I once stopped talking to—and flirting with—a guy at a wedding—on whom I’d long had a crush—because Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” came on and I had to abandon both him—and my heels—to hustle to the dance floor.

I think of this on a Saturday morning in 2025. I’m in the black cotton robe I bought at a department store in 2011 for a 20-minute-long performance art piece called “Baggage Claim,” where I stood on stage in a bra and underwear—having disrobed from the robe—to circle parts of my body with permanent marker and recite the emotional baggage I felt I carried there.

In many ways, it is music—and movement and dance—that has allowed me to release my baggage—emotional and otherwise—throughout the course of my entire life. From the first cassette tapes that adorned my Walkman before elementary school—Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Off the Wall, and the unbeatable and forever seismic We Are the World. Or the Ella Jenkins records that kissed my plastic record player, or the Sharon, Lois & Bram VHS tapes, too.

Music became innate. A way for me to touch my truths from within.

Movement—dance—became the companion alongside the music, the way my body held sound.

I learned to dance young. First, with ballet. Then, one Passover in Palm Springs, California, where my family and several others we knew from the Chicagoland area had vacation homes, I watched my friend liberate her hips on the edge of her pool while Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation blasted from the speakers. We were 7. I would never quiet my own hips—or torso—again.

On the aforementioned Saturday in 2025, I am listening to a playlist I recently made for one of my best friends, which I titled “Go West.” A nod to her journey to Alaska. And the Go West classic “King of Wishful Thinking” that kicked off the playlist (after Maggie Roger’s “Alaska”).

So far this morning in 2025, I have liberated my hips—in order—to The Fray’s “Over My Head,” Beanie Man’s “King of the Dancehall,” Jewel’s “Alaska” (which I actually don’t remember even hearing?!), Damien Marley and Nas’ “As We Enter,” Bahamadia’s “Uknowhowedu,” Umphrey McGee’s “Anchor Drops” (which I skipped over because, while I love it, it just wasn’t hitting the shuffle vibe), Chaka Demus & Plier’s “Murder She Wrote,” and the opening beats of Brandy’s “Full Moon,” which I paused so I could read (whatever I was reading), knowing I’d return to it when I started making myself scrambled eggs for brunch.

I’ve never been able to properly articulate what music does to me.

Or how—for me—music and movement are inextricable.

Recently, at another wedding, while flirting with an entirely different guy, we were talking about our musical tastes. He asked me about mine. I said I loved music. That it was core to my life. He said he could tell. I asked how. He said I gave that vibe. It must have been my dancing earlier. Barefoot on cold flattened rocks and twigs and stones at the outdoor venue in upstate New York.

Sometimes, I like music so much it hurts.

It’s like my body can’t relinquish the compulsion building inside quickly enough. I sway a hip. Tetradactyl an arm. Flaunt my chest to the rhythm of the tone. Nothing does it. Nothing works. And so I move and move and move and move and move until it does. Until maybe it gets close.

Recently, at an open mic a group of close friends curate and host, the one who DJs for the night put on Silk’s “Freak Me,” which, in case you don’t know the lyrics, has a chorus that sings, “Let me lick you up and down, til you stay stop. Let me play with your body baby make you real hot. Let me do all the things you want me to do. ‘Cause tonight baby, I wanna get freaky with you.”

The song was released by Atlanta-based R&B group on February 18, 1993. I was in fourth grade. My first memory of knowing it, singing it, referencing it, and belting the chorus was in fifth grade at my cluster of desks with the classmates with whom I sat every day, some of whom were all R&B and hip hop fans like me, listening to Chicagoland radio stations like B93 and 107.5.

Now, this makes me assume that this was the fall of 1993 when I was singing it, referencing it, deeply aware that this song and this chorus existed, also because I see myself in long sleeves.

But the point is, that recently, in 2025 Brooklyn, at this monthly open mic series, when my friend who DJs the series put on Silk’s “Freak Me,” and walked past me where I was singing the chorus with my legs wide and squatting my hips towards the ground—mid-conversation with a few others friends—he, the DJ, looked at me and pointed, implying that he knew I’d know that track.

Because the people around me know: I bleed the music from my bones.

I have that vibe.

When I was a senior in high school, my family and I went to Las Vegas to see Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young on their Y2K tour at the turn of the millennium. There we were at the MGM Grand. I sang along to every word. Boomers from each direction in the stands looked at me.

How did I know? How on earth did I know this music and all of its words?

They couldn’t understand how on earth this 17-year-old, at the turn of the millennium, knew every word. I explained: My parents had all these cassette tapes in the basement. I’d spend hours down there, listening. Over and over on the stereo system my dad got from rental car points.

There was also the Bang & Olufsen system that hung from the wall in the living room. It looked right out of one of the futuristic scenes in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A CD player—upright—nearby the tape deck, and then the record player jutting out perpendicular to it all.

I spent so many weeknights and weekend afternoons going back and forth to that stereo—even though there was a remote—as I made up dances to Janet Jackson songs blasting through the house. I’d move the purple chair to the edge of what I’d deemed the dance floor. I’d lay my budding body on the pale-wood floor. I’d arch my chest upward with the sound of the beat. I could feel the pulse of sound coursing through my skin, ravaging my blood. I felt alive.

I can measure my life in music. The way I’ve consumed it. The devastation I felt as we shifted to MP3, and yet the thirst I had to acquire everything. Napster. LimeWire. Kazaa. Bittorent. I would spend hours in the late years of high school, the early semester of college occupying the search bar for the shit I wanted to hear. College acapella. The Grateful Dead. Phish. Classic rock. Hard rock. Pink Floyd. R&B. Hip hop. Arrested Development. People Under the Stairs. A Tribe Called Quest. Sound Tribe Sector 9. Béla Fleck. Yonder Mountain String Band. If I didn’t have it—already—in my multi-hundred CD collection, or my dozens and dozens of cassette tapes and mixtapes I’d made on cassette and then eventually burned CDs, I would find it online.

When I need music, I find it. That’s always how I’ve been.

Or, the music finds me.

On the aforementioned Saturday in 2025, I take an afternoon walk and listen to Lizzo’s new album. I cut it short to shower and go see Vulfpeck at Madison Square Garden with a friend.

The concert is tremendous. I stand, dance, move, sit, revel in awe as they sing and play.

But it’s when Vulpeck brings out a guest—legendary drummer Bernard Purdie—that it clicks.

I’ve always marveled at musicians. How they get to do what they love.

And then I think to myself: but I’m also doing what I love.

Writing. Performing. Teaching. Producing documentary films and theater. And the like.

Perhaps art—in and of itself—is the musicality of communication, a language in and of itself.

At some point I start to (negatively) spiral (in my head) about something unrelated to the concert or music or my bountiful joy. I get in my brain. Lean against the wall next to my seat.

I do what I often do in those moments of cavernous cacophony: I call upon my dead brother, Josh. I say to him—quietly, without being vocal out loud, but instead speaking to him with a language we’ve come to speak inside my head—that I could really use his help.

You feel really far away, I tell him.

I’m actually so close, he says back, which is why you think you can’t see or feel me right now.

I ask him for a sign.

I need a sign, I tell him. A sign that everything is going to be alright.

My friend to my left asks me if I’m alright.

Yeah, I tell them.

Snap out of my head.

And then Vulfpeck plays one of their biggest hits.

And Madison Square Garden starts to really, truly move.

Including me, too.

I sway my hips.

I shake from my body the things my brain has been holding too tightly with its syncopated grip.

The show ends. We clap. Cheer. The band leaves. Comes back for an encore. Leaves. Comes back for a bow.

And then. The house lights come up. My friend and I join the masses to descend the steps from section 227 at MSG. And then. Then. Then, the post-show music begins.

“Clock strikes upon the hour, and the sun begins to fade.” No fucking way, I think. No fucking way, I say to Josh. No. Fucking. Way.

“Sooner or later try to figure out how to chase my blues away.”

I descend the steps. Singing along. Out loud.

“I wanna dance with somebody. I wanna feel the heat with somebody. I wanna dance with somebody. With somebody who loves me.”

I feel like music loves me, I think. And loving music helps me love myself. And life. And the world. And the divine. And like the language I speak inside my head with my dead brother and other dead loved ones, is a language too, like music. It transcends words, music—even when a song has lyrics—by permeating parts of my body I don’t otherwise know how to reach.

The beat has a pulse. The vibration pushes a rhythm into my body that navigates a portal that lives beyond noise.

It’s not even auditory. It’s that my skin and all of my organs feel the sound waves as they undulate and oscillate through the air.

Something is happening in a dimension that I cannot fully see or hear with just my ears.

But I can feel it. The pulsating.

I know it’s happening.

I know what it tells my body.

I hear a kind of hereness and hearness that allows me to feel.

For example, it’s just obvious to me that “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” by Bob Dylan (with my favorite two covers by Manfred Mann and the Grateful Dead) sounds like it has a bit of a crossover tickle that shows up in the Beatle’s “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And once a friend leaned over to me at a Phish concert to note that Phish’s “Blaze On” has a melodic stretch that sounds exactly like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land;” I’ll never unhear it for the rest of my life. And you can’t tell me I’m wrong when I tell you that “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me In St. Louis—which is one of my favorite Broadway songs and musicals of all time—yields a perfectly succinct mash-up with The Pharcyde’s “Drop” if and when you tamper down the pace of “Trolley” just enough to sync in tune with the song that birthed—in my humble opinion—one of the greatest music videos of all time, Spike Jonze directing bodies to syncopate to the beat.

Sound is felt. There have long been sections at rock and hip hop and other musical genre concerts for concertgoers who are hearing impaired, with American Sign Language interpreters translating lyrics, some adding their own movement and flare. Because the sound vibrations are felt. Whether we receive them as noise into our ears or not.

I didn’t realize the connection between my love for music and the way I communicate with the dead until now. Until begging my dead brother for a sign two songs before the end of a Vulfpeck concert at the end of a day during which music had—as if often does—consumed my soul whole.

But it makes sense. It is not my ears that are receiving the content that I so cherish and love—even though I have an absurdly wild knack and acumen for remembering lyrics and melodies and noticing how beats can fit together and merge and remembering songs I haven’t heard or sung in decades as if they were living in the caverns of my bones—but something deeper. My synapses.

There are languages some of us hear by feeling them. And that is why my body then moves.

That is why I don’t only want to dance, but need to dance with somebody.

And no matter what, that body is always the music. That body is always the feeling of the sound.

***

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