Who’s Crying Now

It’s a Sunday afternoon. Rainy, which you’d think would be a good thing in my parched, burned-out hometown, and it is, it truly is, except that everything now smells like wet smoke instead of bushfire smoke. A scented candle is no match to the putrid, weighted toxicity of the foul particulate matter we’ve been inhaling for months now, so I decide to cook. Something highly aromatic, with loads of powerful, smoke-busting spices. Of course, you can’t cook without music and wine — well, I can’t, anyway — so I open a bully of a shiraz (it’s going to have to stand up to fists full of north African spices, so it had better have guts). And I crank up the iPod.

Yup, you read it right. I’m using an iPod. In an iPod dock, no less. Go ahead and mock me if you will. Full disclosure: I subscribe to Apple music and Spotify and seek out new tunes from pretty much every source possible. I’m not a complete Luddite. So why the antiquated technology? Because my iTunes libraries are memory reconstituted. They are my tattoos after a wasted night out. They are my tattered love letters, stained with heartbreak tears. They are my repository of magical moments, souls found and lost, landscapes that make me soar, odd bits of trivia that stick and become part of my story, who I am. My iTunes libraries tell me who I have been, who I wanted to be. They remind me of how I came to be who I am, now.

Shuffle is my friend, a blind adventure in musical history because out of more than thirteen thousand songs — many of which I stole via LimeWire but we’re not talking about that — who the fuck knows what psycho-acoustic memories will hurl themselves out of the past.

I get lucky with the first drop, a Robert Johnson guitar hero blast of Crossroad Blues. Immediately, I’m twenty-seven, living a life of tequila happy hours and cocaine dawns in Paris and you’ve never seen anyone as cool as me. I’m sophisticated and bilingual on the outside; underneath, I am bleeding for a man who will get me pregnant twice and dump me three times. He’s a Fender fan, plays lead in a crap pseudo-Coldplay band on weekends, and is wanted by women on three continents for reasons I cannot fathom now. I eventually escaped that circle of hell, something he knew was going to happen before I did, due to my playing Paolo Nutini’s Last Request on loop. Those lyrics make me think I knew too. The guy was an arsehole, and that’s being kind, but he gifted me with a lifelong love of guitar music in all of its forms. So thanks for that.

Next up is Bozz Scaggs. We’re All Alone. Twelve years old and longing with every tormented hormone in my body to be loved. Deeply. Cinematographically. Against a background of pre-parental divorce set in a parochial, closed down seventies outer Brisbane suburb, the soundtrack was pub-drunk men in stubby shorts, neighbourhood barbeques that ended in stoushes, the kids choking on Winnie Blues behind the shed while the mums served up tinned fruit in jelly and swerved to avoid the raised fists of their blokes. Even before puberty hit, I knew I was out of there. I must have been switched at birth; I never fit in. I liked to read, which compounded the cardinal sins of being good at school and wanting to travel. Can’t get much more tall poppy than that. You can bet your bottom dollar that I was out of that suburb, out of the state, out of the damn country the exact minute I could. A big life, that’s what this song meant to me, and that’s what it gave me. Thirty years of expat life, more adventures than I can poke a stick at. A few chaps who loved me deeply, cinematographically, until I got smart enough to understand that love is not a showreel in my mind. Curiously, the Silk Degrees album is the only gift my long-estranged, raving-alcoholic father ever gave me (and even then, it was only to piss off my mum).

The opening notes of Me voilà seule dans la nuit…Comme autrefois from Les Pêcheurs des Perles. My favourite aria from one of my preferred operas. Most know Au fond du temple saint which is a hymn to the true friendship of two men who will both abandon the woman they love for the sake of their friendship (opera is idealistic if nothing else). However, when Leila sings “but he is here, I can feel his presence”, she is speaking my truth. I might be “alone in the night, like before”, but I know that my other half, that part of me that is life as yet unlived and not necessarily a soulmate, is out there. Waiting. The next stage of life, luring me forth, the same at fifty as it was at eighteen. Hopefully with a few additional smarts.

Elton John’s Your Song. A seedy cocktail bar reeking of piggy-eyed businessmen plump with expense accounts; if they drank enough, their tips would make up for the bruises on my pretty butt and pay for my uni books. A one-legged, twelve-string guitar playing Texan reminding me from the platform of his own agonies that I was valued. This is a song of friendship, and of knowing that we do what we have to in order to advance our dreams, but that we can collect some good folk along the way.

Now I’m rocking my colicky, sleepless three-month old baby girl. The only thing that seems to calm her is Celine Dion’s anthematic It’s All Coming Back to Me. I didn’t buy this CD, I have no idea how it ended up on my iPod either; no disrespect to Ms Dion. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. First time mumma with no idea what I’m doing; all I want is for my baby to stop hurting and I don’t know how. Sleep deprivation worse than Guantanamo, my boobs are furiously full-to-bursting and I know, just know that I’m a terrible mother. After the fifteenth replay, bub and I cede to Celine’s confidence. There’s just all that power in her voice, lyrics aside, that grounds us both until finally we sleep.

Dolly Parton is singing about her Coat of Many Colours. I got to play the temptress in the school play although the nuns changed the words from “come and lie with me” to “come and sit with me”. We had priests and fathers putting their hands down our knickers, but God forbid we incite them any further. Dolly Parton is my mum’s favourite singer. She adheres to the cult of Dolly, it’s her own religion and a pretty good one too, composed of good deeds, pure love. Mum didn’t even flinch when she found out Dolly has tattoos, that’s how much she adores her. The only song we don’t play is Jolene, because infidelity can’t be wiped out by melody.

Suicide Blonde’s opening line asks the rhetorical question: don’t you know what you’re doing? It’s a late eighties summer night. I’m sweating under the strobe lights in a skin-tight white leather dress, all big-haired — blonde, permed — yearning. The object of my desire is my boss, but that’s ok because it’s the eighties and we did inappropriate shit like that. Of course, he’s not interested, I know he’s not but he’s drinking enough to try, and I know, just know that if I can get him to do me, he’ll be conquered, and we’ll live happily ever after. The flip side of this INXS hymn to ignoring your better instincts is Everyone Wants You Tonight, which is pretty much where I ended up that night. On my knees. And no, he wasn’t conquered either, although I was a bridesmaid at his wedding a few years later. The rock gods do have a sense of humour.

I learned French translating Long Train Running for my first husband (another guitarist; I’m nothing if not consistent). It’s no fault of the Doobie Brothers that once we were able to speak the same language, we found out we had nought to say. Joni Mitchel got me through; I signed my divorce papers to Both Sides Now.

Aspettimi. The I Muvrini version, because for a significant part of my life, I lived and loved in a culture vastly alien to my own, one that would eventually break me but not before giving me the two greatest gifts of my existence. It might be an ode to the Ile of Beauty but it’s really about how your country never leaves you, no matter how far you run. For a touch of irony, Pink Martini’s song of the same name speaks to the illusion of love and what happens when the diamonds fall from our eyes, if I may misquote.

There’s James Taylor as my best friend and I belt down a Country Road in my little red MG, topless so we don’t get strap marks, freaking the truckies along the way. I’m Sitting on the Dock of the Bay with Otis, eating fresh sea urchins while the crew sorts our tanks for a dive somewhere in the brilliant Mediterranean. And now I’m a mum again, trying to settle two traumatized French teenagers into a white bread Sydney suburb. There are many gatherings. Always at our place, because this drinking culture is alien to my girls and the fibre of my worst childhood moments. And guess what the lights-out, party’s over music is? Come On Eileen. Who knew that in three decades of absence, the soundtrack to teenage angst would remain unchanged; along with Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock and pretty much anything by Cold Chisel, the Dexys Midnight Runners hit has a longevity that makes me feel like everything will be alright in the world, if only we keep listening.

iTunes is being prescient now, and the technology pre-dates artificial intelligence so it must be spiritual; there’s clearly a theme or two going on here. Youthful angst and boys with guitars. And hope, there’s always hope. Don’t Stop Believing. Every now and then, a song comes along that is the absolute perfect enactment of psycho-acoustic memory. Click play on Journey’s eponymous album and immediately you are transported back to the energy, the personalities, the very scent of time. A campfire, a sense of the forbidden. The exciting unknown of what would come next, and the desperate, visceral burn of who we wanted to come next. A time of strings squealing angsty rock, the thrill and bitter envy of an off-the cuff love song, ironic but true, the cool girl/boy IT couple you wished but knew you’d never be. And meanwhile, weeping inside from the rotgut cask wine and unrequited love. Why did he always, always choose someone else than me? He didn’t know he was setting me up for a lifetime of being the chirpy side kick, the friend zone girl. That my trying to drown him out with equally unobtainable others would become a pattern until, a lifetime or two later, someone far wiser than I pointed out that I was too old for abandoned-by-my-daddy issues.

Is there anything more painful than life at 17? Neither one thing or another, absolute in everything and yet so terrifyingly naive. There is grace in an album that allows us to pass from Who’s Crying Now to Keep on Running in the order of the album and to change complete life views accordingly. No wonder music is so powerful, even more so when combined with alcohol, hormones and a great sense of infallibility. Or immortality.

But we are not immortal, none of us, no matter what the tune. Some of us have gone on to great things, others have survived. Some are just gone. Some are just beginning. But the music remains. And with it, the depth of memory, be it a tender friendship or a ride or die moment that forever marks us. Don’t get me wrong: I love the ease of access that new technologies offer us, and I am enchanted by the possibility of sharing my playlists to loved ones near and far, melodic letters that can function as hugs and healing or just a way to be together across the decades or seas. But my iTunes libraries are my souvenirs, intimate and as honest as the sun, and I intend to honour them on many rainy Sundays to come.

The Moroccan Chicken with olives and preserved lemons is ready to eat. There’s no more wine left and ten thousand songs or more to go. Sorry about that. Bon appetit.