Aileen recommends “Closer to Fine” by Indigo Girls
“Closer to Fine” is the first track on the Indigo Girls’ 1989 self-titled album, and it sounds like being a lesbian in the 1980s, all rhythmic guitars and sing-songy harmonies. In 2015, the song was featured in the second season of "Transparent", in which the two Pfferman daughters and their Moppa drive in a minivan to a thinly veiled Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, singing along to the Indigo Girls with off-key patheticism. It’s cringey. Most lesbian things are cringey, which is part of the reason I listen to the Indigo Girls.
In January 2016, I was holed up in my college apartment for the post-holidays stretch of winter break working on my thesis. My first ever girlfriend lived next door, but despite this, I was lonely. Unaccustomed to long spans of time alone, I would end my workday with the sunset around 4:30pm, sprawled out on the threadbare college-issued carpet in my living room, looping “Closer to Fine” as the thin January light unspooled into brittle winter evenings. That song made me feel like I was connected to something that came before me. It gave my relationships and my fantasizing context. It kept me company.
Half a year later, under threat of a summer storm, I attended a free concert by the Indigo Girls in Central Park. It only took half the concert for the rain to start, which encouraged the crowd to thin. “Closer to Fine” was the last song of the set, sung to an audience of ponchos and umbrellas. As we spun and swayed on the soggy lawn, I got the sense that there was something holding us together, something that kept everyone out through the storm and the city heat up until the end. That summer, I was stressed and exhausted and frequently fearful. My future felt as soft and spongy as the lawn beneath my feet, and, amid that spongy uncertainty, I could feel the sinking foreboding of a relationship coming to an end. In fact, it would end exactly four months from that day, over a phone call at 8am on a Thursday. It would shatter me.
“Closer to Fine” was part of what kept me going after that phone call. When it reminded me of falling in love for the first time, I assigned it new memories. I played it during dinners with friends and while waiting for the subway after disappointing dates. I trained myself to hear it when I felt hopeful or secure. Eventually, it came up on shuffle and I was surprised to realize that I was feeling good. Even if I still didn’t know what came next. Even if the hurt still lived inside me, tucked in alongside the joy that comes from making it to the other side of heartbreak.
Over and over again, I practiced resilience by singing at the top of my lungs, "The less I seek my soul for some definitive, the closer I am to fine."
Aileen Lambert is from New Hampshire, lived in New York City for 6 years, and now lives in Oxford, MS with a corgi, a parrot, a cockatiel, and a poet. She is looking forward to her next Indigo Girls concert.
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