'It tasted like I was my own person'
PopTarts, pianos, and Taylor Swift
Today’s accompanying tune: “River Flows in You” by Yiruma
Somewhere over the eastern expanse of the Pacific Ocean, I made the decision. It was time to get reacquainted with a piano.
I grew up taking piano lessons, an obligation courtesy of my parents’ unfulfilled dreams. Then, it was just that: an obligation. I went to the lessons, driving with my mother for over an hour one way after school once a week. I did my homework from the back seat while we ambled through the western Chicago suburbs, first on the way there and again on the return trip. My practice schedule was just as time-consuming, and was heavily regimented at my parents’ behests. At family gatherings and holidays, they would tell everyone I had prepared a performance once everyone was sipping their post-meal coffee, though I had done no such thing. Suffice it to say, I quit playing piano the moment I was given an ounce of freedom over the matter.
Situations came and went. My sorority needed someone to play during recruitment, but luckily my friend Kim never let her skills lapse, and I was off the hook. I avoided choir or any other musical group, anxious at the notion of practices and performances. Until, en route to South America, the thought entered my mind:
What if I played again?
To grasp the full extent of this journey I was on, I need to provide some context.
Other than piano, my musical upbringing was stunted, at best. This is where I out myself as painfully uncool. My family, extended and immediate, only listened to what I would now call Pop Country. Alan Jackson. Toby Keith. Kenny Chesney. Rascal Flatts. The Chicks pre-backlash, which my family eagerly took part in. Some Shania, but only the older stuff. It was loud, it was angry, it was almost always male. The songs of my childhood yelled about patriotism and the man, crooned about farmer’s tans and dirt roads. As with the piano, I diverged as soon as I obtained a DiscMan, buying up CDs from Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne that I hoped would drown out the car’s main radio. It wasn’t much — a bubble gum rebellion — but it was what I had.
It was also around this time that I learned how seriously most people take music. They have opinions — lots of very strong ones — about every band, every song, every media. My cousin informed me that Hillary Duff was Not Cool, had I ever heard of this rock band called Kansas? They were way better. I nodded, pretending to know what she was talking about because I desperately wanted her to think I was Actually Very Cool. I had only just started picking my own music, so why couldn’t I mold it into something that other people would think was Very Cool?
If you’ve ever tried to leave your own likes or dislikes at the altar of Cool, you know how this story goes. I did my best, and I thought I just didn’t like music. I couldn’t get into it. It required too much attention, so I always had to be in the exact right mindset to listen. I ricocheted off of the girly pop that was my debut and ended up somewhere harsher, meaner, louder, angrier. And until recently, I had convinced myself that was the music I liked when, really, it was only a familiarity built over oppressive hours in adolescence.
Enter Taylor Swift. The year is 2020. Things, including my mental health and society as we knew it, were bad. Swift was one of the few artists I was allowed to listen to in my pre-freedom country days — she was, after all, the country pop star of the future, according to the local country radio station. As I moved through the musical world, I revisited her latest albums, curious to see how her own music had evolved as had my preferences. She wasn’t confined to country anymore. Neither was I. But she was not my most visited, easily falling behind the angsty ballads that seemed more in tune with the unsettledness that had come to define my genre selection. Until the world tipped off its axis, and Swift released Folklore. It’s an underproduced braid of storytelling and guitar, punctuated by the soft score of a piano. My Spotify, by then, had veered well into the folk genre, or what I refer to as sad cowboy music. Not country, but still sad cowboys. Folklore fit perfectly in the niche I had carved out, a partner in the darkness of the cave of that year. Years later, here I am. Here we are.
People have opinions about Swift, and they are often shared unsolicited. I can, gloriously, share that I simply Do Not Care. Instead of my earlier years, I am no longer preoccupied with being Very Cool, Actually. There is an acceptance that comes with liking what you like and eschewing the rest. I know that I like Swift’s music, and that knowledge is such that I am not swayed by other’s opinions. It is the first time I felt something so fully that I chose to stand my ground instead of giving in, because my opinion was no less than those of the people telling me otherwise. I don’t care if people think it is cringeworthy, I only care about how I feel singing through Swift’s albums in the car or on a run. If anything, the joy that it brings only makes me hope for those that feel otherwise, that somewhere in their life they have a source of joy that fills them in the way her music fills my head.
I am reminded of an episode of the early 2000s cable staple Gilmore Girls wherein the mother, Lorelei, analyzes whether she actually likes PopTarts, or if she only likes them because her mother, Emily, despised them. So, too, has been my relationship with music. Do I actually like this band, this tone, this song? Or is it simply familiar, a relic of a lost time? Did I avoid this artist because their songs made me emotional, which was Not Cool in the early 2000s? What had I missed, all that time?
And here, we return to the piano. Do I actually dislike the piano, or was it a reaction to my parents’ adoration of it? Did I stop playing because I didn’t want to play, or because I wanted the freedom of choosing to play or not? And when I walked past the piano and out the door when I before would’ve been practicing, did that feel good because I wasn’t playing or because I was leaving?
Classical music had always taken up residence in my heart. It may be the one constant preference I held, even though it wasn’t one I shared publicly. To listen to classical music was to get swept up, carried out to sea on a boat of heart-aching beauty. I was lost in film scores, returning again and again to the numbers that elicited goosebumps and tears. I felt consumed, the music bigger than I could ever hope to be. The vastness of music, of art, to mind-bendingly huge as to tap into the most human of emotions, of feelings. The way Swift’s music fills my head, classical fills my heart. Was there a reason I felt that way, a reason my fingers danced across an imaginary keyboard while listening? Was it worth finding out?
Air travel has a way of unraveling these questions, spinning through thoughts I wasn’t even aware were laying dormant in a recess, tucked away until an opportune time presented itself. Somewhere in Latin America, the thought surfaced. What if I played again? Why not see how it feels, see how I feel, tapping away at the keys under my own power. What would it feel like to choose to play, to choose to practice, to work at something under my own accord and reap the benefits myself? What would it feel like to play the acoustic version of a Taylor Swift song, hearing the familiar notes bounce around the room, brought forward by my fingers and a wooden box instead of a portable speaker. Would it be a source of joy, to work for something I unequivocally loved? To be an active participant in the music, and everything it evoked, instead of the passive passenger singing along, woefully out of tune and desperate to be a part of the world in which it lived? Is it worth it?
If I’ve learned anything these last few years, the answer is almost always yes.
Here’s to the tortured poets, artists, musicians. Those with enough love, those that chase joy, and want to bring us along for the ride, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
- Megan