(12) Aimee Mann, “One”
took the love away from
(1) Sinead O'Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U”
349-273
and will play in the elite 8

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 3/19/22.

Katherine Atlee Robb on Sinéad o’connor’s “nothing compares 2 u”

And it is from that platform I continue to write. After all, there is no point setting out on a healing journey if you’re not going to find yourself healed. —Sinéad O’Connor, Rememberings

I think Prince, who wrote and sang the original version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” with his band The Family, offers the listener a story about something he wanted, but lost. He is sad about the situation. He longed for more, hoped for something different. I hear this in the crashing of drums, the instrumentation demonstrating his anger at not getting what he so desired. Listen to the saxophone wailing in orchestrated lament. Dude is bummed. I’m not saying the loss of one’s desires isn’t painful. I’m just saying, try losing oneself.
I’ll admit the idea I’m introducing is dense with cheesiness and the only rebuttal I have is that for the last few years I’ve been trying to hold my wounds with tenderness instead of distain. Maybe these days, after years of endless pandemic, of massive fracturing on both a global and deeply individualistic level, everyone could use a little gentleness upon their wounds. When this concept first emerged from the mouth of Peloton’s kind-hearted surfer-bro, when he said, and I’m paraphrasing, maybe a person becomes enraptured with a certain love song not because the song reminds them of their lover, but because the song reminds them of themself, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t think his words would stick but, like all statements speaking to the heart in a way the mind is unwilling to accept, they kept filtering back over time.
Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a song that’s been circling back to me for just over thirty years. I loved it since it was originally released in January of 1990. In her hands, the words sound like a dirge sung for herself, for the loss not of a lover, but of an identity. When it came out, I was nine years old and lived in Oregon, which means everything arrived late, so the song probably wasn’t popular on the radio until the fall of 1990. By that time, I’d turned ten and departed from the felt sense of my body. At least I think it was gone by then although that’s the thing about disassociation, it digests time without ever processing it, meaning all the memories disappear or, more precisely, no memories were fully formed in the first place.
When the song was released, critics noted how much pain came through in Sinéad’s voice. In her memoir, Rememberings, Sinéad wrote, “Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again.” Her mother, as is revealed in the memoir, severely verbally and physically abused her when she was a child. It’s further explained in Rememberings that the photo of the Pope she tore up live on SNL was hanging in her mother’s bedroom when she died and when Sinéad took it off the wall, she always knew she would destroy it somehow. Sinéad was angry the Catholic Church was covering up the abuse of children. I’d wager she was also angry her own abuse was never rectified.
Covering sorrow with anger is an ancient trick. A wound left unattended grows a hard shell of preparedness. It trains in survival and in survival there are only three choices: fight, flight, or freeze. I lived bouncing around those three spaces for thirty years. In these recent COVID times I’ve watched friends and family members come to make a home in this trifecta as well. It’s destroying their lives, same as it did to me. We are shadows of our former selves, a cover version of our own truths. Nearly every spiritual practice in the world says to heal such a wound requires one thing: Love. Ugh, how cheesy. How small and foolish. Unless, maybe, Sinéad is singing the word.

It’s been—————since you took your love away.

The first time I disassociated I was four, almost five years old. There was a violent accident in our backyard, and I was the only witness to what happened. My mother says afterward I looked like I wasn’t there. She said something about my eyes and face went wrong. I became a body severed from consciousness and it was visible. Back then, in 1984, the idea was kids were so resilient they probably didn’t remember traumatic situations. I suppose in some ways, that’s true. When police officers arrived and asked what happened, I told them the little girl who was attacked was staring down the dog. Then I changed my story. Nothing happened, I said repeatedly. Nothing happened at all.
Sometimes I wonder about the weight of making things disappear. History, after all, is not a magic trick. When I took the story of myself away from myself, its shadow was still there. It lived in the way I moved my body through the world or sometimes didn’t. When the pandemic first started, I read an article about how hardly anything was written about the 1918 flu once it ended. The thesis wasn’t that the flu was so destructive nobody wanted to talk about it, but rather afterward nobody could acknowledge how horrifically people treated each other while trying to survive.
Witnessing an act of accidental violence before I had the language to name, discuss, or process it sent me down a dangerous path of isolation and disappearance in response to trauma. When violence re-entered my life at the end of elementary school in a random attack, I once again swallowed the story. I told no one, leaving my assault to remain a truth held in my body, but never in my words. I kept it in my stomach, let it become a rock so slicked with moss I could not grip it with my own hands, and I would not dare let someone else get close enough to me to help lift it off.  
I can’t speak for Sinéad, but in her autobiography she writes about such a stone formed by her mother’s violence against her body: “I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well.” There are many horrific stories of physical abuse at the hands of her mother in Sinéad’s autobiography, but we almost don’t need them. Her voice told us long ago. The places it reaches, the clarity and control of its sorrow opens a portal to the listener’s own pain in a way music seems uniquely capable of doing.
According to Rememberings, Sinéad knew she wouldn’t “…have much say in mixes when it comes to vocal level,” so she made her voice “…into its own master fader.” She sang into a home-recording device while watching where the lights switched from green to yellow to red (if the lights hit red the vocals were so loud they’d create distortion on the tape). She did this over and over again until she, “…memorized where green finished and let it sink into my body the same way notes do, so the avoidance of yellow is now part of the songs.” Of course she did. That kind of focus, the discipline of training, that’s survivor language. It comes from having learned how to carry a great stone while making it look effortless. At this point, three years into COVID, we are all carrying a stone.

Since you—gone, I can do whatever—.

Some scientific theorists consider disassociation to be adaptive in periods of great stress, the idea being if there’s nothing one can do to stop serious injury to the body, take consciousness away. Not a bad trick by the Creator. Traditionally the causeway, the bridge that drops out between earth and sea, is brought on by physical threat, but I know several people who experienced disassociation during extremely stressful work situations. In fact, the first time I became aware of the phenomenon, years before I understood what it was or that I’d been experiencing shades of it for much of my life, I was arguing a housing case as a supervised law student. One moment I was aware I was speaking, then my consciousness disappeared for a period of time the length of which I do not know. All the while I continued to talk, apparently making lucent and valid points, until my consciousness returned. I was like Will Ferrell’s character in Old School as he delivered the winning debate speech, speaking with great precision and persuasion, but without awareness that he was, in fact, speaking at all. Afterward the administrative judge and my supervising attorney talked about what a great job I’d done, completely unaware there’d been a blip in my system.  
Perhaps disassociation itself isn’t a bad thing as a brief adaptation technique to deal with threat. But what happens when the threats keep coming like they did for Sinéad growing up in the home of her violent mother? Or what happens if a person, like me, comes to believe her own body is the threat and turns the whole thing off for decades? What happens when a world is put under threat of a deadly and easily transmissible virus and the colonizers respond as they’ve always done, with fear instead of love?
In these situations, a shadow self is born, a disassociated cover that allows the self to go on, often with greater bravery than ever before. I lived this way for decades. It allowed me great adventures. I traveled solo with a false distance between my mind, the part of me I considered to be my actual identity, and my body, that which was visible to the men who called me bella, bella, bella in Italy or the guy who pulled his Mercedes over to try to cajole me into coming to his house party in the hills or the art forgers I met in France or the guy in Hong Kong who took a seat across from me at the hostel on the hill overlooking the city’s sparkling lights and explained the intricacies of Zara’s business model and how he was going to bring the concept to Africa.
When I was a kid, I wanted to live an adventurous life. As I grew up, I discovered my body made me a target. My solution was to hide my body from my own self. And it worked. Kids are geniuses, except their solutions eventually fail because they’re personal systems of survival, never structural change. I’ve had thirty years of adventures. It’s too bad I can’t remember most of them, too bad I never fully felt any of them.

——so lonely without you here,—————

To make a life inside the shadow is to live a lonely existence. The body is in fact our barometer. In turning off its sensations, I could no longer hear when it whispered this is the way to joy. My stories paint a false picture of a carefree person. Have I danced on bars in New York City? Sure, but I did that because of threat calculations running in the back of my mind. I wanted to go out in my twenties, but people would hit on me, brush against me, I couldn’t keep my eye on all of them. On the bar, however, I was safely out of reach. It’s been an adventure yes, but the loneliness has been brutal.
It’s funny the things we want to control when we don’t feel like we have control over our own bodies. It was easy to be brave when I couldn’t feel fear. But being blocked from my body meant I couldn’t hear when it tried to point me toward things I might care about, might find pleasure in, toward people whose interests might match my own. In disappearing my body, I created the darkest kind of loneliness, the kind that doesn’t remember what light feels like.
COVID has exacerbated this muting of emotions across the population. Some people have reacted by disappearing the virus itself. It’s enraging, but I understand the inclination. I disappeared the thing that hurt me the worst for three decades. Indeed, disappearing sexual assault is a global phenomenon. If we can say, she wore X and I would never wear X or she was out in that bad neighborhood late at night and I would never go there, then we can give ourselves the gift of safety. Such a thing will never happen to me, thank goodness, we can tell ourselves. But that sense of safety is false. It doesn’t address the real culprit. Most violence, including sexual assault, is about power. And those without power, or those whose power is being threatened, often respond to their own fear with anger.
Let’s be honest, Sinéad called out childhood sexual abuse by the Catholic Church in October 1992. It wasn’t until 2018, twenty-six years later, that Pope Francis acknowledged the abuse and the Church’s role in its hiding. Investigative reports revealing the extent of victimization at the hands of priests were still being published in 2021. But I’ve never seen an article thanking Sinéad for calling out truth. I’m not saying she’s a saint. I’m not saying she’s not possibly stuck in fight, flight, freeze patterns from her childhood. All I’m saying is, sometimes we should listen to the people who have been there before.
The unrelenting threat to life brought on by COVID switched on fight, flight, freeze survival mechanisms in people who’ve never experienced them before. The rates of depression and generalized anxiety disorder in youth appear to have doubled. From 2019 to 2020, emergency department visits for mental health issues for those ages 12-17 increased by 31% and, perhaps more staggering, over a month-long period in early 2021, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts in girls ages 12-17 increased by 50.6% from that same month-long period in 2020.
With the long-term presence of anxiety, depression, isolation, lack of skin touch, and drop in functional friendship, so many people have become a cover version of who they used to be, a walking shadow of self. My mother-in-law, who once adored large groups and constant conversation, now gets overwhelmed when she’s around small groups of people. She’s easily exhausted by talk. One day in the summer of 2020 she asked, “Is this what it’s always been like for you?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her yes, much less to explain it wasn’t always that way, it was only like that when I started trying to return to my body.

I went to the doctor—————?

The thing about a body is, it falls apart when left unattended. I lasted about two decades. Then, in my thirties, pieces collapsed. Severe bone density loss was discovered in my foot as I avoided bunion pain by walking, along with running ultra-marathon-long distances only on the outside of my foot. An unexplained cyst grew in my knee. Migraines appeared. My skin flared with rosacea. My legs twitched when I tried to sleep. My husband and I moved from San Francisco to New York City and my walking greatly increased, as did the blood in my shoes. Most people become aware of blisters before they turn bloody, but I couldn’t catch the pain until it turned crimson. More than once I pulled off a pair of shoes in a public bathroom and was shocked and confused to see blood coating the heel of my socks. How had I not noticed earlier that I was in pain? How could I have let it get this far without feeling anything?

Doctors told me to be soft instead of hard. Unclench the muscles I’ve held tight for decades. I’ve had fascia adjusted and it snapped, crackled, and popped in release. A heel lift now counteracts the small curves pressed into my spine. Frequently I remind myself not to hold my breath or the whole system will crash. The jaw doctor’s instructions are the worst: “Softer diet: choose softer food, cut into smaller pieces, and avoid thick foods such as bagels, apples, or baguettes.” It’s infuriating how once upon a time a boy held me by my neck and thirty years later, I can’t eat raw carrots. I’m still trying to hold that one gently.

The way back to a full and vital identity is excruciatingly difficult. It’s hard to re-enter the body. Parameters must be re-established. I had to learn how to answer so many questions about my physicality that I’d long ignored. Is this too tight (shoes)? Does this fit me properly (clothes)? Is this too much pressure (physical therapy)? Does this hurt (everyone)? But, as a friend once told me, “Personal growth is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it.”

———living with you———hard, —I’m willing———another try.”

I spent the second year of the pandemic taking selfies. It’s essentially the treatment for long-term disassociation. Instead of avoiding mirrors and photographs of the self, lean into them, study the body until it becomes re-integrated into one’s own story of identity, until it’s no longer a cover, but a song unto itself. In this way, I finally began to hear the story I’d been telling myself for three decades and, until I heard it, I could not dismantle it.
Light pierced shadow in unusual clarity when I wore shorts in September of 2021. My husband and I went to see Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installations at the New York Botanical Garden. I almost never wear shorts. I don’t like revealing my body but, as I’ve said, I am trying to change. We walked into the Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart (2020), a small room entirely covered in mirrors, and I panicked. Ever since I was assaulted three decades ago, I’ve lived my life scanning, aware of all the angles from which I could be attacked again. But a room of mirrors creates more angles than any human can cover. I watched my mind as it switched, as it realized it couldn’t monitor all the angles of attack so it would monitor the thing to be attacked. My mind turned on my body, begin to criticize my exposed skin, the curves of my own angles. Bad body, I thought, bad, bad, bad, and there it was, heard in simple clarity, the story carried by those who have experienced interpersonal violence: I am bad, take the love away.
I grew up in an unusual household where there was an emphasis on complicated humanity over good versus bad. People, my parents preached, weren’t good or bad, they were merely beings who sometimes did things that brought pain and sometimes did things that brought pleasure. This outlook has been vital to my ability to understand compassion and, eventually, try to give it to myself. But I still exist in a culture that hates women and wants to control our bodies and our sexuality. As a queer woman, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a man say I need a good deep-dicking to straighten up or that two women together is great, as long as a guy gets to watch, I’d buy all my ex-girlfriends fresh strap-ons.
Thus far in the history of the world violence has never made anything better for people overall. It produces power, certainly, but it doesn’t alleviate fear. We can turn against each other all we want, but it won’t defeat a virus that floats between our lungs. The only thing that might is trying to care for one another, and for me to care about you, I must first care about myself. I don’t believe in the idea of a singular truth. Rather, I think we live inside diaphanous layers of stories, the ones we tell ourselves, the ones our family tells us, the ones our society tells us. There are so many elements of the stories told in that last space I want to change, but I can’t shift anything there until I unwind the falsities in the narrative I’ve told myself.

Nothing compares—you.

There’s an inscription at the front of Sinéad’s autobiography: Qui cantat, bis orat. The translation is, essentially: whomever sings, prays twice. There’s a reason singing, humming, and chanting are found throughout history and often tied to the spiritual. Such activities stimulate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body connecting the brain to vital organs including the lungs, heart, intestines, and stomach. The nerve is vital to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the “rest and digest” process through its influences on breathing, heart rate, and digestion. The vagus nerve has a vagal tone, meaning activity level, and a high vagal tone is correlated with better physical and mental health. 
All my life I’ve done many of the things that create vagal tone. I exercise, breathe slowly, laugh. In returning to my body, I took up meditation and, for a while, massage. But the thing I’ve always avoided is singing, humming, or, frankly, using my voice at all. The vagus nerve connects to the vocal chords, which means the very act of sound-making is soothing. This was one of the hardest things for me to allow into my body. When people said “Om” in yoga class or when those in my Zen Buddhist group chanted, I recoiled. For a long time, I let my mind provide the answer for this behavior and, as minds tend to do, it came up with all sorts of logical answers, none of which were fully accurate. I didn’t believe the words being chanted. I thought the people chanting them were silly. I didn’t want to chant words I didn’t fully believe in or words the meaning of which I wasn’t sure. But this wasn’t the fundamental reason why I hated it, why I refused to engage. It was because when I chanted or sang, I couldn’t scan my surroundings for potential threats. Somehow the brain can’t do those two things at once.
I used to only sing in my car while driving alone. That was the only place I felt safe from attack. Now sometimes I sing around the house. I can even belt out a tune in the shower, the most dangerous of locations. As someone whose throat was held, as someone who once stood in the cold midnight fall air and searched her phone for the legal definition of strangulation then wept at the realization there was a technical word for what had been done to her as a child, there is a particularly sweet satisfaction in opening up the throat, in letting the beauty of sound pour from my own mouth, the one that stayed silent for so long.
As I write this essay, it becomes news that one of Sinéad O’Connor’s children has died by suicide. It becomes news that Sinéad posted on Twitter blaming herself for his death and now she’s thinking of closing out her life in the same way. As I write this essay, I am also loving a dear family member who is having the same thoughts. I have seen the way this person’s body flinches the same way mine does at loud noises. The violence in my history came from outside the home, while the violence in this person’s came from within. The words Sinéad wrote on Twitter are the same ones being uttered by my loved one. My fault. My bad. If only I could peel the false narrative from this person’s skin through the holding of a hand.
As I write this essay, Omicron is weaving its way into a million more lungs, and I am balancing how to keep traveling all the way across the country to keep holding the hand of this person I desperately want to survive. I hope the weight of my love can sink into this person’s own body, can make them fall out of the shadow of their mind and back into the light. Like all great battles, I do not know how this one will end. All I know is I will go down singing. Because unlike songs, the cover version of a human is never better than the original. After all, in the end, nothing compares to you.

Katherine Atlee Robb is a sensual badass living at and writing about the intersections between fear and love. More of her writing can be found at www.katherineatleerobb.com. She sings a mean "Kiss Me Deadly".

NOT THE LONELIEST COVER YOU COULD EVER DO: BROOKE CHAMPAGNE ON AIMEE MANN’S “ONE” 

Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.

She first made herself known not through sight, but sound. What did she sound like? Like a cartoon bubble bursting over my head. Like the bright pop sound Andy Williams makes in the chorus of The Chordettes’ 1958 song “Lollipop,” sticking his forefinger into his cheek and uncorking the champagne bottle of his mouth. Half-believing I dreamed the pop, I stood up from bed at 2 a.m. and felt a slow leaking, as if my body had forgotten how to hold itself together. At first I thought I was pissing myself. Suddenly, about a gallon of bloody water emptied from my vagina. 
My daughter was due in almost a month, but she’d be arriving today. Still, I had reasons to remain calm. The hospital was only one backroad mile from our house. My husband slept soundly next to my wet spot, but there was no need to wake him yet to pack a bag. I’d read that we wouldn’t need to leave till contractions were four minutes apart, and that was likely hours away. All I needed was my phone timer and something to do. And I knew just what that was. “Okay, this is good,” I thought. “I have papers to grade.”
It was the middle of the fall semester and I had subs to cover my classes, but I didn’t want to leave them with a full set of ungraded memoirs. Besides, I like reading student memoirs. What’s a “bad” one look like? Too self-centered? Too incomplete a narrative arc? Screw all that. My students share their lives with me. They may not completely plumb the depths of why things happen the way they do or what it all means, but they’re getting there. They open up to me in ways they may not with their parents, in ways that—holy shit—my daughter might also close off to me someday. Yes, I was already this far afield while timing contractions and commenting on my students’ uses of reflection and scene, entering grades ranging from A-minus to A-plus. Then, I was somewhere twenty years in the future: who would this early girl be, and what would she mean to me. I couldn’t imagine the answer; the question itself was terrifying.
In fact, the question required further distraction, so I scrolled through my DirecTV guide to where I usually find it: HBO. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia had just started—a perfect movie for the desperation I was masking. Then, I was nearly twenty years in the past, first watching the movie and hearing the dial tone as the song “One” begins, beep beep beep beep. The singer leaned on the word “one” so deeply, so coolly, “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…” The opening film credits revealed a magnolia blossoming at hyper-speed, followed by the slow unraveling of sad, lonely characters I would spend the next three hours only half paying attention to. Like I said, I’d seen them all before.

Now I spend my time just making thoughts of yesterday.

She first made herself known not through sound, but sight. In my second year of college, my mom’s best friend Gloria burned me a CD with a homemade cover design. She often made me gifts like this, introduced me to R.E.M. and Radiohead and all the Gen X coolness I’d always been slightly too young for. On this CD, a long, lanky woman, blonde and cool-looking, like Gloria herself, wore a tankini and her name written in script across her body: Aimee Mann. Oh boy, I thought, another beautiful, blonde singer. But I trusted Gloria. She’d never married or had kids, and so from my purview her life comprised of great-art consumption, astute political commentary, and believing in me. She cheered my amorphous writing ambitions, even masochistically asked to read early drafts.
Gloria wasn’t an artist, but loved art in all its forms. She could name all the architects who designed her favorite buildings in our hometown of New Orleans, and she was fun; she knew every rooftop bar in town. Because my mother spent much of her adult life raising three daughters, three stepdaughters, and cycling through three husbands, she didn’t have as much time to slow down, pay attention. Whether or not a piece of art or music or film was beautiful didn’t much matter. My mother rarely analyzed, or let a thought or feeling linger. She accepted a breadth or dearth of beauty, and moved on. At that time, in college, I saw in these two women two discrete paths for womanhood. The Gloria path was glorious. Freedom, one-ness, living life mostly for yourself. Though my mother is no martyr, I feared choosing her path would mean my own martyrdom. To be encumbered, constantly needed and tired, having little time to contemplate art and the self in the one life I was living. I needed time. I wanted to write, to make art, like this childless, beautiful Aimee Mann.
Because I wanted to impress Gloria, I didn’t just listen to Aimee Mann, I studied her. I read somewhere that Anderson wrote the screenplay with Mann in mind, that he wanted his movie to be the equivalent of an Aimee Mann album. In that sense, the film was a cover of Mann’s musical oeuvre established in the early-mid 90s. The soundtrack’s first song, “One,” opens the film, and it wasn’t immediately my favorite. The song contains no images. It’s pure argumentative lament. When I first heard the album from start to finish, I was most gripped by the track “Save Me.” It begins with the lines, “You look like a perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet.” If you’ve ever really loved someone who’s damaged, or been that damaged person, it’s a perfect simile.
Anyway, “One” is an ostensibly simple song with simple lyrics. The relationship referenced is one where a presumed lover, or loved one, is gone. That’s all we know. When I first heard it, the English major in me found it fascinating to hear that one was a number you could “do.” As in: enact, or perform. The rest of the song felt pointless to deconstruct. “One” is lonely, “no is the saddest experience…”, yes, I get it. I remember sometime after Gloria burned the CD for me, I asked her what she thought of the song, to confirm if I was correct about it. She laughed and said, “Well, yeah, it’s sad, but ‘one’ isn’t always the loneliest number.” Given that I planned to take her solitary path, I was glad to hear it.
Over the years, as I dug further into Mann’s oeuvre, I learned “One” was a cover with interesting tweaks to the 1968 Harry Nilsson original. Mann’s version includes an electric guitar, and her tone makes the song’s argument more starkly than Nilsson. He sings “one is the loneliest number” like it’s a suggestion; when Mann sings it, “one’s” loneliness is fact. But what I love most about the cover is how much Mann relies on Nilsson’s voice, both at the opening and closing of the song. In the opening, just after the beep beep of the dial tone, we hear a male voice shout, “Okay, Mr. Mix!” Which feels totally weird and nonsensical. Turns out it’s Nilsson, from another of his tracks called “Cuddly Toy.” And as “One’s” final cryptic line concludes—one is a number divided by two—Mann’s voice recedes, and Nilsson’s enters again. He sings the following lines, which are not lyrics from “One,” but from another of his songs called “Together”:

And one has decided to bring down the curtain
And one thing’s for certain
There’s nothing to keep them together.

I knew none of this when I obsessively listened to the soundtrack, but hearing a song titled “Together” superimposed over “One” is a bit ironic, and something that two decades ago, I could’ve written an A-plus paper about. Now, thinking about my relationship with Gloria, the song, and my daughter, who six years ago was in the process of being born as I listened to “One” while timing contractions, I’m considering the nature of covers. What makes a good cover? What should a cover song do? As in: enact, or perform. According to Ray Padgett’s book on cover songs called Cover Me, musicians worried for years that if their song was covered successfully, that meant an erasure of their original. Padgett vehemently disagrees with that conclusion. For him, a cover expands the original, adds new textures and contexts, invites a new audience to enjoy the update and revisit the old. In other words, a successful cover only makes the original stronger.

It's just no good anymore since you went away.

She made herself known that balmy January day of 2022 not through sight, or sound, but smell. Warm jambalaya and cold, olive-stuffed muffulettas waited upstairs at Schoen & Son Funeral Home on Canal Street in New Orleans, where my mother and I would eat after we’d said goodbye to Gloria.
Though I didn’t speak at the memorial, I thought a lot about what I’d say. One of the things that made Gloria the best was that she was legitimately interested in what I thought, which stroked my ego in a way my busy mother couldn’t always do. But she was also interested in everyone else, too. There was some artistry, I suppose, in how she plumbed the depths of why people were the way they were. This is why she had so many conservative friends despite being one of the most politically liberal people I knew. Proof was all around me in the hundreds at the memorial, a great gathering of both the masked and unmasked.
The first to eulogize her was a young attorney, one of many for whom Gloria worked at the downtown law firm where she and my mother were legal secretaries for almost four decades. The attorney made a joke about the great unmasked, saying it was a testament to Gloria’s patience and grace that there were so many Trump supporters in the room. It reminded me that when Trump first came down that godforsaken escalator, right around the time Gloria was diagnosed with breast cancer (proof that if there’s a god, he’s a bastard), I raged and scoffed at the stupidity of anyone who could consider this monstrous moron as anything but a joke. Gloria reminded me that listening to others’ wrong-headed ideas only strengthens our positions, because we’re empathizing where they won’t.
Over a dozen people spoke beautifully at the memorial, including members of the great unmasked, but it was her college-aged niece whose impromptu speech most touched me. “I didn’t plan to say anything, but, my Aunt Gloria, there’s probably no other person as responsible for making me who I am as she was. She shared with me what was good, what was cool. Every piece of music I listen to or television I watch and love is because of her. I can’t imagine not being able to talk to her about any of it anymore.”
But silence touched me as well. During the parade of memorial speakers, I asked my mother if she wanted to say something, said I’d hold her hand and walk up there with her, if she liked. She just gently shook her head, and later, in the privacy of plating our jambalaya and muffulettas, said it’d been enough for her to tell Gloria’s family everything she felt, what losing her meant—losing the best friend she’d ever had, losing a piece of herself. In Gloria’s final days under home hospice care, Mom had been with her. She held her hand, watched her slowly go. She didn’t need to enact or perform her love.

One is a number divided by two

It’s sad, embarrassing really, how much I learned about Gloria from her obituary and memorial, simple facts I’d never bothered asking her about. Like me, she attended Nicholls State in Thibodaux, LA (a.k.a. Harvard on the Bayou), and graduated from LSU. How had we never discussed that? She was born earlier than I’d thought, in 1958, the same year, in fact, that Andy Williams swiped inside his cheek in the chorus of The Chordettes’ “Lollipop,” the very first sound I conjured when my water broke. The song “Lollipop” itself is a cover, first recorded by a long-forgotten duo named Ronald & Ruby. The oddly, wonderfully comparable sound would’ve never entered my mind upon my daughter’s arrival had it not been for The Chordettes and Andy Williams’ famous pop.
Covers are so ubiquitous now that we take for granted the term itself—why they’re called covers at all—and as stated in Padgett’s Cover Me, there are three theories for its derivation. The first is that a music label would “cover its bets” by releasing a recording of a popular song; in the second, the idea was that the new version would literally “cover up” the old on record store shelves; and the third, most capitalistic theory was how music label execs would answer, when asked if they had any copycat versions of a popular song to release: “we’ve got it covered!”
I can’t help but find a metaphor in these theories, and how they apply to the relationships I’ve held most dearly. Having a child is a way to cover your bets: if you can’t get everything you want out of this life, maybe your child can. Maybe they can cover up your shittiness, your aging, your (hopefully) slow bodily unraveling. If you choose to have children, a secret, sacred hope is that when you get old, they’ll care for you; they’ll have you covered.
Before deciding to have children, and still, I’ve been both afraid to be covered, and afraid not to be. I’ve feared motherhood would mean half-measures in artistry, and vice versa. And I’ve feared the obverse: that without motherhood, I’d have no excuse, no cover, for my mediocre art. But in listening to “One” again to write this essay, perhaps more obsessively than I did twenty years ago, after re-hearing the lament and singularity of being one, I see that although I planned to take Gloria’s path, and instead took my mother’s, the two paths weren’t discrete at all. The overlap lives in their love for each other. “One” can be sad, but “two” can be, too, and children won’t always cover our loneliness, or any other parts of us that need covering. This essay is an inadequate cover for the originality, the oneness, of Gloria. And of Aimee Mann. And of being a mother to my daughter and a daughter to my mother. But I’m making this cover, anyway. I’m still singing the song I’ve heard before, only singing it differently.
I’ve learned, too, that just the concept of covers is relatively modern. Before the advent of rock n’ roll, it was the song that was paramount, not the singer. The quality of the song mattered more than the person performing it. So to extend that cover-as-relationship metaphor, if my daughter is my cover, the question isn’t what she makes of me, or I of her; the singular song she makes of her life is what counts. My daughter, my cover, who first made herself known, truly, not through sight or sound or smell, but touch. After twelve hours of labor, when she crowned, then blinked, then screamed, I brought her to my breast, and tasted what it was for me to be born into someone irrevocably different, both alone and not alone, not joined together anymore, but not two, either, and never quite one again.

Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece “Exercises,“ which was published in The Normal School and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2019, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Bugginess.” Her writing has appeared widely in print and online journals, most recently in Under the Sun, Barrelhouse, and Hunger Mountain. She is seeking publication for her first collection of personal essays entitled Nola Face.