“Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines.”
David Berman, excerpt from “Snow Is Falling In Manhattan”
When a song is born, where does it live?
Music is ephemeral and fluid in its nature. We can’t hold it, we can’t see it, we can’t possess it.
But when a certain song touches us, we witness its power: we can see the strings vibrate, we can feel the bass in our chest, we can absorb the lyrics in our mind, we can press “repeat” on Spotify twenty times.
We can memorize it, record it, sing it, dance with it, forget it.
Songs can move us through time and space, deeper inside our true body – the one that extends beyond our skin. And still, we can never possess a song.
Connecting to life through songwriting and music, I often find myself wondering what it is about some songs that sweeps me into a place of safety and surrender.
After all, music is just sound and organized time. I’ve often thought of songs as friends or family – companions to cry and sway with.
One of David Berman’s obituaries described a song as “a place where lost souls might gather” (1). When I read that, I had this Aha! moment: what if a song is a place! A place where we may find connection and warmth. A place where memories hang on the walls.
What if we can return to songs like returning to lost homes, or rest in songs like resting in a cabin in the woods. What if we think of songs as a place to experience community? A place where many of us can go all at once and feel what we feel privately and together.
Imagine going to a concert for your favorite band and seeing hundreds of strangers in the audience singing the same words and melody together. How many times had each person listened to this song to commit it to memory? What about this song called to all these individuals who otherwise would not connect? It’s magical that songs can bring bodies together in such a resonant way.
Sometimes, we don’t even notice the way atmospheres change as a result of music. Think of that smooth jazz band creating a mood in a loud bar, elevator music when you’re anxiously getting all your luggage to your hotel room, or pump-up music when you’re jogging.
If music doesn’t quite do it for you, that’s okay too! Everyone has their own way of connecting to people through space-time. Because most of us are either consciously or subconsciously immersed in music daily, it is an important aspect of the human experience to consider.
In this entry, we meet Mariam Dahbi, an incredible singer and songwriter whose songs have made my heart weep with relief. The first time I listened to her at an open mic in Cambridge, the air in the room shifted.
Her song “Solace” (featured in this post) lulled me into her inner universe, a rare moment to share with a stranger. In our conversation, she gives us a window into her journey and reflections as a singer, songwriter, and educator.
Some songs come all at once, when my heart wants to empty something.
Mariam Dahbi
Mariam knew she wanted to be a singer since middle school. “I don’t remember myself not singing,” she reflects.
“I would go to school, come home, go to my room, and sing my heart out. I would sing in English, and I didn’t even know English! I couldn’t understand the lyrics but I could understand the emotion behind them.”
As a middle schooler, she soaked in every second of the French version of “America’s Got Talent” and then ran to her room, bawling her eyes out afterward, desperately longing for a future she knew was out of reach.
Growing up in an academically-focused environment in Morocco, Mariam often felt torn between her intrinsic dream of being a singer and the “practical”, safe approach to life (i.e. education, work, marriage, kids, die). And she knew which road she would have to take – the practical one. This flavor of compromise tastes familiar to many of us, I’m sure.
She went on her academic track in education, abandoning singing as she entered into a deep relationship with a man who said music was “not a serious” form of “entertainment”. He may have felt threatened by the possibility that Mariam’s passion for music may eventually outweigh her love for him.
Upon uprooting from Morocco and plopping down in Boston to pursue her PhD in education, Mariam’s relationship crumbled and the loneliness started to tease her tongue. She realized she had been forfeiting her true self in order to keep her relationship afloat.
Feeling worlds away from her cheerful, sociable, singing self, Mariam returned to her consolations, the songwriters she listened to in high school: Norah Jones, Sarah Bareilles, Damien Rice.
She bought a guitar.
She swam with the shame of it all, the loss and the relearning of the self. In the process, after years of invisible gestation, she wrote her first song, “Solace” at age twenty-five (which is featured below).
She briefly (and heartbrokenly) had a “fling” with an artist who “saw the artist” in her. With an encouraging witness for her creative spirit, she pushed herself into the public eye by attending her first open mic.
When you write a song, you learn to hear yourself.
Mariam Dahbi
Mariam’s songwriting process often involves solitude, repetition, and lots of “crying through stuff”.
After the song is born, it is a whole different process to expose it to the public eye where it can live in a new way. Almost every day, Mariam finds herself fighting mental blocks about sharing her songs.
Her family members have expressed confusion about her desire to perform. Do you just want people clapping for you? Isn’t that narcissistic?, they ask her.
“They just don’t want me to be an entertainer,” she considers. But the main motivation for her has little to do with validation or approval. It has more to do with authenticity.
“It feels like getting naked. Performing was a way for me to get out of the zone of hiding from the world, hiding from myself, and joining a community that I knew I was meant to be part of.”
Mariam wades through the nerves and shakes on stage until she comes to a place of peace inside the song. She keeps her eyes closed and tries not to worry about the people listening.
Life has a way of bringing you to what you were meant to do.
Mariam Dahbi
The irony of Mariam’s story is that she thought she had to forgo singing in order to have security in an academic track. But she has found herself writing her PhD dissertation on the potential links between songwriting and learning in the classroom.
“Songwriting is a literacy activity,” Mariam describes. Songwriting with children in school settings helps with language, communication, and memory retention.
She conducts research on how to integrate songwriting into curricula to give voices to students who come from different cultures, speak a different language at home, or who have different learning styles.
“What you really want out of a student,” Mariam notes passionately, “is to connect, interact, and co-construct knowledge. Not just passively memorize.”
If you’re complaining about being lonely, in a way you’re seeking help. If you’re ready to not be lonely, then you have to put some kind of work in. That work isn’t songwriting for everybody. That work is vulnerability.
Mariam Dahbi
When I met Mariam, I was bopping around open mic nights because I was in a transition phase in my life. I was feeling lonely and isolated, fresh out of college and lost in a job search.
Attending intimate musical nights exposed me to communities of people who valued sharing and openness. If you’re feeling any kind of tug like that, I strongly recommend hanging out at an open mic night. It can be a space where it is socially acceptable for people to get up in front of you and tell their story through music and poetry. Here is an environment where people cry, laugh, and support each other.
Let’s transform the question of where does a song live? into where do we live inside a song?
Thank you so much to Mariam who spoke so openly about her experiences and her intimate songwriting process. A humongous thank you to Jason Kimball for filming and editing Mariam’s beautiful original song “Solace” with such grace and love. Thank you to my living room (featured in the video) for embracing 13 intimate house concerts hosting over seventy singers/songwriters/bands over the last 4 years. And thank you to Kayla Popik and Marc Yaffee for sharing David Berman’s influential obituary from Jewish Currents with me.
A Window In 