When, in 1964, I began to play music and seriously listen to it as a musician, most of the artists I admired were male. There were the Beatles, The Stones, Donovan, The Beach Boys and The Yardbirds. Of course, there was also Cilla Black and Helen Shapiro and Dusty Springfield and Lulu, but they didn’t write their own tunes. I didn’t even realize that Pat Benatar wrote hers (I could have looked at the liner notes!), but they were all basically women who sang. Even the much revered Linda Ronstadt, who in my mind stands alongside other great interpreters like Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day, for the most part covered tunes by other artists, mostly guys, although some of her tunes were written by Karla Bonoff.
Then, in the 1970’s, we were deluged with a wave of women singer-songwriters: Carole King, Jackie DeShannon, Janis Ian, Joni Mitchell, Judde Sill, each of them with their own style, each of them completely revolutionizing the art form. Despite this, it wasn’t until 1997’s Lilith Fair, organized by Sarah McLachlan, featuring artists such as Jewel, Tracy Chapman and Paula Cole, that radio stations played more than one female artist an hour and record executives came to the startling revelation that, yes, women artists were just as marketable as male artists.
I have always been of a mind that an artist is only as good as their songs and gender hasn’t ever really entered into the equation.
Gary Moore, a.k.a “The Old Guy.”Gary Moore/For the Advance/SILive.com
Lately though, I find myself more and more drawn to female artists and two in particular: Taylor Swift and Billie Ellish.
You don’t really know a song until you “track it”: Listen to it repeatedly, writing down the words and the chords as you go, stopping at every line, going back to make corrections.
When I first heard Taylor Swift’s tune about addiction, “This Is Me Trying,” during her “Long Pond Studios Sessions,” it gut-punched me. Since I know a few folks in recovery, I definitely understood where the narrator was coming from. Not a lot of artists bother to write a bridge for their tune (the part that is neither verse nor chorus). She often does and this one ended on one of the most killer lines I’d ever heard:
“And it’s hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound
Hard to be anywhere when all I want is you
You’re a flashback…in a film reel..on the one screen..in my town.”
THAT is good writing.
And then, quite accidentally, I bumped into Billie Ellish, who just recently released an album after three years, not counting her spectacularly successful “What Was I Made For?” from the movie “Barbie.” Towards the end of that tune, Billie whispers:
“I think I forgot /how to happy/Something I’m not/ But something I can be/ Something I wait for/ Something I’m made for.”
A middle-aged man commented “I didn’t know I felt this way until I heard this song.” Much like America Ferrera’s impassioned speech in the movie that even made all of the male cast and crew openly weep, this song cuts to the point of indecision that many of us now find ourselves at, regardless of age or gender.
2023-2024 has kicked my ass repeatedly. First it was the loss of my mother-in-law, followed by a string of ills and remedies. I began to not so much “feel my age” as I did feel much older, like I was struggling to do some of the things that had formerly come with ease. I rationalized that to keep on keeping on, I would don whatever apparatus was appropriate. But, as the list got longer and I felt more and more dependent upon technology to get about, I felt less and less comfortable.
And then, I remembered Billie’s tune. I think I forgot how to be grateful that I got out of bed that morning, that I could get downstairs and outside on my own, that there was a world of possibilities waiting for me, if I gave myself a little bit more room, a bit more grace, to motivate in it. Truly, none of us are where we were 10, 20, 30 years ago and that is a good thing. Change is the stuff of the universe, as are we, and only dead things never change. We must find a way to make our peace with whatever the future holds, no matter how uncertain or even disturbing that might be.
Ernest Hemingway wrote “We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.” It is true that hurt and disappointment leave cracks and spaces in our hearts and souls that are never totally refilled, and in some cases, should never be. The loss of a parent, a child, a beloved friend, a pet or an author or musician you admire can feel like a bottomless pit of grief. But grief transforms over time into something sweeter and longer lasting: memory. While we can never create new memories with those that have passed on, we can savor the ones we have and they can continue to sweeten our days and give us hope.
My friend Freddye Stover, who is a nurse and a musician, was approached by a young girl at one of her performances. The girl asked Freddye how old she was and when she replied 67, the young girl said “No, you’re not! 67 year olds don’t dance that way!” Freddye, just by being herself, gave that young girl a vision of the future, the hope that she, too, one day, would still be able to move “that way.”
Is that the case for all of us? No. Some of us have found diminishment in our elder years. But, even then, there are things we are still capable of doing, provided we’ve been taking the best care of ourselves that we can.
As Browning wrote to his wife Elizabeth: “Grow old with me. The best is yet to be.”
Hold those magnificent grey heads high!
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