Track 15: Listen Again by Raya Yarbrough
“It’s because you’re a chick singer.”
I looked back over my left shoulder, at the bass player, who was looking down at the music on his stand. “What?”
For those unfamiliar with the expression “chick singer,” it is a derogatory term reserved for female singers, meant to describe a person who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Where one might call a male bandleader “inventive” or “experimental,” a woman’s decision to change music on-the-fly gets read as “fickle” or “indecisive,” like she doesn’t know what she wants, because her ovaries are making her confused and emotional. By my age, after decades in the business, I thought I was done hearing it.
The bass player didn’t respond. I was trying to give him a chance to change his words, but his demeanor remained tepid, his eyes down on the music stand, marking the page.
The drummer, an old friend of mine, sensing a spike in the temperature of the rehearsal room, jumped in. “Hey, Raya that sounds like a good idea, let’s switch to a half-time feel for the B section. You wanna count it off?”
Keeping my eyes on the bass player, whose eyes were still evading mine. “You can do it.”
My friend counted us in, and we ran the song.
* * *
After the rehearsal I walked out to my car, alone. I hadn’t heard “chick singer” since college, before my peers and I were professionals—before I really did know what I was doing. I wanted to shake the moment off, but it went deep. Those words were drawing a trail of blood like a knife in my back. The gig was the next day, and it was too late to hire a different bass player, so I sat in my car, in a pool of anger and missed clap-backs. Honestly, I hadn’t dealt with that type of immature disrespect in so long, I froze. I felt like I’d allowed an injury. Then worse, I felt the old creeping doubt that maybe he was somehow right.
The rehearsal studio was down in the San Fernando Valley, the electric crater in the Earth which mountains downward from the back of Hollywood. It’s a long drive back from there to West Los Angeles, so the Ventura Highway and I had some time to think together. It’s amazing how something so small can bloom like water in oil, to toxify your entire mind. I focused on the hills out my window to my left. The high edges of the Valley began to challenge the evening with electric spots of human life. Mountain top, the serpentine backbone of Mulholland Drive spined herself against the blunt fluorescence of this spent day. I was spent too. I needed to fold into the womb of the city for a while, so I drove to my mom’s house.
* * *
Crossing Mom’s doorway, I kicked my shoes off into the hall corner next to the potted ficus under one of her paintings.
Mom shouted, “Hello dear!” from her easel in the small sunroom off the kitchen.
“Hey,” I piped back, a weighted attempt at pleasantry.
Mom could tell. She appeared from around the corner, in her acrylic and time-splattered smock. “You ok?” A squeak from her slip-on painting shoes repeated her question.
“Yeah, long rehearsal.”
“Want some tea?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Mom squeaked back around the corner, and I sat down at the keys.
There we were, a chick singer and her piano.
Some part of me, beneath the intellectual circuitry, needed to make sound. I got up, turned around, and opened the piano bench. Old charts for jazz standards shuffled up in a fluster of dogeared staff paper. All these songs I didn’t sing anymore, but my erasure marks and crossed-out accidentals depicted an ancient, obsessive search for ideal keys. There were song books, random chord progressions, and an old song of mine I’d written for a vocal student. I took it out. I placed the music on the piano: “Listen, Emily” was the name.
I’d written it 20 years before, in this same room. I was just out of college, living with my parents for a year. Although I was performing and recording with my own band, I had to make actual money, so I was singing at weddings, office parties, and restaurant gigs and doing random studio work. I was also teaching vocal lessons through a music store and privately at my parents’ home. During that summer, I got a call from young girl looking for some singing lessons. I accepted her request, and Emily showed up at my door.
She was a dusty blonde with a short, shaggy cut. The style might be called a “wolf cut” or a “soft mullet” nowadays, but those weren’t things back then. I was only five years her senior, but experientially, between eighteen and twenty-three, it might as well have been a decade. Still, she was a cool girl, much cooler than I was at her age, but I don’t think she saw that about herself. She told me that she played bass in a band, and there was boy she’d been getting to know, and getting to like—their rapport had been flirty and inspired.
We laughed a lot. Jazz is funny. Vocal warm-ups sound ridiculous. Emily had a timid approach to singing, but she also had a natural musicality. Week by week she opened up into her own unique expression, and I got to watch her really dig what she was becoming. We talked about pop culture, The Lord of The Rings, Elliott Smith, Britney Spears, and high school.
After we’d been working together for a few months, she arrived one afternoon looking downcast. She usually had some life update, some funny observation, but that afternoon, her whole body was holding a wave at bay. We sat down to begin vocalizing, and she started to cry.
We stopped. Emily took a breath. Earlier that day, before our lesson, the boy from the band had been cruel. He had belittled her playing. In doing so, he had ruined all that freedom of trust that had been so inspiring to her—which also broke her heart. She’d had every reason to believe the feeling was mutual between them, but as it turned out, the relationship really did not mean that much to him.
I let her talk as long as she wanted to. I kept my calm, but internally, I was knives out for this kid who’d hurt her. This boy was shallow—granted, he was also very young, but Emily was equally young, and I wished she could see the wisdom I already saw in her. I wished I could tell her that soon this would not matter—but at that moment, she just needed to cry.
For days, I couldn’t shake her story. I’d been there, and there was nothing else I could say to her. I thought about what I’d want someone to say to me, and I went to the piano, and started writing a song.
I lost touch with Emily after she went to college, but I performed that song for years. Finally, I recorded it for an album in 2008, then it phased out of my performance circulation. And apparently, the lesson got lost as well.
* * *
And 20 years later, I sat at the same piano, feeling as unworthy as a jilted teenager.
This time it was the teacher slouched in self-doubt, with the weight of words on my neck—but here was this music I’d found again. I hadn’t thought these lyrics in so long:
It’s not the time, girl, rest your head. Don’t trouble his words, go make your own trouble instead.
I put my hands on the keys. I pressed through the chord progression and the lyrics of the chorus, and in the span of my hands, I remembered.
…And I swear you’re already above this. I swear you’ve already done this. I swear, to all those who say they’ve been through it, they’re lost in the game, just the same.
I remembered a young, broken girl, reeling to mend herself. I remembered channeling my future counsel, from a future version of myself who had lived all of this down, who knew the lullaby of resilience. What I didn’t know was that I would still be breakable all these years later, and that lessons can be forgotten.
My mom squeaked around the corner with two cups of tea. “I remember that song.”
“I’d forgotten it.”
I played the song for my mother. That toxic oil and water, which had clouded my sense of self, began to clear, and the melody came back to me. There she was, my 23-year-old self. She was doing her best to advise a younger girl, with wisdom she didn’t really have yet, but hoped that she would. She didn’t know she was reaching forward through time, to tell her distant self exactly what she needed to hear.
Raya Yarbrough is a writer and singer-songwriter best known for singing the opening title song of the TV series Outlander. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Frazzled, MUTHA Magazine, and The Manifest Station, and her fiction has been published in Amazing Stories and Witcraft. Her poetry has been featured in Writers Resist, One Page Poetry, and Poetry of the Sacred. Raya has written and produced three albums of eclectic music, and her voice and original music have been featured in many TV series, including Battlestar Galactica and Outlander. She is currently finishing a humorous memoir about being a parent in a multiracial family while also being a working artist. rayayarbrough.com/
