Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury’s Reviews > Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir > Status Update

There was a thunderous greeting from the crowd; it was a “HELLO” so enormous I could climb inside. And I did. Tears stung my eyes. Corin started the first notes of “Price Tag,” the opening track on the new album. Two bars later, Janet and I came in. I was in my body, joyous and unafraid. I was home.

I also, for once, felt a part of something. The inexplicable is its own form of freedom. Belonging is not a form of restriction. We can’t name the feeling but we can sing along.

Singularities had always been foreign to me, and where and who I came from was rife with dualities, a mesh of conflicted and diluted selves attempting to cohere, failing on account of an inarticulate denial. Fortunately, music granted me both an allowance of and a continual engagement with the ineffable.

It was the first time I felt I could be vulnerable in my creativity in which the emotional and psychic stakes were neither futile nor self-annihilating. That unlit firecracker I carried around inside me in my youth, eager to ignite it at the slightest provocation, to detonate my whole being and fill the room in a glowing spectacle, found a home in music.

a woman in her thirties, living alone, jobless and aimless, with animals to fill the space and to patch the holes.

All we ever wanted was just to play songs and shows that mattered to people, that mattered to us. Music that summed up the messiness of life, that mitigated that nagging fear of hopelessness, loneliness, and death. That night, we played for a roomful of the people who understood that very thing. Once again, I felt privileged, lucky.

You start in a tiny room and you end in one, too. Just me and Corin and Janet and a decade of songs between us. We had played those songs for thousands upon thousands of people, but now, as at the beginning, we would play them for only each other.

Halfway through the set I realized that no one could tell. That the difference between half-dead and distraught and fully living could potentially go undetected.

distance, I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again.

Being predictable is boring, and it’s also disheartening and uninspiring. We needed a sense of rediscovery, for the audience and for ourselves.