Country Songs I Can Cry To Again Now That I'm Off My Anti-Depressant
One Month Off Lexapro and I'm Doing Just Fine
Hello subscribers,
I took an edible and now you must pay for it.
It’s been a long time. Since we last spoke, I’ve been searching for full-time work, and gone completely off my anti-depressant. Lexapro saved my ass in a crisis moment four years ago, so that isn’t a disavowal of the wonders of psychopharmacology. I am simply searching for an alternative. My social anxiety has only gotten worse in the interim, and although Lexapro is supposed to tamper that down, too, it hasn’t done a thing for me in that regard.
The upside to all this is: I can cry again. And while I could cry if I was really worked up about something super serious and super worthwhile to cry about, the Lexapro really stunted my ability to cry over shit like a Season 2 episode of Grey’s Anatomy or my favorite country songs.
Despite the big hair, the rhinestones, and the fringe, a lot of queers have an understandable aversion to country music. It is, largely, aggressively straight and incredibly white (the sequel to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).
What’s going on in pop country over the past couple decades seems to me like a weird, grunting caveman version of the genre that was born out of Bush-Era backlash against the country pop divas of the 90s. All tits, beer, Jesus, etc.
See, I grew up listening to the women of country music. Shania Twain, Faith Hill, Reba McEntire, Trisha Yearwood, the Chicks (talk about Bush-Era backlash), the Judds, and hell, let’s throw Martina McBride in there too. Bonnie Raitt and, of course, Dolly Parton, were longstanding stalwarts of the genre by then, but they were just as relevant in the 1990s as ever.
I’m also told that men were there, too.
But anyway, for me to go into this more deeply would require me to listen to some pop country at length and there is simply not enough time, space, energy, or toilet bowl moonshine at my disposal. Let’s just say when the Chicks got cancelled for opposing an irresponsible and illegal war, and “Independence Day,” Martina McBride’s anthem about a woman getting revenge on her abusive husband, got repurposed by a literal-minded right wing demagogue like it was some patriotic torch song, things only got bleaker for country.
Country music is at its best, for me, when it’s closest to its folk origins. Whether it’s classic or kitsch, if it doesn’t have the stench of working class pathos to it, I don’t wanna see it.
Now, is that rich talk coming from someone who is being supported by their partner at the moment? Absolutely, but I know where I come from.
Sorry, I got distracted because I thought a ghost was looking at me. Not that I needed to tell you that. I could have just gone onto the next thought and you would be none the wiser. However, we’re feeling experimental at the gig tonight.
Anyway, the country music that affects me the most is actually the kind that makes me feel the most spiritual and contemplative. They tickle the part of my brain that wants to be free, to be euphoric.
Weirdly, these songs are also, at least lyrically, some of the most simple. They are spare and efficient and accessible, yet loaded with emotional grandeur and meaning.
Trixie Mattel is a drag performer, but she’s also singer-songwriter with one foot in the mid-60s and the other in the ass of a cosmetics/reality TV/podcasting/boutique motel empire.
This song from her first album has a depressing encounter-with-an-ex theme that’s served some of our very best ballads, like Tom Waits’ “Martha” and Adele’s “Someone Like You.” The road not travelled. What could’ve been. Seeing you again. Reunification.
“I Know You All Over Again” is a song that sounds like it’s being told to you by someone sitting in the dark corner of a gloomy bar in Nashville at 2 AM on a Wednesday night in 1967. It takes me back to the times I’ve been the drunkest, the saddest, and the most judgmental of myself for having feelings.
The twanging of Trixie’s guitar and her simple delivery (it’s not an insult) makes it soul-stirring. It’s not a song that’s trying to impress you (again, not an insult), it’s a song that the singer seems to resent for even existing. Why do I feel like this? Why do I let you make me feel like this?
And how long until I feel like me again?
It’s the kind of song someone in a movie gets up onstage to sing, and the person it’s about is sitting in the back of a smoky nightclub, surrounded by a sea of people who may as well not be there. They will not be together at the end of this movie. We will ache for them, even if we know they’re not good for each other.
And when that person’s finished singing, someone gets up onstage and sings this song.
“I don’t wanna hear a love song…” begins “Boulder to Birmingham,” Emmylou Harris’ legendary (if it isn’t, it should be) ballad. You know right away she’s going through it and she’s taking you with her.
While it’s life and circumstance that keep the lovers in Trixie Mattel’s song apart, “Boulder to Birmingham” is a song about death. She wrote it after the untimely passing of her partner, Gram Parsons, who died at 26. She was 27 when it was released. I prefer how she sounds singing it now, with her voice weathered and haunted by time and distance.
“I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham
I would hold my life in his saving grace
I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham
If I thought I could see, I could see your face.”
It speaks to the great hope that faith and religion are built on—that, by some miracle, we will see those we loved and lost again. Because that hope is infinitely better than the pain of knowing they’re gone forever, and we have to go on anyway.
"Well, you really got me this time.
And the hardest part is knowing I'll survive…"
I don’t know how someone could perform that song every night and remain upright and coherent.
This is not a song someone speaks to you in a bar. It’s the kind of song someone brought down from a mountain. It’s a song of pilgrimage.
“That’s How I Got to Memphis” is a perfect marriage between the previous two songs. It part-breakup song, part-pilgrimage. And what’s somehow more devastating is that it seems to invite you to sing along. It’s a story of woe you sing to a bar full of drunk companions.
“If you love somebody enough
You'll follow wherever they go
That's how I got to Memphis
That's how I got to Memphis
If you love somebody enough
You'll go where your heart wants to go
That's how I got to Memphis
That's how I got to Memphis”
It was written and originally performed by Tom T. Hall, who kinda looks like one of those skeptical country lawmen from an early episode of Murder, She Wrote.
I imagine the narrator traveling from city to city, town to town, saloon to saloon. A wayfaring stranger with a guitar and a vague hope that his search for someone, a lost love or himself, is almost over. Maybe they’ll be in this next bar.
“I haven’t eaten a bite
I haven’t slept in three days and nights.
That’s how I got to Memphis.”
Now, I can’t tell you why I lose it almost every time I hear that lyric. It’s not just because I love food and sleeping that much. It’s just… I’ve got to find you because I’m so dizzy, dazed, and out of sorts I can’t even function? Absolutely knocks me out.
“Rainbow” by Kacey Musgraves is probably the least lyrically complex song I’m currently crying to. It’s a pageant song. This is the kind of song an 8th grade choir would sing for some kind of school-wide anti-bullying assembly. It’s overarching message seems to be: Hey, stop being sad.
But it’s got left hooks. The way it rocks me like a lullaby. The way her voice goes up on the word “umbrella.” The way it just makes sense in my bones.
It’s a song about perspective. Because even if the painful time is over, the pain lingers. We wrap ourselves in it like a tattered blanket. It’s not doing the job, but it’s familiar. Sometimes it takes someone else to say, “Uh, that blanket has a hole in it.”
“Hey,” they say as they take your hand, “You can come out now.” When you you’re too fucking sad to rely on your own perspective, rely on someone else’s.
You know how when you get sick, you’re suddenly very grateful for the days you’re not sick? Which is, literally, or hopefully, at least, the majority of your life? There was a time without this. In fact, there was more time without this than with it.
It’s easy to feel like the pain and terror is endless. It’s easy to feel discouraged because we know it’s happened before. What’s gonna happen next? When will this be over?Understandable questions.
That the song is called “Rainbow” feels appropriate. What will the next few years look like for queer people in this country? When will this be over?
Humans can take steps backward—individually and collectively. Two steps forward, one step back. History is cyclical, and progress is never a straight line. The opportunity for forgiveness and reunification is what keeps me from despairing. Doom and gloom may be warranted, but doom and gloom is not forever.
My devotion to Dolly Parton’s effervescent brand of country-folk-gospel is the closest I will ever come to Christianity.
“Travelin’ Thru” is an original song from Transamerica, a 2005 film about a transgender woman (played, unfortunately very well, by cisgender actress and college admissions scammer Felicity Huffman) reconnecting with her estranged son. Religious imagery that would make me roll my eyes in most contexts, specifically Christian imagery of wayfaring pilgrims, the crucifixion, and being born again, are given a sort of divine double meaning for me, a f*ggy non-binary agnostic with a well-practiced suspicion of evangelical proselytizing.
Yet at the song’s most gospel-inspired moments, I am weeping and glowing.
“We’ve all been crucified, and they nailed Jesus to the tree.
And when I’m born again, you’re gonna see a change in me.
God made me for a reason, and nothing is in vain.
Redemption comes in many shapes, with many kinds of pain.
Oh sweet Jesus if you're listening, keep me ever close to you
As I'm stumblin', tumblin', wonderin', as I'm travelin' thru.”
“We’re all God’s children,” she ensures us. That’s her brilliantly simple way of saying something I’ve taken an entire newsletter to communicate in spite of my edible-riddled brain. I may not call that something God, but I know what she’s talking about.
Although I may have my specific qualms about organized religion…
—particularly those who traffic in fear, discrimination, and ultimate submission to a conduit like the organization of The Church itself rather than an overarching non-human figure like God, or what the more agnostic and woo-woo New Age spiritualists among us all agree to call “the Universe”—
I am human. I believe the same wave of euphoria that sweeps across a revival tent when they believe God is in the room is the same one I experience when Kylie Minogue launches into the chorus of “Into the Blue,” the same one I felt when the entirety of the United Center was spellbound by Stevie Nicks as she sang the beautiful Rumours B-Side “Silver Spring” not ten feet from the man she wrote it about, or the absolute tearful joy I felt tonight as I listened to “Travelin’ Thru” for the first time in years.
I don’t want to cheapen what Christians or any religious person experiences when they feel “the spirit,” but I don’t think any of this should be controversial. I just mean that we’re all chasing this feeling of absolute peace that is, in itself, harmless, but we just have different ways to go about getting it. To feel community, to be at peace, to feel worthy of forgiveness. Even if we’re not in the same church, we’re after the same thing.
Dolly’s song is everything good about spirituality, religion, and faith. Community, peace, the constant promise of forgiveness—or, more devastatingly, the constant reminder that we deserve it—even when we backslide into old habits and lessons we thought were long behind us. You’re welcome in this church. We may have different loads to carry, and there may be some downright stupid motherfuckers among us, but we’re all traveling the same road.
We’re never alone, we’re never too far from the people we love, and we only need to look over and ask for a little help when we need it. What a reason to rejoice.
I’ve been crying to these songs all night. Not for what’s sad about them, but for how beautiful they are. For so long, I could only cry when my despair was too much that not even pharmaceuticals could keep it from overflowing. But the joy couldn’t seem to overcome that barrier. I’m so glad Lexapro came into my life when it did. I’m also so glad I can cry for the good again.
What I’m Reading:
I’m listening to this audiobook of Not All Diamonds and Rosé, an oral history of The Real Housewives franchise by Dave Quinn. The narrator does impressions of the housewives, and it’s absolutely insane.
What I’m Watching:
My partner and I finally got around to Killing Eve, and I gotta say—I thought it was one of those cases of the Internet making something seem gayer than it actually is. No, this show is gay. But the biggest surprise is Fiona Shaw as the maverick MI6 agent working alongside Sandra Oh’s Eve. Shaw has had a chance to show her brilliance in roles that stretch far beyond anything that TERF franchise ever demanded (or deserved) of her, but this show really lets her give COMEDY. And Jodie Comer is divinely deranged as Villanelle.
What I’m Listening To:
This Tove Lo cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s fuck-you break-up anthem “Good 4 U” is 2 good 4 words.
If you’re so inclined, buy me a cup of coffee at Kofi for a one-time donation of $3.
The Red Sweater will be updated once per… let’s just say it’ll be updated once, periodically, until the end of time. It will cover developments in my life, work, and all the stupid little things I care about.