Music
Finding My Language of Healing in Indian Classical Music
To cope with pain, and prepare for parenthood, I had to learn how to breathe. To breathe, I needed more than air.
In Defense of the Low Bar: An Ode to Everclear
Kurt Cobain would not approve, but privately I wondered if there wasn’t space for a beloved burnished thing in my new and improved pop pantheon.
What Vin Diesel Taught Me About Singing and Sincerity
Vin closes his eyes and bares his soul, meaning each word of the song, and isn’t that the point? Vin never claimed to be a good singer.
How Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Hiob Cantata” Inspired Me to Become a Screenwriter
This film is an opportunity to help rescue Fanny Mendelssohn from near-obscurity; and to do the same for me.
For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway
I imagine she wrote it for women like me. Women who wear their hearts on their sleeves but hold their hands over their mouths.
Listening to Fall Out Boy on the Brink of Collapse
The release of “Infinity on High” marked the final moments of the mid-2000s, a time when collapse nested on the tongues of everyone in my universe but never made it out of their mouths.
How the Grateful Dead Helped Me Embrace Mortality
Suddenly, miraculously, it was no longer dismay that I felt. It was freedom. It was Death doffing its blackness and revealing itself to me as life.
Spice Girls and the Rise and Fall of Girl Power
Girl power was the freedom to make a scene, make no sense, join together and make something irresistible, spectacular, unproductive, joyful, and to radically claim one another.
What Springsteen’s Music Means to This Child of Working-Class Immigrants
I relate to what Springsteen sings because he reveals much of the American Dream as an intoxicating illusion.
As a Woman of Color, I’m Told I Can’t Show Anger—So I Let Courtney Love Do it for Me
Because it’s still more acceptable for white women than it is for women of color to show anger, I scream-sing along to Courtney Love’s rage.