Luke Sital-Singh and the Weight of Living

I will never be a legitimate music writer because I can't shut up about having kids.

Luke Sital-Singh’s music always makes me feel apocalyptic.

Not in a screaming, terror-helmed, sky-on-fire way. It’s more gray and blue; the eerie calm after a flood or hurricane, surveying an effaced landscape and wondering, why, out of everyone, am I the one still here? When I was in high school, I would play “21st Century Heartbeat” and project myself into the future: graduated and successful, hopefully, but also aimless and uncertain. Sital-Singh opens his song with the speaker getting coffee while, in the background, the radio plays news about “a civil war and a missing child.” It’s the mundaneness of it that gets me. I have been the speaker, in that exact moment, going about my useless business while something terrible happens in the background; the next lines, which cycle endlessly through my head, finish the blow: I woke up hollow as an apple core / I’ve got so much purpose, I don’t know what for.

His latest album, A Golden State, is more optimistic. Written after he and his wife moved from Bristol to Los Angeles, it feels more intensely personal than his other albums, full of meditations on marriage and death and starting a family. Like any Luke Sital-Singh piece, it’s bittersweet and at times melancholic (“Love is Hard Enough Without the Winter” has that achy feeling of being backed into a corner, with nowhere to go but at each other’s throats), but throughout, the drum beats and strummed strings of his Lowden guitar carry this undercurrent of love as a guiding thread. During the early weeks of quarantine, whenever I took walks around the neighborhood, his music convinced me that maybe my sole purpose was to exist on that street, with the sun beating down on the cars parked in driveways and somebody’s drone whirring like a giant beetle in the background, anxious but gloriously in love with the California sky.

I am, in particular, obsessed with one song off this album: “Raise Well.” I sent it to a friend, who said that it sounds like dancing on a New York City rooftop at sunset, swaying in someone’s arms. I’ve decided it’s going to be my wedding dance song. 

“Raise Well” is about starting a family and having children, which might seem like a premature promise to commit to in front of everybody after you’ve just gotten hitched, but it shimmers with such a rest-of-our-lives feeling that I can’t resist it. There are no dramatic swells; sonically, it’s pretty consistent throughout, a steady drum with just a bit of piano overlaying it. Sital-Singh’s voice is slightly scratchy as he sings, as if he has gone threadbare, already, from how much he wants all of this, and that is to be small and muddled and confused and still prevail. Figure out, desperately / I wanna love as we fail / As we fall to our knees. Love does not automatically ensure triumph; it does not preclude failure or despair. It is the gentle work of, simply, pledging to put one foot in front of the other, and hoping that when the time comes, the love you’ve built will be a reservoir you can draw from to help you rise to the occasion. Whatever that occasion may be.

At the risk of sounding navel-gazey, I’ve been thinking a lot about my place in the world. And I am increasingly persuaded that the only thing I might do that really, truly lasts is raising children. This is not a deep sentiment, as generations of humans before me have come to the same conclusion. So then the follow-up question becomes: is it enough? When Luke Sital-Singh ends with I don’t wanna raise hell / I just wanna raise well, it can seem like a retreat, a plea for everything to just be quiet. Let me raise my kids in peace.

The crux of the issue being that peace actually exists for very few of us. Every day we are ravaged by climate crises, global inequality, disaster and war. And so, maybe wanting to bring a child into a world that might very much be unlivable within the next seventy years is willful arrogance. 

Here’s the thing: falling in love and starting a family is not, by itself, a radical act. We celebrate childhood innocence, but plenty of people grow up and turn out to be dicks. “The youth will save us” can often be a stand-in for complacency—someone else will fix this mess. And yet I can’t fully escape my ideal of family being the first site of revolution, that if I keep reading and learning and loving, however clumsily, at some point I will pass that baton to my child, who will run farther than I ever could and keep fighting The Good Fight. 

That is a lofty burden to place on a child, and I’m extremely aware of it. Having children has always struck me as this fine line between selflessness and selfishness. Selfless because I can only imagine the fierce intensity it takes to see your kids through everything life will throw at them, the sacrifices you suddenly become willing to make. Selfish, because you are, in a way, fashioning your children in your own image, a reflection of your ideals and the alternate paths you wish you had taken. Dip too far into either pool and you risk inflicting trauma that your kids will be grappling with for the rest of their lives. Philip Larkin said it best in “This Be the Verse”: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. I worry about this all the time. During phone calls with my friends, I’ve started keeping a mental list of the things their parents have done to hurt them, in the hopes that I won’t make the same mistakes. The other day I listened to a podcast on how to potty train children for absolutely no reason other than to send myself into a spiral wondering if it is, in fact, better for a kid to pee themself while wearing underwear or while buck naked. I still don’t know! And I also have no doubt that at some point all my flaws will catch up to me, and every well-meaning thing I thought I did will rear its ugly head and say: I hate you, Mom.

This is where Luke Sital-Singh sinks his hooks into me once again, because I am convinced that he, like me, has two main preoccupations: failure and time. Or maybe it’s just the failure of time, how there is never enough of it for the changes we want to enact, the places we want to visit, the people we want to see. For anyone who has hung up the phone, breathless, after talking for hours, or rolled over to hook an arm around someone and pull them back to bed, love is an attempt to exist outside of time, if only for a moment, in that transcendent space where anything feels possible. And children are this weird collision of that love with the body’s reminder of death. You and everyone you care about are going to decay, but hey, look at this thing you made. Hope it doesn’t have anxiety.

Planning for children requires me to plan for the future, and planning for the future requires me to think more critically about the world I’m living in now, the actions I’m taking and the solutions I’m choosing to invest in. For me, fixating on kids is my buffer against complacency. When I get too snappy, when I don’t apologize to my mom, when I tune out my dad, I keep returning to this idea of habit. The things I’ve taken for granted, and the things I need to unlearn in order to be better. Especially as we fight against systematic oppression, and move toward new models of justice and accountability, I’m always thinking: what are these discussions going to look like in my household? What practices do I need to build?

Perhaps the most apocalyptic song of Luke Sital-Singh’s is “Benediction,” which I first blasted on repeat when I was busy making fan videos of Black Widow and Captain America during Age of Ultron in my head (which is an entirely different essay). In it, Sital-Singh describes a city falling to its ruin, smoke rising and bombs falling. He apologizes, saying, “Sorry we don’t have more time,” but then implores his listener to keep their eyes open, to witness the destruction in all its terrible beauty. Don’t wanna be the ones caught hiding / wanna see the sky as it hits the ground is a demand to move forward, clear-eyed, knowing all the hurt we’re capable of causing, that it might very well outlive us, but there were times that were warm and mattered and shifted the needle, however slightly.

“Come die with me,” he croons, by which he means: while we’re here, we might as well live.