sweet 16 game

(11) Kate Bush, “Moments of Pleasure”
vs
(7) Hootie & the Blowfish, “Let Her Cry”

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/18/26.

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Just Being Alive, It Can Really Hurt: cheryl graham on kate bush’s “moments of pleasure”

To be a Kate Bush fan in America in the 1990s was to be a lonely, long-suffering apologist waiting, seemingly in vain, for a new album. Before Stranger Things, before TikTok, before 3.1 billion streams on Spotify, Kate’s highest-charting single in the US, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” had peaked at number 22 in 1985. Though it was the song that would return her to the spotlight 40 years later, achieving a level of fame unimaginable when it was originally released, without a US tour or public appearances to support it, Kate’s meager foothold in the country almost slipped away. Her 1989 album, The Sensual World, made some noise on the alternative charts in this country, but by 1991, grunge was competing with heavy metal for supremacy, leaving the idiosyncratic British artist in its wake.
Kate Bush fandom wasn’t much different in the 80s. Which was okay. Kate was not for everyone. Or perhaps everyone just hadn’t caught up yet. She was weird. She was extra. Her 80s albums, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, were esoteric and difficult, full of vocal histrionics, heavy on piano and otherworldly sounds. Not to mention the obscure literary references and what one reviewer called “off her trolley lyrics.” If you were prepared to spend time with the records, though, and willing to be taken wherever Kate wanted to lead, the rewards were abundant.
In the late 80s, if you found another person who knew the deep cuts, not just the one song, you’d found a kindred. A poet I worked—and sometimes slept—with was such a person. I was but one of the many women in her orbit, beguiled by her inscrutable quietude, absurdist sense of humor, and the tan lines criss-crossing her back. Her steadfast aversion to monogamy frustrated me, but our love of Kate Bush became our lingua franca. We’d leave lyrics scribbled on the chalkboard at work, cryptic messages for one another to find, and stay up nights scrutinizing every track. I once got through a busy shift at the coffeehouse by making an alphabetical list of every song in my head.
While our love for Kate was pure, it was not blind; we weren’t above criticism when it was warranted. That one slightly off note in the 1986 remake of “Wuthering Heights,” for example or, well, the whole idea of remaking the song in the first place. There were rules about which albums we could play at work (The Kick Inside and Never for Ever) and the ones reserved for late-night listening (The Dreaming, obviously). My poet friend, who incidentally was also named Kate, was naturally more of a lyrics person, while I was (and still am) someone for whom the music comes first. We drifted apart eventually, both of us settling into altered states. LSD for her; for me, graduate school in Ohio.
Then came the 90s, an altogether unforgiving decade, in which I found myself adrift after grad school with no career, no partner and, owing to my habit of pulling up stakes just as things were getting comfortable, few friends. When, in 1993, I learned there was a new Kate Bush album coming out, it felt like that alone could put things right. Though I listened to grunge, Britpop, hip-hop, R&B, and industrial music, none of it matched the singular genius of my musical touchstone. (Though, like many Kate Bush fans during the fallow years between albums, I clung to Tori Amos as a worthy stand-in.)
A woman I worked with that year, named Liz, had a friend who procured a leaked version of the forthcoming album’s first UK single, “Rubberband Girl.” The friend had gotten it from a guy in England who sent it to him via dial-up, a transmission that took all night to complete. He transferred the digital file to cassettes and distributed them to his circle of equally dedicated friends. Liz and I listened to this contraband several times on our lunch break, trying to decide if we liked it. It was different. For starters, it was very poppy, and—what’s this?—Rock guitar? Horns? A conventional song structure? When she vocalizes the stretching sound of the titular item in a dizzying outro, however, a flash of the old, oddball Kate came through. I was cautiously optimistic.
I bought the album the day it was released, of course. It was the first one Kate had recorded expressly for CD, a format that, unlike vinyl, cannot be cradled in your arms on the way home from the record store. I removed the CD from its tiny plastic bag, stripped the cellophane from the case, and eagerly placed it into my portable CD player. The album in question, The Red Shoes, was—how do I put this?—disappointing. There were flashes of the wacky brilliance I’d always loved (and I’m using “wacky” as the highest compliment here), but there were also quite a few head-scratchers. Where previous LPs had felt self-contained, with a unifying theme or concept, The Red Shoes was wildly inconsistent. Moreover, because it had been recorded on a digital console, the overall sound was brittle and cold, and contained glitchy artifacts that would later be contested and dissected on fan forums.
I was willing to entertain the notion that I was the problem. Maybe the album was really good, and it just happened to be released during a year in which I found it hard to feel joy. Maybe I just needed to spend more time with it. Or maybe I couldn’t like this album because I’d burdened it with the impossible task of changing my life.
I didn’t give up on it—how could I?—and there were quite a few songs that are just as good as anything on its predecessor, The Sensual World. Namely, the Madagascan rhythms of “Eat the Music”; the sensuous “Song of Solomon”; “Top of the City,” a heartsick ballad with an explosive chorus; “Lily,” more of an incantation than a song; and the frenetic fairytale of the title track. Then there is “Moments of Pleasure,” a deeply personal, elegiac song, full of memories and specters. Thirty years on, after countless listens, I still don’t know how I feel about it.

Every Old Sock Meets an Old Shoe

Sometime around the turn of the decade, Kate and longtime boyfriend, bass player, and engineer Del Palmer split up (romantically, that is—the two continued their musical collaboration). Around this same time, Kate’s mother, Hannah, fell ill with cancer. She would die before The Red Shoes was released. Michael Powell, the British director with whom Kate had become close, and whose 1948 film lends the album its name, died in 1990. Two of her closest collaborators, guitarist Alan Murphy and dancer Gary Hurst, both succumbed to AIDS in 1989 and 90, respectively. So it’s no wonder the songs on The Red Shoes are some of Kate’s most plainly personal.
I never harbored a fascination with Kate’s private life. It was as if my reverence for her precluded wanting to know anything about her; it would be like speculating what God gets up to all day. Not that I have anything against confessional singer-songwriters, but Kate’s songs were always bigger in scope. “Wuthering Heights,” her unlikely platinum-selling debut, was based on the Emily Brontë book (although, famously, a book she had not read, but had only seen the last ten minutes of the BBC miniseries on TV). “Breathing,” from 1980’s Never for Ever, spoke of nuclear holocaust from the POV of an unborn child. The songs on The Dreaming ran the gamut from Aboriginal creation myths to a robbery gone wrong, to Harry Houdini, to the Viet Cong. “Between a Man and a Woman,” from The Sensual World, sounds like it might provide some insight into Kate’s domestic life, but it turns out it was inspired by a line uttered by Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Indeed, Kate has always resisted personal interpretations of her lyrics. In a contentious 1993 Sunday Times interview she says, “I’m here to talk about my work. My private life I don’t want to let go of. I need to keep it close and tender so that it is still my own.”
Nevertheless, there are songs on this record that are so intimate, I feel almost voyeuristic listening to them. They’re also bombastic and overwrought, with grandiose Hollywood-style orchestral arrangements in which the music hammers home the lyrical content in an entirely unnecessary and cringey way. If we consider her previous work as fiction and these songs as nonfiction, Kate would have been well-served by adhering to the memoirist’s edict, “when the action’s hot, write it cool.” I am so accustomed to Kate embodying various personae in her songs that when she herself seems to be the main character, it’s jarring.
“Moments of Pleasure” manages to sit at both ends of the spectrum. Some of the song’s lyrics are vivid, sensory, and specific to Kate alone, and for that reason, you’d think they’d be impossible to relate to. The chorus, on the other hand, is laughably prosaic: Just being alive, it can really hurt. Okay, sure.
Why is this song, then, one the Sunday Times called “compellingly sad,” and said “makes people cry for no apparent reason”? When the reporter asked Kate, “What was going on in your head” when she wrote the song, she replied, “Er, it's just a very personal song. It's to show just how precious life is and all those little moments that people give you. And that's how people stay alive, through your memories of them.”
The word “moment” bugs me. Specifically, when people say “a moment in time.” A moment is a unit of time; you wouldn’t say “an hour in time,” or “an instant in time.” Perhaps related to this bugbear is my distaste for the title “Moments of Pleasure.” It’s clunky (why not “Pleasurable Moments”?), utterly meaningless, and doesn’t sound particularly sad. It could be the name of an ad campaign for chocolates, or bubblebath, or some euphemistically-named sex aid. It’s the kind of thing I mean when I say Kate Bush fans sometimes have to be apologists. Like, yes, the words are kooky, and yes, the singing is screechy, but—you know what, I don’t care, you don’t have to like her.
Anyway, I looked up the etymology of “moment” and learned it originates from the Latin momentum, meaning movement. Some sources refer to the idea of a particle so small, it would incrementally shift the needle on a scale. It made me think about how moments turn into memories, and how memories are like a song that’s performed differently each time it’s played. An embellishment here and there, sped up or slowed down slightly, a note bent or missed. Moments that flicker through your mind like old movies, bringing the past alive in the present, and arising as insistently as the piano progression in this song.
 

Moments of Pleasure

Moment: A wide-angle scene of lying on a beach somewhere jump-cuts to diving off a rock into another…
Moment: The case of George the Wipe. (George was reportedly a tape-op who either erased [“wiped”] a reel by mistake, or the victim of a practical joke who was made to believe he’d done so.)
Moment: When something isn’t funny at all but you can’t stop laughing.
Moment: A happy reunion with an old friend, but you realize he isn’t well at all, and in the same…
Moment: You notice how the New York skyline looks just like mountains in the snow.
Moment: You remember something your mother used to say: “Every old sock meets an old shoe.” Ain’t that a great saying?
Moment: Gary, who you called “Bubba,” dancing down the aisle of a plane
Moment: Alan, nicknamed S’murph, playing his guitar refrain
Moment: You challenge Abbey Road engineer John Barratt, aka Teddy, to a chair-spinning contest
Moment: Lighting director Bill Duffield, while having a last look around the stage in the dark, falls to his death though an open panel in the floor. Hey there Bill, could you turn the lights up?

Here Come the Hills of Time

In 2011, Kate released Director’s Cut, a reassessment and remaking of several songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Seven tracks from the latter got updated vocals, new mixes, or were entirely rebuilt from scratch. “Moments of Pleasure” was completely re-recorded, restoring the analog warmth lost in the original digital production. In the new version, the instrumentation is reduced to just piano and voice, and though the piano part echoes the original, it’s no longer repetitive, but more languid and expressive. The original over-the-top chorus has been replaced by a chamber choir humming the melody, which adds a devotional element to the composition. The result is an arrangement with breathing room and a quiet solemnity—despite the presence of poor old George the Wipe. With a slower tempo and a lower key to accommodate Kate’s more mature voice, as well as the emotional depth gained over the ensuing 20 years, the song sounds finally, fully realized.
The chorus in the 1993 version starts These moments given are a gift from time, a phrase I originally thought had about as much substance as “moments of pleasure.” To be fair, the lyrics don't always read as great poetry when separated from the music. But then (thanks to the emotional depth gained over the ensuing 30 years), I realized all these years I’ve been misinterpreting both that line and the one that follows, Just let us try to give these moments back. I thought it meant to return them to their rightful owners. Which doesn’t really make sense, but as I mentioned, I’m more of a music person. Now, however, I think the lyric refers to gifts that are given unconsciously. Giving these moments back means reciprocating; we can only hope we give others “moments of pleasure” that keep us alive in their memories just as they have done for us.
I wonder whether Kate eliminated the chorus on the Director’s Cut version because it no longer fit sonically, or because it ceased to tell the whole story. Or both. I was sad in the 90s because (among other reasons) I hadn’t achieved certain personal and career milestones. Every day I dragged myself to a job I thought was beneath me, and came home to an empty apartment in the dark. But I had Liz, my coworker, and together we made toast in the break room and did the crossword puzzle and talked about music. I had Joel, and Wil, and Elizabeth, and others whose names have been lost to time. I had Kate, whose songs made me cry for no apparent reason, or for all the reasons, happy or sad, in the world. “I’m not talking about only pain or only ecstasy,” she once said. “The moments of pleasure couldn't exist without the sadness.”

Coda

Moment: Hiking on Mt. Lemmon, we find a rusty kitchen implement on the trail, which Kate (the poet) holds aloft like a drum major leading a parade. From that…
Moment on, the word “spatula” sends us spiraling into fits of laughter.
Moment: Listening to a bootleg cassette of Cathy (Kate) Bush’s teenage demos with Liz, and after a long, well-considered …
Moment, she says, “It makes you wonder what was going on in the Bush home.”
Moment: Kate Bush spinning in the air on video.
Moment: Liz riding her bike to work in the snow.
Moment: Kate (the poet) sews a parsnip to her sweatshirt and wears it for several days until the vegetable shrivels and falls off. It isn’t funny at all.

Cheryl Graham does not miss the 90s, but often misses that hair. She lives in Tucson and writes a Substack about mixtapes.

Help Me Fly Away: Katie Moulton on “Let Her Cry” by Hootie & the Blowfish

A great bar band will save your life. You’re in a low-ceilinged cavern amid a dim neon haze, a holding pen for tourists or college kids. In your hand: a bottle of light beer. Under your feet: planked floors simultaneously sticky and wet – something deep and incidental that can never be mopped up. We call that History. You’ve found yourself there, alone in every way that matters, already too old, the promised spark of the night emptied out: You’re a lighter and nothing’s catching. She sits alone by a lamppost, tryna find a thought that’s escaped her mind. You shuffle toward the low stage, where you can just make out the ball-capped heads of the band starting their set. Three genial white guys with haircuts on the spectrum from ROTC to surfer-dude, and a sweet-eyed Black guy at the center. All of them wearing cargo shorts and T-shirts with logos of a particular holy trinity: Gamecocks, Jim Beam, R.E.M. She said Dar’s the one I love the most, but Stipe’s not far behind.
Recall the band’s bright, primary-colored guitar riffs, a springy sway from the kit, a bassist who keeps it chugging. Now imagine the moment that Darius Rucker’s magnificent baritone vibrato first rumbles through the rafters and into your rib cage. The verses delivering a casual talky-blues, each phrase bottoming out into irresistibly round vowel sounds. Tell me you aren’t nodding to the stranger beside you like, these guys are pretty good. Then the arc into the major-key chorus—that sensation of legs hard-pumping the swing to the tippy-top of the parabola, the chains loosing and ker-chunking as your body falls back to earth. You’ve never heard this song before, but you know the words. Tell me you don’t shout to the new friend beside you, These guys should be famous! Tell me, by the end of their ballad “Let Her Cry,” you haven’t hit your knees to those beat-up planks, dropping tears into your fifth Bud. Tell me you haven’t decided to stick around to see what might happen tomorrow.
Hootie and the Blowfish were that bar band. Cracked Rear View, their breakthrough, world-dominating 1994 album, was that bar band committed to record. Hootie—the name of the band, not the man—formed in 1986, honed their skills over years of playing dollar-shows at bars around University of South Carolina, and emerged on the main stage in full homage to their heartland-rock predecessors: the Heartbreakers, John Mellencamp, Blood on the Tracks Bob Dylan. But these older purveyors of jangle-guitar anthems never quite suited where they came from, much as they may have tried to claim it. Petty was too wry, too literate. Mellencamp was too moody and mean. Dylan’s biography just one of his million masks. They were always going to leave for art, for soapboxes, for the shadow world. But Hootie and the Blowfish, with their earnestly euphemistic hearts-on-sleeves, fit the essence of their origin.
“At its peak, Hootie & the Blowfish was a genuinely excellent band,” Jon Caramanica wrote in a recent apologia in the New York Times. “Earthen, soothing, a little ragged. And also deft, flexible and unflashily skilled. It splendidly blended the Southern college rock of the late 1980s with shades of vintage soul, bluegrass, blues and more, rendering it all with omnivorous-bar-band acuity.” The historical record would call the band’s success a fish-out-of-water tale—a fluke (forgive me), quickly tossed back. Their success represented “the day grunge died,” Rucker has said, a seemingly straightforward moment between the politics and irony of grunge and Riot Grrl, and commercial hip-hop and then factory-line pop by Disney graduates. The band names were bad, the chords were major, and as Rucker imagined haters saying: “This little pop/rock band from South Carolina [keeps] telling me to hold their fuckin’ hand.”
The most indelible art has something wrong with it, and the best pure-pop songs are logically incoherent. Cracked Rear View’s lyrics are often jumbled, but the album builds a potently repetitive internal system. Every single song includes: Crying (usually the singer himself), Hands (holding, reaching, wearing rings), and an argument with Time. Though the big singles are remembered as lighthearted, self-deprecating love tunes, each one is undergirded with awareness of a broken world. Rucker says of their breakthrough hit “Hold My Hand”: “For me, that song was always about racism.” In many other tracks, the political message is less opaque; for one, “Drowning” explicitly rebuked the Confederate flag hanging from the South Carolina statehouse twenty years and many anti-Black hate crimes before it was finally removed. Other songs reckon with Rucker’s brother’s addictions, and six songs—half the total on album—overtly mention the loss of the singer’s mother. Rucker’s single mother, Carolyn, a nurse, raised six children, and died suddenly in 1992, before the band hit the big beyond South Carolina.
Near the end of “Let Her Cry,” the singer finally tries to leave the lover whose demons are killing her. At the moment in the last verse when Rucker’s voice swells and crashes, he cries out for help not to a friend or to God, but to his mother—Oh Mama, please…won’t you hold my hand?—who’s already gone.
She never lets me in/ only tells me where she’s been/ when she’s had too much to drink. “I was going to write ‘She Talks to Angels’ for Bonnie Raitt,” Rucker said about sitting down and writing “Let Her Cry” in one stream. The Blowfish have never disguised their influences, and this description is typically straightforward. But neither inspiration Rucker mentions gets close to the sadness of “Let Her Cry.” The Black Crowes song plots a point on the graph somewhere between the Rolling Stones’ “Angie” and Train’s “Meet Virginia” and never achieves liftoff into true sorrow. The singer is almost anthropologically marveling at his Addict Pixie Dream Girl: She’s a tragic fantasy; what does it cost him? I say that I don’t care/ I just run my hands through her dark hair. The existential blues of Raitt’s cover of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is at work in “Let Her Cry,” but the Rucker song is nowhere near as poetic or transcendent. Then I, pray to god ya gotta, help me fly away. And that inarticulate, been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up, failure to transcend is what makes its sorrow so deep.
I want to convince you Hootie and the Blowfish deserved their shocking middlebrow success thirty years ago and that their moment deserves reconsideration now. I want to argue this song is good and quintessentially Nineties, that it combines all the best elements of country storycraft and gospel crying-to-God and sunny socially conscious pop-rock…but that’s not why I’m here.
I’m here because “Let Her Cry” is the saddest song. It’s a song about loving an addict, yes, and about losing that person you love long before they’re gone. But at the core, it’s a song about a powerlessness that can never be reconciled. Knowing the worst will come and slowly realizing that your role is only to watch it happen.
Maybe you’ve got your own Cryer. Maybe you’re the helpless god they call out to. Maybe it takes you a long time to call them back. What can you do? How do you live? How will you lose?
Rucker recalls playing this new song just after he wrote it, introducing it to the bar crowd as untitled. As the band packed up after the set, he was approached by a very drunk white frat bro. This happened a lot. Sometimes the same man lifting a bottle to his chorus would also call Rucker a slur to his face. This time, the fan had a note on the new song. “If she’s gonna cry,” the boy said, “I figure, just let her cry.”

*

I wrote all this before. All these words and a thousand others.
Darius Rucker’s voice has been rattling through my brain for weeks. I’ve got jokes about Rucker’s Burger King cowboy ads and bad puns about the prison of masculinity (“Every-Bro-dy Hurts”). I’ve got descriptions of the lead guitar’s triplets painting those tears clink-cascading down like rain. I’ve got Rucker saying he wants his tombstone to read, “He was a nice guy.” I’ve got my memory of being nine on a field trip to the state capitol and gaping up at Thomas Hart Benton’s “Social History of Missouri” mural, wrapped on four walls by hay harvests, Huck Finn and Jim on the Mississippi, Jesse James pointing a pistol at a train conductor, Frankie shooting Johnny for love, a Black man lynched, a mother wiping a baby’s ass at a civic rally, courtrooms and the Veiled Prophet parade, bondage and commerce, hypocrisy in religion, government, and law—the whole sinewy kaleidoscope of history and myth—then riding home with my 1994 Walkman cassette player, staring out the rain-flecked window at the green-gray world, winding and rewinding “Let Her Cry.” So I sat back down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself, saying— What did I know at nine. But didn’t I know? Didn’t we?
I had a wry observation about the second verse, when the singer thinks his troubled lover has abandoned him, but hasn’t even finished the breath of I wanted to look for youuu—before she walks right back in, barely a glitch in the cycle. In fact, the speaker in “Let Her Cry” never leaves their apartment, just keeps standing up and sitting back down on the same sad sofa, cracking and uncracking a longneck, trapped in the vortex of someone else’s addiction. But addiction never belongs to someone else. It remakes reality. It swallows the world.
Then my Cryer called. Telling me to call back. Telling me, Mindy—
My cousin, one year ahead. My flipped Gulf Coast shadow. Bleached and brown and unforgiving as the sun—
Knowing it was never going to go any other way doesn’t help when it finally goes.
You terrified me my whole life. You took the anger I’m so careful to smother and bury, and you coated yourself in it. I don’t know if you ever made it past eighth grade—you were already running wild then—but you knew plenty. You knew where to harvest the best bay scallops, nestled in the sea grass. You knew how to navigate the back passages of the hotel your mom managed. You knew how to distract the front desk and swipe extra key cards, sneaking into rooms with full ocean views. You never got a driver’s license, but you knew how to get rides and money and wine from old men. You knew how to hide but you didn’t know how to lie because no one paid enough attention to catch you.
Summer trips to the vast beach where you lived. Going out at night with flashlights, swinging the beams and watching a thousand translucent ghost crabs skitter across the sand. Once, when we were little, you disappeared. My mom, scared and mad, scolding your name into the wind and deafening darkness. There were only waves. There was no one coming. Then there you were, stomping out of the ocean like some skinny redneck nymph. I swear to god you were glowing. Mouth set, arms locked out in front of you, holding in two hands the biggest blue crab I’ve ever seen, before or since. How did you pluck it out of the dark? Why weren’t you afraid?
Our dads were brothers, and when we got older and they were both gone, swallowed up by drink and oxycontin, you liked to tell me that we were the same. That we understood them, that we shared this. This family curse. She says Dad’s the one I love the most, but Stipe’s not far behind. You were forty, Mindy, and today, in the pre-dawn on a friend’s couch in Indiana, you died in your sleep. You died like they did. Just later, a little younger. You died like they did, working at it every day.
This sorrow is about losing you, yes. But what hurts more is knowing nothing ever changed, that now nothing ever will. We’re spinning there, inside a narrative that never resolves. In the first verse of “Let Her Cry,” the singer comforts his lover, even as he suffers. In the second verse, he angrily pretends to ignore her cycle of despair: Let her cry—not my problem! From the instrumental break on, he’s the one who’s crying. If the sun comes up tomorrow—it’s not a guarantee. In the third verse, he tries to muster the strength to leave but is paralyzed by the dissonance of seeing a flash of “the same girl I fell in love with long ago”—even as she goes “in the back to get high.”
The song is wrestling with that old Serenity Prayer passed among addicts trying to be in recovery: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. In the end, the singer seems to realize all the things he will accept to stay close to her, to the traces of her he can still make out. That “wisdom” is where the pain is. He knows how much he’ll give up to love her, to witness her disintegration, how powerless he is. There’s nothing lonelier.
One time we danced together. We were in our mid-twenties, and in those years, I found cause to be down 30A more often. You knew every dune-path on the sugar sands of the panhandle, but you said Grayton was still your favorite. At Red Bar, we waited for a table with our moms and your little girl. She already looked like you—straight blonde ponytail, not a spare ounce on her. You were dating a grizzly biker your dead dad’s age. That day, you’d worn flip-flops on a ride, and you showed me where the exhaust pipe left burn marks on your ankles. The sun tilted through the windows, making a blinding latticework of the open space between a tiny stage and people eating hush puppies. The bar band kicked in. Gray hair and cargo shorts, roots-rock jangle, a rhythm section tighter than it had any right to be, a gang of guys who’d jammed themselves into a dependable machine that’ll run 200,000 miles, make you cheer and make you cry. You grabbed my wrist and said, Let’s go. I don’t remember the song, but it must have been “American Girl.” We ran to the front, nearly eye-to-eye with the singer. We danced. We shook and threw up our hands and tossed our heads and swung our asses in time. We were at some ragged edge, alive and surging in a few square feet of floor, and you were right, then – for that song, we were the same.
It got too painful and too dangerous to be around you. I stopped being able to see you behind your eyes. I said I was tired of the people I loved making me watch as they killed themselves. I told you so, because I had to say I tried. Now I don’t know your little girl. She must be fifteen now, living with your mom since before she can remember. Skinny and smart. The last lucid thing you posted on Facebook was a picture of the certificate they gave her at school for academic excellence.
I have my Cryer. The one I’ll never walk out on, who keeps me sitting back down on that same sad couch. I’ll be there with her, as much as I can, until she goes. Not because I believe if I fight hard enough, I’ll change or save her. Not because I believe I’m holding her together, but because I’m trying to realize that I never have. I’m trying to figure it out—how do I love her?—in the time we have left.
I started all this talking about a bar band. How a great one can save your life. I don’t believe that. But a song, being made in real time. A song can hold you, suspended. Can buoy you in the here and now. From there, you can catch a glimpse of your life, whatever you do or don’t do, happening all around you. On that makeshift dancefloor, we spun each other around. We sang into each other’s faces. I’d never seen you smile like that before. I’d never seen you look that light. I convinced myself that I had something to do with it. I had to believe I was that powerful. If you needed me near in order to cry, to feel understood, to stay above the surface— I wanted to let you, for as long as I could.

Katie Moulton is the author of the audio memoir Dead Dad Club: On Grief & Tom Petty. You can find links to more of her work at katiemoulton.com. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and the Newport MFA. She wants to hold your hand.