TUNES // Caitlin McGarvey – Don’t Worry Baby

Post by J

I feel like we’ve all had these types of moments. 

The ones in the passenger seats or back seats of friends’ or partners’ cars, looking out the windows into the setting sun or into the eyes of someone who feels like a breath of fresh air, a new beginning, each sight equally as beautiful. The ones that feel like movie scripts, the movies we never saw ourselves in. Feeling surreal, feeling transcendent, feeling like the car could lift off into the sky at any moment and it wouldn’t be wrong.

And most of all feeling like we made it somewhere that never even seemed like an option. An impossible moment come to life as the sun bursts brilliant and death-defiant through the branches of trees, a blur of green and light.

In this shimmery, aching, washed-out sunset drive, Caitlin McGarvey takes a snapshot of queer happiness that feels fragile for its apparent rarity, and incredibly tender in its honest wonder. Gentle piano and soft electric sounds weave together a quiet but steadfast hope, the blanket of calm that washes over you when you realize maybe it’s going to be alright. Maybe we do have time.

Happiness, for so many of us, has felt so unrealistic, so fleeting, never staying the night. So it becomes a practice of survival and necessity to document those junctures where joy feels elastic. To present proof in the face of a persistent and all-too-familiar emptiness. It’s defiance even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

The brilliant arc that McGarvey paints is both complex and not. Simple and multitudinous. It’s a love story, but it’s also more than that. It’s pulling back the dusty curtains and watching the sun illuminate each speck. It’s knowing that sometimes we still need to draw the curtains closed, and realizing that someone wants to be there even in the resulting darkness. Above all, it’s remarkable. McGarvey captures the precise point we realize this is real, and the resulting joy is especially beautiful considering the contexts into which this new light enters. 

It’s hard to know what to do when those moments come, the ones we’ve spent our whole lives wondering what they might feel like. We’ve been chasing the idea of it, a future without a shape. No wonder the recognition takes a moment to settle. It feels strange, in its unfamiliarity. Calmer than we thought. The instinct is to question it, but don’t. Hold it tenderly. Breathe, and don’t look away.

Caitlin McGarvey is an Eau Claire-made, New England-based singer/songwriter. You can find their EP “Bigger” here, single “Fire” here, and “At the Venue” here.