#Lately i been thinking about us full
#Lately i been thinking about us professional

She happens to be my kid, this person I made, a living being that gave my life a whole new significance. A curious girl of 48 who, today, is walking the neighborhood streets with a girl of 13, and listening to what this girl has to say. It’s a role I can step into when inside, on balance, I don’t feel very Momish at all. Which is itself a very uncool thing to do, and makes me feel evermore like Just Plain Mom, aggressively so. But just a playful reminder or two seems within my rights as a Cool Mom - which is a thing some friends have called me on occasion, and while it’s a thing I don’t exactly feel (I mean, is there a person on earth who has actually felt cool?), that hasn’t stopped me from wagging this status in front of my kid from time to time. So yeah, I won’t harp on being first to the Phoebe party. What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life? I enjoy the soft anticipation of what she might create next and how she will create differently, year to year, as she grows. His records lined up in my parents’ cabinet, played on their turntable on Sunday mornings, decades before I went to college and met a guy who turned me on to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It’s true she had to find her own way, just as I did so many times. Her prompt rebuttal: She was only 10 back then. I remember cueing up Stranger in the Alps in the car and saying, Check this out, I think you might like it. Shortly after I went to that show at the Ryman. Then I remind her that I played “Motion Sickness” for her back in ’18. What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life? We amble around the neighborhood, and she asks for permission to paint Phoebe Bridgers’ lyrics on her bedroom door. Wants to start a band, says her favorite instrument is her voice. She writes songs, plays guitar and piano. She and I talk about all kinds of things on our walks often, we talk about music. Too much bright sunlight hurts her green eyes, while for me it can trigger despair for the burning world she’ll inherit. The sky is a soft white-gray, the kind of sky she and I both like, not too much heat. I’m listening to Punisher all the way through because I’ve actually never done that although I know all the songs. “Listening to music, and researching the music I’m listening to.” I ask her what she’s listening to, and she speaks in a rush. I look up from work emails to see her with her earbuds in, squinting at her laptop.

Three years later, I’m sitting across from my daughter at a coffee shop.

#Lately i been thinking about us professional

Yet when I thought about the show, and how it made me think about my own attempts at art, there lurked the old sidekick of negative comparison, the voice of deeply received ideas about professional trajectory and age: What were you doing in your 20s? You sure weren’t followed by fans, touring the world, selling art made from your sadness. I was 45 and, for the first time in a long time, face to face again with my old self - a girl who went to rock shows alone and loved it.

#Lately i been thinking about us full

Such a long, strange time it’d been, full of becoming-a-mother, since I’d gone to a show alone. I can’t quite own this night as an origin story of my own late-coming catapult to creative heights, art begetting art, Fuck yeah! But I did feel brighter inside that night - my own heart, own mind, reflected in the songs I heard performed. I was there, by myself, a little thunderstruck on a pew in the balcony stage right, in my solitude. I like to think the three women remember that night as some kind of watershed after all, who wouldn’t file their first Ryman gig away with reverence? It was the first date of their tour together, and the first time any of them had played that historic venue it was also the debut of a collab - a girl group - that they’d come to call, with clever irony, boygenius. Three songwriters in their 20s - Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker - performed on one bill. On a November night in 2018, I went to a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the kind of show that fans like me enjoy telling other fans they were there for, years after the fact. Susannah Felts | Longreads | Ap| 16 minutes (4,248 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.