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itsallhoney · 3 days

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NOT A LOVE STORY: The Story Behind the Song

Brian and I started writing songs from very different angles. I started writing libretto before writing lyrics so songs always came from story and plot for me. And then, a few years into writing together, we decided to try to experiment with song forms, which meant not writing from story but reaching for other impulses. A lot of the songs that came out of this experiment that turned into The Bad Years including “Two Strangers”, “I Look Around for You”, and “Not a Love Story”.

“Not a Love Story” took the longest.

The initial impulse for the song was just the chorus, which I wrote about my best friend who had started dating someone and I was grappling with the sensation that it felt like a break up, even though it was platonic (see: Frances Ha and why I love it). It’s not a love story. It’s not a coming of age.It’s not the kind of thing you put into a play. Embedded in that lyric is the very fact that I wasn’t writing this into a plot. It felt too small, too personal, too trivial. I remember writing it on the subway back to Washington Heights from Brooklyn one morning after the fling that inspired “Two Strangers”, (which I wrote on another subway ride from Brooklyn to Washington Heights).

From this little chorus, Brian sent me back an audio file of a 6-minute song that took on a life of its own. Months had passed. Impulses had shifted and anyway, the music was its own beast. It music sounded like a violin line - mournful and yearning, virtuosic. At first, I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d written something so simple, so matter-of-fact, and Brian had exploded it open. When Brian looked at the lyric (and the bit of melody that came with the hook - one of the first times we used one of my melodies as an anchor in a song), it gained its own dramatic context. It became about the the lie of the chorus - someone saying that something wasn’t a love story when, of course, it is.

I listened to the music for a long time and eventually came up with a real context for the song - it would come to be one of the most personal songs I’ve written. It hinged on a moment between me and my college boyfriend on a night after a party that we went to at a co-ed frat.

Every year, ADP had a party called “Hot Jazz” and a friend of mine was a frat member so she got us in. I was excited to bring him to the party. We’d gone to lots of parties at Harvard, at the Lampoon. There were less opportunities at Barnard - more bars, less classic parties - at least in my circle. So it felt special to dress up and dance together. The night hadn’t gone as I’d hoped. I had expectations. I wanted to dance with my boyfriend and my friends and something was off between us.

There are so many things I realize now about what was off - our relationship was already falling apart. The distance was getting to us after three years of it. And he didn’t know anyone at the party and he was shy. I was so obsessed with him - his talent, his wit, his kindness - but I wanted to share that with people and I found it so upsetting that no one understood why I was so desperately in love with him. Hanging out at Harvard was easier. I was easier with people I didn’t know - or at least that’s my perception of it. It was a perfect storm.

We left the party and I was already annoyed. And of course, we were drunk on cheap champagne. We walked down 114th street. I remember St. John the Divine looming in the shadows. It was probably 2 o’clock in the morning. Groups of people I didn’t know walked by, drunk and laughing. We didn’t break up that night but it was the beginning of the end - the turning point. I remember not crying, but feeling cold and a little bitter. I remember seeing my breath. I remember trying to explain why I was upset but I don’t think I was able to name for myself the things I can name now, much less name them for someone else. I had that sensation that I sometimes have of being outside the moment looking in at it - like I’m filming it, or memorizing it, taking a picture - burned into my memory was the smallness of our lives next to a cathedral that remained under construction after a century of scaffolding.

St. John the Divine loomed large in my childhood. I knew of its existence before I even moved to New York City. I was an avid Madeleine L’Engle reader in middle school and The Young Unicorns and The Severed Wasp were two of my favorites. Both were set at this cathedral - that now held my real life and the fictional lives of my favorite myths in its grip. The poetry of us standing against the background of this cathedral was not lost on me even in my drunk anger - or perhaps because of it.

“Not a Love Story” is about telescoping back and then back again through a evolution of a relationship. There are 4 moments that strike within the one moment of song. The first is the moment of the chorus “it’s not a love story”. It’s a person looking back on that second moment of “the old cathedral looming in the shadows”. And then, gloriously - fueled by the sound of Brian’s music - we fall back into “one dark second” - the beginning of the relationship, which for us was our senior year of high school.

He was the smartest kid in our school and we both had the administration wrapped around our fingers. Every afternoon, I had an independent study about women writers (because the school literally didn’t have any novels written by women on the syllabus for all 4 years of high school including AP English and I complained) and he had AP physics. I had created a student-run theater and was directing a show and had gained full access to the auditorium. We spent countless afternoons in the back of the auditorium falling in love.

Then the song fast forwards to college - moment no. 4 - three years of sleeping in extra-long twins together, which is a legitimately terrible way to sleep, but we never said that. We said we liked the size of the bed. I swear we were nostalgic even as each moment passed during those intervening years. It’s easy to be nostalgic when you’re far from each other most of the timing, missing each other. We didn’t even have cell phones. We were dependent on landlines, trying to stay home to catch each other, trying to coordinate so roommates weren’t on the line with their long distance lovers. We sent PINE emails to each other in the printing lab. The moments when we were together were precious and celebratory and stretched out. And we were certain. For a while, we were certain that there was no one else for us.

I remember after we broke up, our post-mort on the phone about how we met each other at the wrong time. It was his idea. It caught my imagination - the idea of alternate timelines. I don’t know if there’s anything to it. By the time we were older, we were probably too different from who we had been, but I have on occasion wondered. I realize now that I’ve only been in love three times and each of those times, I fundamentally changed as a person before I was able to fall in love again.

My favorite painter Amedeo Modigliani had an affair with one of my favorite poets Anna Akhmatova when they were young - before either of them became the artists they’d become. She wrote, about their tryst, “Probably, we both did not understand one important thing: everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one. The breathing of art still had not charred or transformed the two existences; this must have been the light, radiant hour before dawn.” We’ve both become writers in our own right. I know that I needed those intervening years without each other to solidify my voice, but the idea that this was the light and radiant hour before we became who we would become - the romance of that feels resonant to me.

And so we come back to the reality of the night when things began to decay. The moment of half-life, as the seconds ticked away too quickly into morning.

Cathedral bells rang out to mark the hour, Reminding us that this was just another night, That hours pass, That morning breaks, That somehow there’s still sunlight.

The relationship didn’t end in front of a cathedral. That only happens in the movies. In real life, it takes another three months, a bad New Year’s Eve with a scraped elbow after dancing on a table, another half-transgression on a different long night in Florence. Decay comes slow. The next morning would come and we’d still walk down to the deli in our pjs for egg sandwiches but something is already different - even if you can’t quite pinpoint why or how. There are so many bad nights that you recover from, and then there are those that cut to the bone.

Here’s the thing about love stories: they are never just love stories. They are two friends all grown up, who no longer fit together. The difference between love stories and friend stories is that many of the sad friend stories don’t have that additional moment of clarity - “the break up”. They do have this moment - the fight, the silences that can’t be bridged - a beginning of the end.

I’m no longer friends with my college boyfriend. I don’t know how we could become friends unless our jobs somehow brought us together. But I’m going to my best friend’s house to take care of her kids for the weekend when she and her husband (not the boyfriend I mentioned) go out of town for the weekend. Change is the only constant.