The story behind the song
A Dress from 15 Years Back
I found it in the back of the closet, behind the winter coats, on a hanger I didn’t recognize anymore. Navy blue, little buttons, a hemline that used to mean something. I bought it fifteen years ago for a party I couldn’t tell you a single detail about now. What I remember is the woman who wore it.
I tried it on. Of course I tried it on — you always do. And somewhere between my ribs and that zipper, the dress and I had a full and frank conversation about the years in between.
Here’s what nobody warns you about: the dress doesn’t lie, but it doesn’t tell the whole truth either. It only knows the shape of who you were. It has no idea what you’ve carried since — two kids raised, a marriage ended, a whole life lived in a body that kept showing up for every bit of it.
I could have stood there and grieved those fifteen years. For a second, I did. Then I laughed, because the alternative was crying in my own closet over a dress, and I’ve cried over worse for less.
So I wrote a song about it. Not a sad one — a true one. Because the dress from fifteen years back was never really about the dress. It’s about every woman who has stood in front of a mirror and had to decide whether to be at war with herself or on her own side.
I’m on my own side now. Took me long enough.
On starting late
The songs I spent thirty years not writing
People ask why I waited. As if at twenty-five I sat down, looked at a guitar, and chose thirty years of silence on purpose.
It wasn’t a choice. It was a marriage, two kids, a job, a house that always needed something, and a small voice that kept saying later, later, there’ll be time later. Later has a way of eating a whole life if you let it.
Then the house went quiet in a way I hadn’t planned for. The kids left. The marriage ended. And in all that silence I finally heard the voice again — the one that had been saying later for three decades. Only now it was asking, how about now?
I’d love to tell you I picked up right where I left off. I didn’t. My voice had aged. So had I. But that turns out to be the whole point. I’m not trying to sound twenty-five. Twenty-five didn’t have much to say. Fifty-one has opinions.
So I write about what I actually know now — hot flashes and grey hairs, grown children and the strange, unglamorous freedom of caring a little less what everyone thinks. Nobody was going to write me these songs. So I’m writing them myself. Late, and this time on purpose.
A small confession
Yes, there are tweezers in my car
There is a pair of tweezers in the driver’s-side door of my car, and I’d like to explain myself before anyone else does.
They live there because of the lighting. Something happens to a woman’s face in the rearview mirror at a red light — some cruel, honest sun comes through the windshield and reveals a single chin hair standing up like it pays rent. You cannot un-see it. You will not make it home without addressing it. This isn’t vanity. It’s a public service.
I used to be embarrassed by things like this — the body doing its strange midlife bookkeeping, sprouting where it shouldn’t and softening where it used to hold. Somewhere along the way I decided embarrassment was one more thing I didn’t have room for.
So I wrote a song about the tweezers in the car. Because if we can’t laugh about the chin hair at the red light, what exactly are we saving the laughing for?
Just — if you’re ever a passenger in my car and you open that door, now you know. You’re welcome.
