Listening to another person listen
A kitchen in Bellingen, NSW.
Winter 2021, all throughout the day.

I first fell in love with Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ not because of the song but because of how Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem about it shows us how a song can make the life it breaks. Maybe, do we find god inside of music not just because of the songs themselves but because of the sound of someone else who was listening climbing out the window of the song in amongst the sound of piano keys rising up like ghosts as we both step ourselves into its corridor? I was in love when I first read that poem.

Now, every time I’ve listened to Don’t Stop Believin’ since I still see the way I curved my hips around the corner of the kitchen bench of someone whose name I can no longer remember’s house out by that creek that smelt like children bruising their small pink knees for the very first time. What I found by listening to a podcast of someone reading Hanif’s poem about hearing the sound of his own life inside a Journey song.

Around that time, I made pumpkin pasta for dinner. I burnt the hell out of it but the person I was falling for said it tasted better that way. We talk of heartbreak, but, what if the feeling of breaking is the thing that makes one feel like they’re in love in the first place? I believe I listened to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ ten times in one day then told that person that I loved them for the first time later on that night. No wonder it didn’t work out. How could it? It was already written in the song.

In Hanif’s poem he says of Neal Schon’s guitar noise screeching through a gate of sound like a dog in pursuit of a wet ball that ‘I don’t know / how / many open windows a man has to climb out of in the middle of / the / night in order to have hands that can make anything scream / like / that.’

We talk like this of songs and those that play them but what about of those who listen to them? I once saw a person in the middle of a mosh pit at a crowded punk gig perfectly still, like the spirit in their belly was climbing out and drifting to the ceiling. Turns out, that person was myself.

What shape does Hanif’s face make now when he listens to a Journey song? What about yours and what about my own? What I’m saying is, sometimes, I’m convinced that when I’m listening to a song what it is I’m hearing is less the actual song and more the distant whisper of the noise of every single person who has ever listened to it with their eyes closed.

 
 

Stereo Story  876

Rosie Shute is a spoken-word performer, poet, lyric essayist, prose writer, visual artist and creative writing honours student at the University of Melbourne.