I give sycamore trees five stars.

“NEW PARTNER”

HEARTBREAK is not really so different from falling in love. Both are overwhelming experiences that unmoor me. Both burst with yearning. Both consume the self. I think that’s what the Palace Music song “New Partner” is about. But I’m not sure.

“New Partner” has been my favorite song not by the Mountain Goats for over twenty years now, but I’ve never been able to make sense of the lyrics. One couplet goes, “And the loons on the moor, the fish in the flow / And my friends, my friends still will whisper hello.” I know that means something; I just don’t know what. This is soon followed by a line equally beautiful and baffling: “When you think like a hermit, you forget what you know.”

Palace Music is one of the many incarnations of Will Oldham, who sometimes records under his own name and sometimes as the dandyish Bonnie Prince Billy. I like a lot of his songs; he sings about religion and longing and hope in ways that resonate with me, and I love how his voice often seems on the edge of cracking open.

But “New Partner” is not just a song for me. It’s a kind of magic, because it has the ability to transport me to all the moments I’ve heard that song before. For three minutes and fifty-four seconds, it makes me into people I used to be. Through the song I am brought back both to heartbreak and to falling in love with enough distance to see them as something more than opposites. In “The Palace,” Kaveh Akbar writes that “Art is where what we survive survives,” and I think that’s true not only of the art we make, but also of the art we love.

Like any magic, you have to be careful with a magical song—listen to it too often, and it will become routine. You’ll hear the chord changes before they come, and the song will lose its ability to surprise and teleport you. But if I’m judicious with a magical song, it can take me back to places more vividly than any other form of memory.

I’m twenty-one. I’m in love, and I’m on a road trip to visit distant relatives of mine who live in and around the tiny town where my grandmother grew up. My girlfriend and I pull into a McDonald’s parking lot in Milan, Tennessee, and then we stay in the car for a couple of minutes listening to the end of “New Partner.”

It’s spring, and we’re driving south, and when we get out of the car after the song ends, we discover that our long-sleeve T-shirts are no longer necessary. I scrunch my sleeves up and feel the sun on my forearms for the first time in months. At the pay phone inside McDonald’s, I call the number my mom has given me, and a quivering voice answers, “Hello?”

I explain that her cousin, Billie Grace, is my grandmother. The woman says, “Roy’s daughter?” And I say yes. And she says, “You’re saying you’re kin to Billie Grace Walker,” and I say yes, and she says, “So you’re saying you’re kin to me,” and I say yes, and then my distant relative, Bernice, says, “Well, then come on over!”