The Bisbee Music Festival—Sidepony’s 11th year—felt like an underground party where Arizona’s hidden music scene collided with sounds from Seattle, New Mexico and beyond. Every venue felt like walking into the cool scene, bouncing from a dusty guitar riff to a one-man accordion show to a trampoline bassline.
After I get back, my son asked to listen to “We Built This City.” He wanted Starship and Journey, a welcome reprieve from the usual EDM which doesn’t grace my ears so much as interrupt my nervous system like an overzealous flea. I’m excited. My son is making music requests, and we’re starting with the big, bold sounds of ’70s rock. These songs feel like doors I’ve been waiting for him to open on his own.
I wondered, where had he even heard those songs? And why was I turning up the volume, belting out lyrics with him during what has been a particularly stressful month?
December always feels like a race— teaching students to engage in their own learning. It feels like rummaging through someone’s closet: “Look, you already have this here! It’s a great outfit! Try it on—oh, look, you’ve still got it!” I’m essentially advertising their own minds back to them, though sometimes they’re not interested. I wonder how to instill stamina—doing something hard for just five more minutes. Stretching, just a little at a time. Can rest be a stretch of the mind? Surely there’s a balance—a simpler tune, a quieter venue. Grunchy echoes of the festival lingered, more fantasies of getting out of this town.
When my son asked to listen to what I deem “good music”, I felt that bittersweet feeling of finally being able to relate to him and the ever-present realization that he is growing up. I felt a flicker of emotion that bridges generations, music we can almost understand, made in decades we didn’t live in, but heard a lot about. We are the products of wondering about them.
Starship wasn’t without its own drama. Their lead singer needed titanium plates in his skull after an altercation. Born from Jefferson Airplane, the band shares San Francisco’s fertile music grounds with Journey, delivering bold vocals and sweeping drama: empowering. There’s something dorky yet triumphant about singing with my kid. The songs feel like they carry dreams, you can almost taste them.
My favorite lyric from Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” has to be:
“Streetlights, people
Living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night.”
Followed by wordless vocalizing, itself stretching out the hope that only youth can see. There’s something so mundane yet profound about a streetlamp. A banal necessity-turned beacon of hope. The cold night, made colder by its own silence, draws out the warmth of that solitary light. It cracks me up that “streetlight” is the word sung at the climax of the song. It could have been anything—sunshine, window, curtain—but it wasn’t. It was streetlights.
Like a flickering, dimming street light in the night, music and moments with my son illuminate the every day, turning commutes into something warming, and profound. My son asked me the other day, “What would my name be if my name wasn’t my name?” I thought it was a good question, and said so. It took me back to the five days it took me to name him in the first place, coming home with a “baby boy” bracelet around my arm, the nameless child, warm-butter soft. It’s been a hard season. I feel sadness in the soles of my shoes, something I keep tasting like port’s berry sweetness, trying to parse it out: Is it disappointment? Hopelessness? Faithlessness? Could there be a sweetness to despair? Whatever it is, I don’t seem comfortable just being plain old streetlight sad.
His question lingered, a reminder that names, like songs, carry stories. The questions I heard between the lines: What story does my name tell? And does it still apply after these ten years? A name, the thread trailing behind us our whole life, no matter what happens in between.
Next, he offers a statement: “Nature is so symmetrical.” He’s right. Some trees look mechanical, their bark patterned like something replicated over and over again. The math of trees contemplated, adding up to another day, shaking the sadness out like sand. Walking another mile, gathering more, I consider what the song title begs us to ponder: the cycle of believing, and what may stop and start it, one street light at a time.
