A Study in Buried Treasures

Vashti Bunyon’s Just Another Diamond Day (1970) is one of the success stories, and like the best stories, it begins in failure. Though a beautiful record, it reflects the aesthetics of its sole songwriter more than those of the British folk scene into which it was born. The saviors of the traditional repertoire found nothing exemplary in the song selection. Nor did the quiet, unadventurous arrangements appeal to the psychedelic crowd. Both groups were fervently replacing American influence with anything resonantly British, and Bunyon’s simple songs couldn’t compete on that stage. Despite the presence of heavyweight guests from Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, the album was an unqualified commercial disaster on its release.

Decades later, in the twilight of the CD reissue era, Just Another Diamond Day’s stark sincerity won the hearts of the 21st century’s freak folk scene. The likes of Devandra Banhart were disconnected from the politics of British folk music, and thus the new audience saw Bunyon’s idiosyncrasies as a standard more worthy of imitation than yet another rendition of “Blackwaterside.” The delayed recognition even persuaded Bunyon to return to the stage and studio after a thirty year absence.

Stories like this are the legends that critic’s share around the campfire. They promise new buried treasures, flickering like distant ghost lights to lead the unlucky astray. Thrillseekers chase through the woods in search of the underrated, the ignored, the misjudged, the lost. But adventuring in the wilderness of pop music history rarely turns up artifacts as inspiring as the tale above. This musical archaeology is more likely to uncover works that belong on disc eleven in one of those reissue box sets. Like the demo version missing a crucial element, most buried treasures flicker with potential only to fade again. “There’s something raw,” the critic says, but few hear it.

Declaring a buried treasure is a noble act; however small the scale, it’s a call for historical justice. The intention is to correct public opinion and, if there’s any story beyond taste itself, to analyze how the pop music industry manufactured the historical error, how the narrative went astray. After a critic makes their case, we as listeners can return to an album or artist with fresh ears. The search itself is addicting for those of us who love music, who crave new sounds, new songs. Calls for unburying appeal to us because they allow us to reappraise the familiar, to polish a worn song until it gleams again. Perhaps we’ll even hear what the critic hears.

But most unburying efforts stumble. No amount of intellectualizing or exegesis can overcome public opinion. The connection made between a listener and a record can’t be recreated or translated. Where the critic hears a masterpiece, listeners may hear nothing.

Still, we try. There are the success stories after all.

Twenty-five years ago, Throwing Muses frontwoman Kristin Hersh released her first full-length solo work, Hips and Makers. The Muses had been grinding along the barrier of popularity with most of their cohorts on the 4AD roster, a once-fertile river valley always waiting for new critical examinations. Throwing Muses’ best work was disjointed, difficult, and followed few pop conventions. Even Nirvana’s breakthrough couldn’t clear space for them in the mainstream, but they claim a loyal following to this day. Within Hersh’s entire discography, Hips and Makers in particular has a strong case for reexamination: though it earned little attention on its release, it has since proven to be a career-defining move.

By the time it dropped, Throwing Muses released a masterpiece (The Real Ramona), but also lost half of its sister act when Tonya Donnelly left to found Belly. The band’s next effort, Red Heaven (1992), struggled to define itself. It was Hips and Makers that established Hersh as a mature songwriter capable of carrying herself. Its content and its historical placement — a compromise with Warner Brothers to free the band from their contract — set the standard for another twenty-five years of independence and thematically-diverse albums, books, and other projects. Looking back at Hersh’s varied career and her small but dedicated following, it’s little wonder that she chose independence before the CD boom crashed or that she pioneered crowdfunding before it became a tech industry goldmine.

On its release in January 1994, one might have interpreted the all-acoustic Hips and Makers as trend-hopping. Nirvana’s Unplugged performance aired only months earlier, a climactic episode from a show which simultaneously made acoustic renditions both a necessity and an artistic nadir. “Acoustic” had become the dance remix of the alternative scene, and by 1994, it was synonymous with “honesty” and “authenticity.” Artists bragged about “letting the song stand on its own.” Yet “Layla” and “Because the Night” were the exceptions. Aside from a few glowing moments like these, songs from alternative acts like Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Pearl Jam lost more than they gained in the transfer. The difficulties are clear: the tinny ping of piezo guitar pickups, the wet burp of acoustic bass guitars, the weakness of rock’s parallel fifths without distortion adding overtones. The average rock guitarist wasn’t capable of expanding harmony like the jazzy embellishments on Mariah Carey’s Unplugged appearance, nor did the blocky, riff-driven songwriting of the era lend itself toward orchestration that might have substituted for the piezo’s lack of depth and sustain. Acoustic performances were simply less fulfilling than the studio versions that were galloping headlong into the loudness wars.

(There is a story to be told, some day, about the professionalization of the recording studio in the first half of the 90s, and how this enabled the mass-production of debut albums. Acoustic pop music production wouldn’t find itself so heavily standardized, manipulated into a sonic pink slime, until the indie folk boom more than a decade later.)

Hips and Makers never tries to recreate amplified music, and it achieves more from its limited palette as a result. The album showcases a trio composed of Hersh’s distinctive voice, a ringing acoustic guitar, and Jane Scarpantoni’s cello for additional texture and resonance. If there is a fourth element, it’s not the sparse percussion and organ but Stable Sounds, the studio, a space clearly defined in the ambiance. Oddly, though Hersh’s playing drops references to traditionally acoustic genres like folk and blues, she doesn’t shy from power chords. Instead she embellishes these fifths with jangling pedal points to add richness and color.

The combined effect is most obvious on “Sundrops”, whose guitar part features a single chord shape weaving in and out of chiming open strings. Unlike MTV’s Unplugged, the production highlights the genuine sound of an acoustic guitar in a resonant room.

Like the best recordings of the acoustic indulgence, the music itself creates the mood through rhythm and harmony. The chords gallop ahead of the downbeat in irregular phrases that are one of Hersh’s characteristic techniques. By the end, the several layers of voice, guitar, and cello in round overfill the meter, leaping across the chord progression. The result is boundless joy.

The lyrics, too, are unmistakably Hersh’s — scattered with obscured but concrete details from a many-threaded relationship.

You can’t get any more sunshine
Barefoot while the heat rains down
Oh no no no
There’s nothing I forgot
I left that paper heart where it belonged
Who it belonged to
I never knew
I never never knew

One rarely knows whether the narrators in Hersh’s songs are separating or falling in love all over again, but they always own their psyches, their flaws. They bare their complicated entanglements honestly, and the way a song like “Sundrops” develops its core progression and refuses straight repetition underscores this.

The song — like the album — succeeds at the very thing the acoustic trend sought: the music speaks for itself. Critical history hasn’t recognized that, however. Despite critical praise on its release, the album faded into the background of one of alternative rock music’s most productive years. Jar of Flies, Dookie, The Downward Spiral, Parklife, and the blue album all appeared within the next five months, and the second half of the year would prove to be just as iconic. A year of classic albums all competing for their two and a half minutes of fame. Even if Hips and Makers had dropped during the summer of Lilith Fair a few years later, it’s still difficult to conceive of it finding a wide audience.

The critical memory for Hips and Makers was also fleeting. In 1999, it actually placed at number 40 on Pitchfork’s 100 best albums of the 90s. The 2003 rewrite removed it entirely, a fate shared by many unquestionably loved albums: Dots and Loops, Portishead, Repeater, Dirty, Cure for Pain, Mule Variations. Any of these could easily have made some critic’s top ten of the decade, and though they’re all albums more beloved to musicians than non-musicians, none could be considered “buried” today. But the woods grew thick and tangled around Hips and Makers specifically, a destination lost to time and visited only by the few who already know the way.

The burying is always the easiest part to explain. It relies on shared history, or in other words, it reinforces the norms by which many disconnected events become a single narrative. Paranoid gave birth to every subgenre of metal. Conscious hip-hop would have dominated the mainstream but for The Chronic. Ska was the most fun we ever had at a show but an embarrassment now. For a critic to insist that an error has occurred requires a denial of traditional knowledge. Whatever justifications can be found after the fact, this break begins in personal experience.

I was sixteen and newly the proud owner of an acoustic guitar of my own when I came across the local library’s copy of Hips and Makers. It was another gift from my mystery best friend, the librarian who kept the racks of security-bound CDs full of the albums I had read about in magazines but had never seen in a big box store. After I dubbed it to cassette, it rarely left my backpack. Many foggy Indiana mornings would find me at the bus stop, my headphones on, lost in the landscape created from a guitar and cello swarming a former barn in Rhode Island. As I did with many favorite albums, I learned to play every song, every part, on both guitar and piano. I studied the lyric booklet. I absorbed even the microphone techniques into my own preferences.

I don’t remember exactly what I thought about Hersh’s complicated narrators speaking to me as I rode to school. I knew there was something different about these characters. In contrast to the angst-driven and blandly surreal lyrics of the 90s alternative moment, it was a lyrical world secondary to my own that was full of substance and depth. Like the seedy night-life of Morphine or the smart, anticapitalist community promised by Stereolab, Hersh’s world felt like practice for the future. I just wasn’t sure what future.

Like any teenager, I had my moments of feeling lost and misjudged. Music was my escape at that age, that much even teenage me recognized. I listened obsessively. My cassettes followed me on five-minute trips to the grocery store. I gave up my preteen comic book habit to order every three-for-one deal from Columbia House. Growing ever more adventurous as mainstream radio hits grew too predictable to my developing ear, I mail-ordered folk albums from Madagascar, and I dipped my toes into noise and industrial. By the time I graduated high school, I played six instruments. Looking back now, I wonder how much of the appeal was escape, how much my own burying, and how much was the promise of communication.

Music allows you to convey a feeling when the exact words don’t exist. Music gives body to the mysterious, the impossible. Music can allow listeners to experience another life. It’s no wonder we associate pop music with the teenage years — so filled with longing and hope, the search for the self. At that age, every song is an alternate future.

Hips and Makers had all of this for me. But every critic learns early that personal stakes aren’t enough. Those moments can feel like a personal failing, but it’s simply the nature of taste. So we learn there’s always more music to share, to not take a failed recommendation too seriously however disappointing it is to our teenage selves.

In the days before we learned how to talk about mental health, Hersh’s openness about her issues was a large part of the traditional narrative. There was an attitude of distance, othering, that was rarely present in discussions of male artists whose bursts of inappropriate behavior and violence made them the subjects of their own legends. On one occasion, my inexplicable taste was discussed as a symptom of my own presumed mental health. Most people don’t have their tastes questioned so bluntly, but it’s a moment that’s remained locked in my memory. Perhaps my undiagnosed and deeply buried issues were a factor in the difference of my experience. Perhaps it was only sexist garbage that “difficult” women are harder to love than “complicated” men. But that’s hindsight. What I learned that day was that I didn’t want to be a difficult woman.

It’s among the reasons to appreciate our current era, where it’s easier to find people with shared experiences and tastes. In the 90s, if you were too young to travel for concerts, seeing a favorite band on Conan or Letterman was a transcendent experience. Those of us with strict parents envied our peers who stayed up late for 120 Minutes, no matter how often they slept in class. When the music we heard was controlled by broadcast television and marketing-approved radio formats, every sighting was a glimmer of recognition that you weren’t alone.

Today, these performances sit on YouTube, waiting for the right kind of boredom to strike. The long tail means more music is available. Unlike film and television, music streaming services tend not to revamp their catalog. I know plenty of artists and albums have received my own attention out of convenience that would have been an impossible plea for their distributors twenty years ago.

Community isn’t the same as communication, however. There is an existentialist argument to be made about every music listener being alone and that not every personal experience is worth communicating. I myself develop strong associations between albums and eras of my life. Feist’s Let It Die is a time when I was making significant progress at being human. Kate Nash’s Made of Bricks is the winter when that progress came to an abrupt halt. Both are tied to the life events that surrounded my initial obsession with them, and depending on which album I put on, I can clearly picture and smell Indiana University sidewalks covered in cicadas or snow.

These connections are irrational in a psychoanalytic sense — unordered, automatic, free from direct relation to the lyrics and music. They do not add value for anyone else, but they can make an album easier to view with rose-tinted glasses. We all have the experience of looking back on an album and finding it doesn’t “hold up” as well as the memory of it or that its problematic elements weigh more heavily from the present perspective.

Though stories of these connections can be interesting as an examination of the surrealist “encounter,” the buried treasure as a cry for justice cannot be based upon accidents of timing. To demand a reassessment, the work must have meaning or merit on its own, one that can be communicated. The unburying isn’t even just a defense of taste; it’s meant to change someone else’s life.

It’s natural to expect the justification should come from musicology, from a solid artistic statement. As a songwriter, I’ve always been envious of Hersh’s style. There’s a deceptively simple emotional depth to her lyrics, brought about by ambiguity and contradiction.

The opener and lead single, “Your Ghost,” approaches the subject of loss with both broad and delicate touches. A not uncommon trope, the ghost of the title could be someone recently passed or simply someone who has abandoned the song’s narrator.

If I walk down this hallway, tonight
It’s too quiet
So I pad through the dark
And call you on the phone
Push your old numbers
And let your house ring
Til I wake your ghost

As with “Sundrops”, the irregularly measured phrases contribute to the mood. Here, paired with tense minor chords that never feel resolved, the effect is appropriately haunting.

It’s the blaze across my nightgown
It’s the phone’s ring

Even the grammar of the pre-chorus relies upon ambiguity, with that syntactically non-referential “it.” Hersh never identifies the emotion this ghost is meant to conjure. It’s as if the subject of the song doesn’t know herself how the haunting makes her feel.

Let him shoot me down
Let him call me off
I take it from his whisper
You’re not that tough

The narrator being so indirect invites us to practice empathy as we fill in the details. We as listeners turn toward the melody and tone, and we spin a story half of our own design.

Vulnerability is another theme of the album, one that isn’t rare in pop music as sung by women. Madonna’s “Cherish” is typical, expressing love as willfully intertwining one’s life with another’s, but her lyrics are sweetly childish. Hersh’s narrators find vulnerability in the rough, like the drunk couple in “Close Your Eyes.” Though the song opens on a night ending with the couple uncertain about making it home over dense, hammered chords, the midpoint softens to include tender moments such as these:

Stop you ruined all my memories
You ruined all my memories
I want to catch the falling babies
I’m falling into you
My hair’s in your face
Eyes on your eyes
Hands on my back
I can’t leave

The same juxtapositional technique appears on “Teeth.”

Never was a baritone till you stepped in
Never dried my halters on the line
This hairdo’s truly evil
I’m not sure it’s mine.
You’re so tall
It’s like I climb a waterfall

In either song, the narrator cannot maintain her anger with her partner. The voices are transformed by their relationships mid-thought. It’s not quite the same as the stream-of-consciousness and cut-up methods employed elsewhere in the 90s. Many of Hersh’s songs center a domestic backdrop, which lessens the jaded or shock elements of the technique. The relationships feel lived-in. The narrative and mental jumps accumulate into a timeless picture of relationships as work, as two-sided affairs that cannot simply be resolved through declarations of love.

These full-bodied relationships are so quintessential to Hersh’s music that the album’s closer, the title track, manages to present them as folksy wisdom.

I married a boxer to keep me from fighting
I married a brewer to keep me from drinking

These lines scan like American aphorisms handed down by mothers across generations. To grow, you have to acknowledge your faults.

Perhaps the lack of emotional resolution was a contribution to Hips and Makers being buried. The mood is meditative but unmoored. The lyrics direct yet wandering. Unlike top 40 music, the songs can transform dramatically in style before their close. The limited palette means certain motifs return again and again. Yet all these qualities describe another album of the same era: Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele. An indisputable masterpiece, Boys for Pele is arguably the less accessible of the two albums in terms of musicality and lyrical abstraction.

Can we call it a historical error that made the more difficult of these albums the more popular, the more influential, the one subject to more re-examinations decades later? The comparison between the two female artists immediately feels gross in those terms. We shouldn’t be interested in a sort of economic analysis pitting competing albums against one another in a world of rational listeners. The communication that music enables is not perfect, not rational. I’ll only add that Boys for Pele is Tori Amos’s attempt to create a universal mythology out of women’s experience, and that when originally recorded, Hips and Makers had an intended audience of one — Hersh’s then husband.

Thus even when the case for reassessment can be justified, the encounter, the connection, remains paramount. Critics can carve out a home for these lost albums in pop music history, but the actual work belongs to the listener. The critic creates a crisis in noting that things are not as they seem. History is incorrect, they say, incomplete. The listener is thrust into a vulnerable state, and they can tilt as easily toward a defensive stalemate as they can toward renewed enthusiasm.

No one is in control of the results. In the course of writing this five thousand word essay, I didn’t expect much more than “I listened to the songs. They’re good, but not my thing.”

Why do we all do it, then? Music blogs are full of lists of underrated and forgotten albums, but their effect is difficult to measure. Some might say critics are only showing off their encyclopedic knowledge, the obscure corners they’ve swept, but I think this is ungenerous. I know I for one want more, and that personal experience, that break with history, is the foundation of it. When we say “this album is capable of more than it’s given credit for,” it’s a crack in our own walls. An invitation.

How very adult that the critical listener’s experience, like a relationship, requires work. Highlighting the underrated begins to sound more like cleaning the stove-top the further we dig. If artistic appreciation is two-sided, then like the partners in Hersh’s lyrics, deficits cannot be overcome with mere declarations of faith and love.

I was a late bloomer with romantic relationships. This was clearly tied to the greatest ambiguity of my teenage years. As a bisexual transgender woman, my own internal monologue was full of contradictions, fear, and self-hate. This was amplified by the moment of history in which I found myself, that culture of the 90s when LGBTQIA visibility increased but understanding lagged. So many of us, lead by our icons, shunned labels then. We wanted our actions to speak for themselves.

Adults told me that I was creative, intelligent, and full of promise, but they didn’t yet know the historical error that I represented. When women like me were the topic of conversation, they were none of those things. They were perverted, inexplicable and hopeless. So far as I could see at the time, these were my two possible futures.

I wanted to create more than anything. Paintings, music, poetry, prose, and comic books poured out of me. People who saw my art or heard my music were routinely surprised that I became an English major. It was only after my undergraduate years that I learned to pick a lane, to channel that creative impulse toward fewer fields, fewer projects.

I also knew that I was one of those women no matter how hard I worked at hiding it. There’s a common thought experiment for establishing gender dysphoria. Imagine being offered a pill that would make you comfortable with the gender you were assigned at birth. The question is nonsense to most cis people. For many trans people, even before they accept themselves completely, the obvious answer sounds like suicide. I have never in my life wanted such a pill. No matter the attitudes of those around me. No matter my own shame. Removing my dysphoria by making me a man inside and out, that act would erase me.

Yet given my two futures, I believed my best hope lay in keeping myself buried. So I hid in long-term relationships. I hid among my liberal peers. Denying my own truth so long, I didn’t recognize how depressed my emotional responses were. People often call me calm. They might be right, but partly, I was just lagging behind, slowed down by my own unhealthy lie. The closet is an abusive partner. No one should be buried alive like that.

Last year, I experienced suicidal ideation. The thoughts had visited before, but they were suddenly louder, more persistent. The turning point for me wasn’t motivated by bravery so much as by fear. I didn’t want to die, and I knew exactly what I had to do to live.

While coming out, I learned how much of my internal dialog had been driven by the question of who knew all along. I wanted family and close friends to say, “I always wondered.” But traditional narratives are strong. That wall around me, the little ways in which I compensated, they created a shared history, and by coming out, I was demanding others to accept that we had all been making an error. Coming out as transgender is a cry for historical justice, however small the scale.

It can be difficult for others to accept our confessions about our inner lives. It’s grounded in personal experience after all — like the experiences that make an album meaningful to one person while the rest of the world moves on. We want to say, “Hey, I’m a man/woman/nonbinary now. Hey, this album is great.” We want our friends to respond, “Wow, you’re so right.” But it’s not a fair expectation. Identity doesn’t translate.

This was one of the fears that slowed my acceptance. Identity is irrational, an accident. How was I meant to explain that I was a woman when everyone had agreed on the contrary for years? Simply demanding it seemed inadequate. I had encountered the truth, but if no one else recognized who I was, I felt I had no ground to insist. It wasn’t just the fear of bigots outright denying me that help me back. Lacking self-confidence, it wasn’t enough for people to humor me. I wanted enthusiasm. I wanted people to experience my truth, to have come to that realization on their own. This is, of course, absurd and unhealthy.

So to communicate the internal, I sought justifications, evidence, in appearance, past behavior, personality, but comparison invites the flaws to the foreground. I was never destined to be a model. My degree choices leaned feminine, but my geeky hobbies didn’t. I wasn’t practiced in women’s spaces, and I’m so anxious and awkward that I’m bound to make giant mistakes. I’ve never successfully pulled off a cut crease. I mostly consider collaborative conversation styles in hindsight after accidentally trampling over someone’s point. I’m terrible at coming up with compliments. This isn’t even addressing the obvious biological shortcomings. Never mind that I know plenty of cis women who will recognize themselves in these descriptions: if I was a job applicant for womanhood, I was going to fail. At best, I was the complicated woman who would be spoken about with distance.

Yet it’s the truth. I’m a woman. I always have been. Even when I didn’t see it. I love being a woman. At my lowest points, I would never have given it up for anything.

I am learning that I cannot force the results of my transition. It sounds obvious, but this has been one of the hardest lessons for me, that vulnerability. My womanhood is a dialog, and it will be transformed by my relationships. A record cannot be perfect, cannot appeal to everyone. I, as a woman, will never be perfect, but I have to trust people to try to see me. It’s work, I know. I still have my own moments of looking in a mirror and failing to see myself.

I do see myself in Hips and Makers though. Despite the harm my identity has done to me, I have moments of gratitude that it kept me isolated in my teenage years, studying the arts, shielded by headphones from Indiana. Hersh’s narrators’ lives are not mine, but I practiced the future with them as my role models though I didn’t recognize it at the time. It’s impossible in this moment for me, in the weeds of transition, to not read parallels into that quote from “Teeth.” Today, it reads as a dialectic with myself.

Stop you ruined all my memories
You ruined all my memories
I want to catch the falling babies
I’m falling into you
My hair’s in your face
Eyes on your eyes
Hands on my back
I can’t leave

Those two futures no longer define me. Or rather, my identity feels whole. This is my hair in my face. I don’t think of my old masculine disguise as a separate personality, but it’s therapeutic to envision a conversation between who I was and who I am, as it might be for anyone. When my future said “I can’t leave,” it was time to act. When the scared teenager who ruined my memories returns to say “I can’t leave,” I respond, “I know.”

“It’ll be okay.”

I’ve dwelt on the darkness in Hips and Makers, but the album has its uplifting moments too. Calling on Shenandoah, Blue Ridge, and religious imagery, the song “Houdini Blues” is nearly anthemic.

I scaled the mountains skied the valleys
I’ve done the highs and the lows
I don’t feel like work today
Hell I won’t go.
Bess I won’t go.
Just let me at their locks
We should all be free
Oh Bess I swear I’ll call
When I’m free from me
We should all be free.

Similar in subject to the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine”, the song was nonetheless unlikely to become a campfire sing-a-long. Nevertheless, “Houdini Blues” and a few others tracks recall the communal spirit of folk music, the one that was so prominent in the 60s but has been absent in a lot of folk ever since. It’s not necessarily political in an activist sense, not necessarily “folk” in an ethnographic sense either, but within American folk music at least, there’s a strong streak of celebrating community and pluralism. Sometimes in message. Sometimes merely in the act of singing together. The music, loudly, demands to be shared and demands we take a hammer to our walls.

American political discourse has long been divided by the question of what it means to live in a pluralistic society. I’m biased, but I find myself wishing for a 21st century Pete Seeger, though I expect they’re more likely to resemble Lizzo than to play a banjo. Music isn’t a cure for society’s problems, but it is an excuse to come together, to witness each other in all our varieties, and to let literal harmony be a model for metaphorical harmony.

This is perhaps the more biting indictment of the buried treasure hunt. Not that critics cannot separate the personal. Not that technical craft cannot force universality. Not that listeners will resist the work of understanding the unfamiliar. But that music — and music criticism — needs to serve the public discourse. We’ve seen a recurring conversation across the arts about the future of the critic, but that fear is rooted in the process and value of review. The existence of buried treasures proves that the review has always been of questionable use. We should be looking at starred ratings as the critical equivalent of plastic packaging. Practical but unsustainable. Nothing we want to be remembered for.

I’ve been intentionally abusing the phrase “historical justice” in this essay because recognizing the underrated, the buried, should serve a larger purpose than correcting a top 100 list. So let’s be direct when we ask a listener to reconsider traditional narratives and their prejudgments. Our personal moments matter when they tell a story larger than “I was a teenager” or “this came out my senior year of college.” The value of the buried treasure is in the autobiography, in our biases, because ultimately we make and listen to music to communicate emotion, to experience both the unexpected and new ways of conceiving the familiar. We don’t chase into the woods of pop music history looking for lost treasure in order to put it behind glass in a museum. We search to prove that there can be beauty in the overlooked and ignored. To remember that music tells the story of us.

A plurality of histories will ultimately benefit us more than trying to construct a single narrative. Criticism is capable of more than its given credit for.

When I heard Hips and Makers had turned twenty-five this January, I was anxiously seeking recommendations and referrals to finally make my transition happen. Now here I am. Thirty-eight. Writing this, the longest of my coming out pieces, and I’m still struggling with the idea of rejection so badly that I’ve wrapped up my personal experience under the guise of a late record review. Music represents the promise of communication for me as much now as it did when my backpack was full of cassettes.

I originally meant to write a few paragraphs about the album, but in exploring why it meant something to me, it was impossible not to relate it to my identity. I chose to let the essay head in that direction because it felt honest. Although some of these details are confessions very few friends know, I don’t think any close friend could read this and not recognize me.

Which is good. That’s been a consistent message of my coming out, and many of my fears proved to be nothing at all. I’ve been happy how well my friends understand that I’m still me. There’s just more of me now as I unbury the parts I kept hidden.

I spent years imagining the different ways my transition could unfold. Years of learning how to speak to hostile medical professionals just in case. Years learning the check-marks needed to get on hormone therapy. Years reading about trans feminism. Examining my body image issues. Unpacking my toxic behaviors and being honest about which ones resulted from the closet. But as much as gatekeepers tried to make it so, the future isn’t a job interview.

Years ago, I would never have predicted how willingly my friends would embrace my new history. No justifications, no exegesis of the past has been necessary. My claimed identity, name, and pronouns have simply been accepted. We’ve come a long way from how we viewed women like me in the 90s.

I’m grateful for the enthusiasm, because it gives me hope. As much as we want to be overnight successes, identity is a life-long process. Mine began long before I came out, and it’ll continue well past the last time I’m misgendered. At least now I have company in these dark woods and a firm belief in the treasures ahead. I know a smart, funny, patient, kind woman my friends would all love to meet. The trick is she’s buried inside me, and it takes a little work to see her.