First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
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I'm Helene Cooper. I cover the U.S. military for The New York Times. So I'm sitting in my car in a parking lot outside the Pentagon. I had a cubicle with a desk inside the building for years, but the Trump administration has taken that away. People in power have always made it difficult for journalists. It hasn't stopped us in the past. It's not going to stop us now. I will keep working to get you the facts

This work doesn't happen without subscribers to the New York Times. 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 Sellin Davis. We made an episode about this essay back in 2022. It's actually the very first episode of Modern Love that I ever hosted, which is wild to think about. And the essay is still one of my favorites.

It's about all the songs that accompany our love stories, how one track can instantly take us back to a time and a place, to a feeling. 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 a little bit of a recap.

Here's What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love by Lisa Selin Davis, read by Kristen Potter. 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. 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 timber 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 Sacandago 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.

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. I think he said, I like you. But then he looked me clear in the eye and asked, 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. 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 finger-picking, 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. My teeth hit his and my mouth was open too much and it was messy and delicious and terrifying. And then we fell into a rhythm.

I kissed him for the entire B-side of REM's reckoning. I kissed him so much, I went home that night with red, swollen lips. I don't think I ever experienced a physical sensation better than that burn. It seemed to wipe clean the dirty slate of my childhood. 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.

The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. It's just easier to navigate that way. There is something for everyone. The personalized page, the YouTube, that one's my favorite. I can also save my articles easily in this area. Right under the byline, it says, click here if you'd like to listen to this article.

I like that the cooking tab on top is really easily accessible. So if I'm on my way home and I'm just thinking, oh, what am I going to make for dinner? I'll just quickly go on to cooking and say, oh, I've got this in my pantry. I'm going to try out some of these recipes I see in here. I go to games always. Doing the mini, doing the wordle. I love how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for. This app is essential.

The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app. 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? The song that comes to mind is Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.

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 in our... 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. Yeah.

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 all right. 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?

16-year-old me was around the time that the movie Saturday Night Fever came out. Somehow, I snuck in my friends, and I'm sitting there, you know, and the beginning of that movie is John Travolta striding down the streets of Brooklyn. The song Staying Alive by the Bee Gees is playing. ♪

And he's walking to the beat and swinging the can of paint to the beat. And women walking the other way, their legs are like moving to the beat. And he's like turning around to catch their like butts moving to the beat. And he was a working class guy like so many people I knew in Pittsburgh. But this whole thing was so sexualized and...

the Bee Gees with their falsetto voices that the whole thing was sort of this gender bending experience at a time when I didn't even know what the word gender meant.

And it was just exploding with like sexuality and ways you can be in the world that were out of the straitjacket that I felt like I'd sort of grown up with at that point. I want to talk about the lyrics, though, because there's this one line where they say, we can try to understand the New York Times effect on man. What does that mean? I know. I saw that. You know, at the time, I didn't know what the word gender was. I also had never heard of the New York Times. Right.

It was like the media's effect on men, like working class men like John Travolta. Well, I mean, 16-year-old you might not have, you know, heard of the New York Times, but I mean, now you work here and you've created a really iconic part of it. You are the founder of Modern Love. 18 years ago, you started the column. And I want to thank you, Dan, and I also want to thank you, Mia, for trusting me with a little part of it.

Thank you, Anna. Yeah. Welcome, welcome. Thanks so much. When we come back, I share the song that taught me about love when I was 16. Stay with us. When we first aired this episode, I didn't talk about my own song, so I'm going to do that right now. When I think about the song that changed me as a 16-year-old, I'm thinking about Just the Way You Are by Billy Joel. Don't go trying

Some new fashion. Don't change the color of your... My dad would always play a Billy Joel greatest hit CD in the car. I started off barely tolerating it, asking him to turn it off, to change it to like the pop radio station or whatever. But after many listens...

I got hooked. I became a Billie convert. And this particular song, Just the Way You Are, Billie sings that his lover doesn't need to change her hair or her clothes or impress him with clever conversation. And the thing that drew me to the song is like,

I tried all of those things at age 16. I'd straightened the hell out of my hair. I'd gotten bangs. I tested out all these different looks to try to appeal to different guys. I was constantly shapeshifting, attempting to impress. And in this song, I felt like Billie was saying to me, you do not need to do all that. I couldn't love you any better. I love you just the way.

I couldn't love you any better. I love you just the way you are. I still need to be reminded of that sometimes, even today. So thank you, Billie. Okay, as I said at the top, this episode is a two-parter. Next week, we'll hear your stories, stories from listeners on the songs that taught them about love. It's a playlist with some real heartfelt bangers. You will not want to miss it. ♪

This episode of Modern Love was produced in 2022 by Julia Botero and Hans Butow and edited by Sarah Saracen. Additional production and editing by Sarah Curtis and Lynn Levy. Production management by Christina Josa. This episode was mixed by Sonia Herrero with studio support from Maddie Macielo. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Additional music in this episode by Dan Powell and Aman Sohota.

Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Desi Bakwa. And special thanks to Ryan Wegner at Autumn. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you'd like to submit an essay or a tiny love story to The New York Times, we have the instructions in our show notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.