I don’t know where I would be without music in my life. Listening to music has been a healing balm ever since I started paying for my own streaming service (RIP Rdio). I realize “healing balm” is redundant, but I like it.

Anyway(Anyways?), I listen to music nowadays to drown out the homeschooling loudness going on downstairs, or to brighten the task of cleaning the bathroom sink (I hate this chore, but I always feel so much better after doing it).

I have days where I love to discover new music, and other days where I’d rather listen to what I know I like. My lover-boyfriend-partner got me my first pair of cordless headphones for Christmas and it has been wonderful to listen to The Tao of Pooh while I take out the trash.

I do not like not knowing what is going on around me when I’m wearing headphones. That tickles my little animal instincts as wrong. But in the age of quarantine, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not walking to or from work anymore. Now I listen to music in our bedroom/office and I watch the curious dove in the gutter above my neighbor’s window. It does the opposite of glide in the gutter. It juts and pauses and juts. It can be fascinating enough to let the hot shower run out while you stare at it from the window.

I digress.

I have created playlists for much of my adolescent life. It started with burning CD’s and labeling them with blue marker for the road trips to Indiana University or Chicago. Today, I only have to create and name a playlist on Spotify, and away I go. I am very soothed and stimulated by melody. I am attracted to the sound of a song many, many listens before I even notice what the lyrics are.

When I fell in love with my partner but we were separated for a while, I used music as a way to communicate with him in my head. I have curated a playlist for him that is almost 300 songs, and continues to grow.

Listening to music can be too solitary for me nowadays. I used to use it as an escape, and of course, during the Great Lockdown, I still use it in that way. But I find music so necessary to my sanity this April. I tried to convince my partner to have a dance party in the living room with me. We could drink whiskey and slow dance. We could pretend we just came back from some wedding. We could get all dressed up and play our favorite songs.

Music is very important to my partner, too. When I sing lyrics wrong (which I always do), he can tell me what the actual lyrics are, followed by who the musician is, and perhaps, share an anecdote about seeing the band perform live and how he forged new comrades in the pit. Even if I sing the song in the wrong tune, he just seems to know what my heart is trying to express. Something else I love about him. Yesterday, I managed to combine “Kung Fu Fighting” and “Working at the Car Wash” into one song.

One of my favorite songs today? Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.” It tells a whole beautiful, funny story. It was written by Shel Silverstein and first performed at San Quentin State Prison in 1969. How more perfect of a song for my soul could exist?

P.S. I found this beautiful 1994 piece in the New York Times when I researched the title of this post, “A balm for the soul.” It hit on a lot of things in my life that are colliding at the moment. Post on that later.