Music is now and has always been a tremendous part of my life. It has flowed through my veins and oozed out of my cells for as long as I can remember. Although I was late to the party of choosing my own music to listen to – I started ballet classes at the age of 3 and danced until I was 16. After a rebellious teenage break, I went back to ballet when I was in college. It wasn’t until college that any of my dance classes had a live piano accompanist; and I remember feeling magic at the barre whether she was playing Chopin or a slowed-down version of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. There are musicians, dancers, and music fans alike who love music but don’t read music or understand how it works – only how it sounds. And while I’m certain that their love for music isn’t less than mine or anyone else’s – I do feel like when you can read or play music it changes your relationship with and appreciation for music. Much the same way that you can love and be passionate about animals – but having and caring for a pet gives you a deeper understanding of their lives and personalities and gives you an even deeper respect. Music has an incredible power that for the majority of my life brought me happiness in dark times and inspiration and happiness and every other emotion in between.

Aside from classical music, my childhood and early adolescence was steeped in listening to whatever records my parents were listening to. For me that meant a lot of singer/songwriter and folksy music. I watched every Peter, Paul, & Mary live on PBS special; had a deep love of Simon and Garfunkel, and John Denver. (Take Me Home Country Road’ was the recessional hymn at my grandmother’s funeral) As a result, I am a total sucker for an amazing song that tells a story – regardless of genre. (You’re made of STONE if you aren’t moved by ‘Same Old Lang Syne’ by Dan Fogelberg) Additionally, my parents were fans of Broadway musicals, so Pippin, Grease, Camelot, and Jesus Christ Superstar were also in constant rotation. (This is a story for another post but my parents only saw each other 13 times in person before they got married and when my dad visited my mom in NYC they went to Broadway musicals in the 70’s Broadway heyday) That, combined with my dance always made me feel deeply connected with the music on the page, the ability of lyrics to invade your soul and tell a story, as well as the body’s physical movement & choreography to the sound was deeply ingrained in me from a young age. I took piano lessons and clarinet lessons and was in band in both Middle School and High School. I also spent my high school summers being in the orchestra pit of community theatre productions in Highland, Munster, and Crownpoint Indiana. I devoured music in high school like I was starving to death (goth, industrial, punk, classic rock, alternative, heavy metal – anything that I could groove to), and it was the only thing that would nourish me. That’s probably why it surprises people when I tell them that I spent almost 2 full years in total silence repulsed by the thought of music.

In a previous post, I wrote about how I met my ex-husband in 1994 in the Q101 chatroom on AOL. Our first conversation ever was about the Screeching Weasel album Bark Like A Dog and the Type O Negative album Bloody Kisses. He was as obsessed with music as I was. For 20-some years of our long history together, music was weaved through every seam of the fabric of our relationship. While he was a typical high school skateboarding punk rocker, he also had a long and eclectic history with music. He played basically every instrument, had an encyclopedic knowledge of music from classical to current pop, punk, rock, etc. Our connection through music was a cornerstone of our time with one another. Given everything that happened between him and I in the last decade; I don’t want to give him any positive recognition. But the unbiased reality is that he is/was extraordinarily talented. He was a fringe member of the Chicago-based Weasel Family, he played and recorded with John Jughead Pierson and Danny Vapid. So, he was deeply entrenched in the Chicago punk rock community – but it never fully satisfied him. He was so talented that pop-punk was “too easy” for him. He’d play difficult pieces and classical Spanish guitar angrily after coming home from a show because he’d felt “bored” for the past few hours. As a result of this particular trait of his malignant narcissism, he was always starting and leaving bands (usually after burning a bridge in a spectacular fashion) – always searching for musicians that were like-minded and as outrageously talented as he was. By default, since I was the girlfriend/fiancée/wife, I spent thousands of hours in recording studios, at shows, band practices, auditions, etc. When he wanted to write a song or an album, he did it himself.

That whole cycle usually left my ex with the challenge of trying to find live musicians that he considered “good enough” to play with him live. None of these arrangements ever lasted long because he felt that people couldn’t keep up with him. He didn’t NEED to practice so he was constantly frustrated by people who had to – or people that didn’t get a challenging riff or beat immediately. Therefore, I developed deeply entrenched and special memories and remembrances of literally thousands of songs, genres, local musicians, bands, genres, venues, and shows just from spending so many hours around him. To keep myself busy, I graded students’ Constitution Tests in a crappy recording studio in Joliet during a snowstorm and even wrote some Graduate School papers on a laptop at the bar at the Mutiny (RIP Mutiny Chicago). Hopefully the Class of 2003 never finds out that a couple of punk rockers sitting on the backseat bench of a defunct van that was serving as a couch helped me grade their homework before going out on Friday nights. (They were literate and had an answer key so no harm no foul)

After his accident, my now-ex-husband’s betrayals were laid bare to the world, while I was starting a new and highly stressful job and while he was institutionalized in a behavioral hospital. I was driving on a backcounty road between Kankakee, Illinois and my apartment in Schererville, Indiana by myself after a school board meeting one evening in the summer of 2019. The sun was just starting to set, and the weather was gorgeous – I was excited but nervous to be starting my new position even though my personal life was blowing up. I had my sunroof open and decided to turn on some music on Pandora for the hour+ drive home. Every single song on every single station felt like lightning striking my soul. I thought that maybe changing the channel from the Shins and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to something silly like pop punk would be somehow less emotional. As Teenage Bottlerocket’s “Stupid Song” came on I started to tear up. The last show we’d been to before our wedding with all of our friends was Teenage Bottlerocket at Brauerhouse. I had once driven 7 hours after teaching all day to see him open for Teenage Bottlerocket in Wisconsin and we hung out with the band until 2 am. I spun the digital dial again. There was literally NOTHING I could hear that didn’t tear me to pieces. We loved cheesy 80’s music. We loved watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Shit; God Gave Rock & Roll To You was the recessional hymn at our wedding. I couldn’t even listen to Motley Crue, Kiss, or Poison. Beethoven wasn’t an option; crappy early 90’s hip hop was out too; forget about goth, industrial, or any era of punk rock. Even the stuff that he had never liked and was solely my music was still connected to various events in our shared life and what was going on at the time – positive or not. It didn’t help that my ex had released a whole series of songs that were clearly diss-tracks of me/love songs to his mistress. Although I didn’t listen to it – it was out there in the ether and our mutual friends all had opinions about it that despite their best intentions I didn’t need to/want to hear about. If there is something MORE humiliating than being cheated on by your spouse, threatened by them, having your life savings stolen by them – it is having it all immortalized in music that’s out there in the public realm and completely misrepresents the truth. If anything, it did give me a newfound respect for celebrities who have all sorts of lies put out there about them. I was a nobody and had about 5 people asking me about some songs that very subtly shit-talked me – I can’t imagine living like that with thousands of people in your business all of the time.

So, I retreated into a monastic-like existence of absolute silence. I buried myself in work. Thankfully, the school turnaround that I was working at didn’t allow me much spare time or energy to spelunk through the caverns of my sadness. But I didn’t listen to a single song (at least not by choice). I didn’t listen to tunes in the car, or while lying baking in the sun at my apartment’s pool, or while I was taking walks in the forest preserve. I was just living in an eerie silence with a soundtrack of laptop keyboard- clacking. That August, I was grocery shopping, and the radio station was softly playing Flock of Seagulls and I abandoned my full cart and walked right out the door. (Paul Reynolds‘ guitar tone was my ex-husband’s inspiration for his own unique tone) It was as if the whole idea that music was some sort of an emotionally healing balm was just laughing in my face. Arguably mankind’s favorite peacemaker, music, was only bringing more war to my soul.

Wiss Auguste wrote “Once again she was free. Once again, she found peace. It was music that freed her soul from the dungeon of her mind.” But for me, hearing any music at all was putting me in a cage of what felt like hopeless sadness and anger. I felt like I was drowning and choking on any lyric and any melody that invaded my ears just poked all of the sore spots in my brain and my heart. At the time, I didn’t even realize that I was making conscious choices to avoid music. Sometimes when you’re in survival mode your mind and body just do what they have to do to get you through. My spirit was battered, and I could only tolerate a bare minimum of emotion while I healed and rebuilt my life one single day at a time. I am not a religious person. I had always felt a connection to the universe around me and believed that putting positive energy into the world would lead to positivity. For many music fanatics, music is our religion. In retrospect, maybe my silence makes sense. I’ve rarely met a religious person of any creed that has had a crisis of faith who hasn’t struggled with their church. Catholics, Muslims, Jews, or any other religious person can lose “God” and stop going to church for weeks, months, or decades and may or may not find their way back into the fold. So, in some ways, maybe my 2 years of silence was me turning my back on the only spirituality that had ever really mattered to me. A colleague of mine has a podcast where he asks guests, “What have you been listening to this week?” Every time I hear either him or his co-host ask that question, I’m a little relieved that no one had been asking me that question from 2019- early 2021. My answer would’ve been a pretty pathetic and somber, “absolutely nothing at all”.

Between May of 2019 and April of 2020, I was living on autopilot. When I wasn’t feeling stressed and overwhelmed with work and the pandemic and my divorce, I was feeling isolated, sad, lonely, and burned with a constant and simmering anger. I went to work for 12-16 hours a day, I took long walks, I took long naps cuddled up with my cat – but I didn’t listen to any music. I talked on the phone during my work commutes, I watched Netflix shows on my phone during my 3-mile walks at the Forest Preserve, I fast-forwarded through music-heavy portions of TV shows or movies when I watched them. By the time I realized that I was even doing it, I had already been doing it for 6 months or more. Eventually, despite the pandemic I started to think about dating again. Even during the height of the pandemic while submerged in a toxic work environment, things eventually settled into a routine that allowed me to start to decompress a little at a time. Like a teakettle, some of my emotions started to leak out and gradually reduced the pressure inside of me. Without really realizing it, music started to creep back into my life. I still avoided any music that was related to my ex-husband. I didn’t listen to anything that had been played at our wedding or his favorite bands.

I have always been and always will be a huge Keanu Reeves fan. I have loved Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure for decades. As a History teacher, I even showed it to my 6th & 7th graders and had them do a time traveling project at the end of the year when I was still in the classroom. Anytime a sequel or additional movies in a series that I like come out; I usually watch the other movies beforehand to get psyched up. In early August of 2020, I knew that Bill & Ted Face the Music was about to come out. I wasn’t sure if watching the movies and hearing the soundtrack would make me sad or not. I knew that I had progressed a lot in the previous year. I wasn’t just surviving but I was thriving – but I also didn’t want to back slide either. As a result, I watched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure one weekend, Bogus Journey the following weekend, & Face the Music on a third weekend. I figured it would be better to spread out the experience a little and to wait until mid-September to get started on the 3-film process.

As a side note, I went on my first date with my current and amazing boyfriend on September 5, 2020. We wouldn’t officially get together until the following February, but we texted often while we were first getting to know each other during those months. One of the things that he had asked me about (of course) was my divorce, etc. He had asked me how I knew I was ready to date since my divorce wasn’t really that long ago – and I remember telling him that “I gave enough of my life to someone who destroyed me and made me feel awful. I won’t waste one more second on him now that I know who I am and what I want. Life is just too short.” I had no idea if I was over my ex-husband or not – but I knew that I wanted to be and I refused to allow him to prevent me from enjoying (of all things!) Bill & Ted. When I watched Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey home alone with my cat in my lap – I knew that iconic final scene would be a real test. The outrageous concept that it takes Bill & Ted 40 years of time traveling to figure out how to play a single Kiss song notwithstanding, as I heard the opening chords of God Gave Rock & Roll To You start, I noticed that I was tapping my foot. I wasn’t feeling pain – I was just simply enjoying the moment. I wasn’t thinking about walking down the aisle with my husband at the end of our wedding to it; I was just enjoying Bill & Ted winning the Battle of the Bands. It somehow felt like I was waking up from being hypnotized.

I woke up slowly though. It was another whole year before I found my way fully back to music. When I started my new job at the Middle School where I was once in band myself – at first, I avoided the Band Room when I could. I was no longer fast forwarding through musical parts of TV shows or movies, and I occasionally was listening to the radio while I was in the car – but I was still actively avoiding emotional or personal music connections. When you wake up from a long sleep or heal from deep wounds you move slowly at first. Before you heal, you get medicine or take painkillers so that your pain doesn’t overwhelm your body and you can heal while being numb enough to tolerate life. Over time, burns callous over, and you grow new skin and old wounds don’t hurt anymore. The first step in the process for me was music creeping back into the background of my life unnoticed and serving as” just music”/neutral background noise. Slowly, it started becoming an occasional conscious choice again – and eventually back to what it is now – a joyful and cathartic necessity pulsing through my life – just like the air in my lungs.

Now, I have a newfound love for and a rejuvenated relationship with music. I have an amazing job that I love and a healthy, joyful relationship with a man that loves and respects me. Not only is he as passionate about music as I am – but we have made new and special memories with a fresh and exciting soundtrack. We have our own awesome and mutual musical experiences together. As a Chicago House Music enthusiast, he’s introduced me to new music that I’d never heard, creating a vibe that is exciting and fresh and fun. We went to DJ Collete’s birthday party at Smart Bar, danced to Tchami at the iconic Club Space in Miami, went on a behind the scenes tour of Paisley Park in Minneapolis and saw Prince’s shoe collection and held his SuperBowl guitar (basking in the eternal presence of one of the greatest musicians to ever live), we do silly dances while making dinner, and we watch old Talking Heads, David Bowie, Ramones, and Queen concerts while cuddled up happily on the couch.

Music is freeing and fun and fresh again. For the most part, even the artists that were the most connected to my relationship with my ex-husband are basically back in my constant rotation. While there are some songs that bring back a sharp twinge of sadness for me and that I don’t choose to listen to voluntarily anymore (Green Day’s ‘Ordinary World‘ that we danced to at our wedding; or Yaz’s ‘Only You‘ that was considered ‘our song’ for most of our relationship; or other songs that we’d had a special connection to) – but I no longer actively avoid them either. My ability to be spiritual and feel connected to the universe has returned. My world is no longer silent and painful – but rather is full of music and emotion again. Instead of draining me, it now energizes me and powers me. Not only do I want to listen to my old favorites, but I want to discover new favorites and feel an energy that I haven’t had in a long time. The next time someone asks me what I’ve been listening to, my answer will be a stark difference from the ‘silence’ of 2020-21. (Unless I’m referring to the song the Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel which I have been listening to on the first edition Concert in the Park vinyl that my man bought me for my birthday – because I’ve definitely been spinning that lately) In fact, the current playlist will be long and varied and full of options – just like whatever the future may have in store.