I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am

Book excerpt: I Sing to Use the Waiting is a vital and affecting reflection on how popular culture can shape personal identity. With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice. Structured like a mixtape, Pace juxtaposes their coming out with the music that informed them along the way. They recount how listening to themselves sing along as a child to a Disney theme song they recorded on a boom box in 1995, was when they first realized there was an effeminate inflection to their voice. As childhood friendships splinter, Pace discusses the relationship between Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford. Cat Power’s song “My Daddy Was a Musician” spurs a discussion of Pace’s own musician father, and their gradual estrangement. Resonant and compelling, I Sing to Use the Waiting is a deeply personal rumination on how queer stories are abundant yet often suppressed, and how music may act as a comforting balm carrying us through difficult periods and decisions.