One sure way to get over a crush is to embrace someone new and let yourself be drawn into their life. From the outside, his looks perfect — family, following his dream, asking for support and giving back work made from the heart. Personable and humble. And cute.
Jared Halley is an a cappella artist. He builds an entire song by himself — every vocal part, even the percussion, recorded separately and assembled into a split screen of as many as fifteen squares, walking into frame for each part when it’s that square’s turn to sing, sound, or dance. I’ve watched for months. I follow him, click like on nearly everything.
When I was deciding whether I could afford the Escape, I canceled my monthly gifts to two artists on Patreon. Jared was one of them. Not a high dollar amount — but giving gifts while I’m struggling felt like a luxury I couldn’t justify. Then I thought through it, and I wasn’t comfortable having stopped. So I re-upped. I started watching old recordings of his live events, the ones where he just talks to people. Which led me to his newest original, “Rescue Me.”
I wrote about what it meant to me, and I posted it — publicly, on his page. Everyone else will hear “Rescue Me” as a love song to a person. I swap the “you” for a place. Rescue is the town in California where I grew up. Before the first verse ends, I’m nine years old again in El Dorado County, drowning in a loneliness that was true then and is true now — and the thing I’m reaching for was never a person. It was the foothills, the oak trees, the horses, the clean straw late at night. I used to say “Rescue, rescue me” to myself as a kid, because I wanted the name of the town to have power.
Two days later, he wrote back. Not a generic thank-you — a real reply. He had read it. He quoted my own line back to me, “a ghost made of foothills,” and said that once a song is released it stops belonging only to the writer; it becomes something a listener can pour their own story into. He said a song becoming a vessel for someone’s memories like that was the kind of gift he most hopes his music can be.
I cried the hardest I have in months.
Not because I asked. Not because anyone is paid or obligated to. A person I respect read my words, was moved, and told me so. I have been wanting that since I was seven, carrying a drawing to my mother — the overlapping shapes, the little hole you could see the next shape through — and watching her enthusiasm thin by the third one. The armor I wear held all day. This is what finally broke it. I let it.
There’s a smaller thing I can’t stop noticing. After I quoted his lyrics, a few lines of my own came out without my meaning them to — “Standing on top of sadness, being loud and grumpy, the only way to keep myself from drowning” — and they fell right into his meter. His song opens “drowning in lonely.” My ear caught the rhythm and my words followed it home.
I listen to that song maybe ten times a day. Some things you support because you love them. Some things you say out loud because, for once, somebody heard you.
Look for him…
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