by Tracy Lane

We were there–Chicago, July 4, 1993. Four of us drove to Grant Park from Columbia, MO for an all-day concert and to visit the first in our group of college girlfriends to get a real job and a swank apartment with a doorman. We were all in our early twenties as were the thousands like us scattered across the lawn, west of the Chicago Harbor. Each of us with as much aspiration, hope, determination, and confidence as any Gen Xer could gather after living our childhoods in the experimental and experiential 1970s and our teenage years in the exploitative and extravagant 1980s. We had just recently been categorized for the first time by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.” There was so much life ahead of us, our whole adult lifetimes, really, to find a place that would feel like “home.” Each of us had our own favorite artist to see and hear live that day–Fishbone, Alice in Chains, Belly, and Matthew Sweet are the ones I can recall. Despite my significant affection for Belly’s debut album, Star, it was Matthew Sweet’s performance I anticipated most that sticky summer day in July of 1993.

I’d been working at a concert venue for a couple of years and had had a divine intervention of sorts with Sweet in 1992 when he’d played the club. I had picked him up from the hotel to deliver him to his sound check in my 1983 powder blue Plymouth Reliant. Many artists of historic significance had ridden in that car–Queen Latifah, Joan Baez, and Jimmy Cliff are the first three that come to mind. But the most memorable ride was with Matthew Sweet. I had become deeply obsessed with his debut album Girlfriend. Every word of every song had spoken profoundly and prophetically to me for more than a year when he stepped into the passenger side of my car. He smiled sweetly at the sight of my boombox which I always kept in the center of the bench seat of my modest little wagon. A pink plastic cassette holder balanced across the hump in the center of the floorboard. He eagerly reached for the box and began to read the artists’ names and album titles out loud. At the recitation of “Firefall’s Greatest Hits,” his tone changed to pure glee as he asked if we could listen to it. Of course, I obliged and we sang along in unison with Rick Roberts as Sweet pushed the volume to MAX. We arrived at the club quickly and as I turned off the ignition and he hit the stop button on my boombox, he asked if I could give him a ride back after sound check so that we could continue to listen to Firefall. Again, I politely obliged. I managed to arrange for about an hour of free time, thanks to my friend Andrea, so that Sweet and I could circle the town a few times while we listened to the full 45 minute cassette. I shared how much his record meant to me because I was suffering from an unrequited love for a local musician, and that I was certain this was absolutely the greatest love and pain I had ever endured. I told him I’d always known I’d fall in love with a musician someday, I’d known it since I’d heard The Carpenters’ “Superstar” as a little girl–I just knew that would be my fate. He encouraged me to reveal my feelings to the man that had been occupying my every thought, waking and sleeping, since the day I met him on New Year’s Eve 92-93. Even if it doesn’t work out, Sweet assured me, I’d feel better for letting it out so that I could process what I was feeling. I took his advice and it didn’t work out, but eventually, I did feel better. Sweet’s advice did give me what I needed to process my loss and move forward. Coincidentally, in 2013, that local musician and I saw Firefall in concert together. I thought a spark might ignite that night, but it did not. Music has always had this magical way of threading in and out of my life in the most unusual ways…divine intervention? Maybe.

Thirty-two years after my own version of car-pool karaoke with Matthew Sweet, while I was crouched on my knees, digging up dead bamboo plants in a friends’ garden, to earn enough cash to pay my October phone bill, I got a text from one of my dearest lifelong friends telling me that Matthew Sweet had suffered a debilitating stroke. She shared a GoFundMe link set up by his wife to help cover his exorbitant medical expenses. Like me, the music industry has not provided Sweet with long-term financial security, he cannot afford health insurance (also like me). Without a moment’s hesitation, I opened the link and donated the few dollars I had in my bank account. Then, I opened Spotify and clicked to play Sweet’s Girlfriend album. The opening lines of the first track caused me to burst into a deep, heaving cry–the one I’ve needed for quite a while, so that I could begin to process the all the losses of the past twelve months.

I don’t know where I’m gonna live.

I don’t know if I’ll find a place.

I’d have to think about it some and that I do not wish to face.

Guess I’m counting on divine intervention.

As I cried in my friend’s garden, an unsettling cascade of conflicting emotion raced through every cell of my being–the unmatched joy given to me and the crushing loss caused to me by the greatest love of my life–music. I have always felt that I have a creative soul, but I have chosen the path of a creative-adjacent career–always promoting the art of countless profoundly talented artists, never choosing to nurture my own creativity. Three months have passed since that day in my friend’s garden when I heard the news of Matthew Sweet’s stroke. His path to recovery is still a long road ahead, and I still don’t know where I’m gonna live.

On January 8, 2024 I returned to the town where I lived for most of my childhood and teenage years. I moved my daughter into a dorm for her final semester of college, and signed the papers to sell my home in order to pay off my business loan. I packed my car with four crates of vinyl records, two boxes of my most beloved books, my favorite framed photograph of my daughter and me, and one suitcase containing my entire wardrobe. I left before the for-sale sign arrived in my yard, too painful a sight than I could bear to witness. I arrived “home” just before sunset, in the town where my fondest memories of childhood reside.

A few days after returning to this town, I attended a service at the church that our family had attended since 1960, the year my grandparents first moved to this town. I had not been in that church since my Grandma’s funeral in 2007. I wondered if anyone would know me and how I would feel, sitting in the Pollard pew without a single family member there with me? Was our family’s location in the sanctuary now some other family’s weekly gathering spot? All those anxieties dissolved the moment I arrived, I was greeted with warmth from nearly everyone in attendance that day. Each Sunday while I sit at the end of the pew, third from the back on the East side of the aisle, under the stained glass window donated by the Taylor Family nearly 100 years ago, I feel that I am “home” and I feel that Grandma and Grandpa are with me in spirit.

Providing a space that embodied the word “home” was vitally integral to me while I was raising my daughter. In her first 24 years of life, we resided in two homes, in one town. This was of massive importance to me because my own single mom struggled so much financially throughout my childhood that she and I had already lived in four places when we settled into my grandparents’ home on West Gracia Street during my first year of life. I grew to regard that home as the house where love lives, in accordance with my favorite song from Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner’s Always, Always album, released during that first year of my life. And, by the time I graduated from high school, we had moved fifteen times. Although the house on Gracia Street has been demolished, I spent many hours there in 2024, listening to the albums that remind me of Grandma & Grandpa all dressed up in their matching square dance attire, lovingly created by Grandma’s hands; of Mom in her early twenties brushing her and my long dark hair as we sat in her wrought iron bed and listened to the folk artists of the early 1970s on her record player; and of my teenage aunt in the Homecoming parades wearing bright white boots with black and gold tassels, marching under fall Midwestern skies, the sun shining through the red and orange leaves and creating a magical sparkle on her baton as it flew upward and landed in her hands again and again. I could see all of that as I listened to Dolly & Porter, and Johnny & June, and Linda, and Loretta, and Cher, and Joan, and Joni, while sitting in the grassy empty lot where “home” once stood. On my 55th birthday, I watched the setting sun melt into the treeline at the end of Gracia Street from the sidewalk in front of where our home once stood.

There is another grassy lot where I spent a great deal of my time in 2024 while writing and listening to my favorite pop songs from my high school years. This lot is on the East side of town where the cozy little storybook cottage once stood that my Mom purchased for her, my little brother, and me in 1982. When my brother and I discuss our happiest shared sentiments about “home” it is always a memory from East Howe Street. While listening to Madonna, The Cars, The Police, Duran Duran, and Run DMC, I thought of my brother and me playing in his model reconstruction of the Star Wars galaxy with all of his action figures and ships on his upper bunk bed. I recall making a pencil mark on the back of my bedroom door to mark my first crush’s exact height (according to the high school football program from the first home game of 1984) and a Maybelline Hot Pink kiss mark at the approximated lip-placement height of The Boy, so that I could practice leaning in to receive what I hoped would become my real first kiss. In 2024, I stepped across the paving stones that once led from the garage to the front step of that home, where I did indeed receive my first kiss from The Boy.

In the backyard of that home, I learned to twirl a baton and my brother learned to breakdance, and in the front yard, we posed for happy pictures on Christmas and Easter mornings and Prom and Homecoming nights. And in that living room of that home on East Howe Street, the three of us together, throughout the 1980s, watched the I-70 World Series, the news of the Challenger explosion, Michael Jackson’s first moonwalk on Motown 25, and all 16 hours of Live Aid. From its majestic opening ceremony with Princess Diana and Prince Charles greeting the 1.9 billion viewers around the world from London, to its phenomenal finale, “We Are The World” from Philadelphia, Live Aid was the single most life-changing and personally awe-inspiring event I experienced in my youth. Up until that time in my life, I had considered all sorts of career paths to find my entry way into the glittering world of entertainment. The concept of being the creator of musical events, much less such a massive spectacle as Live Aid, a 16-hour multi-national concert featuring 75 artists for the benefit of humanity, had never entered my mind until I saw it broadcast around the world by satellite into our living room on East Howe Street in 1985!

In the past twelve months I’ve rested my head in an Air B&B above the storefront that was my first place of employment as a teenager, and in a cabin on the same aforementioned Taylor Family’s farm, where Walt Disney once played with his closest neighbor and schoolmate, and in the spare rooms and living rooms of family members and generous friends. I’ve volunteered to give tours at the Walt Disney Hometown Museum and to wash dishes after funerals at my hometown church. I’ve cleaned houses and weeded gardens to stay afloat. I even earned my Red Cross life-saving certification so that I could work as a lifeguard and do my small part to ensure that our little town’s amazing, state-of-the-art year-round public swimming pool can remain open this winter. I’m writing as often as I possibly can, and I am possibly more in love with live music than ever before, after finally adding Rick Springfield and Electric Light Orchestra to my list of hundreds of awe-inspiring experiences as an audience member at a live music concert. In January, I reunited with my very first best friend after several years out of touch, as we each were facing huge challenges- her health and my career. She and I became friends in the preschool Sunday School room at our church when we were only two years old. We also share some of our earliest and fondest memories of Saturday nights at Buck Cody’s Frontier Jamboree. We were able experience live music from artists like Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty right here in our own hometown when we were just little girls. When we reconnected this year, we spent the evening listening to old records and talking about how incredibly proud we are of our adult daughters. On that snowy winter night nearly a year ago, we also agreed we would see these two artists together in 2024. We spent our childhood days roller skating to Electric Light Orchestra at Topp Cats Roller Rink, and our teenage years playing 45s while we combed through issues of Teen Beat during sleepovers at each other’s houses. We will never let so much time pass between us ever again and we will lift each other up on our hardest days going forward.

In May of 2024, my daughter graduated from college with Summa Cum Laude honors. Next week, she begins her own fulfilling career path in her field of choice, library science. Nothing and no one in this world could bring more joy to my life than she has and continues to, every day of her life. She is a kind, compassionate, honest, and earnest human and I look forward to all that she will accomplish in her lifetime. What’s next for me? Well, this year I needed to take a thorough look back before I could move forward. I’ve wanted to be a writer for most of my life, and this year, I finished my manuscript for Notes From The Listening Gallery, which I started in 2017. I’ve submitted queries to some publishers and agents, one requested the full manuscript, and at this moment, it is still under “active review” in their database. I do believe that one day in 2025, I will be open to receive genuine divine intervention to know where I’m gonna live. My wish this new year’s eve is that I will remain endlessly resilient and hopelessly devoted to people and places and art and causes that spread joy, so that I can continue to have and to give hope. On that note, I’ll close this Note and this year with the song that I chose to listen to most of all throughout 2024.