This episode of “Modern Love” features Lisa Selin Davis’s essay “What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love.” She writes about how the song “I’ll Be Your Mirror” became the soundtrack to her summer romance with a floppy-haired “rocker kid” who inadvertently helped her find healing. Then, we hear from some members of the “Modern Love” team about the songs that influenced them as teenagers and about the memories — funny, empowering, nostalgic — that they carry with them.Stay tuned for next week’s episode, where we’ll hear from our listeners about the songs that taught them about love.Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times.Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What essay is featured in this episode?
From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
So summer is coming soon. It's getting warmer. I'm spending more time outside. And just like every year when the weather gets like this, I find myself feeling nostalgic. For summer flings, for vacation romances, for first loves. It all makes me think about the modern love essay, What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love, by the writer Lisa Selin Davis. Thank you so much for having me.
It's a beautiful, sunshiny story, so this week we're bringing you that essay again. Plus, I talk with a few of my colleagues about the songs that taught them about love. This episode is a two-parter, so you'll want to look out for the second part next week. But I'll tell you about all that later. For now, here's What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love by Lisa Sellin Davis, read by Kristen Potter.
Chapter 2: How did Lou Reed's music influence the author?
When Lou Reed died, I got on Facebook and found out just how many friends had chosen I'll Be Your Mirror as their wedding song. I wasn't one of them. But that song, more than any other, taught me about love. I listened to it endlessly the summer I was 16.
My father had strongly suggested if I wanted to stay in his house for the summer as the divorce agreement had decreed, I should take a job doing hard physical labor in Saratoga Spa State Park in upstate New York. My father's idea was to heal me through hard work and the grounding power of nature.
The job paid $3.35 an hour for digging trenches, building foot bridges, and learning about anger management and the medical uses of jewel weed, which grew wild along the creek. The work was torture. I was cut out for songwriting, not construction. But the worst part was riding my Fuji 12-speed there with a green hard hat on the rear rack while wearing ochre-colored work boots.
Boy, poison, I thought. I was disturbingly experienced. My older friends had introduced me to a variety of adult activities I shouldn't have known for years. But I'd never had actual sex, or an actual boyfriend, or been in love. And I wanted those things more than anything. After work one day, as I pulled my bike into our backyard, a boy was sitting there with my dad.
My father was the local guitar teacher, and sometimes, gloriously stringy-haired rocker kids arrived at the house for lessons. This one wore beige shorts stained with bike grease, a yellow and blue striped rugby shirt, and very long red hair. The apogee of attractiveness. For me.
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Chapter 3: What was the author's first summer romance like?
I had seen him before at parties with my friends, and each time I had tried to get his attention the only way I knew, by speaking loudly about my stealing and drugs and temper tantrums, expounding on how depressed and in pain I was. I thought this would make me attractive by way of emotional depth, but he never seemed to notice me. This time he looked up, but I was desperate to hide.
I went inside and stood at the screen door and watched as my father taught the beautiful boy the Travis style of finger-picking. After that, I daydreamed anxiously of the boy with the long red hair. At work, I wore scratchy work gloves and pulled tenacious weeds from the side of the creek bed, and every day I hoped to see him. But I feared it, too, lest he see me with my hard hat and work boots.
And then... One Saturday afternoon, when I wasn't working, I saw him leap into the water beneath the Hadley-Lazerne Bridge, the place where the Hudson and Sakandaga Rivers meet. It was a magical spot, with a rope swing and swirls of black water, where my friends and I spent lazy afternoons and played guitars on the rocks.
He had pale freckles all over his chest and collarbone that formed a beautiful dent below his neck. He mumbled hello to me. I knew nothing about how to interest a boy, but I took off my non-work clothes, tank top and cut-off jeans, and went in the river in my bra and underwear. I played the full tablature of Neil Young's Needle and the Damage Done on the guitar.
I put my body next to his as much as possible, standing close whenever I could. A few days later, the phone rang. My father answered, his face momentarily registering confusion as he handed the phone to me. The voice was so low and mumbly that I couldn't understand who it was or what he was saying, and that moment of intense awkwardness seemed interminable,
until I realized it was him, and he was asking me if I wanted to go swimming at Hadley Lazerne. Somehow, I managed to say yes, even though I could barely breathe. He had asked me on an actual date. I had taken LSD and made out with strangers at the Holiday Inn, but I had never been on a date.
He picked me up in his battered yellow Subaru station wagon and we drove north, listening to the band X. It started pouring. We ducked into a cafe and he ordered coffee. I had never had coffee. I pretended I drank it black. It was bitter and gross and the best thing I ever tasted because he liked it. The rain didn't stop, so we went back to his house and listened to the replacements.
He had a job fixing bikes, and he smelled like something tangy called Cornhusker's Lotion, which he used to get the grease off. Nothing else happened that day, but I was so happy it hurt. After that, I kept seeing him, walking downtown, going to concerts, but we never touched. Then, one Saturday night, we met at the radio station at the local college where our friend had a show.
He and I took a walk. The night was warm and smelled of jewel weed, and there were meteor showers everywhere. He had that beautiful hair and the freckly collarbone, and it was way too much. The waiting had become intolerable. I stopped, turned toward him, and said, What is going on here? I was almost whining. What's happening? He grew quiet and looked down at his shoes. He mumbled again.
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Chapter 4: What awkward moments occurred during the author's first date?
Can I kiss you?
No one had ever said that to me. No one had ever been so solicitous and gentle and kind. No one had ever wanted me that way. They had used me that way, but never wanted me. I kissed him on the cheek as fast as I could and ran away, back to the radio station, amid the shelves of records and their musty cardboard smell.
Ten minutes later, he found me there, pretending to study the cover of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills. Couldn't look at him. He whispered, his hot breath on my hair. Um, that wasn't really what I meant. We went to his house. He sat on the couch, I sat on the floor, and he made this awkward attempt to rub my shoulders.
I was more on fire with desire and anticipation than I had ever been in my life. As he leaned down to kiss me, I scooted to the other side of the room.
Why do you like me?
I asked him. Why are you interested in me? I was just stalling, but he actually paused to consider the question. Okay, he said, I'll tell you. He said I was cute and funny and good at the Travis style of fingerpicking and had good taste in music, which among our crowd was the highest compliment. My heart seemed to break upon hearing this list, but in a good way.
Everyone else in my life could rattle off a list of my faults, but the beautiful boy saw what was on the other side of my misdeeds. The lyrics to I'll Be Your Mirror go, Please put down your hands, because I see you. And it seemed he was able to see the beauty in me that I couldn't. He had his face very close to mine, that smell of cheap shampoo and Cornhusker's lotion.
And then he said, I knew I really liked you when I saw you on your bike with the work boots and hard hat.
I kissed him then.
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Chapter 5: How did the author find healing through love?
I lost track of him years ago. I don't know where he lives or what he does. I don't know him digitally. I think of him only in analog. All that love twisted up with my records, which long ago warped and mildewed in my mother's basement. But the lesson from I'll Be Your Mirror remained. That someone can love me for what shames me the most. Now... I sing those same lyrics to my daughter before bed.
The conservation job ended late that August. My soul or my depression or anger management problems hadn't been repaired by it. I hadn't learned about hard work or resilience or any of the other things the program was designed to teach me. But I was healed, just as that love song promised.
When we come back, the songs that taught the Modern Love team a thing or two about love.
Stay with us.
Okay, Mia Lee, you're the editor of Modern Love Projects. When you were around 16, what was the song that taught you about love? Oof.
The song that comes to mind is Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.
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Chapter 6: What lessons about love does the author share?
I ain't saying you treated me unkind. You could have done better, but I don't mind. You just kind of wasted my precious time. Don't think twice, it's all right.
Came across it probably on YouTube when I was splitting up with my first boyfriend, high school boyfriend. We met in poetry class. We were both pretty dramatic and much like people like subtweet, you know, we'd kind of like subtweet each other.
Meaning like you'd write poems.
We'd write poems for each other. But we didn't really get to know each other that well. And this song was about that of like trying to mourn a relationship where you really don't know the person that well. Maybe it wasn't the deepest love, but it was meaningful. So I had this as my anthem. I recorded myself, you know, singing a karaoke version of it on iMovie.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You can't jump past that. You recorded yourself.
I found a karaoke version on YouTube. As in just the instrumentals? Just the instrumentals with the lyrics across the screen. It was you in your bedroom. It wasn't even my bedroom. I was in my communal family living room singing a karaoke version of Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.
Yeah. It's hard to top that, but Dan Jones, hi to you as well.
Hi, Anna.
What about you? What's the song that taught teenage you about love?
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