I frequently feel overwhelmed by New York City. I grew up with trees and grass, in a neighborhood where I could bicycle and roller blade around the development, play in a sprinkler or a blow-up plastic wading pool in our front yard, shoot baskets or blow bubbles in the driveway... Our backyard had a valley with deer and a creek. A playground for swinging or playing baseball or soccer or searching for four-leaf clovers was three minutes away. "Main Street" was a brick road, and the school bus driver who gave horse-drawn carriage rides on Main Street on weekend evenings knew my brother and me by name and let us ride up with him and hold the reigns and pet the horses, Dan Patch and Chester. The library was in a house until I was a teenager, and "downtown" consisted of mom-and-pop shops and a small park with a gazebo where we'd marvel at fireflies and throw coins in the fountain and climb the big tree. I think the biggest crowd I was ever in until New York City was the Fourth of July celebrations there, in a large park where families would come and set out blankets and have dinner picnics and children would run around until it got dark and the fireworks started.
So New York has never been easy for me. It's a wealth of personalities and energy and opportunities and stories and human connections, which I love, but it's also noisy and crowded and dirty, and sometimes I just have to take a deep breath and imagine placing a bubble around myself to get through my time in Manhattan. I've found myself doing that a lot lately... People yell and scream, push and shove, and seem angry for no reason; liquid of unknown origin falls on me seemingly out of nowhere; it's a beautiful, sunny day and I find myself wondering why I'm wasting it in a city of concrete valleys...
When I write fiction, I frequently have music that I use to jumpstart my brain, sometimes just listening, sometimes dancing and choreographing to it. As I write, the right song or artist to match my writing naturally suggests itself to me, and I might use the same song days in a row to establish the right tone for a scene or a chapter. It might be upbeat and fast and happy, or melancholy and lyrical, or driving and rhythmic and determined, or bubbly and fizzy, or any other of the endless emotions and connotations that good music can convey. For the novel I'm currently writing, it has somehow become Ryan Star's music. It started as one particular song that I stumbled upon and instantly felt embodied my main characters' journeys in both the music and the lyrics, and which helped set the tone in my head as I wrote. And then it spread to another song that worked less literally but just as well in tone, and then another and another. And now I find that I'm listening to his music every day before I write.
Star's music has been on my computer for years, and I've pulled it out to dance and choreograph to it a handful of times, but it had never so specifically resonated with me before. After hearing it recently, my fiancé liked Star's music page on Facebook, and then last week texted me in the middle of the day that Star was doing a last-minute small gig at Rockwood Music Hall, and did I want to go? Of course I wanted to go! And yet, somehow the connection between the fact that I was using his music to write and would be seeing him live didn't quite connect with me until I was sitting in the small space sipping on my orange-pineapple juice, thinking the guy in the hoodie by the "stage" (such as it is) a few feet away looked an awful lot like Star (it was).
That was a week or two ago. The concert, which was a substitution for a last-minute cancellation, was awesome, small and intimate and acoustic and nothing like what I would experience if I went to a planned concert on a tour. And I'm currently choreographing to one of the songs he did there that I had never heard before (or if I had, that had never resonated with me before). It was definitely an only-in-New-York experience, and as we rode home on the subway, I didn't even mind the person smoking pot on the train or the teenagers screeching or the elbows jabbing me, because I was still lost in the concert and the magic of live music.
And so, on a day when I've trekked miles in the city with a heavy backpack to get my phone fixed, and when I asked an Apple employee to help me find a product and she waved her hand towards the corner of the room and said, "It should be over there somewhere" and resumed her non-work-related conversation with another employee, and when multiple bicyclists ran red lights and nearly hit me, and when I watched many people prioritize their crossing the street ten seconds earlier over the life of whoever needed an ambulance that had to stop for the selfish pedestrians, and when I feel totally disillusioned with New York City, I'll hold onto this: There was one day last week that I spent the morning writing a novel to the music of an artist I found online nearly a decade ago, and that night I was in a small bar watching him sing that music and play piano with his son on his lap in a concert that wasn't even scheduled the day before.
That's pretty amazing. Only in New York.
