harder harmonies.

This used to live on my old Tumblr and some people liked it. It’s an interesting thing to think about almost a year after I posted it the first time:

songs about jane.

I don’t think love is useless; as an artist, or as someone who has the audacity to refer to herself as an artist, I can’t. As someone who takes feelings and puts chord progressions to them, I have to at least be willing to let lust spark hot enough to burn through a page. Because love is the only thing that’s as universal as music, and they’re the only two things that are more attractive when messy. 

More than any other time I can really remember, I see almost everyone around me struggling with love and trying to make sense of it. Young, smart, beautiful and tremendous people that think the only thing that will make them happy is if they find someone else who “deserves” them. Women who only want to completely abandon self-reliance just to give themselves over because it’s hard to be single; but really, if you give everything you’ve got to someone else, there’s nothing left for you. 

It’s shocking how the term “independent woman” is so easily associated with a strong, single, career-oriented female who supports herself, but the term “independent man” is almost laughable. How sitcoms even today tend to portray the wife as the one who complains when her lovably overweight and acceptably stupid husband refuses to help with the dishes after getting home from his 9-5. It’s disappointing that a man can drag anyone into bed with him and claim “casual” as his saving grace, but if his casual woman did the same, it’s scandalous. And it’s even sadder that women think it’s okay. 

I have so many gorgeous, intelligent, passionate friends who begin to second guess themselves, even though all they’ve done is give. They start to actually believe in the hormone-fueled business exchange that’s so common and so socially acceptable that we forget it’s essentially a bang for a buck; I give you roses, you give me an orgasm. They begin to worry that they haven’t given enough, or have offered too much, when the truth is that they themselves are enough. If you can stand to sit at a table and have a conversation with someone for more than a half-hour, you’re enough. You don’t have to lay yourself bare and show how willing you are to “commit.” Because one of you will always mean it more, and it’s a selfish thing either way.

I have a tendency to fall in love with almost everyone I meet, but it’s not always slathered in lust. And it’s because I play music; most of my friends, even outside Berklee, are singers, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and it’s because we rely on emotion to do what we do that we have to thrive on heart swells, heartbeats, and heartbreak. You can be an accountant without thinking about how it makes you feel. You can fold clothes, fix pipes, and clean teeth without getting attached. But you can’t write a song. 

I’ve tried. 

I don’t know if I would have written the same thing after all that’s happened this year, but I do know, more than ever, that music will always win out. It’s a hard point to argue after you’ve had your heart broken by the guy who wrote your favorite album of 2011, and then you still find yourself excited for the new record. It probably has something to do with what John Berger said about women only seeing themselves as figures to be looked at by men, which probably has something to do with the negative feelings I have towards the lacy underwear I purchased recently. I drank White Russians and talked to one of the tech guys the other night, and he told me that no one is a ruler you should measure yourself against. So now the only way I’m going to gauge my emotions is by which Wave band record I choose to listen to. Lately it’s been Wildlife and The Lack Long After. Whatever that means. 

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