I’m not sure how the song found a place on blank Sony CD-R, track #1. I was only two years old when T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul” reached #4 on The Billboard Hot 100, too young for Pepe Jeans. Growing up, my favorite babysitter was Vh1, so I had a stronghold on many one hit wonders from the 1980s, reciting information I had learned from Behind the Music and Pop-Up Video. Still, this particular 1987 hit escaped me.
It must have come from one of my roommate’s playlists because I had never heard it before. In 2010, my roommate was one of my best friends from college. I remember asking, “Who’s this?” My roommate answered, “T’Pau,” and I thought she was making a sound effect. She was very very very: cool, beautiful, thin, tall. When we lived together, we liked to shuffle through our iTunes playlists while getting ready to go to the bars each night, fourth street, Long Beach, always ending at The Red Room looking for a story. She made a great playlist: radio hip-hop, LCD Soundsystem, something 80s, Sublime followed by Amy Winehouse. Hearing “Heart and Soul” for the first time in 2010, in a break perhaps between pulls of spiked energy drinks or curling my hair, when I was in my twenties and clueless, is all part of its magic. The song must have traveled from her playlist to one of my playlists to a burned CD with no title.

In 2010, I graduated from an MFA program. I was trying to be a writer, but I spent most of my time working: as a waitress and a writing tutor. The restaurant money was good and dependable because I was a hustler, and I did what I needed to make the money good and dependable. The tutoring was temporary. Despite my aspirations, there were no immediate openings for English instructors. During graduate school, we had a professional development talk with a tenured, community college writing professor who explained to us his theory of “a great, big window,” how it was going to open soon, and we would all land teaching careers once it did. He went over to the window in the classroom and opened it, for good measure. The tenured professor said, “Be patient, keep writing.” I was often told I had stamina, determination, heart.
A friend from the MFA program was a youth gymnastics coach, and she was looking for a ballet instructor because all her girls had bad feet. I had danced seriously as a young girl and kept taking classes as college electives before I switched my focus to creative writing. I didn’t feel connected to dancing anymore, but I liked teaching, and more importantly, I needed the money. I thought this could be a good plan while waiting for that window to crack. I remember my professors talking about having a full hand to work with—which meant, find things you can do to earn money that don’t kill you. I was unqualified to teach those kids ballet, but I did for $20 an hour—great money at that time. It was my third job: tutoring, waiting tables, teaching ballet. All the creative people I knew and read about had struggled, so it felt like another step toward the life I had envisioned. I was hopeful it would all grow into something more. 

“Heart and Soul” starts cinematic—like many pop songs from the 1980s—and it’s almost ten seconds of ambient sound before any music begins. A sunrise, a dial tone, an overture—imagine stage curtains peeling apart before presenting a tableau: big hair, electric instruments, fog machine, a duo. The ethereal sound makes me want to jump into my car and go places: the 22, the 405, the 605, the 91. An open road, no traffic. Synthetic beats tumbling in the first minute like a blinker. Forty whole seconds to change your life before a single word is delivered.
The duo in this scene are Carol Decker and Ronnie Rogers, former couple, cowriters, and collaborators from Shrewsbury, Shropshire England. Their band name, T’Pau, is borrowed from an obscure Star Trek reference, a Vulcan Elder who led a rebellion and refused a seat in interstellar government. Fandom websites describe the character of T’Pau as logical and ruthless. She’s a philosopher. The name feels intentional because if it were just about Star Trek, they might have called themselves Spock. With this allusion, it’s no surprise the music feels so otherworldly.

I listened to that CD as I drove to Fullerton two times a week to teach ballet. I didn’t want to be a regular dance teacher using Classical Piano Favorites, so I brought my own CDs to class. In the car, I marked combinations for my student’s barre work with my arms and hands as legs and feet, exercises that the girls hated even though they helped with technique during their floor routines.
“Heart and Soul” has a perfect four-count beat, one that can stay on tempo for rond de jambes, or jump to double time during dégagé. The vocals match the charge: Carol Decker rapping lyrics at double speed, while harmonizing melodies with herself in the background on tempo. Two songs in one—useful for a dancer and her choreography. Often our combinations were a quick quick, slow movement. Or the opposite: slow, quick quick. This kind of movement feels the best because the exercise practices two speeds, targeting different muscle groups with different applications of effort. Going slow reinforces technique and placement. Quick is when the power happens. Those two things together again and again and again equals endurance.
There’s an image stamped in my memory of the gymnasts practicing their tendus to this song. The barre wrapped around the studio with mirrors in the front of the room. A box of crushed resin—so we wouldn’t slip on the hardwood—by the speaker system, three disk changer, my iTunes burned CDs in each slot. I’m standing in the front of the room by the mirror, in my junk clothes (dance warm-ups) with a large Starbucks coffee in hand, shouting 5, 6, 7, 8. The gymnasts stood feet away from each other, lining the room, legs pointing in and out and in and out, their bodies in the mirror, all of it a mirror for my youth. Do you keep the secret left untold?
     I was supposed to be someone else in this scene: a college graduate with her life together. Hard on the heels of something more. If I look close enough, I can feel the desperation seeping from each barre exercise. “Heart and Soul” is a playful pop song, but the background vocals scream something darker. I was teaching ballet, I was begging for more. I was hungover and tired, rolling from bed and teaching in my pajamas. The Starbucks coffee purchased from a gift card. I didn’t know what I was doing. My dancers were miserable. Give me a sign / I need to know.

When I read Carol Decker’s lyrics today, it’s clear they are about a romantic relationship, and those signs had something to do with unrequited love or a lover gone, staples for pop music. Like most people amid a personal crisis, I interpreted the lyrics my way. Love was a synonym for life in this equation, for finding my way.
My favorite bit of Decker’s spoken word happens in the second verse: I used to have a lover with a Midas touch / I turned to gold but he turned to dust. When Decker raps the word, Midas, her voice lightens, accentuating the name. I thought if I repeated the word Midas along with her like a prayer, holding the chain of a gold necklace while driving under a tunnel, slapping my palm on the roof of my car after accidentally running a red light, that fortune might find me. According to Genius, Decker sings an unheard, overlaid vocal in the background of this moment: But miracles are not happening. Nothing I touched turned to gold, even if I willed it. I knew the mythology and daydreamed of success while I drove to Fullerton. The paychecks from teaching ballet were never more than $100: groceries and the cable bill and $1 beers at The Red Room.
Arguably, the strangest part of the song is the bridge where Decker chants:

Somehow I lost my way
Looking to see something in your eyes
But love would never compromise
And this is the politics of life, yeah!

She shouts the last line, a cry that I imagined made the veins in her neck visible on stage. In the music video, all one can see is superimposed images of her fire-red permed hair against the shadow replay of metal bars, from a staircase or a wall or a window. She’s frantic, and it doesn’t match the rest of the quick quick, slow song beat. In ballet class, we would pause here, or I’d start the track over and return to the four-counts. In a choreographed dance, this might be the fouetté solo, the grand jete. In karaoke, the drunkest person on stage would overlap her mouth on the microphone, the sound would cause the speakers to clap.
In 2010, in Long Beach, on fourth street with my iPhone playing “Heart and Soul” as I walked home from the bars, I understood the politics of life to mean it doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how much you put into to something: money, time, energy, friendship. Nothing was guaranteed. There was no window. I stumbled home without a map, a 2am meal of salsa on the lettuce in my fridge that I called salad. I offered to close the restaurant for a free shift meal every time I worked. I promised to spend one day a week working on my writing. I promised to not be discouraged by the rejections, even the one that was the smaller than a business card inside a letter-sized SASE. I swore I wouldn’t always be a waitress.
What did Carol Decker—the philosopher—mean by politics of life? She was dating her bandmate Ronnie Rogers at the time, in a secure love when she wrote the lyrics, and Wikipedia mythology claims that she fictionalized an idea that he didn’t love her back after spending some time on vacation without him. Lost and lovelorn, I understood that feeling, but I wasn’t aching for anyone else when I listened to “Heart and Soul.” I wanted my own life to start. In every chorus, Decker uses the word grow: Give me a little bit of love to grow. Nothing is instant. It takes time, patience. I knew it would be a process.

So much fell apart after grad school. A drunk argument led to a disagreement that my roommate and I never got over. Something I can’t remember the details to today, though the loss of that friendship still haunts me, and now that I’m wiser, I recognize my faults in it. I moved out on my own, and the rent increase meant I needed even more jobs. I sold a lot of clothing at Buffalo Exchange and picked up every shift on HotSchedules. I was still at the bars on fourth until last call, hungry for cheap drinks and fast friends, street burritos leaking onto thrifted cowboy boots as I walked home, a tiny part of myself lying that this was living. Living in a fantasy / Never any room to breathe.
Two years like that—more heart and soul than I had imagined, getting no more than an inch closer to where I wanted to be. A former professor encouraged my application to PhD programs, and when one in West Texas sent an acceptance, I graciously left Long Beach behind to close the cycle. By then, technology had advanced, and we could sync our phones to our cars to listen to playlists without a CD. I uploaded a small fraction of the music from my computer’s iTunes to my phone application as I made the drive two states over, my belongings in the backseat, California in my rearview—no T’Pau as the song was marked by my former friend. Eventually, everyone was listening to music on Spotify, and the song became a memory, tucked under the passenger seat of my car in a binder of CDs, a fine layer of dust settling.
The last time I visited The Red Room before it permanently closed, everyone was so wasted that it felt like I had landed on a different planet. I took one shot and left quickly: to good times. This year, the building was bought by a well-off couple from Los Angeles, and while they kept the bones for its new concept, the walls are no longer red, and they removed the metal bars from all the windows.

Carol Decker continues to write, perform, and record under the name T’Pau, releasing a full album most recently in 2015 with her old pal Ronnie Rogers titled Pleasure and Pain—their first album in the top 100 since their debut, sneaking onto the list at #98. In 2016, new listeners were exposed to “Heart and Soul” when it was used in an episode of the British science fiction anthology Black Mirror on Netflix. The song plays as main character Yorkie gets ready to go out to the bars in titular “San Junipero,” a time traveling simulation designed for the elderly, the ill, or the deceased to peacefully exist in their previous years. Despite the lasting celebration of “Heart and Soul” and T'Pau’s other marginal hits from their debut album Bridge of Spies, there have been interviews where Decker has vocalized her frustration with a lack of radio play for her new music, being pigeonholed into an 80s artist even though she’s steadily released new music and toured in the three decades since then. On November 4th, 2022, Decker shared a new single to streaming services appropriately titled, “World on Fire.” While her passion remains consistent, the song was not a hit.

It took days for me to find it: driving city streets feeding CDs into the mouth on my car’s brain from an ancient binder that now lived in my trunk. I was shocked I didn’t hear those forty seconds of ethereal noise on any of the CDs marked Ballet Class, three separate disks full of Sigur Ros, Radiohead, and Elliott Smith. Not a single Sharpie marking on the front, only a U-shape of yellowing from where it must have sat in the CD holder that was velcro’ed to my driver’s side sun visor. The only way I can listen a CD now is in my car, born in 2012, the year I started my PhD, two years after the MFA, quick quick slow. My car is considered a fossil, but I have good mileage, no payments, two jobs. At least one is teaching creative writing to college students, a window broken or disregarded. I’m still waiting. Like Decker, I haven’t given up yet.
What happens at the barre is preparation for everything that happens after. For most dancers, it’s the worst part of class: endless repetition and correction and starting over before the real work begins. In English, rond de jambe translates into a circle of the leg. In ballet class, we trace the circle first with a tendu to the front, side, back. Tendu means stretched, those exercises essentially a practice. A little bit. A little bit.

Katrina Prow lives and writes in Santa Maria, California. Her writing has recently appeared in The Boston Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, decomP, The Journal, Pithead Chapel, Redivider, Passages North, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing, Fiction from Texas Tech University, and she currently teaches Creative Writing at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Outside of academia, Katrina is completing a novel about the restaurant industry after many, many years in hospitality. Her writing has been supported by residencies at Yaddo and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. More information about her writing can be found at katprow.com