Big Bad Bike and a Cherry Tree

On the second best time to plant a tree.

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For subscribers, a note on the title (because I can’t help myself)

Picture it: you’re eleven years old on a hot summer day in 2006, in the car with your mom, sipping Slurpees on the way back from a guitar lesson you don’t care about (because you’re not very good). The radio switches from some old Rolling Stones song your mom loves to something… new.

It catches you by surprise, cooler and more refreshing than the cherry coke flavored ice sludge you’re slurping through a neon green straw with a tiny little scoop on the end — two, three, four, WOOHOO!

You may not be very good at the guitar, but today you are a rockstar, for precisely three minutes. So you have a sudden urge to dye your hair blue, which your mom lets you do, because she’s a bit of a rockstar on the inside, too. A few weeks later, you enter the 6th grade with faded green highlights in your aggressive side bangs, knowing every single word to every single song on KT Tunstall’s Eye to the Telescope.

Nothing is the same ever again.

Anyone who really knows me knows that KT Tunstall is my first girl crush, and that falling in love with her changed me. I’m not going to say it was a sexual awakening, because it wasn’t (I was eleven). But hearing her on the radio that summer was the first time I earnestly loved listening to music (beyond the early aughts girlhood right of blasting NSYNC and Britney on a boom box without knowing what any of it meant).

KT opened up a new world of sound for me, one where I could project myself into their shoes, sing along, and feel like the voice on the other side of the speaker understood, whether I was good at guitar or not (I wasn’t).

I will be a KT fan girl until the day I die, but I also have to say that I haven’t really kept up with her career. Looking back now, Suddenly I See that a lot has happened since 2006. She’s taken a few breaks from music due to various health issues, been married and divorced, released like ten more albums in spite of it all, and apparently did the score for the Clueless musical? Honestly, how was I supposed to keep up?

I’m sorry to say that none of it hits as hard for me now as this banger did back then. But knowing Eye to the Telescope from front to back remains the best trick up my sleeve when I need to stay awake on a road trip, and the only thing that’s gonna help me do that is singing (badly).

In sum, I dare you to watch this and tell me you don’t have a crush on her after. And, please, the next time you see me at karaoke, I need more of you to do the woohoo’s.

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