Music is the soundtrack to our lives, it is said, and that axiom is true. Many of us always have music running through our minds, and it is the records we are listening to that help us remember the details of our nostalgic reminiscing. There may only be a handful of those instances, but that only makes them even more special.
The first of those came for me when I heard Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)". Even more than Meat himself, it was hearing the rumble in the voice of 'Mrs Loud' as she pleaded, "will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?" that crystalized the moment. That was when I became a music fan, and not just someone who heard music because it was on in the background.
The next such moment came when I first heard the haunting opening chords of Tonic's "If You Could Only See" ringing from the radio. Though I couldn't explain why it was that song among all others that caught my attention, I heard something in it that reflected the haze that made me soul difficult to see. It would take time, but putting that song in the opening slot of my radio-taped cassette was the impetus that led me to my (for many years) favorite band, and to think of myself as a musician. That would become my identity, then the downfall of my psyche, but that's not the story we're telling today.
THE moment that changed everything was still to come. I don't know if 'love at first sight' is a real thing, as I've certainly never experienced it. I do know that 'love at first listen' is very much a real thing, as that is how the golden spike was driven into my heart.
That voice came out of the television, and it took only seconds for the sound to seep into my blood. I knew nothing of her, but I felt like I knew everything. A voice can tell us everything about a person's soul, and beauty is hard to turn away from. Despite being a writer, and taking pride in turning phrases, I struggle to explain what I feel when I hear one of the truly special voices. My common refrain has been to say that she, alone, reverberates at the frequency of my soul. That doesn't seem like enough, at times.
Dilana changed my life. From that first moment I heard her sing, I came to understand myself in new ways. I hadn't realized where my tastes came from, or where they were going, until I discovered the center of my musical universe. Few singers have ever sounded as if they were bleeding their soul into a recording the way Dilana can, with her voice rumbling the ground with the power of her pain, with her heart healing the deep cuts she leaves on us.
For years, I wrote off my fear of being a broken person in the form of a joke about being emotionless. There was enough truth in it that other people did not disagree, although what I think is the root cause of those doubts would not become clear for many more years. Music was many things to me, but it was not 'emotional'. That was a concept largely beyond my comprehension, as was the love so many songs were written to express. It was uncomfortable for so many songs to feel alien on that fundamental human level, but I would have been more concerned if I felt like all those songwriters understood what was going through my mind.
What started in that first moment I heard Dilana blossomed into its final form the first time I listened to "Beautiful Monster". That record is more than just an album. It was the key that unlocked pieces of myself I didn't know were there. I was not broken in the way I thought, I had just never been exposed to the kind of love that could survive in the acid of my blood, that was sweet enough to overpower my bitterness. Dilana's voice could, and did, and the armor plating of my self-deprecating humor fell in a clamor to the ground over the course of those forty minutes.
Toward the end of "Falling Apart", Dilana sings "I'm so bloody fucked up, I don't know where to start." Perhaps no line has summed up my life more than that, and the vulnerability of telling the world that the smile in a picture may be a lie hit me at my very core. If she could feel lost and hurt, but still have so much heart and passion, maybe I could too. I never know whether the shared experience of pain is an encouraging reminder that we aren't alone, or whether it is a depressing reminder that happiness is as difficult to keep as holding a ghost in our hands.
Over the last few years, there have been times when I have found myself at the bottom of the proverbial hole, looking up and barely seeing a dot of light above me. In those moments, when I feel disconnected from humanity at large, Dilana's voice is there in the back of my head to remind me that the threads may be thin and weak, but they are still there. Hers is the voice of the human experience, and hearing her sometimes is the only thing that convinces me I am whole enough to be human.
I loved Dilana's voice the moment I heard it. I loved "Wonderfool", "InsideOut", and "Beautiful Monster" from the very first listen. She is an artist whose voice and whose words felt like someone I knew and understood. While that would be special enough, I have come to know and understand her as one of my dearest friends. I am prone to bouts of existential questioning, wherein I tear myself down to everything but the doubt Descartes told us was all we could know for sure. When that happens, and I struggle to see myself as anything but a black hole devoid of gravity, that connection is the rope that rescues me from drifting into the eternal emptiness of my own little world.
Her song "When You're Around" might be my favorite vocal performance. She croons with the hint of rasp that sands off the facades we put on, then she builds to a powerful roar that hits me in the chest every time, and illustrates that she has lived more life than most of us could even imagine in our minds. Me, especially.
Dilana is more than a great voice and a great musician. She is the dividing line between who I was and who I am, she is who allowed me to begin to understand myself. She has taught me, she has sustained me, she has seen me. Love was one of those 'four-letter words' before she came into my life. For all of that, I will never be able to offer enough thanks.
And all because of a single moment in time... Funny how that works, isn't it?
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