In The Summertime

Top to Toe and a Dead Friend

Picture me writing this in Vermont with a sunburn usually only seen on very drunk men at the airport. I am radiating heat. I feel alive.

---

For the past 5 years I’ve had the same private goal: top “Top to Toe.” It’s the first song I ever wrote and released and has been sitting in first place as my most streamed song since the beginning of time (2016).

Like everything I owe anything to, we have a complicated relationship. On the one hand I’m still surprised and very grateful that its reception allowed me to keep releasing music — it was a catalyst without which I’m not sure what I’d be doing right now. (Probably not in this sun room, writing on a laptop I bought with the proceeds.)

On the other hand I find myself occasionally frustrated that, in the eyes of the Spotify algorithm, I peaked so soon. And yet.

When I think about the when and where (2013, in the garden behind my parents’ house) of writing Top to Toe, I’m reflexively sent back to the who and why. At the time I had a best friend, the kind of best friend you’re simultaneously scared of, jealous of and in love with (the girls will understand.) She was the ‘musical’ one in our school of 600, the only guitar-playing sheriff in town. I wonder if, in a larger school, I would have felt like there was room for two girls who played instruments and learned Tegan and Sara covers, but maybe not — her light was too bright, the shadow I perceived it cast on me too dark.

Eventually I confided in my mum, something I rarely did and should have done more because when I told her I was tired of wanting something I didn’t have, of wanting to do something I felt there wasn’t space for me to do, she made a call.

Before Steve was a friend of the family, he was the pianist in the bands Mungo Jerry (see ‘In The Summertime’) and Heron. When mum told him how I’d been feeling he suggested I come to his home studio and work on some recordings, which I did. I don’t remember what we recorded but I do remember a feeling of confident ease I’d heretofore thought reserved only for my friend. In the studio at the bottom of his garden, Steve gave me something invaluable and lasting. He gave me permission to be heard. Over the next couple of years I wrote the songs that would become my first album.

Last week, when mum texted me one of those scary parent texts — “I have to tell you something”, no emojis — I called her back, flipping through the rolodex of disasters she might be about to disclose.

I ravel and re-ravel a piece of loose thread on my pyjamas as I’m told that Steve passed away in the night, in a hospital bed with his family around him and how, after his heart stopped, a huge summer storm rolled in, the kind that brings you closer to understanding why people believe in God.

While she talks I realise that this isn’t the first time I’d thought about Steve recently. That the day before, walking past a clothing stall on Broadway, I’d seen a pair of trousers that made me say, in my head to myself, “Steve would like those trousers.” I don’t think of him often, I don’t even know if he would like those trousers, he just popped in and popped out and I kept walking.

The age has come where the people who made up the fabric of my childhood are starting to disappear. If I’m lucky I get to talk to them one last time, let them know I’ll miss them, thank them for being around. Steve doesn’t know that what he gave me when I was younger not only set me on the path I’m on but removed the feeling of competition from creativity. He doesn’t know that he allowed me to be the first person to think of myself the way I wanted to be seen. Or maybe he did — he knew that music became my work, I just hope he knew it was in no small part because of him.

I’m thinking of changing my goal. Maybe I don’t need to replace Top to Toe, to knock it off the top spot of my discography. It represents an essential time and shift — moving out of a place of wanting and into a place of having. I don’t believe that everything bad happens for a reason but I think all the good things do, and the leaving or ending of those things doesn’t undo them, just underlines a reason to remember.

The next single off my fourth record will come out soon and while it likely won’t eclipse what I’ve made before, it won’t compete with it either. It’ll join the collection of things I’ve made that I wanted to make. It’s a song about leaving, I was angry when I wrote it but I’m not anymore. The title is Thank You Sorry, and I mean it.

Here’s an early access peek at it. A treat for reading this far

And pre-save it now if you’re feeling particularly accommodating

---

This afternoon, driving through the Vermont countryside, I watched a heron lift itself from a riverbank and fly across the water. I thought about Steve. He may not have liked those trousers but he’d have liked that view.