entering the locked room: brooke white on lucy dacus’s “dancing in the dark”
In the years after my parents’ divorce, my dad blasted Bruce Springsteen through the house. My mother moved to an apartment and took little with her. She didn’t want to squabble over decorations or leave gaping holes in our home. And the house was suspended in time, unable to let go of what it’d once been, though her ornate furniture looked increasingly out of place beside Dad’s gargantuan TV and football shaped beer glasses. Springsteen rang through the halls as he listened to the same album on repeat.
The album he favored flaunts Springsteen’s blue jeans with a wallet in the back pocket wearing a patch through the denim. Above that iconic ass sits a studded leather belt and a billowy white shirt framed by broad red stripes and BORN IN THE U.S.A. in federal blue. Springsteen’s voice is raspy. The synth is a pulsing anthem. The drums and crashing cymbal are knees knocking on the dance floor while Springsteen yells “Man, I ain’t getting nowhere,” his voice wavering like a trembling lower lip weak from long hours of holding back. The guitar is his over-eager backup singer, and those drums and cymbal never, not for a second, falter, lest we feel the weight of his words and stop dancing. We cannot, under any circumstances, let ourselves stop dancing.
When I started singing along to the chorus my dad seemed worried, the same way he lowered the volume on the Toby Keith song about one night stands and asked if I knew what it meant. My dad and I don’t share many common interests, and this was the one Springsteen song I could stand. Springsteen’s voice was so like my father’s I tended to tune it out, only listening when he sang “dancing in the dark,” closing my eyes and imagining a couple twirling.
Then, as I edged closer to thirty and the third year of my graduate program, the heaviest I’d ever been, my hair a collage of dead ends, my thesis a mess of half-starts and second-guessing, I heard the song again. In Lucy Dacus’s version I found this lyric for the first time, “I’m sick of sitting around here trying to write this book,” and I decided to really listen.
A guitar tentatively enters the song like a lanky guy with his hands deep in his pockets, his feet leading the way while his head bobs. And then Dacus sings Bruce’s story and it becomes hers, and it becomes mine, too.
Dacus said her dad is the biggest Springsteen fan she knows, that she has been listening to The Boss since she was born though it took time for her to appreciate his music. I understand. Just like my father, his favorite song felt like a locked room. With her cover, Dacus opened a window and waved for me to follow her in. I crawled inside and made myself at home. Listening to her cover of “Dancing in the Dark” was the first time I absorbed the lyrics, and it felt like I was really hearing my dad—like all my heartbreaks and disappointments were speaking to his in a way we would never talk about these things otherwise.
Still, I can’t decide whether this is the kind of song one sings to themselves when they’re roaming the house alone at night to escape silence, or if it’s the kind you sing to someone. The song seems much too honest to be shared. I have never been so vulnerable with someone. Never. I’ve been honest, sure. But you can be honest in a sexy way. You can talk about how sad you are and make someone laugh at the words you’ve used.
Dacus isn’t playing those games. In the original “Dancing in the Dark” we’re greeted by jaunty up-tempo synthesizer riffs, never forced to sit with any of the uncomfortable bits for longer than we want to. The way Dacus begins is quieter, accompanied by a hushed guitar and clacking drumsticks, it’s as if just before recording started she turned to the room and said hey, I need to get something off my chest. You can hear every catch of her breath.
I listen, and in her voice I hear my depression naps and late mornings. She sings about a heavy tiredness, like a pilled hand-me-down hanging off my arms, the way I wear my mother’s sweatshirts with the frayed collar. She sings about looking for messages in the lyrics, and you know by now that I’m guilty of that too. She sings about the sure sensation that everyone else is off living their lives with a joyous effervescence which evades me. When she sings, her voice is loud and I yell to top it, “I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face / I ain’t gettin nowhere, living in a dump like this!” I turn the volume down on my phone and angle my face toward the ceiling, hoping I don’t disturb the neighbors and half hoping they hear me. I cut my hair, dye it pink, dye it purple, buy a new pair of jeans with money I shouldn’t be spending, but much to my chagrin, I’m still me. The aftertaste of Dacus’s words is delicious, it’s a sadness which has not quite reached defeat, it’s kicking and screaming, on fire with a desperation to reach out and be saved.
Dacus sings that she’s starving, and I realize I am too. And she’s right, sometimes, all it takes is one look to fill you up, at least, for a little while. I linger by the windows in my apartment. I scroll through social media. How long have I been this hungry? It’s not thirst, it’s hunger—this feeling I’ve got, it has teeth. It wants to bite into something and rip it apart, chew on it a while until it softens, then push it way deep down.
If this song was a record, the needle would’ve traversed the same groove so many times it’d look like the path I’ve paced across the rug in my room. I listen and feel as if I’ve lost something fundamental. I keep searching for that missing part of myself in other people, like those doomed half-selves in the Greek myth about love, which come to think of it, might be the origin story for this hollow feeling, or an explanation of how it’s possible to miss what we’ve never had. The more I listen, the more I realize that in this song what both Bruce and Lucy want is for someone to make them feel special. They are completely unable to love themselves without the proper encouragement from someone else. That’s something else we have in common.
Allow me to provide you with a list of people I have fallen a little in love with, who I have never told of my affections:
The boy on the bus
The girl on the train
That guy on the cruise
The tour guide
Unnamed partygoer #1
Club dancers #1, 2, 3
My dance partner
My barista
Neighbors
Coworkers
Classmates
Teachers
Friends
My friends’ exes
My friend’s sibling
Someone in every country I’ve ever visited
Someone on every street I’ve walked
Lucy and Bruce sing “You can’t start a fire without a spark,” and I wonder, what does it mean to use someone else to light your fire?
I tell my therapist about my little problem. I tell her that I obsess over people I respect, doing everything I can to impress them. I have this habit of saying the proper thing first, and the truer thing second, so I tell her that I gravitate toward people who are sarcastic, then add, “men who make me feel like shit.” I feel she is not understanding me so I say in no uncertain terms, “I want everyone to be in love with me.”
She doesn’t question the impulse. Instead, she asks, “What would that mean for you?”
“I wouldn’t have to wonder if I’m a good person, cared for…” my voice gets smaller and I look away. I usually shrink under direct eye contact, the only time I don’t do this, I realize, is when I’m flirting. When she speaks again, I look up.
“Over time, your brain learns that the people who are supposed to love and support you aren’t doing that, and you look elsewhere,” she says. She gestures broadly to my past.
We deduce two things. First, that I seek validation from people who seem like they’ll be hard to win over. Second, since these folks are not aware of the constraints I’ve set out to overcome, the validation is not really coming from them. Here’s where she drops one of those brain doctor truth bombs which is this: the validation, ultimately, is from me, like a present with a pretty little bow and a tag which reads to: me from: me. The validation is hollow. It’s like I open up that present only to find the shadows of my fabrications.
You see the problem, right? You’re connecting the dots much more quickly than I did. It took me years to understand. I couldn’t trust that anyone loved me any more than what they thought they knew about me, or that they’d find any value in me beyond what they assumed I’d let them do to me.
Was it possible for me to be my own spark?
The only time I have truly danced in the dark was on a summer night in Minneapolis. My childhood friend was visiting to celebrate my recent graduation, and to mark the occasion, she treated me to dinner and drinks at a restaurant beside the stone arch bridge. The sunset settled into a soft, dark violet. We wandered the stone streets beside the bridge and listened to music wafting from her phone. When we reached a landing between two flights of stairs, I spun in circles with my arms outstretched and sang in my tipsy, screechy voice. I danced because I wanted to, because I was happy and liked the song. Because I was proud of myself for finishing my book, because the night was warm. Because I’d left home and made a life for myself in a new city. Because I would do so again.
I was feeling the way I do when Dacus’s voice rises at the end of her rendition of “Dancing in the Dark.” If I’m in a car, it’s mandatory that I roll down the window and shout into the wind. This is when the drums and the guitar reach a frenzy, when what felt like a message to an admirer becomes a declaration of self. Whereas the last sound in the original song is a crooning seductive saxophone, this cover ends with a rattling tambourine, then the amp hums like it’s bashful because it didn’t mean to say quite so much, it sounds flushed and vulnerable, but happy. That’s how I was feeling.
I was feeling a little in love with myself.
My friend laughed and joined in my spinning. We danced and danced and danced in the deepening dark.
Brooke White is a Michigander with a penchant for prose and long conversations. Winner of the Hopwood Committee’s Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship for nonfiction, her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Swamp Ape Review, Entropy, Iron Horse Literary Review, and as Lunch Ticket’s “Amuse-Bouche” feature. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She’s currently at work on a book of literary nonfiction about desire, transformations, and fairy tales. Her latest ponderings and delights can be found on Instagram and Twitter @brkthewriter