"In love with almost everything all the time"

The first time I heard Bea Troxel she warned the audience she’d been losing her voice the last few days. It was a house show where the openers read poetry and we fingersnapped our appreciation. Troxel sat on a stool, alone with her guitar and discomfort. I remember thinking, “If that’s how she sounds when she’s losing her voice goddam she is good.”

I bought her 2017 CD The Way That Is Feels on the spot, and have been a devoted fan ever since. I made posters for the release show of 2021’s Gettin’ Where. It’s the kind of music best played driving across state lines after leaving late and getting caught up in the sunset, then nothing but taillights illuminating the night. If you’re driving in the winter her Nashville timbre will keep you warm. In the summertime her songs breeze gently by.

Troxel is insistently incapable of irony or cynicism. Her music is not exactly bubbly or upbeat, but she refuses to let the world weary her, even as she plys the traveling troubadour trade with an armory of songs that would sit as comfortably next to contemporaries like Phoebe Bridgers as they would to classic acts like Woody Guthrie. Troxel knows the world is harsh, and therefore has elected to be soft. It’s not that she doesn’t sing of hurt or heartbreak, only that she’d rather bandage the wounds than dabble dirty fingers at their edges. Her Bandcamp bio reads, “In love with almost everything all the time.”

The album’s closer, “I Want You,” is a track I can, and will, listen to on repeat for an hour or more. Its titular refrain is simple as a hymn, a tale old as song itself: desire. Someone is leaving, someone is always leaving, and someone else wants them to stay.

In the third verse, the story changes,

In Troxel’s song, desire does not posses or restrict its object of affection. “If you love someone, let them go,” has long been a maxim with variable interpretations, and I think Troxel puts her own powerful spin on it.

She follows that verse with my favorite note on the whole album, insisting,

This moment transcends the established simplicity of the song so far. It is not enough for Troxel to write a song about longing—it must be complicated, because our emotions are seldom simple or singular. There’ so much color to this sentiment, and it barrels into me every time, no matter how much I want the strings to lull me into the familiar comfort of sadness. The wanting is made so much sharper and articulate because the narrator knows the subject should go. “I want you,” she says, and unsaid, “I want you to go, because that is what’s best.” There isn’t a drop of self-pity here, no whiff of woundedness, no “you’ll be back!”

It is not an ugly thing, to want, even when our desires conflict. Greater than rejection, the tragedy to Troxel is silence. It’s not enough to learn what we want, we must be willing to risk our hearts in asking for it, out loud, in song.

I’m a chronic singer-alonger, but sometimes I do in fact shut up and let the artist work. What songs inspire awed silence as easily as all-out singalongs to you? Hit me back, I know you’re out there.