What a Song Doesn't Say

There is a version of listening that goes past the words.

Most people hear lyrics. They hear melody, rhythm, the shape of a voice. That's the song. That's what it's meant to give you. But sometimes - not always, not with every song - there's something else living underneath all of that. A frequency the words are circling without ever quite landing on. Most people don't go looking for it. I can't seem to stop.

There was a specific melody that became the first frequency I took into the world publicly. There was one before it that stays private - that one belongs to a single person and always will. This one I opened up and followed all the way down, past the surface of what it was saying, into what I heard underneath. Something about a person who keeps leaving. Not because they don't feel things deeply enough to stay - because leaving had always been the easier answer. And somewhere in that frequency I found Jude.

Jude Hale built his life on music and control - the kind of man who knows exactly how to hold an audience and far less about how to hold the people who love him. For years Wren loved him inside that world anyway. Until she didn't. Until the silence she left behind was louder than any crowd he'd ever faced.

439 pages. One winter. Complete sympathy for a man who kept choosing wrong.

That's the thing about living inside a character - it doesn't require them to be easy. It only requires you to stay with them long enough to see why they keep choosing the harder thing. I never stopped being on his side. The work asked me not to. And when it was done I felt something I hadn't expected - the particular grief of releasing someone you've spent that long understanding. Jude doesn't belong only to me anymore. That's what publishing is. An act of letting go dressed up as an announcement.

But the door the song opened didn't close when the book did.

The writing kept moving. Into new rooms, new centuries, new territory I've never touched before. There's another song underneath something I'm building now - and I've never written anything like it. Which is exactly why it feels necessary.

This is what I think about when artists put work into the world. They release it without knowing where it goes. Without knowing whose hands it will land in, whose silence it might break, whose dormant dream it might quietly awaken - without ever intending to, without ever knowing it happened. That's the nature of it. You make the thing and you let it go and somewhere out there it becomes something you never anticipated.

Sometimes, if you're very lucky, you get to tell them.

I'm still learning what a song can hold.

— SL