Raised as I was, no small amount of shame bubbles up when I admit to you that music - or the habit of listening to songs on a regular basis - has fallen out of my life. Fallen? Plucked? Faded? I'm not sure I know, but my days recently have been quiet ones. When I listen to music at all it's usually a song I knew from before this phase, and I'm usually just plumbing it for access to a very specific emotion. And this is new. Go back only four years and you'll find journal pages across which I've scrawled (in several instances) things like: MUSIC WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE. It used to be how I clawed my way out.

So it was a little like loosening the latch of an old door when, a few minutes before a big buttery sun sank behind the Denver skyline, I was treated to a birthday mix that I made for Anna almost a decade ago. From the very first chords of the very first song (which, by the way, I recommend) I was utterly transported - scooped up & in - to a former version of myself, like a bug up the neck of a vacuum cleaner, in to the dirty dark compression of everything I'd been struggling to move through at the time. The old brain knew things the new one had forgotten, like the lift of a good line, or the way a great chorus can reverberate against the world beyond the windshield, cleaning everything, claiming it all. I'd forgotten that feeling of being held by an idea, forgotten about this notion of shared beauty, forgotten about the loosening of focus when all the dots connect, driving a new notion of personhood straight in to both ears. (And yes, it was a great fucking mix.)

It's later now, and Anna is in the other room, writing songs. From the couch I can lean back and see her in silhouette. A guitar is propped up on one knee, and in between her and a glowing laptop sits a glass of wine, half full. The tune is there, now for the words. It's quiet work. Muttered approximations of a right next line take shape over the chords of a good idea. She'll stop every so often, type, adjust, try again; the very picture of focus. More than anything it's how I imagine I look when trying to crank out one of these things. I think it's a shared addiction, this feeling around in the dark of yourself. A shared willingness to hold up taste like a torch as you pore over the writing on the wall.