“The Playlist” by Monica Edwards

The Playlist

Every time I hear “Losing My Religion,” I think of Beverly Hills 90210, the scene where Brenda and Dylan break up. According to the internet, Brenda broke up with Dylan, and it had something to do with her maybe being pregnant and then not being pregnant. I think they were sitting in a car — probably a Porsche — and the song played from the car speakers. As a teen watching the show, I melted. Oh, how I had wanted my very own break-up. A love ending would have meant a love having once started. Presently, the song is in my ears, which is what made me type these words. I’m listening to a nostalgia playlist (the lengths that I will go to). Recently, someone told me how, years ago, upon hearing the song “Sea of Love” by The National — she, too, was in a car — she realized she had to divorce her husband (if I stay here trouble will find me) in order to save herself. Sense memories, fresh like summer rain.
My biography, too, has an extensive soundtrack. In elementary school in the late 1980s, I would walk to my friend’s house, and we would listen to Madonna’s True Blue album, singing unabashedly into hair brushes in her living room. We met up in 2010 — it all seems like yesterday, not far away — in Seattle and sang “La Isla Bonita” on karaoke while laughing our asses off over beers at an empty dive bar. In college, I had loved her; she would sing “All I Want” by Joni Mitchell — I want to knit you a sweater, I want to write you a love letter — while I played the guitar and stewed unrequitedly.
When I was in high school — during the time we were also to believe Brenda and Dylan on 90210 were in high school, despite the actors all being in their 30s — I had a boyfriend who was a bad kisser but a good guitar player. Together, we learned how to play “Blackbird” by The Beatles. When we broke up, my lips were free — take these broken wings and learn to fly — and I jumped in a pool in my clothes. Such a movie thing to do — or, a suburban thing to do. Either way, it’s what I did, and I never had another boyfriend again. My fingers, though, will always be able to play that song. It’s burned in my brain, although I can’t remember what I had for lunch this past Tuesday.
In 2000, I voted for Al Gore, but the Supreme Court would not let us break up with Bush, Jr., so I made a playlist. R.E.M. showed up there, too. (It’s the end of the world as we know it. Clearly, I had no idea what was to come in 2016.) I made that playlist on a CD burner, which was cool at the time and fancy. When my first long-term girlfriend told me she wanted to date other people, or rather one specific person, and also stay with me, I naively thought I could hack it. Then she made a mix-CD for her new girlfriend, including the song “I Love You” by Sarah McLachlan. To this day, I skip past the song — it’s just you and me, on our island of hope — when listening to Surfacing. I moved out of that house not long after the mix-tape was gifted. The other girlfriend moved in a week or so before my new apartment was ready, and, for a brief spell, we all lived together. 
The first time I lived alone was in a basement apartment furnished with castoffs from my parents’ house and thrift stores. I was sitting with my guitar on one section of an old brown sectional, playing “Moses” by Patty Griffin. I closed my eyes and sang my heart out — to cross this sea of loneliness — and, when I was done, the woman I was dating asked me, “how do you feel so much? . . . you didn’t even write the song.” We broke up a week later when I called her another woman’s name, the name of the woman who was making the mix-tape with Sarah McLachlan for her new girlfriend.  The woman I had been dating went back to being straight, and I went back to my heartbreak. That one section of the brown sectional was in the basement of the house I grew up in, and it’s where the bad kisser first kissed me, where we played The Beatles, and where we watched Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Fast forward ten years, and it’s where a friend sat and cried, listening to “As Is” by Ani DiFranco (just give up and admit you’re an asshole). At the time, it was her ex who was the asshole, though a few months ago — some decades later — she texted me, “now I wonder who the asshole was. It might have been me.”
On another seat shared by many, in the common room of a dorm at Illinois State University, I sat with a friend, again having closed my eyes — I was deep, so I was always closing my eyes — and sang my heart out to “Blood and Fire” by the Indigo Girls. Twenty-eight years later, I texted that friend, “I was always SO SERIOUS when I played that song,” and she replied, “lol . . . yes, you were, but it was always a beautiful moment.” Another 14 minutes passed, and she texted me again: “I just belted out ‘Blood and Fire,’ and it took me back big time. Heart emoji.” I am intense, I am in need, I am in pain, I am in love, sung with the longing of adolescent hormones and suburban alienation. 
Sorrow found me, too, when I was young, though I didn’t have much to account for it. When I broke up with an ex — this one lasted five years — who’d taught me that my feelings weren’t important (“gaslighting” wasn’t a term all over social media yet), I went back to “Done Wrong” by Ani DiFranco — how could you take almost everything, then come back for the rest? — which, incidentally, is playing in my earbuds as I type this sentence. I’m listening to a nostalgia playlist. When I was young and alone and deep in my feelings, I would lie in the dark and listen to “Washing of the Water” by Peter Gabriel. Oh, how I wanted a love to love. How I ached for it. 
A few decades later, living on my own for the first time in many years, I would lie on the floor at night after a few beers and listen to “Pride and Joy” by Brandi Carlile, wondering how I wound up alone — do you make me grieve for you? — again, feeling the music fill me up alongside the darkness. It was well before Susan Cain wrote the book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, so I didn’t know it was a thing to swoon over the dark mood of a song, full of strings and lyrics like bring me something to take this pain away. Now I know.
Rewind the tape: when I heard Amy Ray sing “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” on my Sony Walkman, my whole body buzzed with intuition. I was on the ISU quad, walking from my job scooping ice cream back to my dorm. The earphones were the kind covered with gray felt. Somehow, Ray’s voice — not her looks, not her body, but her voice — confirmed what I knew but didn’t know until then: I was gay. It was 1994, and I was 18. I’m listening to the song now, and her voice still does that thing it did, that I can’t put to words — if I stay here, won’t you listen to my heart? — but I can still feel in my body. I’m listening to a nostalgia playlist. 
A few years into our relationship, my wife and I stood in the entryway of our two-flat while the rain poured down outside. We had a beer buzz, and we waxed nostalgic about our shared love of “Little Wing,” finding commonality in the lives we’d lived before we met. I played her Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version, and she played me Sting’s — take anything you want from me — and we were stirred by the song just as we’d been when we were young.
Recently, when my parents drove my wife and I to the airport after a visit, they played Linda Ronstadt’s “Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like The Wind,” as they’d done for me many times before. I can still hear my mom’s voice in the passenger seat, singing along, and my heart swells with love — my thoughts are filled with memories — and an ache that feels like breaking apart for what I know will someday come to pass. My mom likes to tell the story of how, when I was young — single digits, we would dance (so how could I dance with another?) in the dining room, my little feet on her bigger feet, holding hands while The Beatles sang, “I Saw Her Standing There.” That’s our nostalgia playlist. And mine — a body born of music. 

Monica Edwards

Monica Edwards has a Ph.D. in sociology and teaches at a Chicago-area community college. She has published in academic journals and her recent book is Pedagogies of Quiet: Silence and Social Justice in the Classroom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). She writes for her students, and this writing has been published on Medium (in their “Equality for All,” “Greener Together,” “Momentum,” and “Modern Identities” sections) and online with the Good Men Project. She walks, plays music, reads, and writes creative non-fiction in her free time.

Headshot: Tori Soper Photography

Photo Credit: Staff