listen to pop music in my room at ungodly volumes. To this day, when I hear people talking on my radio, my body revolts. I have to listen to rock and roll music turned up loud because I am young and vital. Not an old fuddyduddy like my parents.
Well, that was in my dad and stepmom’s house. My mother was different. In her car, Lite FM ruled. She would pick me up in her Honda Odyssey on Friday nights and we’d spend the next two hours, driving over the river and through the woods (of Manhattan) to my grandmother’s house (which was also my mother’s house) in the company of Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand.
That’s how, when I was in fifth grade, the song of my heart was Air Supply. I knew all the words to Harry Chapin’s “Taxi,” the single most depressing song ever recorded. It was practically child abuse to expose me to “Taxi” and “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Send in the Clowns” week after week. I may not have been a fuddyduddy, but I was very quickly an old soul.
My mother and I had a complicated, complex relationship, but those rides, often just us, or with my baby brother and sister asleep in the back, those were our times to talk. My parents divorced when I was barely one, my father had custody, I only saw my mother on weekends. Except for one year and a half, when my father was, shall we say, between homes, I never lived with my mother or her family.
So those rides were the longest time we spent alone, the times we got to talk and bond. My mother was a reader and a writer, a poet and a librarian, so we talked about the books I was reading, the books she was reading, what I was learning. She would tell me stories about the things she’d read. All while the easy listening hits of the 60s, 70s and today were playing.
But, of course, no part of childhood lasts forever. I grew up, stopped spending every weekend with my mom so I could hang out with my friends. My music tastes matured. I went from easy listening and a surprising amount of doo wop (I blame Stand by Me) to hair metal and hard rock (I was living in North Jersey, it was required). Eventually into grunge and indie rock and noise rock and post-punk. I became the kind of person who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Barry Manilow. That’s what obnoxious high school vice principals listen to (and whose wardrobe they raid). I was young and vital and rebellious, so the guitars squelched, the bass thumped and the keyboards were tossed into the drum kits, which were full of explosives.
Music was still a regular part of my life, but now it was a badge of cool. And later, as I matured more and more, it was inspiration and artistic discovery. It became not just about the noise, but the lyrics, the sentiments, the poetry. I wanted music with deep emotion. And that emotion was usually heartbreak and grief and loss.
My tastes stayed largely in that same place for a long, long time. And they still are, really. But then the last few years happened. You know how those have gone. And suddenly music full of rage and pain wasn’t a release any more. It was a needle in my brain.
That’s when I remembered “Wildfire.” It was one of those songs that played every weekend on Lite FM. It is of course sad as hell, haunting, and mournful. It is also soft as hell. It’s a song that plays in the back of my head on a loop. But I hadn’t listened to it in literal decades.
But I did and it opened a flood gate of emotions and feelings. Mostly a feeling of comfort, of ease, of safety. Of sitting in my mother’s car, driving through the dark, the two of us in a little bubble for a couple of hours. There’s sadness there and pain, but also…peace.
I’m a grown-ass man with a wide range of tastes in music, in film, in literature, in life. But listening to easy listening always felt shameful somehow. Definitively uncool. I resisted it for a good long while. But then I thought: Why? Why deny myself something that makes me feel good? Something that brings a bit of peace into my life? Why not be uncool for as long as you need to be uncool to feel better about the world?
My favorite band asks this question: “Lord, what would you prescribe to a real soft girl who’s having real hard times?” Soft music, that’s what. And that’s what I prescribed myself.
I created a Spotify playlist and called it My Soft Boy Era and filled it with all of the easiest of easy listening songs. It has over 4,000 songs and lasts for more than 12 days. I play it regularly when the world gets a little too hard. It’s a small good thing in a time like this.
So, if you see me on the street, and I have my headphones in and a smile on my face, just now that I’m somewhere, I’m calling Wildfire into the night…