Sounds Like Me

by Sara Bareilles

  I also noticed that commenting on and critiquing a woman’s physical appearance was fair game for regular old conversation. It was everyday chitchat like, “Can I pour you a coffee? You got fatter, I think. How’s your mom?” I saw this for the first time when my grumpy, short, fat Italian roommate (with a portrait of Stalin over his bed, if that tells you anything) told my stick-thin, gentle, beautiful, bookish roommate that she had gained weight over the holiday break as if he had been discussing the weather. She just sheepishly laughed and agreed that she should skip some meals. I scowled at his dumpy awfulness, finished my plate of pasta, and wondered what I would say if I was ever put in that situation.

  I got to answer my own question at the end of the year, when I sat down with my History of Photography professor for the final oral exam and the first thing he said was, “Sei un po’ingrassata, eh?” (You’ve gained a little weight, huh?)

  The shock of such a statement took me by surprise, and it stung. Regrettably, I only laughed uncomfortably and told him, “Yeah, I really liked the food,” because I didn’t know what tense to use to tell him he was a shithead in Italian.

  I was desperately lonely.

  Even at my best, I still only spoke rudimentary Italian. There’s only so much of yourself that gets expressed in “ONE HAM SANDWICH PLEASE!” and “I AM STUDENT! I STUDY THE COMMUNICATIONS! I EAT THREE PIZZA TODAY!” In any given situation I could only express a fraction of what my brain was thinking or feeling, and it felt like I was projecting a dulled sense of my own personality. Because of my limitations with the language, I had very little nuance. No humor. No bite. It’s maddening to be in a conversation wanting to show someone who you are, while expressing yourself like a child. It kept me feeling isolated from my Italian friends and leaning hard on my American ones, who were great, but difficult in their own ways. I had fiery friendships that were fraught with unnecessary drama, and by the sheer nature of the study program’s design, everything felt temporary. One year of all this craziness and then we’d all go back to our “real” lives. I was living in a strange limbo world, not totally connecting to what was immediately around me, but still incredibly far from what I would be going home to.

  I couldn’t shake this feeling that we were all in suspended animation during our year in Italy. It didn’t matter what I did, because my actual life was waiting for me at home. I experimented with things I had never done before, feeling like it was justified because I was in an alternate universe. I made stupid, rash decisions and let myself off my own leash for a while. It was my own personal Rumspringa. I was exactly like an Amish teenager on a free pass to explore the world outside my community. (Note to self: Find better metaphor before book goes to print.)

  I started smoking. I got my eyebrow pierced. I barely went to class. I asked for rides on scooters with random dudes late at night. I drank many drinks many times. I took ecstasy that didn’t work at a dance club and everyone else felt gypped and I felt relieved.

  In trying to find my footing I lost my grip.

  One night I smoked weed with my two American girlfriends on my couch, watching a documentary about Bob Marley. The night started out breezy. We were laughing, making dinner together, and I felt light and warm, the way marijuana and Bob Marley are theoretically supposed to make you feel. Then I felt a shift, and the sensation turned a corner into something colder and darker. I started to hear my internal monologue at a screaming volume, and it was telling me I was crazy. I left the girls in the living room without telling them what was going on and went to lie down in the little twin bed of my peach-colored bedroom. I put on Fiona Apple’s Tidal, one of my favorite records, and the room was spinning around me as she sang Sullen Girl. I frantically wrote in my journal, trying to keep up with how fast my thoughts were coming, but the whole act of it scared me further. I felt out of control.

  It wasn’t just too much marijuana: it was a kind of homesickness, but not for my life in LA or anything that had come before. I craved some sense of knowledge that I was going to be all right out here in the world, all by myself.

  The day that followed was terrible. My emotional hangover was thick and thorny and I felt antsy, wanting to crawl out of my own skin. I had hoped I would sleep off those weird, crazy feelings and wake up “normal,” but my melancholy was everywhere and I couldn’t pretend otherwise. I sat in an Internet café and wrote again in my journal about how heavy the feelings were, waiting for something to lift, but I had been introduced to what would become a leading character in my life. The melancholy that cracked open that night would eventually become something I’m deeply fond of, but we never know which monsters under the bed will become our friends, do we?

  I took a morning walk that led me into the belly of a tall Catholic cathedral, where I asked for God’s help on my knees from one of the empty wooden pews. Please, God, guide me toward something that feels like home. I walked out of the massive church and its medieval arched doors, back to my apartment, and sent out my version of the bat signal. I called my dad. Through my tears I told him that I was having a really hard time and that I thought I needed him to send me my keyboard immediately. I don’t know why that was my solution in the moment, but it just was. A smarter, savvier person might have noticed that they actually sell keyboards in Italy, but BACK OFF, I’M HAVING A CRISIS!!!!! Aside from singing a couple of times in a restaurant that belonged to friends, I wasn’t involved in anything music related, and I hadn’t been writing at all for the months I had already spent in Italy. The black and white keys of my shitty little keyboard were the only things I could think of that felt like a safe place to go. My darling father took it to FedEx that very morning, and I was at least a little bit relieved to know it was on its way. I was less relieved to know that, with shipping and taxes, it was going to cost us around six hundred dollars. Merry Christmas, FedEx.

  At Merry Melodies Music School in Bologna, Italy, 2001

  The sky took its cue from my stormy mood and opened up with torrential rains as I arrived home to my little apartment. Being inside felt worse than being wet, so after I hung up with my dad, I gathered my Walkman (yep . . .) and an umbrella and headed out in search of something I hadn’t identified yet. A few doors down from the entrance to the building was a large commercial music shop. I absentmindedly made that my first stop. They had big walls of books of sheet music and racks of CDs in those gigantic useless plastic bricks they used to come in, and a small selection of musical instruments. I walked past the headphones, guitars, small keyboards, and amplifiers straight to the man behind the counter. I thought I could inquire about piano lessons maybe, or practice rooms, but I didn’t really know. I was fumbling over the words themselves, as well as tears so fresh they could begin again at any second, but managed to ask about piano lessons. This particular store didn’t offer them, but the man was kind and spoke slowly and said there was a small music school relatively close to our neighborhood. I had a destination now, at least.

  This was before we held phone-shaped maps in our hands at all times, so it felt more like a treasure hunt than anything else. I darted between the rain and the porticos, the big overhangs that are on practically every building in Bologna, and after some time searching down small streets, I saw the tiny white sign that said MERRY MELODIES. The roll-down metal gate was mostly closed, but there was light coming through the window from a back room. I rang the bell.

  A tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and a smile came to the door, raised the gate, and hurried me inside out of the rain. He spoke to me in Italian, saying that the shop was closed for the day and the piano teacher wasn’t there, so I would have to come back another time. As I stuttered through thanking him for letting me in, my unrefined Italian tipped him off, and he immediately broke into English.

  I would come to learn many things about Michael Bruscia in a very short amount of time. That day in the lobby, I learned he was an American music teacher who had been living in Bologna for twenty-plus years, thus giving him an endearing hodgepodge mash-up
vocabulary and pronunciation. He says things like “Cal-ee-for-nee-yuh” and “That’s just fantastico!!” He is from Wisconsin, which he visits every three years, and has a son named Daniele who is also very musical. He moved to Bologna after marrying his Italian wife, and he conducts a jazz orchestra called Born to Swing in addition to giving saxophone lessons and running the studio. I would eventually learn that Michael argues passionately about Bob Dylan’s canon of work. He can drink anybody under the table with great cheer, as I imagine Santa Claus might if he were a drinker, and best of all, he has an enthusiasm for life that makes you question your own tendency to think anything isn’t amazing.

  He was genuine and warm, and so curious about my being in Bologna, and we went very quickly from talking about the prospect of piano lessons to discussing life in Italy as an American. We spoke about music and why I felt compelled to take lessons. I told him I was a singer and a beginning songwriter and he immediately invited me to share something I had written. I was hesitant, but he was so sure that it would be wonderful that I kind of wanted to see for myself. He ushered me into the small, cluttered lesson room adjacent to the tiny lobby entrance. Lit by an old side-table lamp, the room had an upright piano, stacks of sheet-music books, a couple of chairs, and an old record player in the corner. I sat down at the piano and scanned my brain for anything I could play by heart, which was not much. I nervously settled on one of my original songs, Everyday Stranger, and after I finished, Michael applauded and begged for another song. I felt proud. I played Gravity, which was one of the other songs in my repertoire. He showered me with compliments and fantasticos and I blushed and felt special and good and deeply happy for the first time in a long time.

  Michael asked me if I knew the album Blue, by Joni Mitchell. Of course I had heard her name, but I had to admit that I wasn’t familiar with her music. I had just recently ended a phase of my life where I listened almost exclusively to *NSync and Britney Spears, but I omitted that part. He felt a need to share a particular song with me. The crackle of the vinyl began, then the jangly chords of the dulcimer, and then I heard the pure arrow of Joni’s voice pierce the instrumentation, and something in me. The song he played was “California.”

  And I cried.

  Silently, facing away from Michael, staring at the keys of the piano. Her words bloomed into vivid pictures in my mind, and her message, delivered by way of that delicate, haunting soprano, made my heart swell. I felt like somebody had thrown me a rope. The song made peace with living between two worlds, and I somehow felt understood and comforted immediately (in spite of not knowing what a “sunset pig” was). I felt relieved listening to her capture the rapture and mystery of a foreign place and, in the same breath, ache for a sense of home. It was so pure. I told Michael how homesick I was. How I missed a sense of myself. He understood completely. Even for someone who had long since made a very happy life in that Italian world, he could relate to the feeling of missing where you come from, at the same time knowing that you can never really go back.

  Michael and I listened through that song and a few others off of her masterpiece album, Blue, and I immediately felt an urge to make my own experiences sing like that. In my own way, of course, I could try and build songs that might serve as monuments to my own private revelations, and make them into something that wouldn’t terrify, but enlighten me. Teach me. Release me, too. In that moment, I wanted to go straight to my piano and unravel the mess of emotion and anxiety inside me and make it into something beautiful. It felt like pieces of some puzzle had clicked into place, and music was the soul center of it all. Songwriting wasn’t a hobby. It was my lifeline.

  Michael and I spoke for about an hour and I left lighter, with a sense of direction. He invited me to come back the following week, and I did. I took a couple of piano lessons, but after Michael suggested I come sing some songs with his jazz orchestra, I focused only on that. He made me mixtapes of songs to learn by some of the greatest women in jazz. I got to know Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday. I started singing standards with Born to Swing on a regular basis, and we played at clubs, weddings, parties, community events, and even a jazz club in Milan called Ca’ Bianca. At the end of the performance, the owner of the club presented me with a bouquet of flowers and we took photographs while the audience cheered like I was somebody. My picture was in the local Milanese paper the next day, and I have to say, that felt pretty fantastico.

  On stage at Ca’ Bianca in Milan, December 2000

  My keyboard arrived a week or so after my quest to Merry Melodies, and after a snafu with the voltage of Italian outlets, a certain burning smell, and me again realizing I should have just bought a fucking keyboard in Italy, I got my writing station settled and started pouring my stories into my music. With my keyboard next to my bed I felt less alone, like I had a friend that wouldn’t leave my side. I wrote the song Red in that same peach-colored bedroom where I thought I was losing my mind. It spoke to my recent realization that I felt out of bounds and couldn’t depend on my parents or my past to save me, but that was okay. I felt whole again when I wrote the lyric “How you love is who you are.” It sounded like me. I gained a little patience with the uncertainty swirling around me and, through writing about my experience, found my way back to something inside myself that I recognized. I surrendered more fully to what was out of my control and started feeling less sorry for myself, which continue to be two of the fastest and most effective ways to change my perspective.

  It’s been fifteen years since I lived in that apartment in Bologna, looking down over the crowded roundabout filled with mopeds and tiny Italian cars. I have lost touch with most of my roommates and friends from that time, but I still get a call from Michael Bruscia every three years when he visits Wisconsin. I look forward to that phone call, because in addition to the general wave of nostalgia for what ended up being a very rich and meaningful time in my life, it reminds me of that day in the rain, when he introduced me to Joni. I have since shed the extra pounds and most of my Italian vocabulary, but retained a lot of what I learned in Italy. Among the many things I took away:

  1. The Italian post office can close any time it wants to, for any reason at all.

  2. Cappuccinos are not for after dinner. Espressos are.

  3. Italy is beauty.

  4. How you love is who you are.

  5. My soul is a songwriter.

  MANY THE MILES

  * * *

  I HAVE SPENT MANY MONTHS of my life on the road. It’s one of my favorite parts about my job, because I get to see the world through the lens of sharing music, and there is nothing I have found that is more gratifying. I’ll never forget the moment I looked up at the tiers of the audience—lit up—of my sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall. I was wearing a leather tank top and a tutu, and dedicated The Way You Look Tonight to my dad, who stood in the audience. I watched a sea of college kids fist-pump to a song about finding your soul mate, merely because I asked them to. I have looked across the top of my piano onstage while Sir Elton John sang Gravity and Carole King sang Brave. I have hugged Stevie Wonder, and I can tell you for a fact that he’s squishy. The memories fold into each other like paint on a colossal canvas. It’s an elaborate, repeating sequence of morning coffees and late-night bourbons, and everything that happens in between. It is a beautiful blur.

  The stage is like the Wild West: anything can happen, and usually does. This has been the single greatest teacher I have encountered in my life in helping me learn to stay flexible and roll with the punches. For example, on a solo tour in Austin, Texas, the power to the main speakers might short-circuit for several minutes in the middle of a show. Instead of panicking, this is a good time to break out into Part of Your World, from The Little Mermaid. You might also try crowd-surfing. Or, perhaps in St. Louis, the sound of the piano might suddenly disappear as you start playing your solo encore song. Instead of getting angry at the technical malfunction, you might, instead, consider talking to the audience about the firs
t time you got your period. The unpredictability of live performance has encouraged me to flex my own ability to stay playful. It’s a metaphor for the bigger picture too, as many times life doesn’t follow the rules. This reminder is part of what makes performance so magical and keeps me coming back for more.

  Despite the overall blur of touring, there are all kinds of moments that remain distinct and intact. In August 2013, I got an invitation to sing my song Brave with Taylor Swift at her show in Los Angeles. Besides a flattering invite, this was an opportunity to become “Super Auntie” to my two young nieces, who I’m incessantly trying to convince of my coolness. At our afternoon rehearsal at the arena, I learned I would be entering the stage from the elevator platform at the top of a giant staircase. I had never entered any kind of room from an elevator platform, so this simultaneously made me feel nervous and like a Power Ranger. After sound check, my family and I got ready for the show in my dressing room and then headed out to our seats to watch Taylor. She danced and sang and bubbled over onstage like pink champagne. My nieces were in heaven.

  It was then time for me to go backstage to get my in-ear monitors on. The stage manager escorted me to the back of the stage and I stood on the giant metal platform, waiting for my introduction. My heart was racing. I heard the drum introduction of Brave begin and then the ground beneath me started rising upward. Taylor called out my name on the microphone and then . . .

  Nothing.

  I couldn’t hear ANYTHING but the deafening roar of thousands of tweenage apocalyptic screams. I frantically listened for any music at all. I knew the drums had started, but literally no other sounds could pierce the wall of “woo.” I couldn’t hear the beginning notes of the piano over the crowd, so I ripped out my earpiece to try and hear the speaker system of the venue at least. No good. All I could hear was even louder girl-euphoria. It was time to start singing, so I basically just picked a note out of thin air. I could immediately feel in my throat muscles that it was the wrong one, and I’ll never forget the panicked look on the music director’s face on the side of the stage that just said, “Noooooooooooooooooooo!!” I tried a bunch of other wrong notes for the whole first verse but finally hunted down the right ones by the chorus. I was mortified, but I couldn’t do anything except keep singing for the fans cheering us on. I smiled and danced with Taylor at the end of the catwalk and pretended everything was fine. We got through the song, she hugged me, and I came offstage and felt awful.