A Singer Reborn
Selena talks with her alien friend, Breadbox, about what it means to be a musician and singer.
They’ve helped each other recapture their passion for singing. Wanda the AI translates. This is from Aliens Crashed in My Back Yard. Selena speaks.
“Bullshit! Everything I have told you is bull!” I ranted.
“Bull? What is bullshit?” asked Breadbox. Wanda beepled to her, then gave a tentative back translation in English. “The feces of a large male grazing quadruped, sometimes dangerous.”
“I meant wrong. Incorrect. Untruthful. I lied to you. And to myself about why I am a musician.”
I had awakened at 3:00am, my normal angst hour, angry at myself. The truth became clear to me, and now that we were again together, I repeated it to Breadbox. We were back at her crash-site abode beneath the big oak, even before breakfast, the morning after our big jam session. “One does not become a musician,” I asserted, “but rather, realizes she is one. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I just am a musician. I would be one even if I didn’t make a living at it.”
I could have kept music as a hobby and done something else instead, like nurse — or burger flipper—but the right doors opened at the right time, and I ended up doing music. I heard Bonnie Raitt and Melissa Etheridge and I thought, that’s what I want to do.
I paused and looked at my fingers playing an imaginary guitar.
“It’s an amazing gift that I get to travel around and sing to total strangers.”
I laughed out loud. Laughed and hooted and cried. Tears of joy and sadness. Joy of realization and release, sadness for years lost. “Last night you and I both chose again to be singers, did we not? After all the moaning and denying, the truth came out in our jam with our friends.”
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“Yes, I chose,” she asserted, with twirling tentacles and flashing purple skin spots. She did a little skipping dance, with six or eight of her feet, like those Irish troupes do, but she was the whole troupe. “I chose to sing with you and your friends. I loved singing along with your friend Eddy Backwater. I love his double name. Backwater or eddy is the still part of the stream, quiet, out away from the rushing current.”
“That seems just the opposite of what he is.”
“Perhaps his name expresses his quiet inner self.”
I smirked to myself, trying to imagine Eddy with a quiet inner self. But then, what about me? I’d been hiding my inner self pretty well. Mostly from myself. Not wanting to admit who I was, and where my passion really lay. Because if I did admit it, then I’d have to do something about it. I’d have to sing my passion without holding back. Despite my fear of rejection.
But Breadbox had stirred my passion kettle, and stimulated me to sing it all out. And people had loved it! I was amazed; it was hard for me to grant this. They liked my singing from the heart. Loved it! Stood up and applauded. Asked to record and produce it. Ah, Joel.
I had long been a successful singer. Hit songs. Concerts. Albums. Lots of money. Beautiful home overlooking the ocean. But I’d never felt successful to myself. I’d ridden the safety of my early hits, slowly downhill it seemed. I was never satisfied with my recent hits. They seemed clever but derivative, contrived to be popular. And they were popular, but . . .
Further, I’d been a total failure at finding and keeping a true love in my life. Heck, “cotton candy lovin’” — my biggest hit — would be a step up for me! Even Joel didn’t want a fling with me.
“What is the role of the singer in your world?” Breadbox had asked me once.
“It is to entertain,” I had told her. And yet, I asked myself now, why are these songs entertaining? I see that songs carry profound meaning and lessons for people. Things they need to learn in their own lives. Or that resonate with problems they experience. They need this external force — music — playing this back to them. What was brought home to me, particularly by Meg last night, was that things a singer like me might consider trivial and humdrum, the listener might find moving and profound. Maybe the lyrics, maybe the melody. Or maybe the setting, like that magical evening recently up at Point Arena.
Perhaps I feared being too successful. I didn’t feel qualified to be messing with people’s lives and happiness. That’s quite a responsibility. It’s like I needed to be an expert surgeon, but I hardly knew how to wield the scalpel. So I held back.
Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? I feared nobody would care, and I feared that I’d have too great an impact. Well, that was me.
