Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

Instead of sleeping that night I revised my end of the conversation in my head over and over, a lifelong pastime I always rationalized as productive since the lessons could apply to future interactions, though that never seemed to happen.

It’s just that authenticity seems to me only one metric by which to judge music, and I don’t see why it should swallow all the other ones, including beauty and fun.

I personally like to pretend the phrase “deep cut” has a totally different meaning, one that has nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. How deep does it cut? How close to the bone? How long do you feel it?

The goal was stream-of-consciousness riffing; any evidence of posturing or preparing was a greater sin than losing. Losing was fine, actually.

How many love songs admit that they don’t know whether their love will grow, that they don’t even know what it is they love about the person?

I had the sensation of my own memory packaging up this moment,

That’s why the song was so short, I decided—because connection, like memories, came in the briefest of flashes.

I wondered if that was what made us feel so close sometimes. If the weirder the divide, the sweeter it was to cross.

I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable.

I liked working at home, then slipping out anonymously into a loud, churning world. It was just two different flavors of aloneness, but they complemented each other: when I had maxed out on solitude, the city made me feel observed and alive.

The only real compliment Cohen gives Janis in the song is that she doesn’t bother him with emotionality. She doesn’t whine about needing him, or not needing him, a presumably female tendency he refers to as “jivin’ around.” That this is about a once-in-a-generation genius who could sing two damn notes at the same time does make it sting a bit extra, but no woman deserves this as her biggest compliment. Because we’ve all done some “jivin’ around”: that endless game of trying to be heard without accidentally saying too much—of daring to express an emotion that might be subject to change, to a man who just wants you to service his parts.

“Sometimes, you know, you’re with someone and you’re convinced that they have something to…to tell you…. So maybe nothing’s happening, but you keep telling yourself something’s happening. You know, innate communication. He’s just not saying anything. He’s moody or something. So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping, you know. And then, all of a sudden about four o’clock in the morning you realize that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me. I mean, that really happened to me. Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face it happened. Twice. Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen.”

All the mothers warn me against their sons,” Joni told her biographer.)

But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so much.

Because “Our House” isn’t about Joni Mitchell. And “A Case of You” isn’t about Leonard Cohen, and “Chelsea Hotel #2” isn’t really about Janis Joplin either. We are all just writing about ourselves.

The senses are pure experience, I decided; there is no sense for how things seem, which is what matters to the superficial.

Sorry I called you dramatic. You are, but so is life.

By night my sadness seemed to be morphing into a more manageable shape, something I could fit into a livable existence.

The experience—that’s the key, that’s what you can’t get through conversation or talking about your feelings, you can share the facts but you can never really get across the full weight of how it felt to be you in that moment. And it’s the experience that matters, not the facts.

while realizing the loneliness that has characterized your life so far may in fact be optional.

Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone? You don’t give it to yourself, in my experience.

“There was a girl,” before laughing at himself. “It’s not quite how it sounds, but let’s just leave it at ‘there was a girl.’ I don’t mind being a cliché.”

Honestly, how many different ways is it even possible for the same two people to break each other’s hearts?”

She wants him as her deep cut, a B-side unearthed from a rarities bin, proof of her own specialness because she’s the one who discovered it, because she doesn’t know how to sing her own damn song.

How we turn the tragedy inward and make it our own.

To me it was about how it feels when you’ve lost someone, and the one person you want to talk to about it—the one person who could help you grieve—is the person you’ve lost.

It was hard to know what kind of greeting would be appropriate for a history like ours.

have you ever noticed that talking to most people is boring? Easier than this, but boring?”