Musical Love Tour

“Bad” by U2

It’s spring semester freshman year. To no credit of my own—perhaps in spite of my efforts—I’ve brought a girl back to my dorm room on a Saturday night for the very first time. My roommate is serendipitously out of town for the weekend, so it’s just her and me.

I open Windows Media Player on my desktop and turn on a playlist of mellow music, that I’ve had vague aspirations might set the mood for a hookup—a prospect that has hitherto been comically out of reach.

But here we are.

A lot of songs play. Some I remember, more I forget. I know “Bad” by U2 was on there, though. I’d written a sex scene of a failed novel set to this song and here I was living the loosest approximation—making out, at least on an extra-long twin-size bed, barely wide enough for two bodies, though it occurs to me for the first time that’s an advantage in a case like this, no choice but to come together.

”Delicate Few” by OAR

It’s toward the end of fall semester junior year of college and I’m at a concert with a girl I’ve been playing a will-they-won’t-they game with since last spring as flirtatious daylight conversations gave way to late night conversations over AOL Instant Messenger, to later night pizza runs and movie night and walks along sleepy campus pathways.

I learned of OAR freshman year, when a local cover band played “Crazy Game of Poker” at an over/under night at a bar off campus, and I downloaded most of their albums off the college network after. So, OAR became a band I’ll forever connect with college in my mind, for listening to them passionately for four years then hardly ever in the years to follow. I introduced them to this girl via mix CDs I made for her.

“Delicate Few” is her favorite song from the band’s catalog, and a song I like a good bit, too, but a relatively deep cut I don’t much expect to hear when the band plays our college gym.

Only, at the end of the show, on their second encore, after some proclamation about this really and truly being the last song they’re going to play, the lead singer launches into those lyrics the girl and I know so well.

Amazing, how we all want this
Life a little more everyday

It’s “Delicate Few,” and the girl jumps in the air, so I jump, too and we hug tight and holds hands for the whole song. It’s an extended version of the song, because OAR’s the kind of band prone to long instrumental jam breaks when they’re playing live. And I think this relatively chaste moment and the front end of what we’ll become is just about the best moment of my life to date.

“Accidentally in Love” by Counting Crows

Counting Crows have been my favorite band for about five or six years (which at the age of twenty feels like a really, really long time) when “Accidentally in Love” hits Top 40 Radio, a single attached to Shrek 2, and though it’s a little more pop in its sensibilities than my favorite material from the band, I still eat it up with a spoon, the song of the summer as I drive around my hometown in the gap between the end of the semester and my camp job, then on my way to the camp job, then while I’m there and meet another girl and she and I fall into a kind of summer love that’s improbably practical, because outside of the world of camp, our hometowns are less than an hour drive from one another, and our colleges are less than two hours apart—entirely doable for weekend road trips.

We decide “Accidentally in Love” is our song. She’s the director of an all-female a cappella group, and the first time I hear them perform it, I fall even deeper, because I can feel this is her love letter to me, though in my more rational mind I know that’s a small part of the puzzle to selecting the right pop song to arrange for the group to close out their competition set that next spring. Our accidental love carries on for years to follow into the first live-in relationship either of ushave had, past the point when life comes to obscure our innocent beginnings because we’re grownups and even after it feels like we’ve been together forever, three and a half years also doesn’t feel like so long when I move away for a job opportunity. Just past the four year mark, we break up.

”Cologne” by Ben Folds

I didn’t end my first multi-year relationship to date another woman, but it also wouldn’t be entirely honest to ignore that dating someone new gave me the kick in the pants I needed to end a relationship I wasn’t really happy in anymore.

This new woman and I make plans to go to Ben Folds concert, because we fell into an easy friendship in no small part because of a shared affinity for Folds and a bunch of other musical acts that were popular when the both of us were on college campuses a half hour away from one another, years before we ever met.

In an unexpected turn, Folds plays almost entirely new songs from his forthcoming album, Way To Normal. I’ve been wanting to make a move, and thought I might wait for a slow song, when it dawns on me there may not be a ballad on the new record. So, in the opening bars of “Free Coffee,” I go for it and reach for her hand. We hold hands the rest of the show, but after that initial contact, it’s “Cologne” I remember best.

It’s a beautiful, if sad song. But the chorus rubs me the wrong way when Folds sings Four, three, two, one… I’m letting you go because in an overly literal way, letting go of this woman’s hand is the last thing I want to do.

We kiss good night outside her apartment building after the show and date for a few weeks to follow. Then she ends it.

I listen to “Cologne” in the least healthy of ways for months to follow. Pining, yes, but I realize later, probably also mourning the relationship before this one--because even though I chose to end it, I hadn't really paused to process that situation.

The truth is, for years, long after I’m over these women, after my whole life has moved on, I still indulge in the song now and again to remember how the night of that concert felt, and how the nights to follow felt, too--all of it, the bittersweetest. A song that feels like a whole world.

”Us” by Regina Spektor

A woman and I meet at a conference and hit it off, but it looks like that’s the end of it until she invites me to come to her birthday party and we make out there, then she winds up back at my apartment to end the night. We spend a lot of time together the week or two to follow, before she ends it, then says she doesn’t want it to be over. I’m along for the ride.

Rather, I’m driving.

It’s a birthday in my late twenties and I do the driving for a day out she’s planned for us, well outside our city, closer to where she grew up, complete with a brewery tour and picnic. We drive down one particularly pretty country road where leaves fly down with the wind just as “Us” by Regina Spektor plays over the car speakers with its flurry of fanciful piano riffs. It all feels like an adventure. She embarks on a grad program in Scotland weeks later and I visit her there that fall, come to Europe again for a trip through France and England in the spring.

We last two years.

”I Choose You” by Sara Bareilles

Barring a handful of dates, I’ve been single for a full year when Heather and I really talk for the first time.

Coming out of this late night conversation, the end of our time working together, I can’t escape a sense of regret at not talking much to her sooner. Because I have the sense, given more time, she might be a really good friend. Or maybe more.

We text a lot those days to follow, before, during, and after her journey from the Bay Area back down to her home in San Diego, and while I go on a vacation road trip around various California locales. Finally, I ask if she’d like to meet up again, volunteering that I could drive down to her during my final stretch of my vacation, when I’m staying in LA.

I’m not sure it’s a date until we hold hands watching along the beach side, and not sure we’ll get any more intimate that until I wind up back at her apartment after midnight and she says I can stay. I’m not sure what we have will transcend that single, twenty-four hour period until she drives up to LA to hang out for most of the next day, and I tell myself not to get ahead of myself assuming anything on the cross country flight back to where I live on the east coast. But when the plane lands and I take my phone out of airplane mode, there are a series of texts from her waiting.

“I Choose You” becomes our song, out of a combination of my musical obsession du jour with Sara Bareilles, and more importantly the content of the song, all about choice—because what is a long distance relationship defined by weekly-ish Skype dinners and bi-monthly-ish cross-country flights but a matter of choosing, against all convenience and ease, to be together.

A year in, I start my MFA in Oregon and Heather moves there to live with me.

Six months later we get engaged.

A year and a half later, we’re married.

”Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars

“I Choose You” is the song Heather and I pick for our first dance at our wedding reception. Of course it is.

But it’s a long song, and we know people will get bored, and we’re not boring people, we think.

Just before the final chorus begins, a specially edited version of the song cuts to the sound of an alarm, then segues into the Stop, wait a minute of “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars. We proceed into a one-minute choreographed dance routine, fully conscious of the absurdity of the moment. Embracing it.

Three and a half years pass. Heather and I are no longer principally known by our names around the house, but rather as Mama and Dada. Truth be told, these are the names we use most often, period, in this time of the pandemic when most of our lives occur in the confines of our home, most of our daily plans scheduled around our three-year old son.

And our son loves “Uptown Funk.”

He comes to prefer the Kidz Bop cover over the Bruno Mars original, but requests either version ad nauseam, dancing with reckless abandon around the living room in jumps and thrusts, singing the lyric hot damn as hot dance. Now and again, Heather and I break out bits and pieces we remember from our old dance routine and he delights when we sync up especially well for an especially sharp move. But mostly, he’s more interested in his own dancing and singing along.

I watch. I listen.

I think this is the greatest love song of all.