I Will Always Love You

A brief preface: This week, while polishing this post about artistic heartbreaks, I am nursing a different heartbreak: Our government attacked Venezuela, and Jonathan Ross, an ICE Agent, murdered Renee Nicole Good, an ICE observer, in Minneapolis on Wednesday. I was moved by Organizer Kelly Hayes’ remarks at a vigil in Chicago, and I recommend reading them (and, frankly, all of her writing). Here’s a favorite passage:

Some ways to support folks on the front lines: A group of anti-ICE organizers in the Twin Cities are fundraising for dash cams to prevent intimidation. Here in Seattle, Superfamillia is an org worth supporting (Venmo @ Super_familia). Hold tightly to each other, my friends.

I Will Always Love You

Before she hit it big, Dolly Parton sang alongside singer Porter Wagoner on his TV show. In 1973, she wanted to leave the show, but he wanted her to stay. “We fought a lot,” she said. “…There was a lot of grief and heartache there.”

She went home and wrote one of the great breakup songs of all time: the canonical “I Will Always Love You,” usually assumed to be about the end of a romance. The feelings are indistinguishable; Dolly proves it. She is not alone in this idiom: An artist I spoke with recently called separating from a longtime artistic home “a terrible divorce.” Ariane Mnouchkine, the Artistic Director of Le Théâtre du Soleil, once said: “People leave and break your heart and the hardships are constant.” But beyond Dolly’s anthem, where are the love songs, the rom-coms, and rituals—Ben and Jerry’s and shoulders to cry on—for the grief of these lost loves?

Artistic collaborators are as achingly heart-bonded as spouses. But we rarely go to couples therapy or talk about the state of the relationship; we hold no grief for the divorces or betrayals. I dream of collaborators who are the great loves of my life, but—in the words of another of the great breakup songs—oh, oh, love hurts.

So, prepare your acronyms, your questions, and your woes because here comes an advice column. Are you jealous of that girl in your writing group because she’s getting published all the time? Does your bandmate keep dismissing your ideas? Did a collaborator treat you badly, and you’re licking your wounds? Working for a theatre company that’s exploiting your labor? I introduce to you I Will Always Love You, a place for all your creative crushes, heartaches, wounds, and conflicts.

To submit your questions, either send me an email (reply to this one or email me at [email protected]) or submit one anonymously at this form. And Valentine’s Day is coming up, so, in particular, send me your quandaries about showmances, ballerinas fucking the choreographer, romantic literary penpal romances, etc. 

In honor of the launch of this column, I’m going to include a roundup of things that inspired it: art about the joys and pains of making art with others, my favorite advice columns, and my personal ritual for breakups. I can’t wait to read your questions!

The Reading by Yanyi

One of the most direct inspirations for this column is Yanyi’s (now mostly defunct) The Reading, a newsletter advice column about creative writing and life. His advice is consistently tender, with profound respect for the intricacies of the spiritual and practical work of artmaking. For example, this entry, “How do you Begin Again.”

Stereophonic by David Adjmi, with music by Will Butler

This fall, I saw the national tour of Stereophonic, the four-hour-long Broadway play-with-music, loosely based on Fleetwood Mack, which won a gazillion Tony awards. A band tries to make their sophomore album. They think they’ll finish in three months, but it stretches on for three years, during which time members of the band watch their songs leap to #1, do too much blow, get sober, scream at each other, break up. 

The play is oddly tedious, but never boring (at least to me; patrons fled out the lobby doors at intermission). We watch like…six takes of the same few bars of music, stopped repeatedly because the drummer is obsessed with a phantom rattling in his snare drum. The tension between the musicians boils during these moments as they’re held hostage by the banal logistics of artmaking.

I decided I loved this play by the end of the first act, when Diana—the slight, affirmation-desperate heroine, married to Peter, the perfectionistic, unyielding, often emotionally abusive frontman—debuts an original song. In a 3 AM recording session, Peter arranges the song, layering in the instruments over her simple piano.

Here, the play welcomes the audience into the best feeling in the world, when you’re making art, and the whole room suddenly knows that we got it. Dramaturgically, the music has to be this good, and it is. If it wasn’t magic, I’d unequivocally want the play’s women to cut their losses and abandon these self-important, manipulative, coked-up men. But the chemistry in the room and the starlight in the song are maybe too hard to walk away from; I understand why they stay. 

By the end of the play, Diana and Peter can’t be in the same room without screaming at each other. In between singing perfect three-part harmonies, their ongoing breakup escalates like tinder. In the play’s final moment, we hear those harmonies again. After three long years, the album is recorded. It just needs to be mixed. All the musicians leave the room, leaving just the recording engineer. He moves the faders around, playing different tracks of the song. The voices of the trio play from the giant speakers, the recording booth dark. 

“It’s time to start again again”, the voices sing as the lights fade to black. This ending reminds me that we make art, rife with all our baggage and bullshit. Then we start again again, hoping to do better.

Heart Reacts by Sarah Jaffe and Craig Gent

From labor reporter Sarah Jaffe and writer/researcher/journalist Craig Gent, Heart Reacts is “an advice podcast for everyone trying to remain emotionally functional through the collapse of late capitalism.” Jaffe is a favorite writer of mine, who gorgeously fuses the personal and political in her reporting; her book Work Wont Love you Back was a balm during a deconstruction (and I mean that word the way ex-evangelicals use it) of my theatre career. Their podcast fields questions about friendships, organizing, and political relationships: How to reckon with organizing burnout, how to deal with financial inequality in friendships, the problem with “bandwidth” as a metaphor for relational capacity, how to unionize your workplace, and more. The podcast brims with Jaffe and Gent’s decades-long experience in political movements, their bibliographic knowledge of political writings, and their warm love for one another.

Break-Up, This American Life, by Starlee Kine

Like a ritual, after every breakup, I listen to the This American Life episode “The Break-Up”—particularly Starlee Kine’s first act. I heard it for the first time when I was sixteen. A friend of my sibling’s had died that day at the same island house where my parents split up. I listened to it in a parking garage near Seattle Center as I went to act in a conservatory showcase. It felt like some belated analysis on the breakup that wasn’t mine, but built me. 

Since then, I’ve listened to it on planes home after seeing someone one last time, while crying on the floor, and once with a soon-to-be ex as we cried together on the couch, spiralling towards what we knew soon would be the end.

In this episode, Starlee Kine decides that the best way to process her fresh and painful breakup is to try to write a breakup song—despite, in her words, having “no musical ability.” She does an exquisite taxonomy of great breakup songs, featuring my personal favorite, Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me if You Don’t.” Her ultimate breakup singer, though, is Phil Collins. She and her ex loved him. Before long, though, in her heartbreak, she was listening to Phil not “for pleasure, but for pain.”

Then, through a friend-of-a-friend coincidence, Starlee ends up getting Phil Collins on the phone to ask his advice on writing a breakup song. The song she writes ends up being really good, and she and Phil have a touching conversation about breakups and the music they create: