Rememories
Fast Cars and Full Circles
There was a segment of the Grammy Awards that has stayed with me. It was so touching that I teared up when country singer Luke Combs got to sing with his childhood inspiration in what he later described as “a defining moment in my career.”
Tracy Chapman’s rare public appearance was the surprise of the night appreciated by many.
Especially me.
From the illuminating joy on her face to the admiration on his, their performance seems to have struck a chord. The audience of the industry’s best was cheering loudly for her and even Taylor Swift was fangirling in the front row standing on her feet and singing along.
In case you didn’t catch it, here it is…
Tracy’s authenticity first silently struck me when I was about 18 and “Fast Car” became a hit.
For some reason, I couldn’t stop listening to that track.
There’s also just something about her shy smile, hair, big eyes, beautiful face that tugged on my heart, and “Fast Car” is one of those songs that you just feel in your soul: the lyrics about the yearning to escape, the gentle guitar and the hope that something better is coming.
“The world’s a mess,” says Tracy Chapman flashing a winning smile and then breaking into laughter in an interview for Rolling Stone in the late 1980’s. She was only 24-and she seemed to be railing about a catalog of social ills at a time when I was mostly worried about my popularity, the labels on my clothes, whatever team sport I was playing at the time, my love life, and preventing acne.
Or was I?
I heard her. Something resonated deep in my heart. Something about driving in a car and the promise of freedom. Of being able to reinvent ourselves.
I was listening and on some level, I was yearning for the same thing.
There’s a seriousness to her that drew me in. She was so compelling somehow with her streamlined way of being. Her independence, her bluesy voice, and a directness about her political beliefs. I was unaware at the time that she was quietly queer, which later just makes me love her more now for her authenticity and the way she showed up shining as herself in an industry covered in artifice and glam.
I did a bit of digging and found out that Chapman grew up in a predominantly black working-class neighborhood in Cleveland and began playing music as a young child, taking clarinet lessons at school and playing the organ in her home. Her parents split up when she was four years old, and she lived with her mother and her older sister, Aneta, to whom Tracy Chapman is dedicated. “There was always lots of music in our house,” Chapman says, citing Betty Wright, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Marvin Gaye, and the gospel singers Mahalia Jackson and Shirley Caesar as being among her mother’s favorites.
“I was very aware of all the struggles my mother was going through, being a single parent and a black woman trying to raise two kids. I guess there are some people who can take all that in and not look at the bigger picture, not see that there are all these forces in society making things more difficult than they ought to be.”
Tracy Chapman
In Chapman’s sophomore year, the school’s chaplain at the time, the Reverend Robert Tate, took up a collection among students and faculty members to buy her a new guitar.
And then there’s Luke and his smooth country voice.
That’s him with his wife Nicole and one of his sons. He turned 34 this week (March 2, 1990). The last time I checked he had more than 16 consecutive number one hits. His music has earned him three Grammy Award nominations, two iHearts, four Academy of Country Music Awards, and six Country Music Association awards including the 2021 and 2022 Entertainer of the Year award, their highest honor.
He was an only child. He grew up in North Carolina and attended Appalachian State University where he worked as a bouncer at a bar before gaining stage time in that same bar. He played his first country music show at the Parthenon Cafe in Boone.
After five years and with 21 hours left on his degree he dropped out to pursue his country music career. He later moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a music career and the rest is History.
It seemed to me like a surprising song for a white male country music star to cover, but Luke remembered even as a young boy of four how her song made him feel. It was one of the first songs he learned to play on guitar, and it reminded him of spending time with his dad driving in their truck down dusty roads when he was young. He jokes that just hearing that familiar early first part of the song is enough to know it in its perfection. He admitted that it was his first favorite song before he knew what a hit chart was.
And here he is having a full circle moment live on the Grammys.
There’s a famous line in A Course In Miracles that “all who meet will someday meet again, for it is the destiny of all relationships to become holy”.
Holy, in the Course, is another word for “whole”. Complete.
The Course explains that none of our encounters in life are chance meetings. Two apparent strangers in an elevator, a child who is not looking where he is going running into an adult "by chance," two students "happening" to walk home together. Which is ironically how I met my husband at the end of my first year of University.
A rational mind will easily dismiss this, but it seems that from all higher dimensional teachings every encounter we have whether for a moment, a season, or a lifetime has something to teach us.
Some of our encounters seem superficial, but each of them is a teaching-learning situation. The strangers in the elevator will smile at one another, the adult will not scold the child for bumping into him; maybe the students will become friends the way I did with my husband. I remember the energy shifted when we met, it felt like time slowed like it did when I was almost in a bad car accident. Like time was suspended -it had an underwater feel to it. I remember thinking, what is going on? But I never could begin to articulate, it so I didn’t.
Even at the most casual encounter level, two people can lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment, and that one moment will be enough to connect them and affect their energetic field.
Luke met his wife at a music festival. Luke and Nicole are both from Nashville, but they met by chance at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.
I’m sitting here filled with wonder contemplating the effect of music on our field and the coincidental encounters on all of our lives. How some songs or sounds or people get under our skin and stay with us and others just sail right on by.
Or how drastically our tastes change. When I was 12, I wouldn’t have believed that a day would come when Duran Duran wouldn’t be on my yellow Sony Walkman.
The first time I heard Phil Collin’s song “In the Air Tonight” I stopped what I was doing. I doubt I’m the only one of us who played the imaginary air drums in the middle of that song more than once. It’s still hard not to.
I felt it.
I recently read that John Cougar Mellencamp wanted that bombastic drum sound from Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight” on his song Jack & Diane, but neither he nor producer Don Gehman could do it. It took David Bowie’s previous guitarist Mick Ronson, who dropped by the studio in Miami to say hello, to explain how producer Hugh Padgham had used an effect called “gated echo” on the drum recording to get the sound for Collins.
Did you know that Mellencamp was disenchantment with the song “Jack & Diane”? It took about three decades for him to even like it because his record company refused to release the song in its original version, which was about an interracial couple.
“Originally the line was “Jack was not a football star, Jack was an African-American,” Mellencamp told Huffington Post in 2014…
“In 1982, when I turned the song in to the record company, they went, ‘Whoa, can’t you make him something other than that?’
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t really want to. I mean, that’s the whole point.
“This is really a song about race relationships and a white girl being with a black guy, and that’s what the song’s about.’
“And they said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ … So, anyway, through much debate and me being young, I said, ‘Okay, we’ll make him a football star’.”
I liked that catchy song in 1982.
Another song I remember hearing and liking immediately was the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”. There are over 1.2 BILLION views on that YouTube video for that song so I know I’m not alone.
In 2019 it was given an award for being the most-played song in radio history.
Every song has a story and some of them come from a painful memory that can haunt the artist for a lifetime.
Sting (whose real name is Gordon) wrote this particular song in the Caribbean at a hideaway after the public fallout from an extramarital affair with his wife Frances Tomelty’s (left) best friend and their next-door neighbor Trudie Styler (right).
Sting later said: "I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano, and had written it in half an hour.” He later added that it sounds like a comforting love song and most people hear it that way, but the lyrics seemed to also be the words of a possessive lover. Or the obsession with a lost lover, and the jealousy that follows. When he wrote it he didn’t even fully realize this deeper meaning he later acknowledged himself.
As an aside - Sting and Syler are still together and they have been together for over 30 years and they have 4 grown children.
Whatever the intention behind the lyrics, Sting struck a chord with his lyrics and sound.
Music can bring different generations together in a way that words alone never could. I love how our kids learned the songs from the 80’s and 90’s and know the words better than we do.
Music seems to have the ability to connect us to others and ourselves.
It gives us the comforting realization that there are other people out there in the world who have similar thoughts and feelings as we do.
When I think back to Tracy’s influence on my own life and the song Fast Car, I remember being 18 and driving home from a trip with my first serious boyfriend, driving his manual stick shift Subaru that he had JUST taught me to drive 15 minutes earlier and then he loaned me his car to get home.
I can remember rolling down the windows (old school) and the warm summer evening breeze whipping my hair around while I silently prayed for green lights and not having to stop on any hills. Mostly I recall singing at the top of my lungs feeling like I was on cloud nine driving away from my childhood and becoming a woman (in between gear grinds):
“I-eee-I… had a feeling that I belonged. I-eee-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone ...”
I listened to this song about 17 times this week and I smiled at myself when I heard my husband playing it too.
Which songs or artists have guided you in your life or have quietly helped you in the background of your life?
What is it about certain songs that stay with us?
This week I stumbled on a song that I hadn’t heard in years “All the Above”.
It took me IMMEDIATELY back in time. I used to play it over and over and over on my long runs. The last time I heard it I remember exactly where I was. It was during the Boston Marathon and it helped me get over the hilly bits (There is an actual hill on the course called Heartbreak Hill. *My husband Scott is training for that marathon - I’ll be down there cheering for him, my sister-in-law Carol, and some friends next month probably feeling relieved that I don’t need to run it again!? )
The song energetically uplifted me.
The beat and the lyrics are admittedly a bit outdated. It’s peppered with literal “overcoming” words like pain, struggle, destiny, survivor….and well, it did the job and helped me get to the finish line. The energy burst was felt then and still now…it inspired me to break into a run on the golf course the other day for a bit and I even pictured the places I last heard it on the running course in my mind (and then I quickly came to my senses;)
I’m so grateful for all of the music that has played in the background of my life.
Musicians like Tracy have helped me feel like I’m not alone.
The songs and lyrics in our lives seem to be a way to connect beneath the surface of what we see when we look at one another.
We recently went to see the Bob Marley movie “One Love” and it struck me how when it seemed like there was nothing anyone could do to stop the violence, his concert to promote peace ended up affecting more than just the people of Jamaica. He brought reggae to places it had never been before. Bob has often been called a “flawed idealist” and the movie has mixed reviews, but I’ll admit that I teared up more than once and we all enjoyed it. It was powerful.
It showed how gang violence and political unrest shaped his life, how he was displaced by his family and got shot, and how he turned to his faith- a religion of love (Rastafari) - and his guitar to tap into a higher or more peaceful self.
Ras means King. I found it helpful to better understand it to see where his music came from inside himself so let me just paint a quick picture for you because so many of us associate them with dreadlocks and marijuana but there is much more than meets the eye.
Rastafarianism is an Abrahamic religion that developed in Jamaica during the 1930s. A belief in one God. Rastafari seems like much more than a religion. It is a way of life, a social movement, as well as a mindset. Rastas are vegetarians and eat organic whole foods. Promote peace.
The smoking Ganja for a Rasta is a special experience to help enlighten their mind so they can correctly reason the ways of the world. The Ganja is always smoked ritually. Before smoking the plant the Rasta will say a prayer to Jah (God- Jehovah) or to “Haile Selassie I”. The Rasta call them reasoning sessions when they use Ganja for Nyabinghi. There was an oceanside scene where they showed this ceremony in the movie.
The history of dreadlocks is long and can be traced back to Egypt and Hinduism and it means many different things to different people, but one recurring theme is that like the story of Sampson, many believe that our hair holds our divine or energetic power.
“Locs” for Rastafaris came from how the Bible says Jesus will return as the Lion of Judah. So, they grew their hair into locs to resemble a lion’s mane in symbolic preparation for the second coming of their powerful leader. Locs were a symbol of letting go of material possessions and worldly vanity.
The resolute part of Marley that wanted to do right and help the Jamaican people who were divided and caught up in colonial struggles, and gang violence to proclaim peace and unity in the middle of a National election. The unique way he connected with crowds, shut his eyes on stage and sang with one hand high like a preacher reaching up to God at a time when singers like Mick Jagger and David Bower were seducing crowds in an almost cool, disconnected, or untouchable way.
I was moved by his personal history. He was bullied as a child for not being “dark enough”. His mother was black and his father was white.
His magnetism, morning jogs with his mates, and how he pulled off living every teenage boy’s dream life of doing whatever he wanted, noodling on a guitar, taking soccer breaks, and loving many women who were not his wife made him seem eternally youthful.
He was only 36 when he died of melanoma.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds, Have no fear for atomic energy, 'Cause none of them can stop the time, How long shall they kill our prophets, While we stand aside and look? Ooh, some say it’s just. apart of it, We’ve got to fulfill the book.”
Bob Marley ~ Redemption Song
There is a scene at the end with footage of his real life from the show's climax that came during the song “Jamming,” when Marley called rival politicians Manley and Seaga onstage—and held their hands aloft together to symbolize love, peace, and unity. The two men, on whose behalf hundreds, if not thousands, had been killed, appeared uncomfortable like two kids being forced to apologize, but he boldly held their hands in his while the crowd cheered.
As a distant father and flawed human being who grew up in an area called 9-mile in Jamaica, sleeping underneath the house away from the rest of the family he made an impact on the world by being fully himself and connecting with a God of his understanding.
There was a palpable energy about him. A vibration. Everyone that came into contact with him felt it.
I believe that it’s our secret spiritual interests that can silently energize our true power and affect our life story whether we live out our dreams in public like Tracy and Bob did, or not.
We don’t need to sing on a stage in front of thousands of fans. Even if our dream of becoming a musician dies alongside the hairbrush we used in front of our bedroom mirror as a mic. There seems to be a mistaken idea that we need to become what our young minds dreamed we could become to live a good and happy life.
I don’t believe that anymore.
We are not what we do for a living. It’s such a shallow self-concept of who we are.
It suggests that if we become an insurance salesperson or a lawyer, but we dream of teaching kindergarten or singing on Broadway we are not actualizing our potential or living out our purpose as a human being.
Hogwash. We are still us whether we are a crossing guard or the president of the United States.
Human Beings.
Powerful divine thinkers.
Our ego confuses this concept of levels, castes, and hierarchies and wants to be famous and powerful out of fear, not love.
We bring our love and our unique gifts to everything we do and no job title or what we do for a living defines us.
When we believe that nonsense like many of us still do, we can easily fall prey to anxiety or depression.
The idea that is sold to us to “find our purpose” to live a happier and more fulfilling life is finally dying off now thank goodness, because it has had so many of us seeking outside ourselves for a degree of success, the perfect job, or the love our lives to be happy. Even if we get them, it’s not the answer to lasting joy and fulfillment or happiness.
You don’t need to quit your day job or get married and have children to live an inspired life. That’s the illusion. It’s a lie told in fear.
A learned perception we can easily shift.
The journey we’re ON now, as it is… is the masterpiece that is our life.
We are here to learn how to love one another as we are.
To see past the fearful behaviors of others and forgive. To be present, align with our true nature, and create from that place. To stop actively denying our unity and separating ourselves or throwing stones.
It doesn’t matter what Halloween costume we decide to wear while we’re doing it, what religion we practice, or if we do it while we live in a shanty town or a mansion.
Music is one way we CAN open ourselves up and pour ourselves in two directions at once.
INWARD and OUTWARD.
It’s the most powerful way to be in the world because it can help free us from our human egos and material minds better than anything else while we’re here. It strips us bare resonates wordlessly and makes us dance and cry because it’s a vibration of truth.
Music makes us feel things and admit things we won’t even admit out loud to the people around us that love the most.
It gives us a way to speak up when something feels off.
But then one of us says it out loud…
No.
It’s not okay. Music has the power to show us what we can’t yet allow ourselves to see.
There are thousands of examples, but one that comes to mind is the toe-tapping tune that got played over and over Robin Thick’s 2013 giant hit “Blurred Lines”. I’ll admit that I liked the rhythm and cool video when it was released. Still, I’m embarrassed to admit that it took a while for me to recognize the blatant objectification of women or even the subtle sinister promotion of rape culture.
The notion of blurred lines and creepy lyrics like “you’re the hottest bitch in the place” or “you’re a good girl but…I know you want it”, encourages the idea that no doesn’t mean no. Even flashing scenes where men are fully clothed and the women have smoke blown in their faces or are barely clothed dancing around.
Hmmmmm… how did I not notice this?
That was 2013.
It took four years and then it hit the masses…
The #MeToo movement happened in 2017.
This song just wouldn’t fly today.
It’s like we sing to our mass level of consciousness but as we begin to collectively rise before long what was once okay is no longer okay as we evolve and expand.
John Cougar Mellencamp WOULD be able to sing the song he intended about the interracial couple today that he intended in 1982. Maybe the producers were right - in an era of prom Kings and Queens, we all just wanted to hear him say “Football player” instead. I loved that line.
The artists ahead of their time like Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, and Bob Marley seem to almost fly under the radar at first, but eventually, the truth arises and they become iconic for being ahead of their time.
We like their songs, we buy their music even if we don’t know why at the time.
They work their magic on us at a vibratory level. They tap into our creativity and energetic field in a way that is hard to even grasp with our rational minds.
There is TRUTH in them. Vibrating. Resonating.
They strike A CHORD that we’re all in ACCORD with, whether we realize it or not.
Last week at the 66th Grammys Miley Cyrus had everyone standing by the end of her interpretation of her now-famous chart hit “Flowers”. It left an impression and even Oprah was mouthing the words and dancing on her feet.
I noticed that Marianne Williamson wrote about it on her last Substack. She called it “one of those moments” - you know the ones…when popular culture delivers magic and captures the zeitgeist of the moment.
“What an anthem it is for every woman who has ever thrown off the shackles of a hopeless attachment to someone who doesn’t love her back, but it’s about more than that as well. It's about throwing off the patriarchy itself, realizing it’s not what we thought it was, and we can do it all much better ourselves. I had never really taken notice of Miley Cyrus before, but I predict her performance of that song on the Grammy’s will prove to be an iconic moment in popular culture.”
Marianne Williamson
Miley even calls out the audience for pretending like they didn’t know the song.
I remember the first time I heard the song. It was like a reassuring balm. That we can love ourselves better than anyone else ever could.
I’m not sure what to think of Miley, but I admire her. At the very end of the song she did some interesting Tina Turner-ish adlibs that I found myself sitting up straighter for, and when she shoved the mic and walked away in her power mussing up her hair with her hands and it felt like a bit of a mouth drop moment.
Everyone got to their feet.
It was surprising. She shimmied across the Crypto.com Arena and celebrated her first Grammy win while throwing her hands up in self-celebrated joy.
Even on the red carpet, she made a statement.
Yes, in case you’re wondering…those ARE safety pins. In this photo, she reminds me a bit of a young Madonna pushing the envelope and making us all a bit uncomfortable. Like we don’t know where to focus our eyes…the same way she did when she decided to ride a wrecking ball naked.
Creative artists are like wake-up calls.
And this material world is only one part of our human experience.
It’s been the predominant story, and it seems ultimate, but there is another energetic and spiritual story that is much more powerful to tell about the music we all make and enjoy.
Next week I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the metaphysics of sound.
We’ll see how the resonance and vibration of our very beings are creating the symphony of all of life.
We’ve recently discovered that animals, trees, and plants can make music.
Whether we realize it yet or not, we are an important member of a global band that gets to decide what we’ll put in our next set and the effects it will have on all of life.
There is an important distinction to be made between “rememory” and memory.
Memory is a constant knowledge and represents the moments we willingly recall.
“Rememory” addresses the recollection of the things that a person has forgotten and, as Freud puts it, “repressed”.
On the surface, prophetic artists and overplayed hit songs can help show us things we may not be noticing or allowing ourselves to see.
And not only the fearful ways we call out for love but the beautiful ones. Like awakening to the “rememory” of our Soul.
Our brains are designed to block this deeper awareness about our eternal nature from our consciousness for a good reason, so we can be here now and experience this contrast so our Soul can evolve but waking up to it is the most freeing, empowering experience we can have on earth.
Let’s feel the healing magic of sound this week in a new more conscious way and be willing to remember our True nature.
Listen to Tracy’s song one more time.
Why not roll down our windows, turn the music up a bit too loud, and smile knowing we belong (Minus the speeding so fast that you feel like you are drunk part).
You already ARE that someone you long to be.
You have nothing to prove.
With love,
Rev Nona
ps. I’m a Word person and it came to me this week that I don’t like the term climate challenge - it doesn’t feel inspiring, maybe instead I’ll call this post-script segment Charles Eisenstein’s…
The more beautiful world we all know is possible…
This week’s idea is to listen to this song by Neil Young.
Neil Young is one of rock’s most dogged green campaigners but he never wrote a more affecting song on the subject than his sci-fi esque “After the Gold Rush”, home to his most famous line:
“Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.”
I was recently watching the sunrise over the water while I was listening to this song and appreciated his haunting lyrics. Neil Young's poignant storytelling, accompanied by the melodies of this song, paints a vivid picture of history, the present, and a speculative future.
Apparently, he had had writer's block for months, and his record company was after him. The lyrics to After the Gold Rush were inspired by a dream[1] and they consider a future when mankind uses space travel to perpetuate the species in the wake of environmental destruction so they have the almost confusing feel of someone telling you about their dream.
To me, this song feels like a full-circle moment over 50 years later.
His final lines suggest that the earth is now dying as the chosen ones board spaceships to find a new planet to colonize. The imagery of tragedy (children crying) and hope for the future of mankind (flying - in spaceships)- Mother Nature's silver seed (-the few chosen ones-) to a new home.
Will we ever have an “off-world” presence?
Your guess is as good as mine. The subject of space colonization has rapidly moved several steps closer to becoming a reality thanks to major advances in rocket propulsion and design, astronautics and astrophysics, robotics, and medicine. The urgency to establish humanity as a multi-planet species has been re-validated.
Companies such as United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin are designing infrastructure for lunar habitation. Elon Musk has claimed SpaceX will colonize Mars.
But are any of these plans realistic? Just how profoundly difficult would it be to live beyond Earth—especially considering that outer space seems designed to kill us?
Maybe his dream was prophetic.
But it’s not clear if it’s even possible. I guess we’ll see but to me, it makes so much more sense to simply swallow our pride and change our minds instead.
What current songs are we listening to and could be learning from?
Do you have any particular songs or artists that have helped you or have impacted your life?
I’d love to hear from you.
ps. As most of you know, I did not plan this vacation ahead of time and I appreciate your patience with my video-making “Nine Minutes with Nona” and my new App “The Shift” which are coming this Spring. I’ll be returning to Canada on March 7th and I’m excited to get back to work on those projects!
If you’re in the Collingwood area I’ll be speaking at a Library event in celebration of International Woman’s Day with my “One Decision Away” co-authors on March 8th at 2pm.