This Song Got Me Through This Week: June 27th, 2024
A mixtape and a blurb. (One of us writes beautifully, the other phones it in.)
Ari & Pete’s love language is sharing songs.
This can either be incredibly endearing, or it might derail a very emotional and serious conversation we were having with you.
So, instead of bombarding your phone with YouTube/Spotify/Apple Music links, we've decided to limit ourselves to one(ish) song per week(ish).1
We'll include a lil’ essay about the song, followed by a link, and that's it. You're done. Perhaps you'll tap the link and listen to the song, maybe you'll love it, or perhaps you'll listen and think, “Oh, they're in a place.”2
The Songs That Got Ari Through This Week:
Reclaiming Disincarnate Feelings// a playlist of love songs I used to think weren’t meant for me
As I prepare to bid adieu to my beloved Brooklyn sublet, I can’t help but reflect on how completely and totally different my life is now than it was when I got here nearly six months ago. This is the longest I’ve been single since I was 20 years old, and I joke (only half-kidding) that the past ten years of semi-obsessive dating were my attempt at making up for the first 20 years of my life—in which, like many young closeted queer folks growing up in the 2000s and 2010s, I never dated anyone. This six-month pause has been delicious: I’ve relished the opportunity to be one with myself; to read and write and think; to connect to my spirituality and to my higher self. And a great deal of this self-connection has involved reclaiming my old disincarnate feelings—specifically around love.
About two months ago, I discovered a playlist I made nearly 10 years ago that I had titled “Movie Montage Clichés.” It was full of songs I was too embarrassed to claim that I actually liked—because, in all their epic, requited joyfulness, I never thought they were meant for me. No, I thought, much better to listen to “Fuck Was I” by Jenny Owens Young on repeat: that song truly got me.3
I look back on that 18-20 year old version of myself, and I just want to give them a giant hug. Love isn’t a tumor! Or a parasite! Or a bulldozer! I want to shout. Love isn’t embarrassing! Love isn’t wrong! Especially queer love!
So, this week, as I prepare to set out on the next step of my journey, I wanted to do something 18-20 year-old me would’ve found unthinkable: I want to share with you all my favorite love songs. Ones I now know are meant for me—and can be meant for you, too, if you choose them:
“This Kiss” - Faith Hill
I unabashedly love this song. The end.“Kiss Me” - Sixpence None The Richer
Couldn’t kick off this playlist without it.“You Picked Me” - A Fine Frenzy
This song first came to me on my Fiona Apple-inspired Pandora station when I was in 9th grade. It’s lush and beautiful, and, for a deeply-closeted trans / queer kid who so desperately wanted to be chosen, was quite poignant.
It still is.“Breathless” - The Corrs
Tell me you grew up in the late `90s/early `00s without telling me you grew up in the late `90s/early `00s.“Can’t Get Enough of You Baby” - Smashmouth
Another early `00s jam.“Buddy Holly” - Weezer
One of my favorite love songs; it’s masterfully catchy, and is (arguably) one of Weezer’s best-known hits for a reason. Sure, some of the lyrics get a little weird (I could do without “your tongue is twisted / your eyes are slit / you need a guardian”), but, to me, nothing gets better than that chorus: I look just like Buddy Holly / and you’re Mary Tyler Moore / I don’t care what they say about us anyway / I don’t care ‘bout that.“Caught in the Rain” - Revis
As a nine-year-old, I was obsessed with two things: post-grunge and the computer game MVP Baseball 2003. I made myself a cis-male baseball-playing alter-ego named Adrian Green, and this was one of the songs that would play in the background of Create-a-Player mode. It always felt to me like credit music at the end of an epic action film love story. And here it is.“You And Me” - Lifehouse
This was the first song I witnessed people in my grade slow-dance to. It was fifth grade, we were at somebody’s birthday party at Dylan’s Candy Bar,4 and “You And Me” by Lifehouse—which had just come out—started playing. I watched everyone pair up without me—a sight I’d later see nearly every weekend at Whomever’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah—and felt this black hole open up in the pit of my stomach. The lyrics seemed to mock me: “You and me and all other people”? I thought. How about “you and you - and then me all by myself”?
As middle school continued, I began to feel like every slow dance was an unwinnable game of musical chairs5—and I, the perennial loser.
Being able to reclaim this song as a 30 year-old who now recognizes there’s a ton of love in his life, is true, pure joy.“Harvest Moon” - Neil Young
A new addition to this playlist—and one of my new favorite love songs. Neil Young is a master; it’s sweet and harmonic and wistful in all the right ways. And feels like a perfect end to a new beginning.
And that’s it: that’s my playlist. Go listen to it—or not. Better yet: go make and listen to your own playlist of songs you once found too embarrassing to love.
I promise you won’t regret it.
Ari - aka A.A. Brenner (they / he) is a playwright, screenwriter, dramaturg, and New Yorker. Their plays have been presented or commissioned by some pretty cool places (La Jolla Playhouse, Lincoln Center, Breaking the Binary Theatre Company, and more). They’ve been awarded some pretty cool residencies (SPACE on Ryder Farm, Catwalk Art Institute) and have been a finalist for some pretty cool awards at some pretty cool organizations (the Leah Ryan Fund, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, The Lark, and Platform Presents, to name a few). They’re pleased to see you here, on the internet, reading their prose. Enjoy!*
*or not! That’s up to you
This Song Got Pete Through The Week.
Jordana - Go Slow
I’ve still not 100% from COVID. Energy levels are really drained, but work/life is incredibly busy at the moment. So, as a way to cope, I’ve really only been listening to audiobooks.
That said, Here’s a song that I really like.
I don’t know much about Jordana, but this song gets lodged in my head every time I hear it, and I usually add it back to the queue to listen to it again. There’s something melancholy but still hopeful about the song, and I appreciate all the disparate elements coming together to form a nice catchy pop song. Most of all though, it’s something that feels good to hear in earbuds.
If that’s not a good reason to recommend a song, I don’t know what is.
Pete DeCourcy (He/Him) is a writer based out of Toronto, Canada. He has written for stage and screens (Phone, iPad, TV, Billboards, etc.) He was recently told by his osteopath that stretching doesn’t involve making your body experience intense pain and that it’s just to go slow, be present and breathe. His lack of musical skill is the reason the not-quite-a-podcast-not-quite-a-mixtape Ambient Noise Between Friends sounds like that.
If you’re going to set your own rules, you have to be able to break them, constantly and with no regrets.
Currently, one of us is in NYC the other is in a state of decay.
Which is one of the saddest, gayest songs ever written. Oy, my sweet younger queer self!
Yes, I know; the New York City Kid of it all!
A game I was objectively terrible at. Please imagine a child with mild Cerebral Palsy trying to play musical chairs. Whatever you’re imagining, the answer is yes: that’s what it was like.