My First Song

I’ve always had songs in me, usually spilling out like sung comedy. They’d animate whatever mundane task I was busy with: buttering toast, stubbing my toe, taking out the trash. But I didn’t need those songs, I just enjoyed the giggle. The first song I “wrote,” I needed.

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I was on a trail in Skinner Butte Park, in Eugene, Oregon, in August of 2017. That summer, the wildfires sucked all the oxygen out of the sky and left our throats sore and our vision hazy. I was a recent college grad out for a run, on a trail I’d climbed countless times with my best running buddy, Ellie Bartlett. This time, though, I ran alone. I paused to grip a tree branch as I heaved a few horrible sobs. I crumpled to the forest floor in time to watch an enormous, golden maple leaf glide back and forth like a falling feather. Ellie had died the week prior, in a car crash on the Mckenzie River Highway. I couldn’t breathe. That whole month, I couldn’t breathe. 

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Watching the maple leaf fall, Ellie felt so close that she was… me. In my pulse, sharing my tears, and that’s when the song came:

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If I stay put long enough

WIll you run to me?

If my tears pool up

Will you catch them with your hands?

If I call to you

From wherever this is

Will you take me by the hand

And guide me home again?

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Because I miss you

Sweet girl I miss you

Though your feet dance light

Upon the trail

Yes I miss you

I goddamn miss you

You are wild and extreme

Will you go on loving me?

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And then, as if Ellie was near and eager to respond, the conversation I craved emerged through a second verse:

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Yes, if you stand back up my dude

I will run with you

If your tears pool up

I will mop them with my weave

And if you call to me

From wherever you may be

I’ll take you by the hand

And guide you home again

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Because I miss you

But I’m still with you

Hear my feet dance round you

On the trail

Yes I’m with you

Hold me with you

I’m not gone but I am free,

You must go on loving me–

I’m not gone but I am free;

You must go on loving me.

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It all flowed out of me in perfect, teary melody, sung into the hazy golden light of the trail. The song soothed me like a mother, or a friend. It pulled me from the suffocating nightmare and told me, “this isn’t a nightmare, and it’s not the end. This is living, and this is what you can do with your breath.”

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At Ellie’s memorial service a few weeks later, I sang in front of a crowd for the first time, for hundreds of people who had loved my friend, too. My first time on a mic, I sang a-capella, just as I had sung into the woods. My voice cracked, adding texture to the story I was singing. And boy does an untrained, earnest, sad vocalist really release the floodgates at a funeral. The voice I gave to my pain cracked other people open, too. One after another, they thanked me.

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That first song introduced me to musicians, organizations, and internal capacities that I continue to create with, eight years later. The cellist at the memorial, Ellie’s freshman roommate Nora, became my musical collaborator and inseparable friend. I partnered up with Documentary Songwriters, and began facilitating songwriting sessions for folks who had never used their voice musically. I learned guitar, and now I share my music with friends and strangers regularly.

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These days, I don’t exclusively write songs when my soul is trying to save me from something. Sometimes I work for a song: write it first, then tease the melody out. Sometimes a song is a howl (like the endorphins-flooded fuck! that follows a stubbed toe). Sometimes my songs are a playful joke, intended to make my nephew laugh. Every time though, the song reminds me: “you are living, and here’s something you can do with your breath.”

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Clara is a storyteller and singer-songwriter based in Portland, Oregon. Currently recruiting musicians to build a cohort of local Documentary Songwriters, she aims to elevate underrepresented stories by singing them. Clara is a natural connector and passionate disrupter, challenging old-school structures to make way for innovative community building and creative expression. As the Gal Pal Museletter editor & chief, Clara juggles a large community of writers and readers with humor, empathy and grace. When she’s not singing or Gal Pal-ing, she’s probably riding her bike over some beautiful mountain.

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