You'll Find What You Need When You Need It
Featuring Stranger Things, Kate Bush, and Sharon Van Etten
Spoilers for Stranger Things season 4, episode 4 ahead.
Max is trapped in the Upside Down. The monster Vecna is calling to her, chasing her, tightening its tentacles around her neck. Meanwhile, her friends in Hawkins are searching for just the right cassette tape — her favorite song, the thing to bring her out of this alive. “A lifeline back to reality,” Nancy calls it.
Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” kicks in. It opens a suspiciously heart-shaped window through the dark, and Max can see them all calling to her from the other side. You belong here, the monster insists. But the song itself, the pain she feels, the love and friendship she still has waiting for her… it’s all a counter, a proof. All she can think about is a supercut of all her friends: Halloween costumes, ice cream at the mall, kisses on the dancefloor. She runs. A last gasp, a leap, and she’s free. I’m still here, she pants, I’m still here.
I’ve listened to that song over and over again the past few weeks, the repetition in the warped synth melody. When the song came out in 1985, it held various interpretations. In one Guitares et Claviers interview, the journalist mentions that the “deal with god” could be to swap places with the deity, which Bush swiftly shuts down. In another, a Blitz writer wonders if “running up that hill” is a metaphor for heaven, choosing death in order to be with someone who has passed rather than be alive alone.
Bush herself has described its fundamental premise as an exploration of the dynamic between a couple in love: “A man and a woman love each other enormously, so much so that the power of their love is the source of their problems. Briefly, if they could make a pact with God to exchange their roles, the man becoming the woman and the woman the man, they would understand each other better and would resolve their differences.”
These disparities between intent and interpretation are cliffs connected by swinging bridges, people waving at each other from a hundred feet away. Or the roots of a central tree, growing down in a hundred different directions. Things can mean whatever you want them to mean, for better and for worse. Context can change everything, and something you missed can turn up again at just the right time, ready for you to see it at last.
When I listened to it this past month, rediscovering a song I’d heard before but never felt too deeply about, I thought about running. I heard the lyrics as bargaining away a loss with god, and running freely as a result, unburdened by something so heavy. Bring him back, I told myself, told god, and I can be innocent a little longer, smooth and unscarred, instead of living in exposed skin.
I was stunned I could still think that thought, the one I had immediately and often after my dad died two years ago this month. Half the loss was him in specific vivid detail — the way he smiled and the cleft in his chin protruded, the button-downs worn thin at the elbows, the sound he made when he was joking with me, shaking my shoulders lightly as he laughed. How he would complain about his knee bothering him, or about my incessant need to control the music in the car. How he let me interview him once for a class project and told me some of the hardest things he’d ever been through, the loss that never went away.
The other half of the grief was him in symbolism, and what it meant now that my dad was dead. I was terrified I wouldn’t grieve him properly, that I would avoid bad feelings all together in search of the previous stasis I had been so lucky to have for 26 years. And I did do that, despite my best efforts. I pushed it down more than I wanted to. I went back to work, I hung out with friends, I moved apartments. I fell apart but usually only after a few drinks and then a few more, drunk crying on friends’ beds late at night. I was terrified of losing time windows for sympathy if I decided to fall apart at the wrong moment, of carrying something with me the rest of my life and never being able to shake it.
It felt like I needed permission to let it out. I was anxious and self-conscious of making my grief everyone else’s problem. I still am, even though I’m working on it. But when I’m drunk I can’t hold myself together. It’s not a matter of wanting to be sad, but having to be.
On the second anniversary of his death, my sister Marianne and I talked about him over his favorite food, burgers. How there’s still some places of grief we can’t go, some feelings too raw and painful to touch for too long. Maybe we have to uncover them gradually, the way you discover a song years later and listen to it obsessively and make it your own. A perfect song to pull you out of the dark, or make it more comfortable to sit and stay awhile.
That same evening, the singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten announced she was playing a surprise album release show at Union Pool that night. It felt fated — a few weeks before my dad died, he came up with a game for us in our group chat, always wanted to play a game.
“We should make a list of our top 20 songs. Any genre,” he wrote. “Each one of us gives their pick via a group text, like this one. Then we all have to look up the songs we all pick and make a comment on the song.”
He chose Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John,” because it always made him cry. I chose Sharon Van Etten’s “Seventeen,” which always made me cry. He watched the video and the live version so he could make his comment: “She has a very interesting and strong voice. Song has a thriving beat and good flow to it. Is this about loss of innocence? Nice song. Yeah, kind of like a Springsteen song. Keeps building to a fever pitch. I have never heard of her, but she is very good. And good live.”
Is there a greater pleasure than having someone listen to your favorite song and hear it exactly as you want it to be heard? Is there a better way of feeling seen and understood?
I stood on the dance floor at Union Pool with Marianne, in the place we’d spent several nights over the past year trying to feel something. The opening piano chords kicked in, the drum beat, and I felt it build inside of me, putting something back into the place it belonged.
Sharon looked out into the crowd and sang about not being seventeen anymore, of growing up and away from half shy versions of yourself and boundless time. She picked out a young girl near me and sang to her directly as the last chorus swelled, looked her in the eyes and held her hand. Was it just a dream? Tears dripped down my face, permission to let it all out in the safety of one perfect song. I found the girl later on Instagram; she had shared her own story of Sharon, who she became a fan of because of her dad. At the end of the song, Sharon kissed her forehead gently and left the stage.
Sometimes you can’t articulate what hurts until you hear it. You’ll find what you need when you need it, and no sooner.