Last Year a DJ Saved My Life

Here’s a playlist to listen to while you read.

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in…
—Bob Seger, Night Moves

If you are the correct age, right now, your mind hears the alternating chords. G F C F. G F C F. It’s not a complex progression. It repeats for most of the song. There’s a little riff over the chords, too, if you know it, you’re humming it now. I don’t know if this is a good song, it’s too bonded to my memory; I’m not objective. The lyrics are hokey in part, but I like that last verse so much, it’s poetry. Shut up, it is.

Night Moves was released in 1976. I was 12. I had a red-orange plastic transistor radio with a single waxy ear plug. I did not know what the song was about, but late at night, instead of sleeping, I would listen to the radio. Night Moves got a lot of airplay. I can still sing the whole song without looking up the words. This is the first song I remember gluing to the synapses in my brain where music lives, it shares wiring with the entire Hotel California album, George Benson’s Masquerade, and Rod Stewart’s Do You Think I’m Sexy. A steady rotation of late 70s FM radio does not loosen its grip easily.

Shortly after the 2016 election, I stopped listening to the radio. I was so devastated by the results. It wasn’t just the election, though, I had been living through what felt like an endless season of loss. My father died, then my stepfather, and my relationship of more than 20 years was crumbling. I was breaking under all the sadness. My radio diet had collapsed to mostly news and I did not need to hear any of it. The 45th president’s voice, the mention of his name between sets would set my teeth on edge. It was everywhere, there was no escaping.

My house, and then my car, went silent.

***

I don’t have satellite radio in my car. On road trips, I prefer to spin the dial (what is this called now there is no dial?) to find the local community radio stations, the public radio stations, or the dinosaur rock stations. One summer day I was driving north on Interstate 5 singing along with the classic rock station. I looked over to my left where a car of four guys in their 20s were doing the same, all of us singing the chorus to Elton John’s Rocket Man. “Yeah, I think it’s gonna be a long long time…” We saw each other, the guy in the back seat closest to me put his hands up, bobbed his head, his smile doubled.

When you are away from urban areas and don’t have satellite, you have few choices when it comes to radio. You get classic rock, country, and Christian sermons. That’s pretty much it. I’ll listen to country, that’s how I know the words to Luke Combs’ When It Rains It Pours, a song about a redneck dude experiencing a change in his fortunes, including scoring the phone number for the Hooters waitress and winning a fishing trip to Panama. It’s a terribly sexist song full of dated tropes — “I ain’t gotta see my ex future mother in law anymore” — and it’s catchy as hell. Goddammit. These limited options are how I find myself deconstructing Lynyrd Skynrd’s Sweet Home Alabama in my head over and over. Is this song okay anymore, I can’t unravel it, plus, hell, Michael Jackson still gets mad rotation. This is the joy of open road radio, this ramble through the airwaves and what those songs mean.

But I shut all that off, plus the discovery of anything new, sometime in 2016. It had all turned to static and I couldn’t take it. I started listening to audiobooks instead and watching a lot of TV.

***

In the middle of March 2020, I woke up feeling very much alone. Maybe it was a Sunday. For the purposes of this story, let’s say it was a Sunday. It was clear by this point the pandemic was very, very bad, but there was still a lot we did not know. The guy I had been seeing preemptively dumped me, an action which stung but ultimately did me a favor; I’d been dragging my feet on ending it.

There I was, alone, a dark winter morning, my dog quietly snoring, my house cold. I got up to make coffee and tuned in to one of the local community radio stations. On Sunday mornings, there’s Pacific Notions, on KEXP. DJ Alex plays “neoclassical and ambient music,” something I had no idea I needed. I’m an early riser; the show runs 6 am to 9 am. It’s the perfect onramp to my Sunday, my radio Sabbath service. DJ Alex’s voice has no hard edges and the music he plays quiets my worrying mind. After more than a year of regularly listening to this show, I still can not name a single artist. I can not attach names to the tracks that capture my attention even 20 minutes after they’ve been aired, no matter how easy it is to scroll back through the playlist.

But there is a meditative, transitory nature to the time I spend listening to this show that nothing else has given me in this difficult era. Not swimming laps, not the finest of Washington’s legal edibles, nothing. There is, I know, a great deal of science about what music does for our brains, but I don’t need to fall down that rabbit hole to understand that this quiet acceptance of how things are right now is created by the sounds coming out of my speakers on Sunday mornings.

***

Saturday Night Fever came out in 1977; the soundtrack to that movie (which has aged very, very badly, the movie, I mean) was my first album. I won it from my local radio station: I was the magical 10th caller. My parents were not psyched when I asked them to drive me to the edge of town to pick it up. The album, unlike the movie, is still fucking great. It is probably not a coincidence that one of the first songs I taught myself to play on the ukulele was the Bee Gees How Deep Is Your Love. It is not an easy song, it uses jazz chords and it’s in a difficult key and oh, shit, it turns out that the Bee Gees were actually fine musicians, not just pop icons. Go figure.

I was reminded of the heft of that two album set when Judy Lindsey, the host of the KBCS afternoon show, asked people to write in about their first albums. She did not have the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on hand, but she did read my email on the air and she played Jive Talkin’ for me. I was prepping dinner when I heard her say my name out loud. Her 4 pm to 7 pm slot is the soundtrack for when the day changes from the time I give to The Man to the time I give to myself. I love hearing her voice, she is light and warm in a time that has been cold and dark.

Chris Stapleton sings this lyric — Some days we might fall apart, some nights might feel cold and dark — in Starting Over, a song I heard first on her show. I taught this song to some musician friends recently and it was fun to sing it while they played. This song has become a low-key anthem for me; the first two, three dozen times I tried to play it myself I could not get through the second verse without crying. It was overwhelming to be touched so deeply by the words coming from my radio. In a time of such isolation to hear Judy say my name out loud in my kitchen was to be reminded that I exist.

***

There is nothing I can say now about the pandemic that you have not already heard or read elsewhere. There are endless words about your special plague-era hell, whether you’ve been raising school age kids, are stuck in a bad relationship with no exit in sight, or like me, live alone in a place people perceive as a hassle to visit.

A handful of friends have asked what we will miss about this time when it ends. I respond the same way every time: Nothing. Not one fucking thing. The death toll is shocking, current statistics report that over 750,000 Americans have died from Covid, over five million worldwide. That’s the big ticket item right there, but we have also formalized fear of strangers and learned that many of our compatriots are not willing to do the bare minimum to keep their community safe. That’s some fucked up shit right there. I imagine we will be sorting out the psychic damage for years to come. I do not believe there is a silver lining.

And also, I found this gift. When I fade into the soft ambiance of a Sunday morning, I feel grounded and safe. When I hear my name attached to that one song I want to hear, I feel real. It feels like I have been alone forever, but also, I fell in love with radio all over again; it has been the one thing to truly make me feel I’m not alone. I had forgotten and it has all come back. A tinny brick of plastic with a spin dial, a low warm light, a beacon in the dark. Ain’t it funny how the night moves?