The pandemic was winding down. Or it seemed to be winding down. Everyone was acting like that was what it was doing, like the coronavirus was the generic toy that the Energizer bunny outlasts every time.

I was still afraid, of many things, killer microbes included.

I had been feeling like we, meaning all of us, were on the verge of something big. Whatever it was, I couldn’t help thinking, would sweep through our lives and change our lives. COVID had swept through, and so many people were dead, so many more permanently sick. Climate collapse was underway. Things would, I thought, get worse.

But those thoughts didn’t stop me, in May of 2022, from driving to a folk music conference and breathing the same air as a lot of people from all over the world.

I’d had all my shots, and I thought I should try to be among people again, to see what it felt like to insert myself into a crowd of bodies, after two years of avoiding them like the plague, because they might have the plague.

The folk music conference was here in Kansas City, at a hotel downtown. A musician was playing that I wanted to see. I thought, as long as the folk were congregating near me, I might as well spend some time with them.

I’m still, more than one year later, trying to understand how it happened, that I came away from that experience with something in my heart that hadn’t been there before, something that was good for a change.

I still felt certain, when it was over, that all the world’s worst events were just beginning. But I also felt—I’m not sure what, exactly. It’s more than a year later, now, and I’m still looking to figure it out. 



As it happened, I was, at that time, when I wasn’t crashing conferences, trying to learn how to use the word “dialectic” in a sentence without sounding like a buffoon.

I didn’t have to learn it. I just wanted to.

There aren’t many things I want. Most of them don’t cost money. A complete understanding of the dialectic would be free, but it would take time and patience.

I had known for years what “dialectic” means, what the dialectic is.

It’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

It’s a model for how an idea forms. It starts with a stray thought, or an impulse, which is then challenged by some harsh reality or other, oppositional thought. Emerging from that conflict, that meeting with resistance, is something distinct from what came before, something more fully developed.

The initial thought is the thesis. The antithesis is the reality that starting thought must reckon with. The more refined idea is the synthesis.

But that’s also not really it, I’ve come to understand. The dialectic is bigger than that. It’s smaller than that, too.

Or something like that. Maybe.

I didn’t know for sure. I kept reading books whose authors used the word “dialectic” in ways that didn’t make sense to me, didn’t agree with what I had come to think the word meant from other books I’d read.

So I was trying to figure it out, once and for all, during some of the time I spent in my basement. 



I spend a lot of time in my basement, where I work all day and listen to music.

I use the streaming service Tidal for that, because they say it pays musicians better than other streaming apps. As a creative person who doesn’t earn enough money, I want to do my part to make up for other artists’ losses. It’s not much, but what the hell.

At some point in the last few years, I spotted a pattern in my listening habits. I realized that I tend to listen to albums that have a thoughtful-looking woman on the cover.

That’s all it takes, apparently, for me to want to listen to an album: a photo on the cover of a woman who looks like she’s about to have it all figured out.

I didn’t decide to go looking for thoughtful women. But when I scrolled one morning through the albums I’d put on my favorites list, gazing upon a dozen covers, and then another dozen, I saw staring back at me a lot of pensive women: Shannon Lay, Kate Stables, Gemma Ray, Mavis Staples. The list could go on, and more of the names would surely rhyme.

The women gazed into the camera, or off to the side. They didn’t smile. They looked like they were thinking of profound things. Like maybe they were considering the dialectic.

Take Julie Byrne. She appears, on the cover of Not Even Happiness (2017), like she’s reached a kind of nirvana of deep thought, eyes closed, face forward, long-fingered hands held before her. Her songs are what it would sound like if you could overhear a meditating stranger’s thoughts in the form of a song. You don’t know that person, but they’ve let you into their mind, and the sound of it fills you up.



Before I went to the folk music conference, I had never been to any kind of music conference. I didn’t know they put them on. I thought writers went to conferences, and musicians went to festivals. I assumed they preferred it that way, because conferences are awkward, and festivals are fun. Or at least they can be.

And I didn’t go to this conference because I’m passionate about folk music. I’m not. At least I didn’t think I was.

The first thing I learned at the conference is that “folk music” includes things that go beyond my first associations with the word—which are Pete Seeger, early Bob Dylan, and “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Folk music, at least at the conference, is a broad category that includes blues musicians, English singer/songwriters, goofy guys with banjos, and rock and roll bands from all over the world.

They played, throughout the day, in the ballrooms that took up the first and second floors. Attendees could walk into one ballroom and hear traditional Irish music, cross the hall to watch a Canadian band with electric guitar and keyboards, then stroll next door to hear a British guy play acoustic guitar.

It was something like a big outdoor festival. Only it had the advantage of not being outside, which meant I wasn’t stumbling in the heat, surrounded by drunk people, getting a sunburn. Festivals can be fun, but you can also get a sunburn.

There were drunk people at the conference. But we were all in a hotel. We were wearing masks, because COVID was in the air, and surely some of us were getting infected, and I shouldn’t have been there, shouldn’t have taken that risk.

But then it wasn’t a profoundly crowded conference.

It wasn’t a festival. It wasn’t for everyone. It was meant for people who were in the industry. It was where musicians could hang out and learn stuff from one another, and where owners of clubs and theaters discovered new acts they could invite to perform. Music journalists went there, and if you played none of the above roles, if you were a fan who just wanted to hear live music, it cost a lot of money to go.

I don’t have a lot of money. I was only able to attend the conference because a friend of a friend got me a pass for free, I don’t know how. Someone was playing there that I was dying to see, someone who looks thoughtful on album covers and whose music helped me through the isolation of the first COVID months. I would go and watch her perform, if I could find where she was performing.

I wasn’t sure I would manage to do that. The hotel was a maze. I could hardly find the things I went looking for in there. The building that hosted the conference was like something out of my most aggravating pandemic dreams.



Ever since I started taking Lexapro, not long before COVID arrived in the US, I went from having unpredictable nightmares every night to having the same nightmares again and again, a few scenarios playing out in rotation throughout every week.

I don’t know how Madame L’Exapro did it, but once she was in my system my bad dreams went from erratic to recurring. They took place in a handful of established settings. Their narrative arcs, such as they were, took on reliable shapes.

It’s an effect I can describe using the dialectic. My unconscious (thesis) met the chemical influence of Lexapro (antithesis), and the result was that my dreams were more static and repetitive (synthesis).

I doubt that’s a valid use of the dialectic.

It certainly doesn’t tell us anything particularly helpful. I doubt Theodor Adorno, Karl Marx, or Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel—pioneers of dialectic thinking—would approve.

But I’ve been having fun with this. If nothing else has arisen from my study of the dialectic, it has given me new and annoying ways to distort profound philosophies, twisting them to suit my whimsy.

One of my most persistent Lexapro dreams took place at a conference. 

It was inspired, I’m sure, by the annual creative writing conference I sometimes attend, which isn’t so different from the folk music conference. 

In the dream, I have traveled to a city to attend the conference. But when I reach where it’s being held, I can’t find my way through the structure. A stairway takes me to a hallway, which leads to another hallway. I don’t know where I am. I storm through a door and turn a corner. I’m more lost than I was moments before, and sometimes a friend of mine is there, someone I haven’t seen in years. They’re not happy to see me. 

The hotel where they held the folk conference had in it those lost hallways and stairways to nowhere. It had the same tantalizing energy, the sense that something important, something essential, was taking place where I was all too likely to miss it, because I couldn’t seem to get to the fifth floor from the second floor. The elevators were so crowded with people I couldn’t reach them, and the only stairs I found ended with a door that wouldn’t open. 

It was as if, having spent so much time in my house, thanks to COVID, and thanks to my mania for staying at home even when it was arguably safe to come out again, I forgot how to navigate buildings. But this building really was a confusing mess. It wasn’t my fault. 



For more than two years, prior to my night at the folk conference, I was inside my house nearly always. I saw new faces on album covers far more often than I saw new faces in the flesh.
 
That might be why I took such an interest in the thoughtful-looking women, and why I tried to determine who did the best job of seeming to consider important things on the covers of her albums.

It seems to me that, of all the women who have looked into cameras and had their photos taken for album covers, Sinead O’Connor is the queen. On The Lion and the Cobra (1987) and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (1990), she looks as pensive as a saint awaiting execution.

I haven’t seen every cover, though, and women have been looking thoughtful on records for years.

Judy Collins looks thoughtful on 1974’s Judith, and a bunch of her other albums; Aretha Franklin looks thoughtful on a lot of hers; Buffy Sainte-Marie is pretty consistent; and so is Sandy Denny—though she verges on looking confrontational, which is another option you have when you look into the camera on your album cover. 

Men often look confrontational on their album covers. Take Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. 

Bob Dylan looks that way on Highway 61 Revisited (1965), but he looks welcoming on Nashville Skyline (1969).

Thoughtful, confrontational, welcoming. Surely there are other options, but those seem to me to be the primary modes of appearing on album covers. 

And plenty of men look thoughtful on theirs. 

Steve Gunn does it. Marvin Gaye did it. 

It tends to look different, though, when men do it. It seems to me that women are more likely to be seen on their covers gazing into the camera, rather than looking to the side.

Of course, you don’t have to look into a camera to appear thoughtful. You can look away.

Katherine Priddy does that on the cover of The Eternal Rocks Beneath (2021). She runs her hand through her hair and wears an expression that’s hard to read, like maybe she’s sitting across a table from someone she’s only just getting to know, someone she hasn’t yet made up her mind about but whom she finds intriguing. He’s a rakish puzzle of a man—or else she’s an old friend who has come back into her life, someone she didn’t always get along with. But since they parted last, they’ve both matured. Despite their old differences, now they don’t seem so different. Both of them feel like they’ve been made anew by the gentle passage of time.



I don’t know if English folksinger John Smith looks thoughtful on his album covers. It’s hard to see his face on most of them.

I listened to him quite a lot in the years leading up to the conference, and then I saw him perform there. I sat six feet from him in a hotel room upstairs as he spilled his heart in songs across the room and down the corridor, inviting anyone who wanted a closer listen to come in. Lots of people came in.

What happened at night, at the conference, from 10:30 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., way up in the hotel, was that they booked every room on several levels and took out all of the furniture. They transformed those floors of the drab, old building into an intricate performance space.

Every room had music pouring out of it. It was like a giant beehive of sound. You could walk down the long hallway and hear as many forms of live music as there were rooms.

It was all folk, I guess. Some of it was Irish; some of it was Turkish; some of the acts were full bands; others were soloists. Most of it sounded nothing like anything else.

There were guys like the ones you’d expect to see, who were putting on a kind of Woody Guthrie act, some of whom did a fine job of it. Others would show you things you never thought possible. It would not have occurred to you that music could sound like that, until you entered that room.

It really was like something from a dream.

One of the rooms on the fifth floor was reserved by the conference’s UK delegation. Every half-hour, throughout the night, a different act they’d brought to the US would perform a handful of songs, then make way for the next act. That was the room I spent most of my late-night time in.

I didn’t spend much time at the conference at night. Not nearly enough.

I rarely stay up late, is the problem. I have kids to help take care of in the early morning; I have to get things done when the sun is shining; I have all these semicolons lying around that I have to put into sentences; and I’m middle-aged and not getting younger. When I sleep in, I feel like the world is ending, like the clouds in the sky are dying and I’m dying, too.

But I stayed up late to see John Smith perform.

He plays an acoustic guitar and has a throaty voice. He means what he sings and he sings about love and other things. When he wasn’t singing, he told the small crowd in the hotel room about how he’d spent his time in Kansas City getting sunburnt and eating barbecue.

It felt so good to be in that room, to see John Smith perform, to watch a singer/songwriter who knew what he was doing. Sitting up there, close to him, mask on my face, chin in my hand, I understood that something in that room was really happening, that I should keep hanging out in that room, because more good things were likely to happen there. 



I think it was after John Smith did his thing that I saw Katherine Priddy perform and thought about the dialectic. She was playing and singing, up there in front of the hotel room, near the patio doors. She played an acoustic guitar while another musician, George Boomsma, stood beside her with an electric one. He seemed nice.
 
I thought of myself as the thesis, and the music they made as the antithesis.
 
I knew my application of the dialectic to that scene was probably a gross misapplication, a crime against sophisticated thought. But I couldn’t help myself. I was on a roll.

I was the thesis, the music was the antithesis, and the synthesis was whatever emerged from that meeting of the performance and its perceiver. The soundwaves coming from Katherine Priddy’s face and the guitars were the antithesis that changed me, that turned my thesis to synthesis.

But I want to pause there. Because while I embrace getting the dialectic wrong, I fear I may be getting it a little too wrong.

I’ve been thinking of it as too much of a math problem, I think—or a “maths” problem, as they’d say in the UK room.
 
The dialectic isn’t an addition equation. As Adorno explains in An Introduction to the Dialectic, which was in the satchel at my feet, the antithesis doesn’t add to the thesis; it only brings out, critiques, or somehow transforms what’s embedded in the thesis.

It’s like pancakes. If you think of making pancakes as a metaphor for the dialectic, then the thesis isn’t the dry ingredients that you add the antithesis to, in the form of wet ingredients.

The thesis is all of the ingredients, both dry and wet combined, and the antithesis is the heat source you place the pancake pan on top of. It’s the stimulus that causes the batter to move onto its next stage of existence, before it gets in your mouth and tastes like pancakes.

The upshot of it is that everything you needed to move from thesis to synthesis is there in the thesis; you only needed the antithesis to cause that transformation.

And in his book, Adorno says that if you’re focused on the three static points in the dialectic, the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, then you’re missing the point of the dialectic.

What we should focus on instead, he says, is the stuff that happens between those points, the tension that vibrates in the spaces that are in flux.

So I tried to do what Adorno said I should do, and focus on the tension between thesis and antithesis, the space between those things. I tried to visualize the effects Katherine Priddy’s songs had on me. I imagined the thesis and antithesis—me and Katherine Priddy’s songs—meeting in midair.

I didn’t really get anywhere with that. And if Adorno had been there in the UK room, he would have watched from the back row and known exactly what was going on. He would have sat there, arms folded, shaking his head at me, perplexed and dismayed by my misapplying something as profound and rich as dialectical thinking to my personal reaction to hearing live music.

But still. Katherine Priddy’s songs, and John Smith’s songs, weren’t just things I heard in a room. They were a force that reached into me and made something happen.

This is what I find hard to explain and understand. Because something went on in that hotel. I don’t know what it was exactly, but I want to put it into words, the way if a dog could talk he would want to tell you how it feels to have his beloved owner’s hand descend and rub his neck, then do it again, and again. 



When I was much younger, I loved to be the only one I knew who knew about a musician. I felt like I was a special guy because I listened Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and no one else around had heard of them.

I didn’t have much going for me. I needed something.

Now I feel the opposite. Not only am I not that into Tom Waits anymore, I want everyone to hear the music that makes me feel like I’m alive.

It seems wild to me, to take one example, that the people I know who should know all of Jesca Hoop’s songs don’t know any of them.

I tell them, in so many words, that if you engaged in a kind-of/sort-of dialectic by running musicians through a particle accelerator, and collided PJ Harvey (thesis) against Bjork (antithesis), you’d come out with Jesca Hoop (synthesis).

I’ve never tried to describe music, before writing this essay, and so the best I can do to put Jesca Hoop’s work into words is to say that if you went to an ancient, enchanted forest, and kept walking deeper into those dark but vibrant woods, which were alive with birds, bugs, squirrels, and living shadows with souls like tar and smoke that no human eyes will ever see, and the woods made music to accompany your journey to their heart, and you could hear that music in the distance, reverberating off the bark of a thousand trees, it might sound like what you hear on Jesca Hoop’s album Stonechild (2019).

On the cover of that album, she looks into the camera but wears a wooden mask. She may look thoughtful under there, but it’s not clear. I can’t see.

The mask looks thoughtful, I guess. It’s looking at us the way the thoughtful musicians do. But it’s a mask.

Every album Jesca Hoop makes is different but unmistakably hers. She seems to strike the perfect balance, as she moves from project to project, between bringing something new to her own body of work and retaining the best parts of what she’s done before. It seems to me that that’s the challenge for creative people: to change and grow at all times without shedding too much of what we’ve accomplished already.

Corrina Repp does that as well. She sings and plays an electric guitar. She has blonde bangs that hang low, to just above her eyes, multiplying the thoughtfulness quotient of the cover of her album How a Fantasy Will Kill Us All (2018). It is, like all of her records, full of music that sounds like it came out of dreams, like what might be on the edge of hearing as you rappel down a vertical tunnel into the depths of your own incredible mind.

And then there’s English singer/songwriter Chloe Foy, who looks unbelievably thoughtful on the cover of her 2020 album Callous Copper. 

She looks, on that cover, like she’s gone beyond looking thoughtful, like she’s discovered a new form of thinking altogether, like she’s on the verge of solving the hardest riddle in human history. Like she’s about to utter the words that will save the world.

I was right in the eye of the COVID hurricane when the image of her face appeared on my new albums feed, and I heard her sing, on that album’s title song, “Take me home upon your back and bring me to my bed.” From there the song seems to lift and take its listener with it. At least it takes me with it every time it comes on.

I listened to it again and again. And I think I seized on that song like I did because I first heard it early in the pandemic, and because it expresses perfectly how it feels to embrace exactly the person you need to be with in a given moment, when no one else and nothing else will do.

I was cut off from contact with nearly everyone in the world. The only people I saw in person were those who were already most familiar.

Huddled in my basement, safe from COVID but exposed to despair, I wanted to feel the warmth of other bodies. I wanted to see the faces of people I didn’t know.

I didn’t want body warmth sexually, or romantically. That was not the nature of my longing; by that point I’d been married ten years. Happily so.

It’s just strange to go from being around other people, out in the world, all the time, or at least pretty often, and then not doing that at all. In usual, normal times, I take it for granted that I can see unfamiliar faces, that I can crowd into rooms with them and share the heat my body radiates with theirs. When I was cut off from them out of nowhere I felt their absence.

I guess I’m saying that before COVID I never thought I’d need so many people. And that was partly why, I think, something in Chloe Foy’s song reached me like it did. I was frightened for myself and my family, and in a manner of speaking her song carried me upon its back. It didn’t bring me to my bed; I did that, every night, on my legs; but it helped. 



When Katherine Priddy left the stage, or the front of the UK room, where she’d been singing, I turned around and saw Chloe Foy sitting in the back row.
 
I knew she would be in the building. I’d seen her announce her upcoming appearance on Instagram.

She was the reason I chose to go to the conference in the first place. By then I’d listened to her albums over and over again. I listened to them sometimes with my big headphones on, as I drifted off to sleep at night, to greet again the same confounding architecture that plagues me as I dream.

She was alone back there in the UK room. I saw my chance.

I went to where she sat and introduced myself. I said I thought she was great. 
I said a couple of other things, and then went back to where I’d been sitting. I don’t always have the easiest time with simple tasks like saying words to another person, and I didn’t want to overdo it.

She didn’t play “Callous Copper” when I went to see her perform the next night in that same room. She played songs from Where Shall We Begin (2021), a full album, on the cover of which she not only looks thoughtful, she’s holding binoculars, as if to indicate she’s thinking hard about something or someone far away.

And this is where I have trouble. Because I don’t know what it was about her performance in the UK room that made it the thing that it was. I had thought I would sit up front and hear some good songs by a songwriter with a great voice. But there was more to it than that.

Her performance sounded like a kind of invitation, to what I’m not sure. To life, maybe, or to deeper feeling. To love in some form, or to the beauty she brought into the room.

It was really like no other performance I’ve ever seen. It was like she opened a portal to someplace I’d never been before, or hadn’t been in a long time. I didn’t have to walk through it. I had already crossed over. I sat in my chair, there, having already arrived. 



The dialectic helps me illustrate, for my own sake, what it was like to see and hear Chloe Foy perform that night. I was there; I was met with something that challenged something in me; that thing changed me. The music met my ears, reached into my mind with a long spoon, and stirred.

My state of being was the thesis, the music the antithesis, and the synthesis is whatever I’ve become since then—still myself, but a little different.

One of the songs Chloe Foy played was “Where Shall We Begin.” It’s about falling in love with someone who wants to move too fast. It urges that person to be patient with the slow build to true love; it implores them to savor that gradual progress; and the way it grows, recedes, and grows again reflects in its halting fashion the way love can stagger under the weight of stubborn impatience and break apart. It’s a song that sounds like it’s full of semicolons. It moves at a pace all its own.

I had listened to this song many times, but in that room, sitting six feet from Chloe Foy, I heard it as if it were new. And it was made anew, there in that room—as for moment after moment after moment the right performer played exactly the right song at the right time in the right place. It seized me by the heart and woke me up late in the night.

Since that night, I’ve watched Chloe Foy perform the same song on YouTube. I’ve played it on my big headphones at night, at high volume. It’s not the same.
 
There is something about being in the presence of a performer that makes possible a beauty that we can’t reach otherwise. It sounds like a droll enough observation, something anyone can tell you who has been to a good live show. But what I heard in that hotel room was much bigger than that, bigger than anything I’d heard before, or felt as a result of hearing music.

I’ve been trying to articulate how that works, and I can’t pull it off—but I will do my best, and say that if we’re lucky in life we get to live out a handful of moments of unparalleled beauty, things that no work of art can quite match.
 
I mean the big life events, the true highlights of our lives. They are the undeniably best parts, the ones that matter most.

It’s a short list I’m referring to, at least in my life. They’re things like: the moment I knew I was in love with the woman who has been my wife, now, for more than a decade; the moment our daughter Moriah was born; the moment Rose, our next daughter, was born; the nights in my youth I spent hanging out with the guy who’d become my best friend for life.

I’m really not sure what other things would make that list. Maybe if I’d saved someone’s life, at one point, that would count.

Other major moments make another list, of maybe second-tier experiences: the first time I read my work to people who received it well; great sex I’ve had in the daytime; the first time I read Lucinella by Lore Segal; the moment I learned my first short story would be published; sex I had at night that wasn’t exactly great but was still good for all involved.

But it’s that top-tier batch of moments I’m thinking of now, the moments that nothing can touch but which some things can evoke. 

What a certain kind of experience can do, such as the one I had in the UK room, is lift us to a height that’s somewhere near the elevation of those greatest moments of our lives.

It isn’t quite like falling in love.

It’s not at all like that; not really. But it allows us to glimpse that feeling from a short distance, to bask once again in its glow. It can show us something we may have almost forgotten, like how it feels to have our lives bent backward in the best ways possible.

What Chloe Foy did was remind me of what it felt like for a new life to be brought into my life. She let me be warmed, for one second, then another, by the same sun my kids were born from.

Much in the same way a real-life experience that resembles a recurring dream can make you feel like you’re in a dream, a transcendently beautiful moment can remind us of prior moments of even more staggering beauty.

A great performance like the one she put on that night for a small crowd of folk conference attendees can bring something out in you. It can cause something that’s already there to emerge, so you can see it again. It can press against the soft spot on your heart that’s been tender ever since you first kissed the woman you’re spending your life with. 



Earlier in the night I heard Chloe Foy perform, I had found her and Katherine Priddy downstairs at the hotel bar. When I’d heard Katherine Priddy’s set, the night before, she’d said that anyone who wanted to could come and say hello if they saw her down there.

I wasn’t always the sort of person who would do that.

I’m still not. I believe in leaving people alone. But Katherine Priddy had invited her audience to talk to her, so I did.
 
She was with Chloe Foy. I bought them drinks. They had espresso martinis, I had an IPA, and we talked for a few minutes. I explained that I wanted to buy them drinks because I’d gotten into the conference for free—I knew someone, who knew someone, who did me a favor—and I felt like a freeloader. Performers shouldn’t have to pay for drinks when I’m standing there, having paid nothing for something that was pretty damn expensive.

I asked Katherine Priddy if she was famous, because I didn’t know. It turned out, she had been at the top of the folk charts in the UK. She got recognized in public, sometimes, and she was a lovely person to talk to. I had, with her, as they say over there, a laugh.

I told the pair of musicians about my system for selecting what album to listen to, based on how thoughtful the woman on the cover looks.

I looked at Chloe Foy, as I explained this.

I saw the same face I first saw on her album cover. She looked back at me the way she does on the cover: thoughtful, with a penetrating gaze.

It was utterly surreal, to stand there and see her like that, and I’m convinced that I came across as a strange person, because I was really having a moment.

After years of seeing thoughtful women on album covers, I was standing with two of them, looking into the eyes of one of the most thoughtful of them all.

The whole scene fulfilled another nightmare I’d been having on Lexapro.
 
I would dream that I went to an indoor space that was full of people. I stood at the center of a crowd and it dawned on me: I wasn’t wearing a mask. It was like the old dreams about showing up naked in public, only it was worse, because if I went maskless in the wrong crowd I could get sick and die from my affliction.

No one at that bar had a mask on; the mandates had been lifted, and we weren’t technically at the conference, which required masks. We were at the bar.

It was okay. I’d had my shots. I didn’t get sick.

Maybe someone did, but if so I didn’t hear about it.

And then it was over. Chloe Foy went upstairs to perform. I finished my beer, took the elevator up to see her, and had the transcendent listening experience that led me to write this essay.



I went home, eventually, yawning on the highway with a new appreciation for all those young women who used to scream at Elvis and the Beatles.

They were, for what it’s worth, maybe the opposite of thoughtful women. They look, when they scream in those old films, like no thought could possibly enter their heads. I don’t mean they look dumb; I mean they look ecstatic, like they’ve gone beyond where thought can find them.

My grandmother was one of those women, incidentally. She loved and screamed at Elvis, according to my mother.

And I’ll admit something. It’s not easy, to go from being in the presence of something tremendous, like what I heard at the hotel, to not being in the presence of anything like that at all. It’s hard to have that wonderful, beautiful feeling slip out of your grasp.

When I got home from the folk music hotel experience, and I thought back to the scenes I was in up there, and wrote about them here, I felt like the farmhand who stands in the mud on a cold morning and watches as the circus rolls out of town, maybe never to return.

I was back to my life of work, back to writing and childrearing, back to making breakfast and feeding the cat.

That feeling didn’t last, the sensation of loss. It’s good to be down here. I’m lucky to be who I am, to have what I’ve got. Things could be better, but they’re nothing close to bad.

I live in a house, with a family I belong to. I have a whole collection of albums by thoughtful-looking women on my Tidal account, and I can listen to those albums anytime I want.

It’s the turning back to my ordinary life that hurts, that moment when I look away from what I remember and find myself here.

I can’t deny how empty I feel in the moment when I glance at the height I was lifted to and know I may never be lifted there again.



It’s not the musicians themselves I miss the presence of. Their company is not what I feel I have lost—it’s something else.

Before I read Adorno, I tried reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

It was ridiculous. It was so complicated. Several pages in, I felt lost, and I didn’t get much farther than that. It is a notoriously hard book to read, for good reason, and I can’t scale heights like those. Not in this life, I’m afraid.

But before I gave up I picked up on something I’ve caught glimpses of elsewhere: the understanding that we human beings, with our experiences that we think are so great and precious, are, in fact, mere emanations. Our songs and our essays that we prize so highly are hardly ours. They’re expressions of something bigger than anything we can see.

And so when I write this essay, I’m not making something new that’s all mine. I am acting as a conduit for some vast spirit, a greater intelligence that permits me to channel it for the time being. When I marveled at what Chloe Foy can do, upstairs at the hotel, I was glimpsing something far bigger and profounder than either one of us, than all people put together.

When those women screamed at Elvis it was, of course, sure, because he was good-looking and overtly sexual in ways people rarely are in public even now—but it was also because of the spirit that animated him, that spread through the theater or the arena by way of his gyrating body. He channeled something that was almost holy, and that was what drove people wild.

If I were religious, I would say that when Chloe Foy played “Evangeline” I felt the presence of God in a hotel room, that His being there with us on the fifth floor was made tangible by the sounds she made.

But I’m not religious. So I won’t say that. But I have to admit it’s the most concise way I’ve found, to express what this is all about.

And I have to admit that I feel ridiculous, writing about something that felt good because it felt so good, and expressing anything like hope or optimism in this early year of a cursed millennium. I’ve lived in the United States more than four decades, now, and in all that time none of the things I really care about have been addressed in a meaningful way. We’re still fighting wars there is no need to fight; there’s no public healthcare system I can access before I turn sixty-five; the militarized police are murdering three people a day on average; everything costs too much; nobody pays well enough; women’s bodies are treated like property; universities have been hollowed out by villains; the president is like a bad guy from those old Captain Planet cartoons; the last guy was even worse; so will the next guy be, I bet.

I can hardly sort it all out. It’s a mess, in my head, churning like dirty laundry in a washing machine. And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.

And I don’t know what to do about it all. But I feel certain that if we’re to survive what’s coming we will need to have access to beauty. We will need people who can show us where to find it and remind us that the best parts of ourselves are still in us, that we haven’t lost what makes us good and enables us to lift one another up and march on.
 
Chloe Foy isn’t just a musician. Nor is Katherine Priddy, nor are Jesca Hoop. Nor is Adia Victoria, who is also great. 

Nor is Grace Cummings, a singer/songwriter who doesn’t look thoughtful on her album Storm Queen (2022), but who is holding a bird on it, and whom I want to mention in this essay because her voice is like a tornado.

There’s a truth that spills out of the songs of these musicians that you can’t access anywhere else. And if there’s a word in our language that does justice to people who can do this, I don’t know what it is. They are rare, and they are precious. They’re not just musicians, nor are they prophets. They’re not gods, but they’re not mortals, either. They are something in between I wish I had a name for, and as bad as things are, and as worse as they’re bound to get, it’s a blessing to be alive on this earth at the same time as all of them. 

ROBERT LONG FOREMAN's most recent books are Weird Pig, a novel, and I Am Here to Make Friends, a collection of short fiction. He is online at cannibalalley.com and lives in Kansas City. 

Volume 15.1, Winter 25

Robert Long Foreman

Where Do We Even Begin

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