I’m working on a new essay, but for the moment, I just want to share this.
This morning, during an idle moment, I was enjoying the sounds and sights of music producer Rick Beato geeking out over demo recordings of songs from Boston’s monumental 1976 debut album, Boston. This led me to go back and listen (again) to that amazing album. And that got me curious to check out some of Boston’s subsequent albums, which I was totally unfamiliar with.
My wife calls this “bird-walking”—that is, hopping playfully from one point of interest and curiosity to another, with no particular path or ending place in mind, as a bird hops beneath a tree from spot to spot in search of little treasures, edible or otherwise.
Upon pulling up the track listing for Boston’s third album, 1986’s Third Stage, I noticed the song title “To Be a Man.” I played the song, and I heard this:
It’s an utterly gorgeous song, beginning as a piano ballad and blossoming into ever-greater sonic richness, as if the aching tenderness held in the late Brad Delp’s singing were blooming through layer upon layer of Tom Scholz’s guitar lines.
I’ve no idea what prompted the writing of “The Be a Man,” but I share it for a few reasons, which I offer as my own personal reflections.
First, “To Be a Man” is beautiful, we need beauty, and we need to share the beauty that we find.
Second, living as we do in a patriarchal culture that separates us anxiously from one another as discrete individuals and as “nuclear families,” we need reminding that, through our seemingly private pains, we are carrying on a legacy that connects us: many men before us have struggled to articulate and embody live-able lives that honor the worth and dignity of both self and other, and many men after us will do the same.
Finally, the song is aspirational, like a seed planted in the conscience, yet forthright about the work involved in cultivating such a seed.
No man embodies the kind of vision at the heart of “To Be a Man” with complete faith in all moments. Patriarchal forces from both within and without invite us, continuously, to take advantage, to fall short of our higher intentions, to turn away from ourselves and others, to simply go along. Those forces were not created by us, but we experience them as us, and therein lay fear and shame.
Boston also wrestled with manhood on their previous album, 1978’s Don’t Look Back, I’ve now learned. There, the song “A Man I’ll Never Be” explored the abiding fear of failure: of letting down the people who love us, of not having the internal resources and capacity to love them as they deserve.
When the voices inside us—and perhaps outside us—are screaming anxiously in fear, a song like “To Be a Man” is a little voice upon the shoulder, speaking calmly, calling us back to ourselves and each other.
It was a good bird-walk.