GIVING UP GHOSTS AND SATURN RETURNS
I hated the term “Saturn Return.” I guess Western astrologers believed that, as Saturn “returns” to the degree in its orbit where it was at the time of one’s birth, supposedly a person crosses over some major threshold and enters the next stage of their life. My therapist kept gently mentioning it to me. Anything that had to do with predestiny or mind expansion made my Bible-loving mind pretty nervous. Doomsday prophet Harold Camping was date-setting again. I knew he was a total fraud, but because of the way I grew up, end-times prophecy sent chills down my spine...no matter how often I told myself it was complete bullshit.
Nevertheless, by the time I was twenty-eight, I was in two different kinds of love with two incredibly magnetic people, and completely codependent with my parents, not to mention the twins. I was overly invested in my dad’s sobriety and my mother’s too. I technically didn’t own anything, I handed all my money over to Kim, and I was leaning hard on steroids and Xanax to balance each other out. I believed I needed this to get through my tours and the rigors of sleeping on a tour bus.
Sometimes, I wanted the plane to crash...or at least just disappear. It would take off and I’d picture it just never landing so that I wouldn’t have to go onstage. I was seeing huge swaths of the world through the eyes of an emotionally repressed folk singer and writing some of my best songs ever.
My niece Caroline had taken me by storm, and I was feeling really intense about my lack of familial and emotional stability. I had no real support system because I wasn’t being honest with anyone about what I was doing, or the thoughts I was entertaining.
I had distanced myself in my home relationship, but I was seriously considering turning back toward Kim and renewing the nature of our commitment so that I could start the family I desperately wanted. The problem was that there was this invisible wall there that I would soon learn was a result of Kim having a totally predictable and possibly even justifiable affair—albeit slightly less honest than my escapade. I don’t even know how I felt about it at the time...as I mine my memories both hurt and relief come to mind.
I had come back into contact with Rick Rubin in the wrong way at the wrong time. He was now the chairman of my record label and he felt more like my “boss” than he did eight years prior. The first thing he did when he took the job at Columbia was request that we remix and master The Story. Man, it pissed me off. He wanted to make our next album with us, and I was still miffed about the year I spent broke and believing I was on his label over at American. I didn’t want to make my album with him as a result. For the most part, I told him that. BUT being the total Zen Yoda he is, he basically gave us a budget, his blessing, and permission to try out someone else.
It was a total disaster.
We moved into a small rental in Nashville. Three twin beds in one room. Tim and Phil and me. Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
The “in-loveness” I was experiencing with the woman in my musical life was reaching a peak when she came to see me on that trip. If we didn’t see each other, it would become all consuming. Connecting in the real world actually normalized it. But when the distance was there, I was writing about her all the time. We missed each other constantly and we were finding ways to be together more and more while our parallel musical lives crossed as frequently as we were making them. I had idealized plenty of authority figures before...but she was anti-authority. She was different. She was ten feet tall...still disappointing me but in ways that I could get high on. Somehow she was more Brandi than I was even capable of being! In retrospect, I can see that it was classic mirroring. I’m not saying by any stretch of the imagination that she wasn’t special, because she was and IS... It’s just that throughout the years, all the songs about her still apply because everything I loved in this brilliant woman, I wanted in myself too. The relationship had taken on the shape of the muse or a cloak that I could slip on and off.
The young should never deny themselves their feelings. No matter how turbulent they get. Just don’t lock them inside, don’t keep them secret lest they overpower you from the repression of it. I wanted to talk about it and sing about it...so I did. The first song I wrote about this feeling was called “Love Songs.” I played it for Kim proudly as she walked in the door one day. She rolled her eyes and said something like “You got it bad.” I was in over my head and everyone knew it. I was so much younger than everyone else. I wanted to stay innocent. I didn’t want to be denied my feelings. When I sing the song now I sing it to myself. I no longer require completion. “If I ever write a love song, I think I’ll write it about you.”
When I’m in the grips of my ego I fill my life with restrictions followed by secrets and emotional binging. Declaring myself a vegetarian and driving four towns over to buy a Whopper. Collecting emotional affairs while setting myself phone conversation time limits and deleting emails. Freebasing multivitamins AND also NSAIDs and Xanax. In Nashville I was starting to behave in ways that were conflicted and secretive. I was indulging some strange and self-destructive thoughts. I even did a weird thing where I snuck out on a date with a guy to the Grand Ole Opry. I had made a music video for my song “Turpentine” the previous year, and I’d hit it off with the sweet man who played my brother in the video. We had stayed in touch and I think in some confusing way, I just wanted to hang out with Jay. The guy wound up being a Republican and I laughed at myself and called him the wrong name all evening.
I was absolutely rudderless.
The producer we had chosen to work with in lieu of Rick Rubin didn’t believe I was “capable of delivering a live vocal” (his words), which put my ego through a total tornado by the time it was all over. I was having hourly white-knuckle confrontations with him and rage-pacing the rest of the time. I just wanted to play my guitar and sing. It seemed like a reasonable request...but I had the hardest time earning that inalienable right as a female artist. I was always too loud, or pitchy...too affected, too emotional, or just out of bounds somehow. I was starting to detest making albums.
I went to bed one night in the bedroom with the twins, and my grandfather Vernon came to me in a dream. We were in a laundromat way out in no-man’s-land at the end of a dirt road. I heard him before I saw him. He was singing and leaning on a washing machine next to his brother Sonny, who had not died yet but was just about to. Sonny was playing guitar; he was old, but Vern was only about forty. His hair was brown, and I
felt confused, remembering him as blond. He was singing:
Anytime you’re feeling lonely,
Anytime you’re feeling blue,
Anytime you say you want me back again, That’s the time I’ll come back home to you.
His voice was lower than I remembered. I walked in and he stopped singing and said, “Here she is, Sonny, you’re gonna hear her now,” and nodded for me to take over the vocal. As soon as I did, he started grinning,
 stomping, and elbowing his brother. “Didn’t I tell you she could sing?” he said. “Man, she can really sing.”
No one knew how bad I needed to hear that.
I felt really strongly that it was more than a dream. With one eye open, I grabbed my phone to see what time it was and saw that I had gotten a totally random text message from my mother with a photo of her dad from just before I was born...and he had brown hair.
When I woke up the next day, I prayed for the first time in years and thanked God for the access to Vernon and Sonny and for the encouragement. We had the weekend off and I cryptically snuck away from the twins for the day to go and find a church in east Nashville.
I phoned in the rest of the recording session because I knew innately that I had made the wrong decision. It was time for me to find my way back to Rick, who we all now know is notorious for second chances...I knew he’d forgive me, and he did. I knew that I was going to be okay because the songs were very good and for the first time in a long time, I believed that I was very good.
I dove into an independent Bible study that led me to read the Good Book itself and then thousands of pages on Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation gospels, as well as some of the great pop-culture Christian icons of our time: Brennan Manning, Rob Bell, Rachel Held Evans, Greg Boyd, C. S. Lewis, of course, and many more.
I decided to confront my fear of church and what I came to understand was actually a moderate form of PTSD by sitting through unknown sermons and surrounding myself with strangers. My head would pound, my palms would sweat, and I would even get mild vertigo. It defied all sensibility for me. No amount of “learning” would take it away. The books couldn’t touch it. I had to show up.
I knew it was time for my actual baptism.
Brennan Manning was a disgraced, divorced, alcoholic Franciscan priest. I read everything he wrote. Ragamuffin Gospel is my favorite. He fell off the wagon and continued to write from a perspective of brokenness. His meditations affected me in a way that no pious teacher ever could have. I imagined him writing page after page while sipping on a Jameson, still believing in himself and in God enough to know that his worthiness was simply irrevocable. He taught me a new way to say the phrase “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”—the phrase I’d been carrying around since
 my grandfather’s funeral. He replaces “I shall not want” with the Greek understanding: “I lack nothing.”
“The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing.” This subtle difference is night and day to a self-punishing person.
These songs and heartaches, my misplaced anger and how it led me to seek all this forgiveness on this side of the divide and the other one, were my “second calling,” my actual Saturn Return and what ultimately led me to my actual adult baptism.
I WAS FINALLY baptized on Easter Sunday in 2009. I wish I could report the usual feeling of renewal, but I wasn’t as present as I would have liked to have been. The botched baptism of my fragile youth still owned that moment in some ways. I light a candle and say a prayer every year on Easter, and every year I feel better, and further away from that day. As the distance between me and that moment grows, it pushes me closer and closer to God.