176. Song No. 2,613: “Do Ya Love,” Michael Franti & Spearhead
Stay Human, 2001

So many times, people turn they backs to you
‘Cause they don’t wanna see what’s inside you
‘Cause lookin’ inside of you
They might realize
There’s something inside of them
They might not wanna find…

This song (and, really, its entire album) sounds like the old apartment and that heady mix of late spring ceding to early summer, with the open sliding glass doors letting in warm breezes and the best seasons’ perfume rushing in to meet our first home’s mingling essence of incense and pot smoke. It’s the kind of immersive sensory invocations that make me understand people who wax nostalgic about the broke early days and the pure joy that thrives in sparse environments. But that’s not why I love this song as much as I do.

Over the past 15 years of my career, I’ve talked to all kinds of people for all kinds of interviews covering all kinds of ground, always barreling right past polite conversation’s usual terrain via my job’s core tenant of asking Explain Like I’m 5 questions. The best is when someone really starts opening up and lets loose a few life lessons, like the time one of my longstanding favorite interviewees, a middle-school teacher spearheading his school’s Gay/Straight Alliance, went off on this beautiful, heartfelt tangent about how for kids that young, their sexuality isn’t about sex: It’s about love, making it extra-imperative that they’re treated like young adults who deserve to know that their expression of an emotion the world always needs more of is just as beautiful and valid as they themselves are. And celebrating the necessity of love in all its forms is the driving sentiment of this and so many of Franti’s other songs.

I try not to spend too much time dwelling on how the world changes a person no matter how much they resist, but the person I was when I fell in love with Franti’s music, his anger at injustice turned productive and poetic in equal measures, his unwavering messages of hope and love and power to the people, was more of a complacent pacifist than an exasperated leftist constantly tempted by the seductress of ur-appropriated accelerationism as an excuse to just give up on giving a shit and root for the giant meteor to end this failed experiment of humanity and its infinite capacity for harming others.

Sunshine and loveliness
Ain’t nobody feeling no ugliness tonight
Ain’t it fine like sippin’ sweet Georgie wine
See, I’m just chillin’ with these friends of mine

I ain’t tryin’ a bother you
So why ya gotta bother me
What goes on in your bedroom ain’t no mess to me
You say your God don’t like my God
‘Cause you don’t like my friends
But your friends tryin’ to kill a man
And I don’t understand

But it ain’t about who ya love
See, it’s all about do ya love

As far as I’m concerned, the two key commonalities in people who make the world a better place are wanting to be awed and wanting to find something to love in everyone they meet. While the universe is absolutely brimming over with things to be dazzled by every day, not every person you meet wants to be loved, nor does every human have something redemptive inside them. Sure, some are so impenetrably cocooned in layers of hurt, protection, defense and coping mechanisms, suspicion and a host of other learned responses that they seem utterly unlovable without an invitation first and then some work; other people, however, are simply beyond redemption, and that’s not anyone else’s responsibility or fault. We choose to be open to rehabilitation of the spirit or remain emotionally immobilized in prisons of our own design: There are those rare and radiant souls helbent on being the catalyst for positive change in others, but someone has to let them in for them to work their magic in the first place.

It is not who you love or how you love or even why you love: What matters is not only being capable of loving someone else—platonically, romantically, like family, whatever—but also that you love someone at all. Entrusting a piece of yourself to someone who opened their heart to you is a tremendous, exhilarating risk that only pays off if you can be reciprocally vulnerable and honest with each other. It is one giddily daunting ask to surrender your defenses at the door and proceed with nothing but faith that your fondness for each other is enough to keep you both from taking the other for granted, but there’s also nothing like finding another soul whose very existence brings an untold wealth of warmth and that indescribable confidence of inviting a uniquely compatible, comfortable companion into your world. The only thing capable of eclipsing that joining of twin spirits, really, is the compliment of getting to be that person someone else was waiting to love with well-matched full-hearted ferocity.