My Prejudice

Listening to my new favorite song

There is a microsecond, give or take, in many interactions before we know exactly what’s going on, before we start to categorize and evaluate what we’re experiencing. Putting things into their proper box is part of our survival instinct (I presume and therefore proclaim). I’ve read that when we walk down the street and see another person approaching us, the first thing we register—in a flash so fast it eludes us—is gender, then age. Familiarity vs. danger comes somewhere after that, followed by the cascade of questions and associations that unfurls based on those first conclusions. Are they like me? Are they trustworthy? Powerful? Attractive? On their way to work? Cab driver or doctor? (No, doctors don’t walk down the street, cab drivers maybe not either.) Are they noticing me?

I was in an Uber recently and a song came on the radio. In the split second before I could recognize the melody, the voice or anything else about it, all that registered was the sound and how it made me feel. My mind scurried to make an identification: Mazzy Starr? There was a dreaminess and a bit of echo. I was loving it in that unregisterable amount of time. But as the seconds and measures mounted, the truth hit me. In another micrometer of time, I felt embarrassed by my misidentification of the artist. It was not Mazzy Starr. It was not someone enigmatic or alternative. No under-the-radar indie artist. It was Taylor Swift.

Photo from China tour with UN singers. What do you see first? Woman? Child? Love?

I had put her in the column of “does not fully, truly transport me.” I could acknowledge and admire— envy, actually—her skill, her craft and her marketing acumen. But in that moment, I now had to surrender a different part of myself to her, to the oozily sensuous tempo and tender melody of “Lover.” And those words that form the question haunting all new lovers: Can we always be this close, forever and ever?

My teenage self, leaping to her own inner soundtrack on the back roads of my hometown.

In that microscopic moment—in the back seat of a car, no less—I had fallen in love. I wanted to marry that song, live with it forever, and make sure we could always be that close. It transported me (fully, truly) to a place of sweet longing and insatiable desire. I wanted to hear that thing over and over. I was a teenager again, sucked straight back to my adolescent years when I would listen to my current favorite song countless times, like endless dessert. I had a certain good fortune in those days that most of my friends didn’t: My parents worked nights. As the youngest in my family, I was home alone a lot. So I could turn up that stereo just as loud as I wanted. I could move inside songs and live there for hours. And I did.

Reviews for the album Lover made me curious. I bought it last summer to listen to in the car on the drive back from a Midwest visit, my first Taylor Swift purchase in a while. Perhaps I was distracted by driving, but it didn’t grab me or get under my skin. I don’t think I listened to it twice. I dismissed the song that had now taken me back to my high school self, the self that could become so possessed by a piece of music that everything else fades away in fast motion, like looking out the rear window of your boyfriend’s speeding car. “Bye bye everything, except for this song.” What a glorious state. 

Oh how I can cheat myself when I unconsciously pre-react to a thing before I’ve actually experienced it. I’ve already put it in its box. Item: Taylor Swift. Where to file: Stuff that cannot fully, truly transport me. But in the back of that Uber, in that micro moment when I didn’t yet recognize the melody wafting towards me and that voice still belonged to a stranger, I heard something I instantly and desperately loved.  

I went home that night and did my Internet homework to see if it was a different mix. How could I have been so wrong last summer? How could I love this song so much now? It turned out to be a different version of the song, a duet with Shawn Mendes—another person I knew nothing about but knew I couldn’t possibly like much. Yes, it was a remix but the tempo was the same; drum sound and bass, the same; Taylor’s vocal, the same.

And so I surrendered. I played that song over and over and over and stopped before I really wanted to, unsated and insatiable. I love you “Lover.” Thank you for sweeping me off my feet the way we want people and music to do. I hope we can always be this close, and I can always be this open, forever and ever.

“Hi, Mary Lee.”

P.S. I can respect Taylor not attending the Grammy’s, but I sure missed getting to hear her sing my new favorite song live. (Here she is doing it on SNL, just her, singing and playing piano.) I’ll make do with diving back into my teenage headspace and listen to “Lover” again just a few times less than I actually want to because I will have to go to bed, or get to work, or eat something or communicate with others.

Mary Lee & Rod Hohl, filmed by Rebecca Hohl.

And here’s me and rockin’ Rod Hohl doing a cover of “Mean” at the suggestion of a social media expert. Ha!