In the summer after my junior year of college, I received an internship working for an enzyme company. The job was over an hour’s drive from my house, causing me to almost always come in later than my scheduled start time. It was an internship with the Household Care department, which meant I was responsible for labeling and scanning literally thousands of pieces of stained fabric which I would then wash and scan again.
As you can imagine, the project was tedious and downright boring on most days. During one of my days spent labeling, I decided to listen to an artist that my brother recommended: Nahko and Medicine for the People. I had heard only one of his songs before that day called “My Country” which used the same tune as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” while the lyrics condemned many aspects of America. The song begins with the line
My country ‘tis of thee
Sweet land of poverty
For thee I weep.
My brother also informed me of some of the artist’s backstory. Nahko, I had heard, was conceived by rape, given up to be raised in a completely different world from his parents. In his songs, he claims to be a mix of Puerto Rican, Filipino, and Native American growing up with white parents in a white neighborhood. To put it shortly, he was different.
I arrived at work, slightly late, like any other day and sat down at my desk to begin my tedious chore. I put my headphones in and started a YouTube playlist of the band which began with the song “Aloha Ke Akua.” The soft piano melody began and I lowered my head to get into mindless labeling mode. A few seconds later a line caught my ear and forced my head to raise back up. That line was
I am a miracle, made up of particles.
I spent the rest of the day listening to his full albums as well as several videos of songs he hadn’t fully produced. The work absolutely flew by because I was with Nahko. I barely paid attention to my tedious work, mindlessly labeling and stacking the stained fabric. My full attention was on this guy’s words and the sounds that accompanied them.
Eventually it was time to go home, an entire day spent labeling was surprisingly enjoyable. I must have listened to a few of the songs upwards of three or four times just that day. I would soon get both his albums and over the next few months he quickly ascended in his importance to me.
It was these months when I experienced one of the calmest periods in my life. I wasn’t necessarily happy but I wasn’t necessarily sad. I was just peaceful. While not being happy might sound like a bad thing, a break from the sad was just what I needed at that point. I saw Nahko as an indirect teacher and mentor. At the time I called him “my messiah” because he granted me the emotional calm I so desperately needed.
In September I bought tickets to see the band live in Wilmington, NC in mid October. I was so excited to meet “my messiah” that I shaved my head into a mohawk like his. It was clear by looking at me, I was following someone I believed to be greater than myself.
My college roommate, whom I called Xerxes, joined me for the three hour ride. Although he had never listened to Nahko, he was willing to see him live with me. My new hairstyle, mixed with my new calm disposition was enough to spark his interest. He later told me his thoughts were, “This guy must have some really good ideas to have grabbed Eddie’s attention this much.”
Xerxes, like any good friend, allowed me to go on and on about Nahko and the meaning I had interpreted from specific lyrics. We listened to the albums during the drive and enjoyed a nice afternoon on the beach. The sun went down and it was time for the concert.
When we first arrived at the venue, we got in line and began talking to two large guys with large beards. They looked like bikers but talked like hippies, I didn’t even know that combination existed before. The more fans I talked with, the more different walks of life I discovered. But the one thing that stayed consistent among all of us was our love of peace and freedom. Nahko had brought us together, a bunch of peaceful freedom fighters with nothing else in common.
The stage was prepared and the opening musician finished his set. Nahko walked onto the stage to thunderous cheering, but he did not walk out with a smile. He came out and introduced a local politician who took center stage and began reading a recent watershed bill that had been passed. The bill was one of the many around this country that works to sacrifice clean water and natural lands for the profit of businesses, namely fossil fuels.
The politician was impassioned in his speech and he was truly preaching to the choir. The audience was on his side, how dare this bill be passed! When Nahko retook the stage, my expectations were shattered.
I had first learned about Nahko during a directionless time in my life after an emotional marathon. He gave me peace. He gave me calm. He brought me as close to happiness as I had been for several years. His words inspired me to take action for myself, to accept the badness in the world and choose to see the goodness. He inspired me to choose to be happy instead of just waiting for it to come. Here was this guy who taught me about finding peace and calm, about to grab the microphone.
He stared at the shouting audience with no joy in his eyes. The only thing I could sense in him was anger. Anger at the watershed bill seemed to turn into anger at the people of North Carolina for letting this happen. It turned into anger at us. He spoke with rage and began playing some of the faster and more boisterous songs off his upcoming album to start the show.
In retrospect, it would have been a jam if I hadn’t been so emotionally involved. I sang along with the songs that I knew but before long, I couldn’t even look at the stage anymore. I couldn’t look at the people. I just looked down and the tears began to fall.
I cried because I thought my happiness wasn’t real. My “messiah,” the one who helped me find my peace, was not who I thought he was. If he wasn’t what I thought he was, maybe his lessons weren’t what I thought they were. Maybe I wasn’t who I thought I had become. The only thought in my head was “Not again…”
This can’t be another time my world shatters around me. My world can’t keep being built up and crumbling down. I had put so much of who I was, who I was becoming, into this one guy. I cried at the Nahko and Medicine for the People concert. I cried and hid my face from the stage. I looked at Xerxes with tears streaming down my face and simply said, “I have to leave.”
We retreated through the crowd to reach the back of the group. He asked if I was okay and I told him that I couldn’t handle this show. The look in my eyes was enough to convince him and we left the venue.
When I returned home late that night, I immediately took an electric trimmer to my hair. I couldn’t stand to look at a symbol of the person I was in love with less than five hours earlier.
The next few days were a blur of apathy. I was apathetic about the way I looked because my hair had never been so short. I was apathetic about the experience because it was easier than processing my feelings about it.
About a week passed and I found myself on a run. It had been a while since my last run and my eyes kept darting to my shadow, whose head was smaller than I’d ever seen it. I like to use running as a distraction and tend to run more when there is more I need to be distracted from. I was running to forget about the concert but my shadow kept reminding me that it really happened so I kept on running.
By the time I finished my run, I could feel the openness in my lungs and the powerful pulse of my heartbeat throughout my body. I slowed to a jog, then a walk as I approached the front porch of my house. As I approached, one of my roommates walked out with a freshly rolled joint. He sat down to light it and invited me to join him.
Just a few puffs were all I needed, my open lungs and blood vessels only amplified the drug’s effect on me. I headed inside to take a shower and brought my speaker into the bathroom with me. My mind started racing as I scrolled through my music to pick which songs I would listen to while showering. Finally I selected Mumford & Sons’ first album entitled Sigh No More.
The album began with the title song and I turned to look at myself in the mirror. I had stripped out of my running clothes and now stood naked in front of the sink. I looked specifically at my eyes, nose and mouth. I’d seen those eyes so many times before. The nose was as it had always been in my reflection. The mouth, while I’ve seen it with braces and missing teeth, was the same too. I imagined a line separating these features from the rest of my head and body, in a T-shape. Then something strange began to happen in my mind.
I started to remember all of the bodies that had surrounded my T-shape. I imagined it with long hair, chubby cheeks and the pudgy body that came with it. I imagined it with shorter hair, a lean face and the lanky body corresponding to that face. I imagined a face with pimples, a beard, and glasses. Then I saw my present form, nearly bald with stubble on my face and the body I was occupying at this moment. Suddenly, my thoughts jumped back to the music to reinforce what I was already thinking,
be more like the man you were made to be
My T-shape face has resided on many bodies throughout my life and now that I could finally see the outline of my head without hair, I seemed more human than ever before. I began to see myself not as I was, but as what I could become.
The next song began with the line, “It’s empty in the valley of your heart,” and my full attention shifted to the music. I had spent the last few months living by the peaceful and loving teachings of Nahko only to find out that he was not peaceful nor loving. Yes, the “valley of my heart” felt very empty indeed. The chorus played:
And I’ll find strength in pain
and I will change my ways
I’ll know my name when it’s called again.
As the banjo took over, I reflected on those words. I had plenty of pain and I could certainly appreciate some strength. My brother had told me he saw the whole album as a story when this song was played as the finale. With that in mind, I thought of those words as my destination on the mental journey I was about to take.
“I’ll know my name when it’s called again.” Throughout my life, I’ve used music and especially lyrics to overcome mental and emotional hurdles. That line was the first to ever pinpoint my exact thoughts at the moment I was listening: I was going to be different, but somehow I would still be the same.
The album continued with a trumpet-heavy narrative song called “Winter Winds.” My head turned to look out the window and I noticed it started to lightly drizzle. It seemed like a moment of serendipity, but so did the first two songs.
One of the only consistent thoughts I had throughout college was my romantic interest in a girl named Sarah. Our story was one that would never happen for any number of reasons, but it didn’t prevent me from growing emotionally attached. I mention this because it popped into my head right before the chorus sang, “and my head told my heart ‘Let love grow’/ but my heart told my head ‘This time no.’” It was too much of a coincidence this time, Mumford was somehow in my head and his album was perfectly synced up with my thoughts.
I began to wonder if this wasn’t just a coincidence. I began to think about Mumford himself. I read online that the lead singer/songwriter was a religious Christian. Many of Mumford’s songs make way more sense when taken in a more religious context.
I thought about how I had treated Nahko as my version of Jesus for the last few months and thought, “maybe this has all been a journey to understand that the Christian God is the true one.” I thought about how I’d grown up Jewish and had never actually considered the possibility that Christianity is correct.
As you can imagine, this was a pretty intense and complex thought process and I took a few more songs to verify whether Mumford, or his god, were directly talking to me. After all, I had recently lost my “messiah” after seeing Nahko in concert, the position was now available.
Around the sixth song, I came to my senses a bit and realized I hadn’t even started the water for my shower. I had been standing and staring at myself naked in the mirror for half the album, lost in my head.
I turned around to start the water when the familiar guitar strums of “Little Lion Man” began. Again, I forgot all about the shower as I turned back to look myself furtively in the eyes. I saw the T-shape again and imagined all the different bodies that face had been on. The chorus played,
It was not your fault but mine
And it was your heart on the line
I really fucked it up this time
Didn’t I, my dear
He seemed to be talking to the ‘little lion man’ but I wondered who was the one talking. It would have to be someone whose decisions affect the life of the ‘lion man’ but who has a much smaller stake in those actions.
Mumford’s Christianity made me think he was speaking as God was talking to him, the ‘lion man.’ After all, many religious people believe that their actions are simply the Will of God flowing through them. At the same time the speaker admits to being flawed, not usually a characteristic of God.
I started thinking broader. Mumford wrote the song, so he created both the speaker and the ‘lion man.’ The speaker seems to spend the song berating the ‘lion man’ for obsessing over failures while the chorus shows the speaker taking the blame. It felt as though the speaker were trying to clarify their intentions since things didn’t work out.
Then it dawned on me, the speaker is the ‘little lion man.’ The song can be viewed as an inner monologue with the speaker like a mental voice in your head. We all have a part of our brain that hatches up ideas and convinces our bodies the idea is a good one. “Little Lion Man” can be viewed as a self-apology.
With the song winding down, I reflected back on the mental rollercoaster I’d just ridden. First I thought the song was describing God talking to Mumford, then I thought it was Mumford talking to himself. That’s when I realized they were the same thing.
Everything started to click for me. I realized that the ‘little lion man’ was like my ever-changing body surrounding my T-shape face. I realized that God is just another name we can give to our own mental voice. I realized that my internal voice knows everything about me because it is me so it’s easy to make connections to things I already know. Every song felt as though it spoke to me not because Mumford’s God was speaking through the music, but because my own brain made the connections.
I thought back on my time as a follower of Nahko and applied this new revelation. Nahko spoke to me in a way no other musician had but it was all in my head. I built Nahko up to be so great because his perspective and attitude granted me peace and calm. Although the ideas originally came from Nahko, they now belonged to me because I translated them from the music.
I finally got into the shower and as the water cascaded over my head and shoulders, I thought of nothing at all. I left the bathroom after about an hour, but only the last five minutes were spent showering.
Walking downstairs, I found that my Xerxes had come over to visit and was sitting on the couch. He greeted me by telling me I looked different, and it wasn’t just the hair. He said there was a difference in my face, in my eyes. I felt different. I felt as though I was two people, one living inside the other making the decisions.
I didn’t feel like the same Eddie I was a few hours earlier, nor did I feel like the same Eddie from a few weeks earlier. This was something brand new and I knew that I could never go back. I was not the same and I would never be the same again, but somehow I was still the same guy overall. I thought of a single lyric,
I’ll know my name when it’s called again.
It would take me a few more weeks to fully understand the realizations I made that day. I’ve long since forgiven Nahko for his anger, especially after hearing his lyric, “Written on my face: Do not follow, do not follow me.” I’ve realized that while his ‘lion man’ was angry, Nahko’s mental voice has always been calm and peaceful.
We all have a ‘little lion man’ following the orders of our mental voice. But sometimes it’s hard for the ‘lion man’ to not be overwhelmed with emotion. Seeing my face on an unfamiliar body in the mirror that day has taught me to overlook the ‘lion man’ and look for the intentions hidden in the T-shape, namely the eyes. After all, our ‘lion men’ are just trying their best to follow our own orders and not get hurt along the way.
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