Written in response to this entry from author John Green’s podcast (and later book), The Anthropocene Reviewed:
Dear John,
I want to say thank you, first of all, for your work on The Anthropocene Reviewed. That podcast—and the book that it eventually became—has meant a lot to me, coming to me as it these things sometimes do at a difficult time in my life when I needed a gentle reminder that there is beauty to be found in wintery mix, and hope to be found in plague. These were things I already understood, but had allowed myself to lose sight of as I allowed by focus to become consumed by my own small problems. What truly surprised me was that somebody else had actually heard of the Palace Music song “New Partner,” which I had come to think of as almost impossibly obscure, given that none of the people with whom I’ve shared it over the last twenty-something years had ever encountered it before. As a person familiar with its particular wistful sort of magic, I hope you don’t mind if I share something of my own experience with the song.
I first heard “New Partner” as a sophomore in college, when a roommate brought home one of those burned compilation cds frequently sold for $5 at flea markets and independent record stores—the kind with the disc label written in sharpie and the ink-jet printed cover cut by hand from a letter-sized piece of paper. I remember enjoying several of the songs on that mix, but it was “New Partner” that immediately captured our attention, and for much of that fall it was in heavy rotation on the stereo in our stained and bottle-littered living room. I don’t remember learning to play it, but as it was built out of three simple chords it probably didn’t take terribly long to figure it out, even though that is exactly the sort of thing that has always been difficult for me as a musician. I do remember that it was one of very few songs I was brave enough to suggest incorporating into the repertoire of the band I was in at the time.
That’s the form in which “New Partner” became one of the threads keeping my continually aging self tied to the person I was in my late teens, the shapes of its harmonic bones embedded into my hands as its words have taken root in my voice. I haven’t actually heard the original Palace version in a decade or two, but I haven’t needed to. Not because my own rendition can compete with the one that Will Oldham recorded all those years ago; at this point I can’t honestly say whether I even have all the chords exactly right or remember the words as originally written. But songwriting has a magic of its own—one distinct from the miracle of performance—and a good song has a way of creating its own home within the limitations of your own meager abilities and taking you to that place whenever you play it. It feels as comfortable to sing “New Partner” as it does to settle into a well-loved sofa, and though I have many times gone years without playing it, it has always come right back to me any time that I have asked it to.
When I began hiking long-distance trails a few years ago, I found that I often needed something to work on, something engage my mind while my feet pounded out the endless miles. I picked up a 3lb “backpacker” guitar 500 miles into the Appalachian Trail and began a sort of half-assed tradition of playing it at particular milestones along the way. The songs I chose for these small celebrations were ones I had typically learned on trail, listening to them as I hiked and figuring out how to play them while noodling around in camp. In that way, they were meant to be representative of the experience they were being used to commemorate. It was a hard practice to maintain, as I frequently didn’t have the energy to pick up the instrument at the end of a long day on foot, but I managed to keep it up, if just barely, for both the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail.
It was while hiking the Continental Divide Trail, however, that things began to fall apart. Part of it may have been the fact that I was a handful of years further into my middle age than I had been on the previous hikes; a lot of it was definitely due to the this particular pathway’s infamously brutal terrain. The most rugged and least populated of what are known as the three “triple-crown” trails of “thru-hiking,” the CDT pushed, challenged, terrified, and broke me in ways that the others hadn’t, and it was a rare night that I didn’t collapse into my tent immediately after eating dinner. Most evenings I barely had the strength to thumb-type a few words into the diary I kept on my phone as I lay in my sleeping bag, let alone find a secluded corner of some mosquito-infested clearing and attempt to parse the harmony of an emotionally relevant song.
The tradition was dealt a further blow when I decided the that carrying the backpacking guitar through the high passes of Colorado was both unnecessarily difficult and unsafe and I sent the thing home. I replaced it the same day with a small plastic ukulele, which seems like a plausible substitute, but really only if you have the time and energy to learn an instrument that is only kinda sorta like the one you’re actually familiar with. I didn’t play anything when I hit the 1,000 mile mark, nor 1,500 miles, nor 2,000 miles; each of those markers passed with little (if any) fanfare of any kind. I was determined, however, not to let the final milestone of the trail slip by without a song to mark the occasion.
With the CDT’s northern terminus at the Canadian border looming on the near horizon, I came to accept that I would not, in fact, miraculously find the time to learn any of the many songs that had supported me as I’d trudged my way through deserts, mountains, bogs, meadows, snowfields, and forests. As I started to consider which of the songs I already knew might be appropriate, only one stood out as having the proper emotional weight: “New Partner.” I still can’t say exactly what it was about that melody that so perfectly seemed to fit the moment, but something about it’s melancholy hopefulness and the way it had lived inside me for so long felt like the right accompaniment to the end of my last triple-crown hike. As I sat awkwardly against the obelisk marking the trail’s end and strummed on an instrument that felt small and wrongly-shaped in my hands, “New Partner” felt like the only possible musical coda for the previous five months, even if I’d have been hard-pressed to explain exactly how.
The magic of a personally resonant song is fragile, as you’ve said. I hadn’t played “New Partner” for a long time before then, and I don’t know when I will play it again. Maybe I won’t: it’s entirely possible that that moment was so laden with emotional weight that in playing then I might have reduced the song to a mere sacred artifact instead of a living piece of art. That does happen. Either way, it’s fine. I’m just glad that the song was there when I needed it, as it had been for me many times before, as it had, indeed, been for you. I’m happy to know that “New Partner” continues to live a full life in the hearts of others besides the few of us who lived together in that squalid college apartment in the late 90s. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with it. I hope it continues to carry you as long as you need it to.
Sincerely,
Etc., etc.