round 1

(1) Sinéad o’connor, “nothing compares 2 u”
pulled over
(16) xiu xiu, “fast car”
270-85
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/22.

Katherine Atlee Robb on Sinéad o’connor’s “nothing compares 2 u”

And it is from that platform I continue to write. After all, there is no point setting out on a healing journey if you’re not going to find yourself healed. —Sinéad O’Connor, Rememberings

I think Prince, who wrote and sang the original version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” with his band The Family, offers the listener a story about something he wanted, but lost. He is sad about the situation. He longed for more, hoped for something different. I hear this in the crashing of drums, the instrumentation demonstrating his anger at not getting what he so desired. Listen to the saxophone wailing in orchestrated lament. Dude is bummed. I’m not saying the loss of one’s desires isn’t painful. I’m just saying, try losing oneself.
I’ll admit the idea I’m introducing is dense with cheesiness and the only rebuttal I have is that for the last few years I’ve been trying to hold my wounds with tenderness instead of distain. Maybe these days, after years of endless pandemic, of massive fracturing on both a global and deeply individualistic level, everyone could use a little gentleness upon their wounds. When this concept first emerged from the mouth of Peloton’s kind-hearted surfer-bro, when he said, and I’m paraphrasing, maybe a person becomes enraptured with a certain love song not because the song reminds them of their lover, but because the song reminds them of themself, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t think his words would stick but, like all statements speaking to the heart in a way the mind is unwilling to accept, they kept filtering back over time.
Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a song that’s been circling back to me for just over thirty years. I loved it since it was originally released in January of 1990. In her hands, the words sound like a dirge sung for herself, for the loss not of a lover, but of an identity. When it came out, I was nine years old and lived in Oregon, which means everything arrived late, so the song probably wasn’t popular on the radio until the fall of 1990. By that time, I’d turned ten and departed from the felt sense of my body. At least I think it was gone by then although that’s the thing about disassociation, it digests time without ever processing it, meaning all the memories disappear or, more precisely, no memories were fully formed in the first place.
When the song was released, critics noted how much pain came through in Sinéad’s voice. In her memoir, Rememberings, Sinéad wrote, “Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again.” Her mother, as is revealed in the memoir, severely verbally and physically abused her when she was a child. It’s further explained in Rememberings that the photo of the Pope she tore up live on SNL was hanging in her mother’s bedroom when she died and when Sinéad took it off the wall, she always knew she would destroy it somehow. Sinéad was angry the Catholic Church was covering up the abuse of children. I’d wager she was also angry her own abuse was never rectified.
Covering sorrow with anger is an ancient trick. A wound left unattended grows a hard shell of preparedness. It trains in survival and in survival there are only three choices: fight, flight, or freeze. I lived bouncing around those three spaces for thirty years. In these recent COVID times I’ve watched friends and family members come to make a home in this trifecta as well. It’s destroying their lives, same as it did to me. We are shadows of our former selves, a cover version of our own truths. Nearly every spiritual practice in the world says to heal such a wound requires one thing: Love. Ugh, how cheesy. How small and foolish. Unless, maybe, Sinéad is singing the word.

It’s been—————since you took your love away.

The first time I disassociated I was four, almost five years old. There was a violent accident in our backyard, and I was the only witness to what happened. My mother says afterward I looked like I wasn’t there. She said something about my eyes and face went wrong. I became a body severed from consciousness and it was visible. Back then, in 1984, the idea was kids were so resilient they probably didn’t remember traumatic situations. I suppose in some ways, that’s true. When police officers arrived and asked what happened, I told them the little girl who was attacked was staring down the dog. Then I changed my story. Nothing happened, I said repeatedly. Nothing happened at all.
Sometimes I wonder about the weight of making things disappear. History, after all, is not a magic trick. When I took the story of myself away from myself, its shadow was still there. It lived in the way I moved my body through the world or sometimes didn’t. When the pandemic first started, I read an article about how hardly anything was written about the 1918 flu once it ended. The thesis wasn’t that the flu was so destructive nobody wanted to talk about it, but rather afterward nobody could acknowledge how horrifically people treated each other while trying to survive.
Witnessing an act of accidental violence before I had the language to name, discuss, or process it sent me down a dangerous path of isolation and disappearance in response to trauma. When violence re-entered my life at the end of elementary school in a random attack, I once again swallowed the story. I told no one, leaving my assault to remain a truth held in my body, but never in my words. I kept it in my stomach, let it become a rock so slicked with moss I could not grip it with my own hands, and I would not dare let someone else get close enough to me to help lift it off.  
I can’t speak for Sinéad, but in her autobiography she writes about such a stone formed by her mother’s violence against her body: “I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well.” There are many horrific stories of physical abuse at the hands of her mother in Sinéad’s autobiography, but we almost don’t need them. Her voice told us long ago. The places it reaches, the clarity and control of its sorrow opens a portal to the listener’s own pain in a way music seems uniquely capable of doing.
According to Rememberings, Sinéad knew she wouldn’t “…have much say in mixes when it comes to vocal level,” so she made her voice “…into its own master fader.” She sang into a home-recording device while watching where the lights switched from green to yellow to red (if the lights hit red the vocals were so loud they’d create distortion on the tape). She did this over and over again until she, “…memorized where green finished and let it sink into my body the same way notes do, so the avoidance of yellow is now part of the songs.” Of course she did. That kind of focus, the discipline of training, that’s survivor language. It comes from having learned how to carry a great stone while making it look effortless. At this point, three years into COVID, we are all carrying a stone.

Since you—gone, I can do whatever—.

Some scientific theorists consider disassociation to be adaptive in periods of great stress, the idea being if there’s nothing one can do to stop serious injury to the body, take consciousness away. Not a bad trick by the Creator. Traditionally the causeway, the bridge that drops out between earth and sea, is brought on by physical threat, but I know several people who experienced disassociation during extremely stressful work situations. In fact, the first time I became aware of the phenomenon, years before I understood what it was or that I’d been experiencing shades of it for much of my life, I was arguing a housing case as a supervised law student. One moment I was aware I was speaking, then my consciousness disappeared for a period of time the length of which I do not know. All the while I continued to talk, apparently making lucent and valid points, until my consciousness returned. I was like Will Ferrell’s character in Old School as he delivered the winning debate speech, speaking with great precision and persuasion, but without awareness that he was, in fact, speaking at all. Afterward the administrative judge and my supervising attorney talked about what a great job I’d done, completely unaware there’d been a blip in my system.  
Perhaps disassociation itself isn’t a bad thing as a brief adaptation technique to deal with threat. But what happens when the threats keep coming like they did for Sinéad growing up in the home of her violent mother? Or what happens if a person, like me, comes to believe her own body is the threat and turns the whole thing off for decades? What happens when a world is put under threat of a deadly and easily transmissible virus and the colonizers respond as they’ve always done, with fear instead of love?
In these situations, a shadow self is born, a disassociated cover that allows the self to go on, often with greater bravery than ever before. I lived this way for decades. It allowed me great adventures. I traveled solo with a false distance between my mind, the part of me I considered to be my actual identity, and my body, that which was visible to the men who called me bella, bella, bella in Italy or the guy who pulled his Mercedes over to try to cajole me into coming to his house party in the hills or the art forgers I met in France or the guy in Hong Kong who took a seat across from me at the hostel on the hill overlooking the city’s sparkling lights and explained the intricacies of Zara’s business model and how he was going to bring the concept to Africa.
When I was a kid, I wanted to live an adventurous life. As I grew up, I discovered my body made me a target. My solution was to hide my body from my own self. And it worked. Kids are geniuses, except their solutions eventually fail because they’re personal systems of survival, never structural change. I’ve had thirty years of adventures. It’s too bad I can’t remember most of them, too bad I never fully felt any of them.

——so lonely without you here,—————

To make a life inside the shadow is to live a lonely existence. The body is in fact our barometer. In turning off its sensations, I could no longer hear when it whispered this is the way to joy. My stories paint a false picture of a carefree person. Have I danced on bars in New York City? Sure, but I did that because of threat calculations running in the back of my mind. I wanted to go out in my twenties, but people would hit on me, brush against me, I couldn’t keep my eye on all of them. On the bar, however, I was safely out of reach. It’s been an adventure yes, but the loneliness has been brutal.
It’s funny the things we want to control when we don’t feel like we have control over our own bodies. It was easy to be brave when I couldn’t feel fear. But being blocked from my body meant I couldn’t hear when it tried to point me toward things I might care about, might find pleasure in, toward people whose interests might match my own. In disappearing my body, I created the darkest kind of loneliness, the kind that doesn’t remember what light feels like.
COVID has exacerbated this muting of emotions across the population. Some people have reacted by disappearing the virus itself. It’s enraging, but I understand the inclination. I disappeared the thing that hurt me the worst for three decades. Indeed, disappearing sexual assault is a global phenomenon. If we can say, she wore X and I would never wear X or she was out in that bad neighborhood late at night and I would never go there, then we can give ourselves the gift of safety. Such a thing will never happen to me, thank goodness, we can tell ourselves. But that sense of safety is false. It doesn’t address the real culprit. Most violence, including sexual assault, is about power. And those without power, or those whose power is being threatened, often respond to their own fear with anger.
Let’s be honest, Sinéad called out childhood sexual abuse by the Catholic Church in October 1992. It wasn’t until 2018, twenty-six years later, that Pope Francis acknowledged the abuse and the Church’s role in its hiding. Investigative reports revealing the extent of victimization at the hands of priests were still being published in 2021. But I’ve never seen an article thanking Sinéad for calling out truth. I’m not saying she’s a saint. I’m not saying she’s not possibly stuck in fight, flight, freeze patterns from her childhood. All I’m saying is, sometimes we should listen to the people who have been there before.
The unrelenting threat to life brought on by COVID switched on fight, flight, freeze survival mechanisms in people who’ve never experienced them before. The rates of depression and generalized anxiety disorder in youth appear to have doubled. From 2019 to 2020, emergency department visits for mental health issues for those ages 12-17 increased by 31% and, perhaps more staggering, over a month-long period in early 2021, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts in girls ages 12-17 increased by 50.6% from that same month-long period in 2020.
With the long-term presence of anxiety, depression, isolation, lack of skin touch, and drop in functional friendship, so many people have become a cover version of who they used to be, a walking shadow of self. My mother-in-law, who once adored large groups and constant conversation, now gets overwhelmed when she’s around small groups of people. She’s easily exhausted by talk. One day in the summer of 2020 she asked, “Is this what it’s always been like for you?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her yes, much less to explain it wasn’t always that way, it was only like that when I started trying to return to my body.

I went to the doctor—————?

The thing about a body is, it falls apart when left unattended. I lasted about two decades. Then, in my thirties, pieces collapsed. Severe bone density loss was discovered in my foot as I avoided bunion pain by walking, along with running ultra-marathon-long distances only on the outside of my foot. An unexplained cyst grew in my knee. Migraines appeared. My skin flared with rosacea. My legs twitched when I tried to sleep. My husband and I moved from San Francisco to New York City and my walking greatly increased, as did the blood in my shoes. Most people become aware of blisters before they turn bloody, but I couldn’t catch the pain until it turned crimson. More than once I pulled off a pair of shoes in a public bathroom and was shocked and confused to see blood coating the heel of my socks. How had I not noticed earlier that I was in pain? How could I have let it get this far without feeling anything?

Doctors told me to be soft instead of hard. Unclench the muscles I’ve held tight for decades. I’ve had fascia adjusted and it snapped, crackled, and popped in release. A heel lift now counteracts the small curves pressed into my spine. Frequently I remind myself not to hold my breath or the whole system will crash. The jaw doctor’s instructions are the worst: “Softer diet: choose softer food, cut into smaller pieces, and avoid thick foods such as bagels, apples, or baguettes.” It’s infuriating how once upon a time a boy held me by my neck and thirty years later, I can’t eat raw carrots. I’m still trying to hold that one gently.

The way back to a full and vital identity is excruciatingly difficult. It’s hard to re-enter the body. Parameters must be re-established. I had to learn how to answer so many questions about my physicality that I’d long ignored. Is this too tight (shoes)? Does this fit me properly (clothes)? Is this too much pressure (physical therapy)? Does this hurt (everyone)? But, as a friend once told me, “Personal growth is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it.”

———living with you———hard, —I’m willing———another try.”

I spent the second year of the pandemic taking selfies. It’s essentially the treatment for long-term disassociation. Instead of avoiding mirrors and photographs of the self, lean into them, study the body until it becomes re-integrated into one’s own story of identity, until it’s no longer a cover, but a song unto itself. In this way, I finally began to hear the story I’d been telling myself for three decades and, until I heard it, I could not dismantle it.
Light pierced shadow in unusual clarity when I wore shorts in September of 2021. My husband and I went to see Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installations at the New York Botanical Garden. I almost never wear shorts. I don’t like revealing my body but, as I’ve said, I am trying to change. We walked into the Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart (2020), a small room entirely covered in mirrors, and I panicked. Ever since I was assaulted three decades ago, I’ve lived my life scanning, aware of all the angles from which I could be attacked again. But a room of mirrors creates more angles than any human can cover. I watched my mind as it switched, as it realized it couldn’t monitor all the angles of attack so it would monitor the thing to be attacked. My mind turned on my body, begin to criticize my exposed skin, the curves of my own angles. Bad body, I thought, bad, bad, bad, and there it was, heard in simple clarity, the story carried by those who have experienced interpersonal violence: I am bad, take the love away.
I grew up in an unusual household where there was an emphasis on complicated humanity over good versus bad. People, my parents preached, weren’t good or bad, they were merely beings who sometimes did things that brought pain and sometimes did things that brought pleasure. This outlook has been vital to my ability to understand compassion and, eventually, try to give it to myself. But I still exist in a culture that hates women and wants to control our bodies and our sexuality. As a queer woman, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a man say I need a good deep-dicking to straighten up or that two women together is great, as long as a guy gets to watch, I’d buy all my ex-girlfriends fresh strap-ons.
Thus far in the history of the world violence has never made anything better for people overall. It produces power, certainly, but it doesn’t alleviate fear. We can turn against each other all we want, but it won’t defeat a virus that floats between our lungs. The only thing that might is trying to care for one another, and for me to care about you, I must first care about myself. I don’t believe in the idea of a singular truth. Rather, I think we live inside diaphanous layers of stories, the ones we tell ourselves, the ones our family tells us, the ones our society tells us. There are so many elements of the stories told in that last space I want to change, but I can’t shift anything there until I unwind the falsities in the narrative I’ve told myself.

Nothing compares—you.

There’s an inscription at the front of Sinéad’s autobiography: Qui cantat, bis orat. The translation is, essentially: whomever sings, prays twice. There’s a reason singing, humming, and chanting are found throughout history and often tied to the spiritual. Such activities stimulate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body connecting the brain to vital organs including the lungs, heart, intestines, and stomach. The nerve is vital to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the “rest and digest” process through its influences on breathing, heart rate, and digestion. The vagus nerve has a vagal tone, meaning activity level, and a high vagal tone is correlated with better physical and mental health. 
All my life I’ve done many of the things that create vagal tone. I exercise, breathe slowly, laugh. In returning to my body, I took up meditation and, for a while, massage. But the thing I’ve always avoided is singing, humming, or, frankly, using my voice at all. The vagus nerve connects to the vocal chords, which means the very act of sound-making is soothing. This was one of the hardest things for me to allow into my body. When people said “Om” in yoga class or when those in my Zen Buddhist group chanted, I recoiled. For a long time, I let my mind provide the answer for this behavior and, as minds tend to do, it came up with all sorts of logical answers, none of which were fully accurate. I didn’t believe the words being chanted. I thought the people chanting them were silly. I didn’t want to chant words I didn’t fully believe in or words the meaning of which I wasn’t sure. But this wasn’t the fundamental reason why I hated it, why I refused to engage. It was because when I chanted or sang, I couldn’t scan my surroundings for potential threats. Somehow the brain can’t do those two things at once.
I used to only sing in my car while driving alone. That was the only place I felt safe from attack. Now sometimes I sing around the house. I can even belt out a tune in the shower, the most dangerous of locations. As someone whose throat was held, as someone who once stood in the cold midnight fall air and searched her phone for the legal definition of strangulation then wept at the realization there was a technical word for what had been done to her as a child, there is a particularly sweet satisfaction in opening up the throat, in letting the beauty of sound pour from my own mouth, the one that stayed silent for so long.
As I write this essay, it becomes news that one of Sinéad O’Connor’s children has died by suicide. It becomes news that Sinéad posted on Twitter blaming herself for his death and now she’s thinking of closing out her life in the same way. As I write this essay, I am also loving a dear family member who is having the same thoughts. I have seen the way this person’s body flinches the same way mine does at loud noises. The violence in my history came from outside the home, while the violence in this person’s came from within. The words Sinéad wrote on Twitter are the same ones being uttered by my loved one. My fault. My bad. If only I could peel the false narrative from this person’s skin through the holding of a hand.
As I write this essay, Omicron is weaving its way into a million more lungs, and I am balancing how to keep traveling all the way across the country to keep holding the hand of this person I desperately want to survive. I hope the weight of my love can sink into this person’s own body, can make them fall out of the shadow of their mind and back into the light. Like all great battles, I do not know how this one will end. All I know is I will go down singing. Because unlike songs, the cover version of a human is never better than the original. After all, in the end, nothing compares to you.

Katherine Atlee Robb is a sensual badass living at and writing about the intersections between fear and love. More of her writing can be found at www.katherineatleerobb.com. She sings a mean "Kiss Me Deadly".

justin brouckaert on xiu xiu’s “fast car”

This one begins with an impossible memory: That I could have been listening to this song, this interpretation of this song, on my iPhone plugged into a cassette adapter in my 1992 Dodge Dynasty on the very afternoon I first had the thought that I, too, wanted to drive far, far away.
But memory is always impossible. It’s really the feeling I’m after.
The feeling is this: I used to sit on my lunch break at the Burger King that owned the last few months of my life before I went away to college, and I used to fight the urge to drive away. I did not want to drive an hour-and-a-half to the college in the cornfields I’d agreed to attend. I didn’t want to start my next chapter, to pursue a new stage of life during which certain mundane accomplishments would be not only expected of me but passed along the grapevine to family far and wide. For years, I had wanted to escape my hometown in suburban Detroit, but things had gone all wrong. I wasn’t off to New York or LA or Europe or even to a ranch in Montana. There was no excitement; it didn’t feel like much of an escape. Instead I had been fast-tracked toward the painfully normal life I’d never wanted: college, internship, job, wife, family, inevitable return to the suburbs where I had trudged through my first 18 years, a little lonely and unassuming.
Try not to mock me: What it felt like, really, was that my life—what I dreamed my life could be—was over before it had really begun.
So what I wanted to do was head west without telling a soul. Take the six thousand dollars in my bank account and stretch it out as long as I could. Find some anonymous job and disappear, for all intents and purposes, from the face of the earth. I was just logical enough to know that plan would doom me. And yet how can I explain the pull?
I told no one about that urge, which was such a powerful manifestation of my anxiety at the time that I needed to sit and grip the steering wheel hard, very hard, until it passed. No one besides my best friend at the time, who asked me to never mention it again, unless I was serious. Because he would leave with me, in a heartbeat.
It seems ridiculous now, to dream of running away at that moment, with the privilege of such an exciting opportunity in front of me. The support of a loving family. An ambitious dream or two, tucked in there somewhere, deep but not unrecoverable.
Then, of course, we shouldn’t judge each other’s base urges. It all really depends on what exactly you’re running from. Or what you think you’re running toward.

*

Yes, I was the teenager who would scroll forums searching for “indie bands.” I didn’t care what the term did or didn’t mean, I only know that I wasn’t getting what I needed out of the alt-pop-punk morass of the 2000s. And to me, Xiu Xiu was an indie band to its very core.
How indie is Xiu Xiu? The cover of their 2003 album A Promise features a naked Vietnamese prostitute holding a rubber baby doll upside down. How indie is Xiu Xiu? The name itself—pronounced “shoo shoo,” tailor-made for scoffing 14-year-olds eager to test your knowledge—comes from a depressing late-90s Chinese indie film. How indie is Xiu Xiu? Google’s “People also ask” suggestions include Is Xiu Xiu a sound? and Is Jamie Stewart okay? How indie is Xiu Xiu? One of the band’s early members left to focus on her vegan boutique and self-published zine.
It would be a disservice to the band to say they haven’t evolved over the past two decades. Still, they’re known for a specific sound and style—lyrically raw and heavily programmed. It all traces back to Jamie Stewart, the only mainstay since the band’s formation in 2000. Xiu Xiu mixes acoustic guitar with synth and bells—then, always, for a moment, there is only Stewart’s voice, warbling and rising and reaching just close enough to tune.
In 2003, Xiu Xiu released A Promise, a largely acoustic album that Stewart has implied was inspired by his own personal tragedies. The band’s debut LP, Knife Play, was noisy—microphone feedback, Stewart’s breathy yawps, fuzzy distortion, blended vocals, unusual percussion. A Promise is stripped down by contrast, not entirely acoustic but less of the cacophonic production that makes Xiu Xiu’s music experimental and often intentionally grating. Instead, it traded the raw chaos of the band’s early work for the raw intensity of a man’s mouth pressed too firmly onto a microphone.
Nestled deep in that set list is Xiu Xiu’s cover of Fast Car. It has only 314,000 listens on Spotify. I have to imagine at least ten thousand of those listens are mine.

* 

Released as a lead single in 1998, “Fast Car” was a hit for Tracy Chapman, making the Billboard list and leading to three Grammys the following year. It’s now one of the most covered songs of the past decade. Among the many bands and artists that have covered, sampled or performed it live include Khalid, Justin Bieber, Jonas Blue, Kelly Clarkson & Daughtry, and Sam Smith. Before all of them, in 2003, was Xiu Xiu.
For years, Xiu Xiu’s rendition was the only version I acknowledged. The first thing I noticed, returning to Tracy Chapman’s original after years of only hearing those lyrics through Jamie Stewart’s breathy voice, was how cheery Chapman’s song sounds in contrast to the unusual cover I’d come to love. Even a sad song has to have something of a melody, of course. It’s got to at least sound somewhat pleasing to the ear. Fast Car is a song about dreams that never materialize, escape routes that are never what you need them to be. Chapman’s lyrics are haunting. The acoustic loop of her verses is transfixing—but then the drum kicks into the the chorus, and the listener feels a glimmer of hope. Hell, if you’re someone who doesn’t listen to the lyrics, you could groove to this song, maybe even sway to it.
Your assignment, dear reader, is to listen to the original first. Respect it for the touching piece of art that it is. Then, listen to the cover. Then, try to think about literally anything else, except how an artist took such a profoundly dark song and took it subterranean.

*

Here is where we must spend most of our time: A man, a microphone, a guitar.
Xiu Xiu’s music features beeps and squawks and any number of discordant noises that fade and flutter and crescendo when you least expect it. Suffice it to say, it does not have the troubadour-like quality of Chapman’s work.  
“Jamie Stewart’s vibrato-laden whispers and shrieks, set over with an instrumental framework that runs the gamut from gently strummed acoustic guitar to crashing fleets of atonal gongs, certainly doesn’t fit into the cookie cutter definition of ‘sincere’ and ‘reflective’ music that we’ve come to expect,” wrote Pitchfork’s Matt LeMay in 2003.
Stewart himself acknowledge the over-the-top nature of the music. “[A]ny creative venture that’s ever meant anything to me personally has been really over the top,” he tole LeMay. “I mean, shit like, most indie rock, I think, is some of the dumbest fucking music I’ve ever heard, because it’s usually just, listless. Not even the same old stuff, but people being very subtle, and very guarded. I mean, fucking, why?”
Xiu Xiu’s music does not often get accused of listlessness. One gets the impression, sometimes, that the band is recording their albums not in a studio but in an empty warehouse, Stewart’s desperate shrieks bouncing off lonely, post-industrial walls. Another incredible Xiu Xiu cover, of David Bowie’s Under Pressure, is beautifully cacophonic, building up into the chorus like an orchestra tuning for a concert, winding through endless discordant interstitials. Why can’t we give love one more chance? Stewart screams. The cover amplifies the chaos of the song, puts serious pressure on one’s nervous system.
“Fast Car,” like much of A Promise, is almost purely acoustic. (Stereogum describes the cover as “terrifyingly minimal.”) What is there, beyond Stewart’s acoustic guitar, his mouth touching the microphone? At one point, a harmonious note held during the chorus that could be a cello (or else timely microphone feedback). At another, Stewart’s muffled tap on the guitar. At another, a gentle off-tune pressing of strings on a second guitar.
The song begins with a slow and heavy strum, amplified to the point that we can hear its very echoes, trace the journey the strings take as Stewart’s fingers graze them. His voice, eleven seconds in—You’ve got a fast car—can only be described as a breathy murmur. The listener may know the story, yes, but not the storyteller. This is not so much a performance but a confession, and the confessor’s confidence is waning. We’ll make something, Stewart croons, his voice suddenly elevated to a higher pitch. The microphone sounds as if it may be inside his mouth. Myself, I’ve got nothing to prove. His voice quivers. In the background, as the guitar strums take over, you can hear Stewart swallow hard. Then, back down to a murmur.
“For years and years, that song has just killed me,” Stewart said of Fast Car. “Because of how much things are that way sometimes. You try and try and shit does not fucking work out.”
Part of what makes his performance special—what makes his investment in the song’s story feel real—are the decisions you feel him, make, vocally, seemingly in real time. The bit of the chorus he delivers quickly, the words smashed together staccato as if he’d mistimed the space he had to deliver them. Quick little bursts, expressions of emotion that slip out before the demands of the form re-assert themselves. Just across the border and into the city, he sings, and his voice seems to trail off, get even quieter than before. It sounds fucking impossible, in that moment, to get where he wants to go. By the end of the chorus, the man sounds spent.
There isn’t a shred of real or manufactured hope in the performance, which is less a cover song than a one-man show. And yet one must deliver the message.

*

I can’t think of a band I loved from my teenage years that didn’t have a front man prone to the squeak, squawk or shriek. Mostly it was Conor Oberst’s quivering longing, Robert Smith’s heavily accented croon. But it was also Jamie Stewart’s reaching yawp, unpredictable in pitch and volume, intentionally off-rhythm. Stewart fucked shit up. He wrote about dark, uncomfortable topics I’d never experienced—sex and suicide and politics—but also about estrangement, loneliness, difference. To those three, I could certainly relate.
As a child, a teenager, I was called sensitive—meaning that I cried too easily, felt too deeply, took things more seriously than a child, a teenager should. I was called sensitive because I was. It’s why I was always searching for the music that sounded to me the rawest, the most expressive and intensely personal. It’s why I felt every quiver in Conor Oberst’s voice even when his critics accused him of manufacturing emotion. It’s why I lost myself completely in Disintegration, almost always on the brink of tears, screaming, with Smith, “in the hope of sincerity.”
It’s always why I felt Stewart’s emotional performance in Fast Car so clearly and deeply, even as a child of the suburbs who was, at that moment, in little danger of being abandoned by family, of being lost to drugs, of being too poor to survive or trapped in an unhealthy relationship. In Stewart’s hands—in his voice—Fast Car becomes unmasked. It is unashamed in its sensitivity, its assertion that a story is worth telling, even and especially in the moments you feel you are without hope.
I had a feeling that I belonged, the chorus goes.
I was a sensitive child, then a teenager, and now a man, distrustful of any veneer or marker of prestige—too-clean guitar licks, a face too composed, a book too casually written. What I like about art is the mess of it. Not the plot but the feeling. The permission to feel.
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.
In Stewart’s hands, the line feels mournful, almost hollow. But it also makes you feel the stakes of trying.  

Justin Brouckaert works in book publishing and lives in Metro Detroit. In high school, he was in a band called Penis Flytrap.