I Dated A Musician

Let me start this off by telling you that I grew out of my “I want to date a musician” phase in high school, after I dated a grand total of zero musicians.

But, when you’re attending a small liberal arts college and hanging with the surrounding branches of social groups, you’re almost guaranteed to date someone with a musical inclination. I found mine my sophomore year, on a chance encounter after a drunken ChatRoulette session and an agreement from his bandmate to be the subject of an article for my Music Journalism class.

Our relationship wasn’t out of the ordinary for a college relationship. It was hard and fast like the music I would listen to while trying to stay awake at 2 am to drive to see him. He brought me to the shows I wanted to see, introduced me to the people I wanted to know, and then broke my heart.

We continued on and off for a while, with him much more invested than I was. I was kissing other guys and making terrible excuses and dangling a real relationship on a string in front of him (now that I think about it, it’s not that surprising that he wrote those songs). That finally teetered off and we lost touch, save for the occasional passive aggressive tweets and nearly bumping into each other at half a dozen local shows.

Around the same time that I had started a new relationship, I had heard through the inklings on Twitter feeds and Facebook updates that he had started a new band. When I proceeded to dig further like any scorned, millennial ex-girlfriend would, I could only find a small splattering of lyrics. But, the words were so familiar to me, and I had hoped, prayed, that these were just his musings on the subject of our relationship and nothing more. Man, was I wrong.

A few months later, my friends started booking shows on Long Island and my ex’s new band was one of the names consistently on the lineups at VFWs and backs of furniture stores. After gaining a slight following, he put out the album online with a grainy, black and white photo of his dorm room as the cover. I saw it, saw the lyrics, saw the hope for our relationship dissipating silently into the ether completely and utterly vanish. He was a cut I had just started to forget about, and now the scab had fallen off and it had begun to bleed.

I can easily remember when I first heard it, cringing deeply at the sound of his voice in my ears again, this time angry and tense. He was screaming through crackling microphones to anyone who would listen. That’s when I realized just how wrong I really was in hoping he’d go out with a whisper. It made me taste blood in my mouth, as I heard his old, cryptic Tumblr posts put to music and become something so much more public than I thought our breakup would ever be. It was telling me to stay away from Connecticut, screaming back text messages he sent at 3 am. It was the aching, brittle end of our relationship being sung back to me. It was the final, haunting moans of a sinking ship.

After reconciling with the deep feelings of betrayal and anger I had felt from our breakup being turned into a debut album for a band that eventually became pretty prevalent in the DIY scene in Connecticut, I let it be. When I really thought about the whole thing, it boiled down to the fact that, to many of the people listening to the songs about hating me, I would never be able to tell my side of the story. They knew nothing more of my existence than I did of theirs; it was all in the abstract.

It’s like, everyone knows who Taylor Swift’s exes are, but I was a nobody that people were screaming about in their bedrooms, because to them, it didn’t matter who I was. Everyone always takes the writer’s side of the story, like their words are worth more. The lyrics of a breakup song touch parts of you that you didn’t know existed until the shattering of your heart reveals them. And it doesn’t matter who the songs were originally about because in that moment, they’re about whomever you want them to be.

It’s the strangest feeling, knowing that there are hundreds of kids listening to his gritty songs over their speakers, thinking that they reach them on a deeper level. They’re singing them like lovesick little kids, because everyone knows what it’s like to have a broken heart and everyone has those songs that help put it back together. For me, knowing that these songs exist in such a strong cultural landscape is like having to live two lives at once, but you never actually know what’s happening in the other one.

Long after the album dropped, and after another failed relationship, I finally went to one of those shows that my friends had booked, with his band listed as the headliner.

Through the navy blue lights on stage, I could just make out his sweat-covered face pressed against the microphone. Though I didn’t know the words to the songs he was singing through gritted teeth to a bar full of patrons, I really didn’t need to. I knew that they were about me. I sipped my drink and smiled a little because it was my own like dark secret, except by this point, everyone knew. I was the 5’1″ elephant in the back of the bar, and I kind of enjoyed it.

I ended up buying him a beer after his set (after he had lost his wallet the night before). Maybe it was a peace offering of sorts, or just being a decent person. But at its core, it was really just a small way to say Hey, I know those songs were about me, and I know you used to hate me and it’s okay. I understand.