There was a pause, then a click, and then it was too late.

After that Brian and I were touring a lot, doing all the stupid things people do living that kind of a life. Whenever we came back to New York, our manager would drop off a box of band mail that had been sent to the label. To sort through it, Brian and I would spend hours holed up in his apartment drinking Jack and Coke. People sent all kinds of stuff: poetry, drawings, love letters, hate letters. One night I opened a big yellow envelope with my name on it, and inside was a picture of me sitting cross-legged on the hood of a car. I had no memory of anyone taking that photo or of sitting on that car to begin with, which wasn’t unusual in those days, but it felt like I’d been spied on. Brian was pissed when I tore the photo in half. He said it was a great shot, but what mattered to me was the invasion of privacy. After Brian grabbed the envelope, he read the note that came with it, then started shaking his head. “Nice job, shithead. You just tore up a photograph by Lillian Preston.” When he showed me her name, I wanted to kick my own ass.

For the next twenty-odd years of making music, my Lillian Preston story stayed filed away with everything else I wished I’d done differently, until I got a call from a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. They were planning a Lillian Preston show: would I take a look at the photographs, maybe write something for the catalogue? I figured this would be my chance to thank her. The math in my head told me Lillian Preston was in her fifties, so when I got there, I was looking for a middle-aged person. Waiting for me in the curator’s office instead was a woman about my age. I was pretty sure I’d seen her somewhere, but that’s a feeling I get all the time. Then she said, “Are you Frances Pell?”

Don’t hang up, yelled the voice inside my head. I know who you are.

For the rest of that day, we looked at her mother’s photographs. I thought they’d all be naked people, but they weren’t, at least not in the usual way. Lillian Preston was mostly a street photographer. She lived her life blending into backgrounds and snapping whoever passed by. For all that, these people aren’t strangers. Sometimes it’s a look in the eyes, or the way someone is standing, but what’s unfamiliar lifts away. The people in Lillian Preston’s pictures seem like people I know. Sometimes, looking at a stranger, it feels like I’m looking at myself.