The enduring gay joy of MUNA
I am only here to tell you that I am eviscerated
May 9, 2023. The pit at Terminal 5 was completely packed. Body to body, and in my particular case, my leg and tote bag to some girl’s overturned beer. But at that point, I was sweating so profusely that the melted ice soaking through my pants was a sick sort of relief. I looked up at my friend C, who I realized I’d trapped in this hell with me by inviting her to take my extra ticket. It’s not usually like this, I said weakly.
The crowd was all glitter and glow, mesh overshirts and rhinestones. A group of teenagers somewhere in front of us took a selfie on 0.5x zoom, with flash. I threw up a hand to shield my eyes, and C grimaced. They better play “Pink Light” tonight, she replied.
The venue’s pre-concert playlist began to blast “High Horse” by Kacey Musgraves. Behind us, three gay men screamed in excitement. I bought my dad this vinyl for his birthday and he loved it, one of them said. Music is the one thing we can bond over. I mean, he’s a dad, but he has taste. He doesn’t care about Taylor [Swift], but he heard folklore and he bought the vinyl for himself. I’m trying to get him into MUNA too.
I smiled despite the asphyxiating crush of the crowd around me. Hearing snippets of conversations like this, between people like these, is part of the magic of MUNA. It never gets old.
I have been lucky enough to see MUNA live five-ish times (the uncertainty comes from a virtual stream of one of their concerts that I did not physically attend but watched live nonetheless, so I count it). After my first MUNA show in 2019, they cemented themselves as one of my few autobuy bands. The list includes only four acts: Florence + The Machine, Mitski, Yumi Zouma, and MUNA. No matter which record they’re touring for, no matter how many times I’ve seen them, these four acts will always take my money. For the others, it’s pure love for the music that keeps me coming back, but for MUNA there’s also the specific draw of the concert experience itself. The energy at MUNA shows is singular and so, so special. Most attendees have been fans since the start, or if not, at the very least they know all the words to even the band’s oldest songs. The crowd is mostly, visibly queer. I feel safe at MUNA shows in a way I can’t seem to at any other concert. I know instinctively that no straight men will leer at me or try to just squeeze past me by pressing a hand a little too low on my back. When the show starts, no one will elbow me in the side to get a little closer to the barrier. When I squeal (admittedly obnoxiously) at the opening notes of my favorite songs, everyone around me will turn and smile with shared euphoria instead of glaring in annoyance. MUNA crowds are more than just an audience – they feel like home.
But even the sacred cathedral of MUNA shows is not immune to pandemic teens. With every year that elapses after 2020, I’m becoming more and more aware of the shifts in concert etiquette that I believe are the direct result of the stunted socialization of America’s teenagers after spending their formative years in quarantine instead of being bullied in the halls of their high schools. Kids these days simply do not know how to act at shows. They’ll hold their phones up for ninety minutes straight, witnessing the entirety of the evening through their camera app and blocking everyone else’s view. They’ll scream MOTHER in the quiet moments between the most heartfelt, vulnerable songs. They’ll loudly declare that if the artists play a certain song, they will kill themselves. (The fuck you will, I thought to myself when I overheard this in the MUNA pit two weeks ago. This is the Life’s So Fun tour, not the depression unlimited tour. Go stream About U and let the rest of us be horny.) 21+ shows provide a temporary respite from this behavior, but before long these pandemic teens will be pandemic early-twentysomethings, and then we’ll all be fucked. (Maybe I’ll write a blog post more explicitly about this someday.)
There’s also the simple fact that MUNA is blowing up, resulting in more expensive tickets, higher demand, less intimate venues, and poor crowd management – in short, a total crush like the one C and I got stuck in. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so selfish of a fan as to root for my favorite band’s downfall just so I can save a couple bucks. But holy shit, it was genuinely hard to breathe in there. Maybe this was just a Terminal 5-specific problem, but nevertheless, as I waited with aching knees, craning my neck to see around the sea of iPhones and the pole that divided our view of the stage neatly in two, a heartbreaking thought crossed my mind for the first time: I don’t think I can do this again. It was just sinking in that this might be my final night at gay church.
For those of you who are straight, self-proclaimed “greatest band in the world” MUNA is a Los Angeles-based alt-pop trio composed of Katie Gavin (she/they, lead vocals / songwriter), Josette Maskin (she/they, guitar), and Naomi McPherson (they/them, producer / guitar / keyboard / renaissance man). All three are openly queer. They met while attending USC for undergrad – on an episode of the podcast Queerbait, Naomi says that Katie approached them and was blunt about her intentions:
“When we were first starting to talk, she was like, ‘What do you do aside from school?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, I play guitar and stuff, and I’ve always had music in my life.’ And she was like, ‘Oh cool, you can be in my band.’”
The pair would go on to date for three years and, yes, form a band in 2013 after the additional recruitment of Maskin. They released their first EP More Perfect on Bandcamp and Soundcloud one year later, all traces of which have since been scrubbed from the internet despite my desperate attempts to find it. (If you know or are a plug for the forbidden MUNA tracks, PLEASE email me.) After the success of More Perfect, the band was signed by RCA Records.
There was just one small complication: right after MUNA was signed, Katie and Naomi broke up. The former moved in with their aunt, and the latter remained in Los Angeles with Maskin. They weren’t on speaking terms, but they still had a full-length record to produce. So they sent songs back and forth via email. For a long time, it was the only way in which they still communicated.
The result? About U, a stunning 12-track LP whose cohesiveness belies the fractured and fraught nature of its production. It opens with the suckerpunch of “So Special” – There’s a few bad things I've done that nobody made me do / Most just to get myself off, and the rest to get over you – and doesn’t take its foot off the emotional gas pedal all the way through to the very end of the deceptively soft, synthy final track “Outro” – I said “try,” I thought we could / I thought we could / You said you would. “I Know A Place,” a defiantly hopeful anthem about imagining a better world, was an immediate smash hit, particularly among members of the queer community. “We wanted this video to be a depiction of the fact that acknowledging the humanity of your enemy can be the most powerful battle tactic of all. Lay down your weapon,” reads the description of its official music video. It was this track and the record’s other lead single, “Loudspeaker,” that kick-started the momentum that would eventually propel MUNA to where they are today: regularly playing sold-out headline shows in increasingly larger venues and, in their free time, opening for the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift, and later this year, Lorde.
“Loudspeaker” was in fact the very first MUNA song I ever heard, at the tender age of fifteen gay little years. Fifteen years during which I mostly despised myself and was trying and failing to find the strength to stand up for myself against the world the way you need to in high school. Those I wished to connect with the most were constantly demanding my silence: from 7:30am to 2:16pm, Monday through Friday, all I ever heard from the people that were supposed to be my friends was that I talked too much, said nothing of value, ought to erase my irritating existence entirely. The bullying was spearheaded by a girl I was in love with at the time, adding a horrifyingly gay lens to the whole situation and culminating in a pain I would have done anything to escape. Anything, of course, except actually fighting back. I didn’t know how. (It could be argued that I still don’t – my friend M recently told me we have got to make you meaner.) Part of me believed that if so many voices agreed I was worthless, there had to be some truth to it.
But then one afternoon, as I was doing my trig homework and listening to Spotify’s Indie Next playlist, the opening notes of “Loudspeaker” rang out from my laptop and changed my life forever.
What you want from me is all of my time wasted on you. Trying to teach me a lesson – well baby I’ve learned one thing from you: you can try to be my hell, to be my beating, but every time I love myself, it hurts your feelings.
In my chest I felt a snap of healing pain like a dislocated joint popping back into place. I had no idea who MUNA were, or how similar they were to me in one very crucial way I was trying furiously to deny. But their music saw and reached me when I was at my loneliest and gave me the words to start putting myself back together. That was enough.
What follows is a chronology of my MUNA obsession: the heartbreaks it helped me survive, the concerts to which I was lucky enough to bear witness, the lyrics that saw right into my soul and pulled me back from the edge time and time again. It is very long and very sad and I cried twice while writing it. I hope you enjoy. <3
Summer 2018. It’s not until a few months after my first gay breakup that my obsession with the rest of MUNA’s oeuvre beyond “Loudspeaker” really begins. She and I have a close mutual friend with whom she’s living for the whole summer, so as much as I want to pretend she no longer exists, it’s an impossibility. If I want to see my friend, I usually have to see her too, if only in passing. When my first New Haven summer starts, I’m optimistic. Two weeks in, I’m not eating or sleeping. The whole summer I flirt with suicide. I’m failing spectacularly in the very first lab I’ve ever worked in, as my grad student mentor loves to remind me. My closest friends are scattered across the country at their fancy publishing and journalism internships. The students in my program don’t understand “struggle” as an academic concept and give me sidelong glances when I proudly mention my B-minuses of the semester until I realize it’s nothing to be proud of. And ultimately, devastatingly, I have a “closure talk” with my very first ex that leaves me reeling from her coldness:
I’m sorry, she says, for not realizing how invested you were. It is the only thing she apologizes for.
I want out of my life so badly, but I’m lazy – like most things, I want it to be easy and painless, or I don’t want it at all. So instead I cry all the time, everywhere. But when I hear “Around U” (track five) for the first time, crumpled in a sobbing heap on my twin XL, everything stops. The reverberation of faint vocals that open and close the song sound to my heartbroken ears exactly like her name. And the lyrics…
How can I try to be civilized when inside there is a shifting paradigm? And everything we built, we built on our love. Everything is spinning on the one assumption. How can I try to say sorry when my words don’t carry the same gravity? And everything I say, I say it knowing full well you still don’t want to believe
that something massive happened here.
It’s only through this song that I finally start to understand her denial – she was afraid of both her queerness and how unafraid I was of my own, and she truly didn’t want to (or couldn’t) believe that something massive had happened here. I wander around the ghostly green campus with my earbuds in and the whole album playing on a loop, wondering if this sinew-stretching sadness will last forever. I want to cut out the part of me that wants and get free, finally. I don’t know how to stop needing someone else, nor do I know how to keep the lack of love in my life from destroying me. But what I do know is that sometimes if you say the same thing enough times over, you start to believe it. I mumble the refrain under my breath, sing it through tears in the shower. I no longer revolve around you, I pray, begging the universe to make it true. I no longer revolve around you.
October 2019. I’m nineteen and a junior in college. My friend E and I are driving down to Williamsburg from New Haven in his red Prius named Valerie. We’re both queer writers with depression, both constantly trying to escape the bleak realities of our life via the written word, so MUNA’s next-level lyricism makes them the perfect band for us. Three weekends before the concert, I had sex for the first time, and ever since then I’ve been floating somewhere above the rest of my life on a cloud of bliss and lust. That night and the girl who played the starring role in it are all I can talk about. I recount the dreamy memory to E in excruciating detail. (I don’t know it yet, but that one weekend has unleashed a monster of desire that will absorb my life and heart for three straight years afterward.) (Okay, that’s a lie. I’ve been in this body and brain for nineteen years – I know full well what I’ve wrought upon myself, her, the world. But I guess I don’t know that it’ll last so long, and I certainly can’t predict the fire in which it will end.) Saves The World, MUNA’s second studio album and the reason for this tour, blasts from Valerie’s speakers as we speed down I-95. We intermittently pause our conversation to belt along with Katie Gavin’s cathartic lyrics: SO I’M LIVING INSIDE MY MIND. I KEEP RETRACING THAT STORYLINE THINKING IF I START AGAIN, I CAN CHANGE THE WAY IT ENDS.
Compared to About U, Saves The World is relatively upbeat, both in lyrics and production. There's no shortage of deep cuts – “Navy Blue,” “Taken,” and “Never” come to mind – but there’s also the pulsing self-love anthem “Number One Fan” and the tender, forgiving embrace of the nearly-six-minute autobiographical powerhouse that is “It’s Gonna Be Okay, Baby.” I don’t know Katie Gavin, and I likely never will, but I remember that when I listened to the album for the first time, I was so happy for her. I was so glad that after everything that inspired the raw anguish of About U, she had reached a point in her life where she could write a song like “It’s Gonna Be Okay, Baby” and get to sing it every other night on tour. I could only dream of someday having that level of compassion and care for my younger self.
Valerie, E, and I arrive in Brooklyn early enough to get Shake Shack and still end up only two rows back from the stage. We sing, we dance, we scream. The bass and drumline shake my bones. Everyone in the crowd knows all the words to every single song, something I have yet to experience at a concert before. We are one voice, one gay superorganism pulsing in unison like a massive bloody heart. Katie is so close I can see the sheen of sweat on her skin. I swear she makes eye contact with me during “Number One Fan,” but that might be wishful thinking.
Towards the end of the show, the lights turn cherry-red. This was one of the first songs we wrote where we started to figure out what MUNA really was, Naomi says into the mic. It’s very special to us. Jo starts to play, and an ancient primal part of me, that scared fifteen-year-old and all her hurt I’d buried so deep, recognizes the riff before Katie steps forward to the mic.
What you want from me…
I watch Katie close her eyes and let the music run through her, a small smile on her lips in anticipation of the joyful refrain. I can’t stop crying. I can’t help it. This is the song that saved my life.
Right before the bridge, Naomi leans into the mic. If you know the lyrics to the next part, it’s very important that you SING ALONG, they call over the roar of the crowd. COME ON NEW YORK, Jo screams at the same time, leaning over their guitar to point their mic at the pit. They don’t have to tell me twice: I can confidently say that screaming the bridge of “Loudspeaker” along with Katie, Naomi, and Jo is about as effective as several years of therapy. I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE BLAME LIES, BUT YOU BETTER BELIEVE I’M NOT GONNA CARRY IT ALL. I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE SHAME DIES, BUT IT’S HELPING ME TO SCREAM: “THIS IS NOT MY FAULT.” I’ve never said it aloud before. A weight slips off my shoulders to crash beneath the sea of Doc Martens in the pit as I repeat through tears: This is not my fault.
September 2021. The second time I see MUNA live, my friend A and I smoke the world’s smallest, shittiest joint while waiting in line outside the Bowery Ballroom. It goes right to my head and I faint not once, but twice in quick succession from the lack of oxygen. A weighs less than I do and can’t scrape me and my patent-leather pants off the ground. No one helps him. No one gives us a second glance. But after I recover on the bench where he’s dragged me, they let us back into our place in line as if we’ve never left. Classic New York.
The rest of the show is spectacular and uneventful. I find myself wishing I’d pass out again if only for the temporary recognition I know I’ll receive from the band members. They’re the types to pause a set at the first sign of crisis. They care about their fans. I want them to care about me – I want to be seen by more than just their music. But I hold it together, drink the overpriced water I bought at the bar, and wait for “Around U” like I always do. I told A when we walked in that we should aim for the left side of the pit, because that’s Naomi’s side, and I was on Jo’s side last time. Now I watch Naomi’s lips brush the mic as they sing the gorgeous harmonies I can only hear live and I feel, just like I did the last time, like I’ll never stop crying and smiling simultaneously. I no longer revolve around you, A and I both scream, knowing full well that after all this time we are very much still satellites to the planets of the people we love. Three weeks after this concert, I will stand in front of the woman who broke my heart two years before and give her permission to do it again. Escape velocity was never an option. I know MUNA would want better for me, but I’m not strong enough. Not yet.
January 2022. The third time I see MUNA live is a technicality. They’re livestreaming a sold-out show in Vermont. Access to the stream costs $10. I’m fresh off an earth-shattering breakup with the girl I’ve been in love with since September 2019 and have chosen to isolate myself at my father’s home upstate, unable to face a city full of people who aren’t her, who will never be her, because she’s broken every promise she ever made to me. That she’d move to New York. That she wanted to change. That she wanted to be better, because of me.
Upstate is simple. Upstate is ice and hush. I can sit outside in the cold and allow myself to grieve, allow the tears to run down my face and sting as they freeze. The snow is my only witness. I tell myself that if I watch this concert, she’ll come back to me. Each of the two previous times I’ve seen MUNA live correlated directly with her entry, or reentry, into my life. I buy the virtual ticket as a cosmic summons. If MUNA comes back, why can’t she? In high school I learned to spin a future from hope and ash, which is to say from nothing, to keep myself alive. I had to believe in something to make it to the rest of my life. But I’ve gotten too good at it. Now I don’t know how to stop drawing connections that don’t exist, how to stop seeing signs in every random coincidence. I create meaningless associations and hitch my love to them. She’s already gone but I cling to the negative space like I can will her to fill it again.
I wrap myself in a blanket and carry my reluctant cat into the drafty guest room, where I’ve connected my laptop to the small TV. My mother walks in holding two homemade mojitos. I’m surprised at first. The few times I’ve played MUNA for her, her reactions have been lukewarm at best. But I realize as the stream’s countdown begins that this concert is the only thing that’s made me smile in weeks. She’s probably curious and trying to support me in the best way she knows how.
The show kicks off with “Number One Fan,” which my mom does enjoy. She hums along, but I’m oddly self-conscious about singing along in front of her. My mom and I used to scream at the top of our lungs to Florence + The Machine on long drives between the Hudson Valley and New York City, but this is different. This isn’t our band. It’s mine, and it’s very gay, which makes me a little nervous to share them with her. We still have trouble referring to my sexuality directly, although we’re both getting better at it. The breakup has forced us to face it together head-on in a way we never had to while I was away at college. MUNA transitions into “Stayaway”––Any little misstep, I'll be at your doorstep talking 'bout forgiveness, giving you my heart back just so you can break it one more time before I say: I GOTTA STAY AWAY––and I take a huge gulp of my mojito to numb the sting, then glance over at my mom. Her eyes are bulging nearly out of her head.
Her voice is incredible, she says in wonder, staring at the TV. Just incredible.
She means it. My chest expands with pride and I grin despite myself. I know.
During the talk break that follows, Katie drops a few f-bombs, and my mom shakes her head. Why does she have to swear so much?
That does it. I burst out laughing for the first time in what feels like years at this incredible mom-ism. My mom rolls her eyes at me, but when she takes a sip of her drink, I see the tiny smile on her lips. Maybe that’s what she was after all along.
September 2022. Three months ago, MUNA released their self-titled third studio album. Naturally I’m back in the pit where I belong. By my side this time is my friend B, who I met towards the end of my first semester of college. They are one of the people who know me best in the world. They’ve watched me use MUNA to cope with armfuls of despair for over five years now. They actually started listening because of my relentless urging (not to toot my own horn or anything), and now MUNA will be the very first concert we’ve ever attended together. We’ve both listened to the new album several times over and each root for our favorites to be played tonight – “Runner’s High” for B, “Shooting Star” for me.
MUNA (the record) is just as expertly produced as the previous two albums, but there’s a stark tonal shift compared to the others. The songs on MUNA are written from a place of growth, acceptance, desire, and unabashed sexuality. Critics refer to it as their “horniest” album. I find its joy refreshing and radical. In a time when laws policing and criminalizing queerness (and transness most violently) are being passed at a terrifying clip, one of the bravest things we can do is be publicly, loudly, unapologetically gay and have fun doing it.
But fans have come to expect “depression bangers” from MUNA, and many didn’t know how to cope with the new record’s lightness. I’ve seen this pushback happen time and time again whenever musicians (usually women) experiment with new artistic styles and genres. I’ve also seen fans mourn when musicians get into stable relationships and celebrate when those relationships fail explicitly because they’re excited to consume the art that this pain will inspire. This behavior is entitled at best and dehumanizing at worst – these are real people with real lives, not content farms. I find it truly grotesque to root for someone else’s suffering because you want another album to cry to. Then again, maybe I can only embrace MUNA’s joy because I’m finally ready for it. A year and a half postgrad, nine months out from the worst breakup I’ve ever had, just a week out from a writing workshop taught by my favorite author who now texts me memes about queerness. The grief isn’t gone completely, and it likely never will be, but I can finally feel myself growing around it.
The lights turn ocean blue. Naomi and Jo exchange massive grins as they prepare to play their favorite song from Saves The World, and immediately my knees feel weak. I had offhandedly mentioned to B as we walked over to Irving Plaza from dinner that if they played “Navy Blue” that night I would almost certainly cry, but I hadn’t truly prepared myself to hear it live for the first time since the breakup. Katie’s image onstage, sheathed in cerulean, blurs with my tears. Do you know that I’ve been holding my breath all of this time? Weren’t you gonna call me when you got back? Was it all lies? Do you know that I’ve been holding my breath all of this time? Weren’t you gonna love me if I just did everything right?
The bridge, which the band members repeatedly said was the greatest bridge ever written when the song first dropped in 2019, reminds me so much of our dissolution. The final phone call she promised but which I had to force. The endless searching in the aftermath for how I had erred, what I could’ve changed, certain that the problem was me, always me.
Weren’t you gonna love me if I just did everything right?
I don’t realize I’m shaking until I feel B’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing tight. I’ve almost forgotten they were here. I’ve almost forgotten anyone is in this room at all aside from MUNA and I. I glance at B, their eyes so patient and kind over their black KN-95. They nod once at me, and I reach up and place my own hand over theirs. How lucky I’ve gotten to have someone in my life who understands me so deeply, who can tell from a single glance that I will be okay, but that I might need an anchor just the same.
I’m so blue, I whisper along with Katie’s outro. I’m so…
January 2023. Dawn breaks and I’m lying in bed beside my lover in her Somerville apartment as we both refresh Ticketmaster anxiously on our phones, trying to snag our tickets to see MUNA on their next tour. It’ll be her first time seeing them live. It will be my fifth. I feel prepared – I signed myself up for an automatic purchase the day before, anticipating a sold-out show. But something glitches, and the single New York City date sells out in seconds, and I am left ticketless. My lover, however, manages to buy four tickets for herself and her friends with ease. This is the Boston difference.
One of these is an extra, she says, just in case. You can have it if you want.
The show isn’t until May, I reply. What if we aren’t together anymore?
She smiles, always so glib when it comes to my anxieties over the grey area that composes our entire relationship. She once said to me that she loves uncertainty in romance, that not everything needs to be defined. For a month I’ve been telling myself I’m okay with this, letting a small part of me die every time she touches my face with her careful hands, just so she won’t say goodbye yet.
Well, you can still have it, she says. You don’t need to come with us.
I’ve gotten better at pinpointing the exact moment when my relationships fall apart. With this one, at least for me, it was one night a few weeks later, in early March. I was back home in New York. We were texting when, unprompted, she mocked my favorite verse of “Everything”:
And at the bar, on TV, they were talking about the casualties
Four hundred and counting, and my only question was, How would you feel if one was me?
Would you wish we’d made love again? Would you want to revisit the marks on my skin?
‘Cause the world could be burning, and all I’d be thinking is “How are you doing, baby?”
“Everything,” the penultimate track on About U, is arguably my favorite MUNA song of all time. It’s hard for me to talk about, though, and I rarely listen to it these days because it takes me back to a very specific moment in time that is dark and swirling and impossibly painful. I just see myself at eighteen years old again, broken and sobbing on the floor of my criminally small double, listening to the song over and over and over. I can’t hear it without hearing a younger version of myself so full of self-hatred and terror, on my knees rasping I am only here to tell you that I am eviscerated, wholly unable to let go. It was a song that allowed me to feel, well, everything. It was a song that demanded to be screamed in the shower or the pit, a song that gave me the catharsis I couldn’t find anywhere else.
My lover couldn’t have known this. I never told her. I never told her lots of things. Our relationship was always a temporary arrangement, by her design. I was only trying to keep myself safe. If I let her in to the degree I was used to doing with my partners, I would be that much more devastated when she left. I regret many things about the relationship, but I don’t regret this. That being said, when she told me the lyrics to “Everything” that I loved the most, that I thought I could’ve written myself for how seen they made me feel, were corny and silly, I felt something break inside me.
So that’s what you think of me, I thought. And for what little remained of the relationship afterward, I could never shake this feeling. It was a little too perfect of an allegory. Here I was, the great feeler humiliated. Here I was, the woman who drowns in the wave of her own emotions, who genuinely does sometimes see a tragedy on the news while missing someone with all her heart and wonder if the person she’s lost would even care enough about her to mourn if she were mowed down in mass gunfire, or crushed in a parking garage collapse, or, or, or. Because just like Katie Gavin, without fail when my world is burning, all I’m ever thinking is, How is she doing? But what she’s thinking is, it’s not that deep. What she’s thinking is, you are too much in the ways I don’t need, and not enough in the ways I do.
But this hasn’t happened yet. What is happening right now is I am in her bed and I know I won’t survive hearing “Navy Blue” or “Pink Light” or, god forbid, “Everything” live with her standing right next to me. I refuse her spare ticket to the Boston show. I stick to my guns. A few hours later, after I’ve made my walk of shame back to the friend’s apartment where I’m supposedly staying (though I haven’t slept there once the whole time I’ve been in Boston), MUNA adds a second New York show. This concert, too, sells out in minutes, but I manage to secure a ticket this time. This might be the only moment they’ve sent me a real sign – when you see us live again, you will no longer be hers. That’s why we’ve allowed you this chance. We are going to set you free.
I ignore them. I text my lover about my victory, and I return to her that evening. I will do this every night for five nights straight. I will do this until it hurts, and then I will do it even more.
May 9, 2023. Here we are again, back at the end. In the pit with C, waiting impatiently for the greatest band in the world to make their appearance and free us from purgatory. I know when the first song starts we’ll dance as though our joints aren’t frozen stiff. We just have to make it there.
The lights begin to flash. The crowd roils like a storm-tossed sea. And then they emerge: Naomi, then Jo, and then finally Katie, her ruby hair absolutely huge, her hands encased in bright red patent-leather gloves.
OKAY HAIR! one of the gays behind me screams.
Katie grabs the mic like a lover and launches right into “What I Want.” On our side of the stage, Jo grinds their hips slowly against their guitar. I feel like I might pass away from the sheer homosexual overload of it all. I've spent way too-too-too many years not knowing what, what I wanted, how to get it, how to live it and now I'm gonna make up for it all at once, 'cause that's, that's just what I want. I grab C’s hand and scream the chorus at her, and she grins.
The show is a blur of new songs, deep cuts, rave lights, and lots of homosexual activity – at one point, Jo walks right up to Katie while she’s in the middle of singing “No Idea” and makes out with her in front of all of Terminal 5 and god herself. The crowd’s screams break the sound barrier.
But it’s right before the performance of “Around U” that I really lose my shit. The band pauses for a talk break – We’re messy, you guys, Katie says. And we used to be so much worse. This next one is actually a breakup song that I wrote about Naomi.
The crowd howls. Across the stage, Naomi’s face splits into a massive, self-satisfied grin. I almost faint. I’ve always suspected that “Around U” was about Naomi, but the band had never confirmed it before. The euphoria of being right in such a gay way spreads like heat throughout my body. It’s an indescribable feeling.
MUNA is so much more than the dyke drama that inspired a handful of songs on their first record. I am in no way trying to reduce their artistry to this, but it would be dishonest to say that I don’t find it a little inspiring. Unlike most lesbians, I am not known for remaining friends with my exes. Writing creative nonfiction, especially about ex-lovers, has resulted in lots of burned bridges. We don’t get to choose the art that we’re compelled to create, not really. You can spend your whole life fighting it, churn out empty, untethered work without the attached emotional weight, or you can give yourself up to the impulses of your heart and the risks such a thing entails for the chance to create something with teeth. Watching Naomi and Katie harmonize perfectly while performing a song written about their shared romantic collapse reminds me that the right people will recognize and appreciate the power of your work, even if it indicts them in some way. The right people will take your metaphorical lyrics, your accusations and confessions, and instead of reacting defensively and trying to silence you will embrace them as art, as truth, and choose to help you transform them. I have yet to meet my Naomi, but I have faith that I’ll find them someday.
After this comes “Pink Light,” then “Crying On The Bathroom Floor,” C’s two favorites in quick succession. I remember us playing these songs on the radio show we used to have together in college. I think about the heartbreaks she and I have endured, and I think about where we are now, living our real adult lives in New York City, and I think maybe anything is possible, maybe we can survive anything and make it to the dance floor at the end of the night. When it’s time for the encore, I turn away from MUNA, grab both of her hands, and let out all the love I feel for my friend as I sing along for what I know might be the last time (and I think I might finally be okay with that): It’s hard to love with a heart that’s hurting, but if you want to go out dancing, I know a place.
For eight years, MUNA has given me more than I could have ever imagined. I fall in love and MUNA is there to catch me. I fall in darkness and MUNA drags me out, holds me tight. I am a writer – I am always searching for The Words. MUNA pulls them straight from my head and heart and wraps them in electric, expansive production that transforms each song into its own world. When the one in which I live lets me down, I can find comfort in the multiverse MUNA has created. I can get enough sleep and drink enough water. I can ask for more from a lover. I can drape my sadness around me and let it flow. I can look at myself in the mirror and say I’m your number one fan. I can keep it light like silk chiffon. I can dance in the middle of a gay bar. I can stay out of the path of a shooting star. I can scream this is not my fault. I can lay down my weapon. I can stop being afraid of love and affection. Because as long as I have MUNA, I am not alone.
Thanks for reading this installment of Overripe Peach :) If you’re new to MUNA, check out this playlist of my favorite tracks! This playlist is ordered sequentially and by album, not preference – my top five MUNA songs of all time are, in this order:
Everything
Around U
Loudspeaker
Pink Light
Navy Blue
**Honorable mention to Shooting Star**
Meme Corner
The first two memes in this post’s meme corner were created by @officialmunanation on Instagram. Thanks, gays.
