Brotherly Love

2012-02-05T21:13:00.000-08:00

I have this vivid memory of when a song made me cry for the first time. I was six. I remember the loneliness of sitting in my mother's bed as I wept. I remember clutching onto my disc-man because it was my most loved possession. I remember crying out of sadness, not for myself, but for the boys who wrote the song - because something in their lives allowed them to write it. It was in this moment that I first understood that words have this incredible, unparalleled power.

It was in this moment that I found my first love within every word that the Hanson brothers wrote down. I saw the world through their music at an age when I couldn't see things for myself.

MMMbop image courtesy of The Island Def Jam Music Group (1997).

The Hanson brothers mean the absolute world to me. When I look back on my childhood, I realize that an immense portion of what I stand for today are things that they taught me. It was through their songs that I discovered empathy, togetherness, and even heartbreak. They taught me what something sounds like when it's bittersweet. Hanson made me question the way things work, because at six years old I couldn't fathom the idea of a music video and its visual capability.

MMMbop image courtesy of The Island Def Jam Music Group (1997).

Hanson will be playing a concert in Toronto in four days. I'm not going. I'm not going even though it's on my hypothetical bucket list to see them play. I guess there's a tiny part of me that's afraid of hearing that same song again - except this time, it won't be fed through the mechanics of a disc-man. There's this tiny part of me that fears the song won't mean the same thing it did to me when I was six-years-old.

"I Will Come to You" is the name of the song that made me cry. I loved that song from start to finish, because it meant that three young boys had this immense capacity for kindness. I loved them for writing that song because they found something beautiful inside the sadness that everyone feels.

I will never throw out my Hanson CDs.

I Will Come to You image courtesy of The Island Def Jam Music Group (1997).

elephant hearts

Brotherly Love