“Awhileaway”

For John Drake and Ashley Stephenson.

Cheers to two friends making the leap, at middle age, into new love. Because love is always new, right? Even when the feeling is familiar, or the people are long familiar to each other, even when you’ve fallen in love with a hundred different people before this one, even when you tell yourself a hundred more times that you won’t don’t do it again, love hits us anew. The world feels brand new with that love in it. Even once you’re together and you’re working at it and you think you know everything there is about the other person and/or your love with them and you’ve told each other all of your other love stories and oh god don’t tell me again, love is new. It can renew. Something shifts in the relationship, or something external changes the terms of the relationship, and the love wobbles, evolves, grows, settles, and then shakes things up again. The two of you grow together or apart with it. If you work at it, and if there’s more good luck than most of us are willing to admit, the love refreshes, changing you separately and in tandem. Love radiates. Love warms. Love leads us into discomfort and useful change, which is always hard to take. Love makes us go absolutely fucking nuts. Love pains us. And then, if we’re lucky and if we’re willing to work at it and think it through and think ourselves through, love soothes us.

It’s not easy, love. Especially the matrimonial sort—the kind you can choose to leave at any point because it’s the one you chose fully instead of being born into. The falling is the easy part. The maintaining, the tending, that’s what is hard. Nurturing love is like gardening at night. You till, plant seeds, keep watch, water, shelter, whisper at leaves, pray to the moon. But the blooms come slowly. You only see what you’ve done over the course of days and weeks, in the often harsh light of day. Then you correct, change course, re-irrigate, call on other gardeners who know better (you think so, anyway) than you do. You adapt in that night garden. Sometimes you make love on that loamy soil. Sometimes you throw clumps of dirt at each other. Sometimes you tear up roots and fling them miles away. Occasionally—and this is sad—you realize that the soil is barren. 

But, sometimes, you two sweat it out and in the early dawn there are shoots of green that you never could’ve anticipated. The love becomes a nourishing thing, something that gives to you and sustains you and that you find gorgeous and sumptuous, and sometimes others see that bounty and come to you when their own gardening of love is going awry.

*******

In pop music, Yo La Tengo has done the most work to chart the slow growth and tending of matrimonial love. I have no idea what the interiors of Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan’s 30+-year marriage is like except their music. That’s ok because that’s enough. In song after song, whether noisy or delicate, poundingly electric or whisperingly acoustic, the Jersey band traces the quiet triumphs, lingering arguments and almost unspoken resolutions, and images that come only from close observation of the person you love and of the love you make with them. 

There is joy in Yo La’s music. Heartbreak, too. And, maybe most significant, there’s the decision—again and again—to stick it through, to see what the love brings, takes away, and alters. So much of pop music is about that first wild bloom of love in the Garden of Eden. Most of Yo La is about the Fall of Eden, the coming down to Earth, when Adam and Eve have to work back-breakingly just to keep the earthly garden going.

Back in March, about a week before I went to a wedding, I heard Yo La Tengo live. Two sets, the first largely quiet, the second blaring. Two poles of love, Eden and Earth. Both were needed, as skronk and placidity on their own are less powerful apart than when heard side by side, and thus understood as two aspects of the same whole. Anyway, in the first hour, they played one of my favorite songs, even though I had trouble placing the title readily. “Awhileaway” seems to be, like so much of the band’s output, about a romantic spat and perhaps its resolution. 

So it’s you and me
Hard times pass peacefully 
Is that true? 
We’ll see

Even with its anxiety, the narrator notes tiny details about his partner that keeps him coming back—his partner’s smile when she sleeps, her tendency to chuckle at the narrator’s pseudo-profundity. Georgia Hubley’s gentle brushing of the drums matched her husband’s near-whispering singsong. The thousand people in Union Transfer were utterly silent on this song, leaning into to hear. It was like we were hearing a secret, an intimacy that we were eavesdropping on.

It’s a song that feels like marriage. It’s so specific to this particular couple that maybe no lessons can be extrapolated from it. Maybe its lessons lie beneath the surface. Maybe it’s good to hear it anyway, no matter what, because maybe the lesson is that matrimonial love is intimate, unknowable, often seemingly uncertain except to those in it.

Still, we learn how to love—for better and for worse—from others. “Awhileaway” is on 2015’s masterful Stuff Like That There, which is a mix of covers and Yo La “covering” its own material, plus a couple of genuinely new songs, of which “Awhileaway” is one. The song that follows it is a gently bouncy cover of “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” (1967) by the Parliaments. Yes, the Parliaments that became Parliament-Funkadelic. George Clinton knew how to write classic soul before he went full-on Afrofunk. The original, jaunty and trying to hide its yearning a bit, feels like a man coming on to a woman at the start of a relationship. Yo La’s cover, though, sounds like a couple coming back together after a fight. Let’s start again. 

Love revs us up but, ultimately, if it’s gonna last, it’s more about revving up again after a stall, a blowout, a major repair, sometimes a new engine altogether, than it is about the fresh set of wheels.

*******

Supplemental listening:

The Parliaments, “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” (1967)

Yo La Tengo, “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” (2015)

R.E.M., “Gardening at Night” (1982)