round 2

(10) Sarah McLachlan, “Dear God”
dried up
(2) k.d. lang, “Crying”
208-189
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/22.

sheila squillante on k. d. lang’s “crying”

For most of my life, I was terrified to sing out loud. I thought—no, I knew—I had a terrible voice. My mother couldn’t carry a tune, and I was sure I was just like her. She sang to me often as a child, but instead of soothing me, as was certainly her intention, it made me uncomfortable. Her lullabies were Irish rebel songs, dirges about men in damp prisons, awaiting their deaths by hanging in the morning, but that wasn’t the most uncomfortable part. It was her delivery. She a low, raspy smoker’s voice and would sort of speak-sing them. I can remember cringing to hear the unnatural drop off at the end of a phrase, the way students sometimes read poems, followed by a quick, short intake of breath before starting the next. Like a hiccup or a gasp for more air. A clipping of wings for birds that should soar. Later, she’d let her erratic lead foot push the car to accelerate, then take it off and let it glide until she needed more speed. Down, up and then back to the floor. These were the days of too much to drink. Of choosing between two bottles of red wine before bed or else crying herself to sleep after her marriage to my father disintegrated and then he died. The years of her driving her car onto neighbor’s lawns, somehow not killing herself or someone else. For a long time, we swam away from each other on opposite currents. But when my kids were born, she got sober and we floated back to one another. It was more complicated than that, but it was enough. She died of lung cancer nine months ago.

*

In the 80s and early 90s when she was a rising and then established star, I wasn’t really aware of the music of Canadian country singer k.d. lang. I was busy being a fawning girlfriend and then a voiceless wife to a swaggering, smart guy who turned off whatever I happened to be listening to, and blasted Metallica and Ministry from the flimsy speakers in the drab brown living room of our sad, drab duplex in Naugatuck, Connecticut. After he left me—an utter obliteration—I worked as a nanny for a lesbian couple whose kids loved me, who became my family, who, in my mother’s absence, helped me put myself back together. I would do their laundry sometimes, folding soft linen shirts and skirts into piles on the dining room table, and wonder who I was. I had just started feeling drawn to women’s bodies. Their hips, ample like my own, I found especially distracting. Later, a lesbian grad school professor of mine would say “like attracts like,” as an explanation for why she always fell for swaggering, smart Butches. In the 80s and 90s, was there a more famous Butch lesbian than k.d. lang?

*

Before my thirties, there is only one time I sang intentionally, by myself, in front of other people. It was 1988 and I was auditioning for the part of Glinda the Good Witch in my high school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. I sang two or three verses of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” into the awful spotlight of the mostly empty auditorium, knowing my teachers and classmates were looking at me, and worse, listening to me. I felt like I would faint or throw up. After, an ex-boyfriend who was a musician, approached me and said, “I didn’t know you could sing.” I didn’t believe him. I was sure he had misheard me.

*

In 1988, k.d. lang appeared onstage on the program Top of the Pops with Rock legend, Roy Orbison, to perform his 1961 hit, “Crying.” Having heard her early work and been impressed, Orbison invited the twenty-seven-year-old lang to record a duet of the song the previous year, thus securing her status as both icon and iconoclast in the Country and Pop music landscape for at least the next decade.
For me, the decade that followed my terrifying live audition (I didn’t land the part of Glinda but was instead cast as Munchkin Number 2. I declined.), included a marriage and a divorce and a graduate degree and a reinvention of myself. I wouldn’t go so far to say iconoclast here, but I did what I could to undo many of the things I had once believed in for and about myself. I pawned my diamond engagement ring for almost no money and loved the dark symbolism of that. I dropped my wedding dress off at a Goodwill in New Haven. I fought a judge for over a year to get my last name back. I became a feminist. I got a tattoo. I kissed the lips of a girl with hips like mine.

*

Roy Orbison had an angel’s voice. Routinely, when we listen to his music at home, my husband and I marvel at the clarity of the tone, the smooth, delicious, pitch-perfect richness of that great man’s talent. If you’ve ever watched videos of Orbison singing, you know that even when he hits those highest, most out-of-the-reach-of-mortals notes, his face shows no strain. He simply opens his mouth and the notes soar out and up, up as if on the wing. He was an astonishing, singular talent, that is not to be denied. And “Crying” is as classic a song as we have in our American songbook. It’s a ballad of love and lament for what’s been lost. Imagine you are a person who runs into an old love, someone who has left and gone on to make a new life, maybe with someone new. You exchange pleasantries—hello, how are you, it’s been so long—and you think, with relief, Okay, I got this. I am over this person. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Or, at least, it doesn’t hurt the same. And then, in parting, you find your hand held tightly in friendship and well wishes and nostalgia and goodbye, and suddenly it all falls apart and you find yourself crying. Alone and crying.
Science calls this phenomenon frisson. It’s basically a physical reaction to intense stimuli— emotional feeling or experience. It’s the same autonomic nervous response as what happens when we get goose bumps or chills from the touch of a someone we love or find sexually attractive. A spark in the skin that ignites a dopamine fire. Frisson is also sometimes referred to as a “skin orgasm” because of the waves of pleasure that wash over the person experiencing it.
If you’ve ever felt chills while looking at visual art or listening to music, then you’ve experienced frisson. Not everyone does. Some studies suggest as few as 50% of us have nervous systems wired for it. I’m one of the lucky people who do, given the right music, the right voice. Here are some songs that elicit frisson in me: “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” by Blue Oyster Cult, “Oh Holy Night,” the traditional Christmas hymn, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin but only as performed by Ann Wilson of Heart at the Kennedy Center, “When Doves Cry,” by Prince, and Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” as performed by k.d. lang.
After listening to lang sing “Crying” a bunch of times for this essay, and experiencing those waves of pleasure, I wondered if I would have the same reaction to hearing Orbison’s version. I feel certain that his voice has elicited this response in me in the past, but I wasn’t sure. I had to test it. So, I conducted a Very Scientific Experiment. The table below presents data that tracks my heart rate (I wore my Apple watch) and tallies the number of chills I got while listening to the same song sung by the two vocalists. My method: listen to three different recordings by Orbison, followed by the famous Orbison/lang duet, and then three different recordings by lang, all of which I found on YouTube. I kept my eyes closed during the listening so that my data wouldn’t be skewed by visual stimuli.

The results surprised me. I would have expected Orbison to rate higher, and even though I wasn’t shocked to see lang pull it out as clear winner in terms of quantity of chills given, I really thought MTV’s stripped down version would come out ahead of the Kennedy center’s more orchestral performance, because I really don’t love all that over production. But then again, it might be the very presence of that sweeping instrumentation that gave it the edge. According to the article “Have You Ever Had a Skin Orgasm? By Ainsley Hawthorne, PhD in Psychology Today, “the features that most commonly induce frisson are ones that violate our expectations, like crescendos, the onset of unexpected harmonies, the entrance of a human voice, or affecting lyrics.” So, maybe flutes, too? I don’t know what’s going on with my heart rate here, because many times I could feel my face blush while listening, but the numbers didn’t show an appreciable increase. Though interestingly it looks like where lang’s Kennedy Center “Crying” puts me into a state of clear ecstasy, Orbison’s studio version calms me down. I should also note that I listened to these in the sequence they appear here, and with no down time in between, so that by the time I got to the final version, I was having the odd sensation of feeling like the chills were there, but I couldn’t quite feel them. Like they were dulled by…overuse? How many times can one experience this sort of euphoria before becoming a little spent?
Well, this has gotten steamier than I expected it to at the start of my little experiment. Let’s leave it at this: 1990s lang, with her sharp suits and sharper jaw, close-cropped hair, skin like moonlight, and, oh yes, swagger, looks nothing like me, but frisson doesn’t lie. The hypothalamus wants what it wants.

*

Alcohol abuse damages several parts of the brain including the cerebellum, which is responsible for the motor coordination and reflex action that would have helped my mother not drive her car onto neighbor’s lawn, and the limbic system, which controls our emotions. At my mother’s (fully-vaxxed) memorial at the Jersey Shore this past summer, we, her daughters, sat under a canopy among her many brothers, cousins, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren. That is to say, my children. The past year of anticipating a death that was hard on all of us, was hardest of all on my daughter who had an especially close relationship with my mother. When my daughter was born my mother got sober, finally, and for good. That was fourteen years ago. Fourteen years of healing and largely normal, healthy (if not always positive) emotional response. My daughter studies voice at a performing arts high school here in Pittsburgh. She is a Singer. She loves to be in the spotlight, on the stage. This is her identity in the same way that I am a Writer. When she saw my mother’s casket at the church, she let out an involuntary wail that shook every heart in that building. I wailed too, but quietly, into my husband’s shoulder, into myself. She opened her throat and screamed her pain out. After the service, under the canopy, my mother’s cousins gently cared for my daughter. They held and rocked her and told her how much she is loved. They asked her to sing, so she stood in the center and sang “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. We all cried. How could you not? I had gone to get a piece of cake and talk to a cousin, when behind me, under the same canopy, another powerful voice erupted in a different song,

In a dreary Brixton prison/where an Irish rebel lay…

and I stood, mute with shock, and listened. These were the words to the dirge, the lullaby my mother would sing to me as a small child, the one that filled me with discomfort and embarrassment for her and caused me to silence my own song for much of my life. I had never head them sung by anyone else.

By his side a priest was standing/’ere his soul should pass away…

My mother’s older brother, Tommy, sang “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland,” with sad, clear tones that lifted and soared up, up through the top of the canopy and out over the Atlantic Ocean, and I cried and felt love and shame and regret and relief for the fourteen years we had.

*

In grad school, in Kim’s kitchen, we cooked tuna burgers out of a Martha Stuart cookbook and laughed at how outrageously expensive they were. Chaka Khan spun in the CD player and we sang along. In her car, on the way to somewhere, we had the windows down and the Indigo Girls on. I must have forgotten myself, the way you can with great music, because I still, at this point in early 2000s, only let myself hum along to songs when I was with other people. I still felt embarrassed about my voice. I skipped out on karaoke night every time. I only know I was actually singing in the car because I got all tied into knots trying to navigate the sonic complexity of those songs, trying, as one does, to sing both melody and harmony at the same time, and ended up laughing and saying something like, “Oh god that was awful. I can’t sing!” And then Kim, who has a beautiful singing voice, said the thing that changed my self-perception for the rest of my life: “Of course you can. You have a voice like k.d. lang’s.”
I knew my friend did not mean that I could sing like k.d. lang. She meant that, like, lang, my voice sounds comfortable in the lower range. Lang is actually a mezzo-soprano—as is my daughter—but I cannot hit those high notes.
Five years after this moment in the car with my friend who had no idea the gift she had just given me, the damage she’d just undone, I would find myself in a darkened nursery, rocking my infant son to sleep, singing “Here Comes the Sun,” singing,” Rudi Can’t Fail,” singing, as I would also to my daughter two years later, every verse of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” brightly and with something close to confidence, but also dolce, dolce, so as not to wake them, as mothers do.

*

The month before she died, I sat next to my mother on the white leather couch in her southern Florida living room. Cancer had made her so small she had almost disappeared, and she knew she was going to die very soon. She told me she was ready for it. We had spent severa weeks over Zoom together earlier in the year, before she lost so much of her cognition. “I want you to interview me about my life,” she said. “I have some things I want to say.” So, we moved through her seventy years, one decade at a time. I felt anxious as we approached the 1990s—those were some of my darkest years. My father died. My marriage died. My relationship with my mother ached from the strain of her alcoholism, my resentment and our total misunderstanding of each other as people. What would she say about all of that? What would I?
It turned out, we said nothing about those most defining moments of my life. Her memories of the 90s looked different. They were filled with the stuff of her life and that’s what she wanted to talk about. It made sense, finally. We were, and always had been, separate people whose lives intersected irregularly. This sounds lonely, but I don’t mean it to. Maybe it’s how mothers and daughters should be after a time. Both of us moving forward on our own journey, both stranger and familiar to one another, waving and smiling as we pass on the way.
She was done talking now. Tired, often confused and already beginning to transition to the next realm. I pulled out my phone and opened YouTube. I wanted to make things easier for her. Softer. I thought we’d listen to some music to pass the time, so I cued up Simon and Garfunkel, a favorite of hers for my whole life. “Mrs. Robinson” played from my tinny phone speaker and I started to sing to my mother and my mother sang every word with me. An unexpected harmony. I cried, knowing that soon I would lose her, that I’d be standing alone, as we all do, in my grief. I cried. I’m still crying.
But I’m so glad we sang.

Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist living in Pittsburgh, and the director of the MFA program at Chatham University. She serves as executive editor of The Fourth River literary journal and editor at large for Barrelhouse. She is the author of the poetry collections MOSTLY HUMAN, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books, BEAUTIFUL NERVE (Tiny Hardcore, 2016), and three chapbooks. DEAR SUNDER, her fourth chap, will be released by dancing girl press in late 2022, and her debut (as yet untitled) essay collection about motherhood, daughterhood, love, grief, food and music, will be published by CLASH Books in 2023. She doesn't understand how 1990 could be 32 years ago. Visit her at www.sheilasquillante.com and on Twitter/Insta as @sheilasquill.

I DO(N'T) BELIEVE IN YOU: EMILY MILLS ON GROWING UP AND ANGRY WITH SARAH MCLACHLAN'S "DEAR GOD"

Say the name Sarah McLachlan and you’re likely to get one of three reactions: “Oh no it’s the sad puppy lady,” “Isn’t that the Lilith Fair chick?” and/or “I am obsessed with her music and have been for years.” Most people who were alive and aware of the radio in the 1990s at least heard her hit single, “Building A Mystery.” Sarah was, in fact, the founder and consistent headliner of the Lilith Fair festival that ran from ‘96-’99 in cities across North America. And she did record a notoriously sad PSA on behalf of the ASPCA, resulting in numerous parodies and tear-soaked cheeks.
You might also recall her pleading ode, the theme song for many a high school graduation of the era, “I Will Remember You.” Or maybe you chuckle over the fact that her extremely melancholy “Do What You Have to Do” made its way into U.S. history when it was referenced in the Starr Report about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (true fact).
Real ones know that Sara’s repertoire isn’t limited to wistful ballads or soft adult contemporary, though (no offense to those excellent offerings). Do a little digging and you’ll find the occasional hard edge, thrilling like hearing a soft-spoken grandparent say “fuck!” for the first time. One shining example is Sarah’s cover of XTC’s sacrilegious screed, “Dear God.”

*

I think Sarah’s cover transcends the original.
I don’t mean any disrespect to XTC or songwriter Andy Partridge in particular. He wrote what I think is a great song. I just think Sarah performed it in a way that better reflects the pathos and nuance in the lyrics. Listen to her version: the slowed down, pounding tempo, the uncharacteristic growl of Sarah’s voice during the emotional peak of the bridge, the live room quality of Pierre Marchand’s production work. There’s something altogether more deeply felt and urgent about the cover. It feels appropriate given how the lyrics grapple with some massive but intensely personal topics, something XTC’s almost jaunty original take doesn’t quite capture.
Of course, XTC’s original version helped propel the band back into the spotlight and got far more play than Sarah’s iteration ever did. After the song didn’t make the cut for their 1986 album, Skylarking. “Dear God” was instead released as a B-side and was only later re-added after it turned into a huge hit (thanks in large part to college radio). Predictably, there was serious backlash and even violence in response to the song–most coming from the United States. At least one radio station even received a bomb threat over it. A student forced his high school to play the song over the PA system while holding a teacher at knifepoint. It stirred up some intense feelings, is the point.
Andy also says that part of the reason the song got left off the first release of the record was because he felt like he’d “failed” to really do justice to the topic.
“It's such a vast subject—human belief, the need for humans to believe the stuff they do, and the many strata involved, the many layers of religion and belief and whatnot,” Andy told Todd Bernhardt in 2006. “So I thought I'd failed to address this massive subject for all mankind.”
No one song could do that, of course. But it can still bring an important perspective to the table. More importantly, I think, a song like this can provide a much-needed lifeline to other people struggling with similar questions and feeling otherwise alone on that journey.

*

Picture this: It’s 1997, summer probably, and I’m 15 years old, a preacher’s kid, a gamer, and an awkward tomboy whose fashion choices could best be described as “thrift store raver.” I’m bubbling over with hormones and big emotions. I’m bisexual but I don’t fully grasp it just yet, still convinced that the intense feelings I sometimes have toward my non-male friends are just “fascination crushes.” I’m occasionally bullied by peers and adults alike who are pissed off about not knowing whether I’m a “boy or a girl.” Oh and, through all of it, my mother is slowly dying–but I don’t fully grasp that just yet.
My older sister introduced me to Sarah McLachlan in the early ‘90s. The revelation came via a dubbed copy of her outstanding 1993 album, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, and my sister’s throaty sing-alongs in the shower before school each morning. That album would go on to become the soundtrack to my teenage years. It helped spawn a slightly obsessive fandom that brought me to an email listserv community (shoutout to the Fumblers), three Lilith Fairs, and as many of her solo concerts as I could manage.
Point is, my opinion on anything Sarah-related is obviously extremely biased. There is simply too much nostalgia and sense memory tied up in my feelings about her music for me to even pretend to be objective. Still, you gotta admit, her version of “Dear God” slaps.
I first heard the song that summer of ‘97, on a compilation record of Sarah’s contributions to movie soundtracks, other people’s albums, and tributes, called Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff. It was my introduction to her voice outside of her original music (ex: the killer newbeat track she recorded with Manufacture, “As the End Draws Near,” which yes I do own on vinyl now, thanks for asking). “Dear God” hit my newly agnostic, raised-in-the-church, lost little lamb self like a ton of bricks.
For those unfamiliar, the song is a sort of ironic indictment of religion and belief in a higher power. It calls out the rank hypocrisy of so many “people of faith” who use their dogma to excuse being horrible to others while grasping at a sense of control. It questions the existence of an allegedly all-powerful God who would allow awful things to happen to us. Repeatedly, the singer insists that “I don’t believe in you,” but the whole song is addressed to God. It’s an intentional paradox and a surprisingly nuanced argument, an almost universal human struggle put to music. Not so shabby after all, Andy.

*

While my mom was dying, my father’s church began to question the time he was spending away at the hospital instead of attending to the needs of the congregation. After years of service, he was now driving one hour each way to visit his wife as she underwent multiple surgeries, rehabilitation, and relapse. Shortly before she died, when she had been in the ICU for a month battling a fungal infection in her brain, the church voted to terminate my dad’s position. It meant he needed to begin looking for a new pulpit somewhere. It meant going through the exhaustive application and interview process required by the Presbyterian Church all while tending to my sick mom. It meant upending my life, too–a new school in a new state far away from friends and family, except for a dad who would increasingly disappear from me.
Mom died a little while after the church issued its decision. It was a beautiful, sunny September morning. I had been in math class, daydreaming as usual, staring out the window at the clear blue sky and wishing I was someplace else.
All of that, as you might imagine, made me feel some bitterness toward the church and those pious people who’d kicked us out in our darkest hour.
One evening that autumn, I slipped my headphones over my ears and clicked play on my silver-and-blue Discman. I had Sarah’s version of “Dear God” cued up. As the sun began to sink behind the horizon, I walked from our house through the long parking lot to the church itself. I alternated between sipping from a bottle of pop and singing along, feeling myself get more and more worked up as the song progressed. It had been a long time since I’d let my anger fully manifest itself. The last physical fight I’d been in was in the 6th grade. I’d worked hard to seal tight the lid on the boiling cauldron of my temper, channeling the energy into drumming, punk music, softball, and angstry journal entries. Constructive things.
I skulked around to the back of the building, where the brick wall of the sanctuary bordered a narrow strip of grass and then a sad line of trees that shielded it from the view of the subdivision beyond. Shadows grew long, then all-encompassing. I finished my pop. I felt Sarah’s pleading, angry voice as she hit the pivotal bridge where the music and the lyrics hit their emotional crescendo. Through watery eyes, I stared at the tall, expensive, stained glass sanctuary window, and I listened.

And it's the same the whole world round
The hurt I see helps to compound
The Father, Son, and holy ghost
Is just somebody's unholy hoax
And if you're up there you'll perceive
That my heart's here upon my sleeve
If there's one thing I don't believe in…

I wound up and, with all my righteous fury, hurled that fucking bottle at the window.
And missed.

…It's you,
Dear God.

The glass shattered against the brick wall instead. I sat down in a heap and stared miserably at the shards now strewn in the grass. The sublime peak and quiet release of the song’s end was almost too perfect, too on-the-nose. But I felt it all the same. Deep. I was a teenager, after all.
I also felt some amount of relief. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d actually broken the window. I don’t think God would have minded, but dad and the church folks probably wouldn’t have been chill about it. I wasn’t looking for ways to make our lives harder. I wasn’t really thinking, either. I was just angry. Grieving. I was trying to make sense of my life as the old world I’d been raised in died and a new one struggled to be born.
I think I’d stopped believing in the things my dad and his church taught many years before. I don’t remember there being a specific moment or incident that caused it, that severing. I just knew that the God I felt in my bones did not match the God of the Presbyterian Church USA. I wasn’t able to articulate it just then, but the God I sensed wasn’t interested in causing joy or pain. After all, humans were plenty good at that on our own. And that, I think, is what really resonates in “Dear God.” All the things the singer complains about? Humans, not God. So really, it’s a letter to all of us, a recognition of the myriad ways we contort ourselves in order to justify our own best and worst instincts and behaviors. To make sense of the insensible.
Sarah is herself a self-professed spiritual agnostic who has noted of the song that “it has an intensity that perhaps I don't possess on my own.” Still, she manages to tap into something profound just in the way she sings it. And here is the beauty of the thing: The self-doubting songwriter who manages to pen great lyrics, the gentle singer who digs in and infuses the words with added power they hadn’t known they possessed, the listener who experiences it all and finds desperately needed connection. Strangers meeting over soundwaves.
Some covers are just covers. Others breathe new life into something that was always great and just waiting for different people, with different lives, to be in conversation with it. Humanity will likely always wrestle with questions of religion, spirituality, systems, relationships. And so we will continue to hurt and heal each other with our seeking and our answers, and so “Dear God” will continue to be relevant–ready and waiting for the next artist to add a chapter to its story.
I will probably still think Sarah’s is the best. Not because it objectively is. She was an artist and it was a song that both found me when I needed them most. And that’s enough.

Emily Mills is a writer, musician, amatuer naturalist, and gadabout who lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partners and two smol rescue dogs. She will burn in heaven, like we do down here. Find her on Twitter @millbot or online at www.emilymills.org.