There is a kind of knowledge that only music grants me. I have experienced this intuitive magic since I was at least a teenager, seeking salvation in Pitchfork best-of lists and random finds at the Independent Records dollar bin a block from my high school, whose rows I would trawl during lunch, antisocial but in communion with these life-saving sounds. And now I’m so many years on, still resonating with tunes well-worn and shockingly new, alive in so many other parts of my life too but never more so than in the company of a beloved artist, there to bring these vibrations to life within shared space.

I turned 31 on the 10^th, in addition to hitting seven years on hormones. (Also: my mom’s birthday! Always shared, always a wild thing to know we have that connection.) And what better way to celebrate the turning of another year than with music, lots and lots of it? And not only live shows themselves, but sharing the gift of music writing in my classroom, introducing my Intro to Creative Nonfiction students to a lineage of music writers I’ve been lucky enough to know and befriend and share in the glorious revelry of what music gives us. Sasha beamed in from Colorado to chat about their Pitchfork Sunday review of Hole’s Live Through This, a review so thorough and thrilling that one of my students immediately did a deep-dive of Courtney Love’s life, thinking for the first time about her power outside of the men she collaborated with. We read Jessica Hopper’s “I Have a Strange Relationship With Music,” in which Hopper writes, “There is a void in my guts that can only be filled by songs.” To share these words with my students, and help them appreciate how lucky we are when we find the songs that keep us going, was one of my favorite experiences this entire quarter.

My run of birthday-season shows began on the 1^st, when I went to one of the best shows I’ve ever experienced: David Byrne at the Auditorium. Whew! Talking Heads was one of those bands that made me feel so much less alone as a teenager just by listening to them, so witty and political and experimental without being inaccessible. Hearing songs like “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” which was Elise and I’s wedding song, was undoubtedly going to be sublime; yet the whole experience was remarkable, all of his solo works just as lively, the immersive video screens that created a half-circle behind the band beaming footage from How to With John Wilson and the clip of the guy escaping ICE on an ebike near Marina City from just a few weeks ago. I sobbed my way through that one, at the show as a birthday gift from Elise, overpowered to be present to one of those performers whose indelible impact on my life will never wear away.

Then, for three nights in a row starting on the eve of my birthday, a string of shows, each in such different flavors, all of them a delight. Jens Lekman played at Lincoln Hall on the 9^th, and to hear a bunch of songs from his new concept album Songs for Other People’s Weddings, including performances from David Levithan, who wrote a novel accompanying the record and extending the story of a wedding singer composing songs for those getting married. In both book and album, the wedding singer J falls in love at a music-themed wedding, dressed up as the song “Raspberry Beret” by Prince. Six years to the day that a stranger sang that song to me as I wore my beret and biked through New Orleans, and after a busy fall full of family weddings that reminded us of the fragile beauty of our lives and the loving relationships that sustain them, seeing Jens for the second time was a perfect way to say goodbye to year thirty.

No sooner had the beauty of that show set in, and a sudden snowfall descended upon Chicago to welcome me into my 31^st year on earth, did I get to see Alex Grelle, Andrew Sa, and Elizabeth Moen perform the tunes of Bruce Springsteen at Martyr’s on my birthday itself. I had the three performers on my radio show a few days before, so eager to hear about their love for Bruce, a musician that’s become a favorite thanks to Elise’s influence. To see three of Chicago’s finest performers so earnestly perform these tunes of heartbreak and political disillusionment, solidarity and love lost and remembered, all while raising money for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights, was all I could have asked for. Dancing the night away with Mandy and Erik, Mackenzie and Steele, Mary and Anne, watching a puppet named Gruce lip sync one of Bruce’s tunes: what more could I ask for?

As if that weren’t enough music in such a short span, I saw Tortoise play Auditorium the next night, accompanied by my friend Jo. For those who don’t know them, Tortoise is a longstanding Chicago post-rock institution; they’re one of those bands that make me deeply envious of those who got to be in Chicago in the Nineties, a fertile and chaotic period in the city’s history. To see the band’s seemingly effortless groove backed with the power of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was a simultaneously energetic and yet chill way to conclude three straight nights of live performance, a short reprieve that only lasted a week.

Last Tuesday, Elise and I made our way to the Chicago Theatre to see Patti Smith. Lots of our friends saw her last year at the Salt Shed and raved about it, and knowing she would be performing all of her seminal 1975 debut Horses, I was thrilled to get to go. Still, it was a strange feeling heading into the show: though I enjoy the album, I’d mostly appreciated it on an intellectual level, unable to feel its raw power as something tangible in my real experience. What a gift, then, to see a 78-year-old Smith, born nearly eight decades ago in Logan Square, still so full of vim and vigor, spitting on stage numerous times, there to animate these durable old tunes once more, to help me find my way to loving them the way I’d always wanted but never quite unlocked. Funny how these things work out, how music travels with us across our lives, shapeshifting alongside us, the seeming fixity of recorded music really the only stable facet of the experience we might have with these songs.

After a lovely, silly second evening with Elizabeth Moen again on Saturday, this time playing a show at Timber Lanes, now the second Chicago bowling alley I’ve seen a show within (go Chicago!), I was ecstatic to see the Beths at Salt Shed on Sunday night. This was my fourth time seeing the New Zealanders live, six years removed from catching them with Elise in Toronto for the first time. The band finished their main set with “Expert in a Dying Field,” turning love itself into that most intangible of life’s gifts (“You can't let go, you can't stop, can't rewind/Love is learned over time/'Til you're an expert in a dying field”). Knowing it was soon time to leave, I screamed and cried and ran back and forth, grateful to let it all pour out, to understand that while our moment to share a room together was now departing, the memory of these words screamed out will echo within me for a while to come.

What to make of all of this? Undoubtedly, I’ve at times felt a little self-indulgent during many of these shows. Put together in their totality, at a rapid pace that I once did far more normally yet have slowed considerably over the last few years, I remembered why, on a purely physical level, it’s hard to sustain these sorts of experiences within the shape of a usual busy life. I couldn’t help but feel escapist at times during these performances, using the music to pretend away the hard shit happening outside, the ICE agents trawling our neighborhoods, the increasingly heartbroken and overworked shape I see so many of my friends falling into. As I head into a much-appreciated reprieve from school, I think of the 18 students that I had the privilege of teaching this quarter, and the ways in which I myself still feel so new to the exciting and beautiful things I’ve been lucky to learn in this life, and knowing how much harder the world will be as it shapes their young adulthood has at times sent me into a state of great sorrow, wanting to be honest with them about what’s ahead for them but not knowing what advice will actually be useful in the climate we’re in today.

And then I return to the writing, and the gift of sharing it with others. Unsurprisingly, a lot of my curriculum focused on words about music, about art, and about the city, and to see the amount of care and affection that my students had for the stories they had to tell has kept me hopeful in some deeply despairing moments as of late. It’s been silly to come to understand that my students and I are listening to lots of the same tunes, that indeed I’d attended a show near the beginning of the quarter (Waxahatchee at Salt Shed) that one of my students was at as well. While I’m grateful to be at a place where I’ve accumulated enough wisdom to be able to teach, I’ve been just as fortunate to learn alongside my students, to work together to figure out what we need to say and put our ideas out there, not yet sure what will resonate, hoping to find an echo in the hearts of another who might be listening.

On the day before Halloween, I brought in all of the Tarot decks that I own, letting my students find cards that spoke to them, using the images to inspire them to embrace the uncertain questions that might arise within them. We read Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in which she wrote, “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

There is danger in these self-revelations, as Lorde argues: we will be changed by what we express from the deepest parts of ourselves, forced to face what’s hardest to admit, prodded to transform patterns that may have helped us in one moment yet cannot survive forever. Without those hard internal conversations, put onto the page and given voice that can be put into conversation with the world, I would never have come to terms with the need to transition. Writing has saved my life, time and again, and music too. And while I still come to terms with the sacrifices ahead, the precious and fragile gifts of this life that seem so imperiled with each passing day, the small creature comforts I know to savor while they’re still here, I know that music and writing will be with me until the end of my days, opening doors within myself I’m not even aware yet to find, revelations that are best when they become a bridge to connect more deeply with the world around me.

PS: If you haven't listened to the song "Taxes" by Geese, strap in and watch this music video and if you don't feel blasted out of a cannon in the best way, then I don't know what to tell you but I'm obsessed!