Me as a grown-up: messy, more than my list of things to do, capable of a million feelings and often on the edge of broke. I wear my independence as armor while wholly aware that self-sufficiency is an urban legend and pretty much a drag. I’m thoroughly puzzled about how to navigate a world where facts don’t matter much and being human is an expensive flaw. What I like best about myself is that I live my values and I long to be fully known. I operate on the economy of motion which is honesty. Of my plenty of flaws, the one I resent the most is that no matter how much I love my daughter, I cannot protect her from the things I can’t even protect myself from. In fewer words: I still have a lot to learn.
But I keep singing. One little voice. Who can say why? And what’s the difference anyway?
What I keep coming back to as real comfort these days is that I’m not just one voice. I’m part of a long line of women who have cut a path and sung a whole lotta love into the world. Eudora Welty, Bobbie Gentry, Maria McKee, Nina Simone. Independent women leading their own kind of lives. Joni, Roberta Flack, Michelle Shocked found me in the record bin and handed me keys. Townes got me to Emmy, Emmy to Linda to You. I bought your first record when I was about nineteen. I looked for myself in the chords and liner notes and found everything I needed there. Women Be Wise was in every early set I played in every bar and everything I aspired to be. I knew that golden album backward and forward, wherever the needle dropped. (I still do). That girl on the cover was the toughest, coolest girl in the world with heart and voice running over with the velvety very much you had lived.
I can’t imagine where I ever got the courage to start all this, but I suspect it was from you. I wanted to be a writer since before I even have a memory of wanting to be a writer. The first time I remember feeling loneliness like a sandbag to the gut was about the time I picked up a guitar. I took everything to that guitar, a safe place to put the whole lot inside me. At first, I was a little scared of what I might write. (That was the first ten years.) Then, I was going to gigs. Giving it all I had and up at the plate. (Another ten years.) Then, I was in my mid-thirties. Life getting real, divorce, careers, money. Now, I am another ten or fifteen years down the road, and still doing the artist hustle. No time to fake it, I am the product of my practice.
You’ve been with me in the car that whole time, whether you knew it or not. You and all the women who came before me who gave me this life. It isn’t an easy one, but you made it easier for me than it was for you. You sang your values into the world. You danced barefoot and talked back. You kicked the status quo in the shins. I don’t know you at all but you feel like home to me — I have talked to you in success, failure, off the road, backstage, making decisions. You taught me to swim in a world where you get thrown off the dock to see what will happen. You swam. I swim. I have talked to you about sex and sexism. About money. About the music business. About family, friends, failure, emptiness, joy and anything at all that was worth mentioning.
Needing a hero is not something you grow out of. My conversations with you as I get older only get wider, more necessary. Not how does one make a song, but how does one make a good life? What is the daily process? Not just how to sing without thinking or how to lead a band, but how to make meaning over time. How to show up everyday with integrity even if nobody sees it and why that matters so much. How do I live up to the path I was given and how do I live up to those I will leave that path for?
I’ve even talked to you about the importance of human made music and my discomfort with AI training on us without consent. I roll the dirty disquiet of plagiarism – a personal violation – up to scale — the whole of women musician’s creative labor made invisible, to replace us – and I get overwhelmed. I can’t imagine my daughter doing what I do, or worse, looking up to AI music rather than a hero like you. I worry about the women coming up the path now, how they’ll make a living. Hell, I worry about myself. But you bring me back to my basic impulse — to say something true, to reach for others, to understand what it means to be here and human right now. You remind me that saying thank you is the opposite of erasure and the antidote for just about everything.
Lineage, citations, bibliographies, thank you letters, family trees. Stories. Liner notes for life. The inside knowledge of where the knowledge came from. The real deal. The mark of the handmade. Whenever I’m on shaky ground, I turn to this lineage for the deep, invisible marks that human work has made on me. I find myself in a room full of beautiful, brave women. I am proud to be part of the choir making the more than noise that binds us together, that keeps us turning to each other with that mysterious language.
When I was asked to put a series together at Duke this fall, saying thank you was all I could think about. How to nourish the lineage, honor the magic, spend time inside it? Not the gatekeepers who can’t sing, but the women like you who knock the doors right off the garden gate so everybody can come in to the table. So much goodness, so much kindness, so much hope given. How do I even begin to say thank you?
Remember that one time you dedicated Nick of Time to me at a concert? You probably don’t. You heard I had my daughter in the Nick of Time, and you knew exactly what I was risking to get her here. You know what it means because you have lived it. What you didn’t know is how that moment meant everything to me. I show up because you show up. Your work has made a difference in my life every day. Thank you.
Love, Tift
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