Where we sit, two decades later
Yesterday evening, as I’ve done for years to close out my weeks, I spent a soul-restoring couple of hours playing music for an invisible audience through our campus radio station.
On the air, I share a love of music through a weekly curation of songs recommended by others, as well as those unearthed from my own memories. Some shows fall flat, but others — as was the case yesterday — open up a clearing where I can just be.
Perhaps it was the theme of “saints, angels and prayers” that forced the inevitable upward, inward glance before 6 p.m., just as I was about to launch headlong into another weekend that would lead into another week looking forward to another weekend.
I queued up the final song, Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” a beautiful piece robbed of its magic through endless repetition. Despite the requests and my own adoration of McLachlan, I almost left it unplayed; there’s little enigmatic about hearing a song drained by overexposure. And I couldn’t locate alternate versions — performed live as duets or by others — in our library. It was the well-worn original or nothing.
My search for alternatives reminded me of a faded moment from the Season 19 finale of “The Voice,” one now erased from our shared YouTube memory, when finalist Maelyn Jarmon performed “Angel” with McLachlan. I remember watching it live in 2019: McLachlan closes her eyes and loses herself in the ecstasy of the duet, stepping back to nudge the spotlight toward the star-to-be. It is that perfect instant where an artist — fully in command of her gift — embraces beauty in any form, whether melody or harmony.
Get Jonathan Groves’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It is difficult for me to recall the purity of that performance without tears forming. I admitted as much on the air, more for my own benefit than the audience’s, since few these days share my undying love of reality competitions. I hit play and prepared to load up my bag for the Friday night to come.
The reliable creek-ripple chords forced me to stop and listen and take in each note and nuance. It brought a respite of cleansing tears on the eve of a terrible, horrible anniversary that none of us wants to relive.
Earlier in the week, the ceaseless images had already begun — the smoking, collapsing towers on repeat, an unending reminder of the terror wrought and the forever divide opened. I wanted to stay away from the gratuitous history, the self-serving remembrance.
This morning, I sifted through my CD collection, a habit rekindled by the current deep-listening renaissance, and dug out McLachlan’s “Afterglow,” a disc I hadn’t played in over a decade. Through the 10 songs, she struggled to make sense of the chaos and the uncertainty and the horror our world had become after that fateful day, one that reminded us so viscerally of the evil that we can inflict upon one another.
At the time, a reviewer criticized the album’s opaque nods toward 9/11, especially the impressionistic “World on Fire,” which has neither anger nor sadness, solution nor resolution. We are left with a fragile voice, however angelic, of doubt and disbelief.
I watch the heavens but I find no calling / Something I can do to change what’s coming / Stay close to me while the sky’s falling / I don’t wanna be left alone, don’t wanna be alone
Today, I have played that song on repeat, hoping the ecstasy never fades and the tears never dry as the sky falls on us, together.
