I struggled a lot with this Music Monday because I was worried it might be too much of a downer. I think we often think about music as a soundtrack to our lives. Music can be empowering or depressing. It can fill us with tears or make us want to dance, but it is, more times than not, deeply connected to our emotions. And emotions are messy. It is easy to tell someone how happy a song makes you. It is harder to tell someone that a song makes you cry every single time you hear it because it reminds you of how lonely you are — but sometimes that’s what we need to hear. Music can articulate hard things that we often cannot articulate ourselves, and that’s what I want to talk about.
Finding new music is both the love of my life and the bane of my existence. I listen to music almost constantly, but I rarely find artists I like. Songs that I like are easy to pinpoint, but genres I like are not. I tend to find a song here from this artist or a song there from that genre, but I don’t end up liking the artist’s music or the genre as a whole. It makes finding new music really hard.
Every now and then, though, when mercury is in retrograde and the Wi-Fi in the PAC actually works, I find an artist whose music I really like. When that happens, I hyper-fixate on that artist and their songs.
Back in September, I stumbled upon Jordy Searcy. He is a small(ish) indie-pop artist with a regular-guy-in-a-coffee-shop vibe about him. Spotify suggested his song “friendship?” to me and I found myself listening to it on repeat every day when I had my music on. (I’m not obsessed. You’re obsessed). When I jumped into the rest of his music, I could not find anything from him I did not like.
About a week after finding Jordy, he came to Nashville to perform a concert. A friend of mine got tickets, so we made the last-minute decision to cancel all of our plans on a Monday night and drive two hours to see him play in some low-lit, hipster college concert venue called the Basement East (which isn’t actually a basement). But what would an indie concert venue be without irony and nose piercings?
The entire night was copy-paste straight from the script of a Netflix original coming-of-age story. I got to wear a flannel and stand among a hundred or so other twenty-somethings wearing flannels and singing songs that most of us knew most of the words to.
Toward the end of his set, Jordy played a song that I had not heard called “Favorite Days.” You knew the song was important when his band left the stage and it was just him, his piano and a microphone. It is a tear-jerker about his brother and best friend and the typical apple-cheeked, invincible-and-in-your-twenties shenanigans that adolescents usually get up to. He talks about how these days with his brother and best friend are his favorite days and it will take a lot for him to leave that behind, even though he knows that one day he will have to.
I found myself, very hard and very suddenly, being hit with a fearful sense of loneliness. Jordy’s song was drawing from me something new and delicate that I could not yet articulate. When I listened to the song on my own again later, I broke down in sobs because it reminded me of my sister.
Why was I suddenly accosted with thoughts about someone who was just over in Heritage, not even a five-minute walk away? It wasn’t until a few months later that I started to understand the season of life I was entering and am still in. A season of life characterized by grief and loneliness.
Songs like Searcy’s “Favorite Days” encourage us to romanticize the past, be nostalgic for the future and idealize the good ol’ days while we are still in the middle of them. They also depict a very real thing that most college students experience and that is the grief that comes with saying goodbye to people who are still very much alive.
Goodbye comes in a lot of different shapes and colors. Sometimes you’re physically moving away from a person, sometimes spiritually. Sometimes the relationship is changing, sometimes going away altogether.
While I am not physically leaving my sister behind, I am giving her away to a really wonderful guy that I know will take great care of her. Which makes it all the more frustrating because I can’t even be mad at him.
What I have come to realize since September is that I was at the beginning of learning a difficult lesson: how to adapt to a changing relationship that I always thought would be permanent. It is a tough lesson to learn because I want to hold on to my favorite days. I want Cobo lunch every day and late-night talks in my bedroom and the pew next to me at church to not be empty anymore. I want her to come with me after college and be there like she always had been. I want My Person back. I want my favorite days back.
But the bittersweet fact about favorite days is that the thing that makes us love them so much is the fact that they are finite. The only infinite, permanent thing is the Lord. Favorite days end, and then we have new favorite days, different favorite days with different people.
The nights right now are not my favorite. Nights are when the lesson is the hardest to learn, but I can still say that the days are my favorite. They may not be the same, but with each passing one, I find a different reason for them to be my favorite.
So remember that goodbyes also come with hellos. Remember that neither lonely nights nor favorite days last. Remember to savor them while they’re here, mourn them when they’re gone, then make new favorite days. Finally, remember that no matter how lonely you feel, you are never ever truly alone.
“Favorite Days” can be streamed on Spotify and Apple Music.
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