Your Voice Becomes My Home
I feel as if we have known each other for years, yet it is only a fraction of you that I see and hear and feel. Your music, your artistry, speaks to me in ways words can only attempt to describe. We have never met, but we have shared the same air in concert venues. Your voice is in my ears with the touch of a button, never far away. You are the reason I dance walk to work each morning. You would not recognize my face in the crowd, though I would be there smiling, for you to notice would have me speechless.
Immersed in your sound, surrounded by an audience that adores you for all the same reasons I do. Oh, how I die listening.
It was late winter ’09 when I first heard your voice through computer speakers turned low as to not wake the household. I was up late crafting mixtape love letters to hearts never meant and instead lost myself in you. Your music became the soundtrack to my heart’s expenditures that winter and I return there with each listen, the heavy weight is lightened by your voice, and I am granted escape.
Tuned to an Old Flame
As I found myself in looping repeats of your tracks on online streaming I found your label and ordered the vinyl. To my surprise, your band was on one of my favorite indie labels in the USA and I was shocked by how I could have missed you. And you are Canadian! A sense of pride washed over me having found you nestled amongst some of my favorite artists, already feeling your artistry and thankful that the label heard it too. I know I would have found you eventually, but that night, with a shattered heart scrambling to piece together some semblance of self that felt safe, I needed exactly you.
That night, I did not sleep, transfixed on the idea of love that I had created for two who had come unglued. I forged a cassette of tracks with the intentions of bringing the relationship back to something better, but it did not land as I had hoped. I remember, sleepily wondering why I was giving away this tape, it may have been laced with confessions and honest intentions, but it was part of me now. Only I understood what it meant.
Her lips mocked me in silence, she would have to listen to this sixty minutes of feeling in order to understand my heart, and on the ride home I realized she could not commit to that. All the feelings I could not put into words were encapsulated there and the next step was to wait for them to be deciphered. This was not a good idea. I remember feeling helpless and wishing I could put the cassette back in my walk-man and listen alone, I wanted to turn myself inside out and get to side B, instead we sat in silence in the haze of morning, cold, unsteady.
Then it Snowed
It was not long after this tape exchange that my life became untangled. Our threads of different colors and opposite philosophy could no longer hold without knots and no one was tying on. We frayed and fell into the sea.
Time passed, and one day I came home to some bags on my back lawn, thrown over the fence like trash in reverse, inside were my notebooks, letters, and mixtapes made for her, and though I know this gesture was meant to hurt me, I was elated to have in my possession the only proof I had ever loved her. All else could be erased from my memory, but these fragments of my insides, this trace evidence of something ephemeral was embarrassing to have outside of me now that those words had become meaningless. I laughed and was overjoyed, the tape I made that night was returned, all of the tapes, finally at home with me.
"Even if I could get you back,
I don't try
You weren't all that good,
but I loved you like you were
mine"
~ Got A Call
The Way You Hold Me Brings Me Back
I brought out my walk-man and tapped into the stereo speakers and played the tape. Looking at the volumes of musical collages I had made made me smile as I listened and returned to the tracks that would always have me floored. My heart could love all it wanted, and what was not returned was like a song only I was signing to a distant audience or for no one, it did not matter. I could live with that as long as I had music.
Forever entwined with my febrile heart strings, you, Land of Talk, are always.
I have written this letter in my mind ever since. Your music helped me recover myself when I felt like a sliver of who I wanted to be. When I listen to you I feel as if I am a part of you, and you a part of me, something I can never unlearn. Thank you.
When I attend your shows it never surprises me how many of us are enamoured by your voice and that sound. My favorite part is watching how the music moves through you and through us, enveloped in your artistry. My heart is in a constant break and repair loop when I listen to you and I live for it. The sadness and darkness in your songs makes me ache like you ache, but at the same time, as I’m sure it is for you, the music speaks to me and all else fades away. I am left with the smile on my face, overjoyed like a fool in love.
Everyone’s in Love with Someone Else
You may never read this or know that I exist, but you have breathed life into me when I felt deflated, and I hope to return the favor through my adoration and support of you and your music. Your records are locked into my life and I grow more fortunate every time you create.
You are a permanent resident in my life’s mixtape. My attendance at your Vancouver shows is compulsory. I’ll wait up for that noise.
Thank you for always being there when I need you.
Your listener,
Caprice