Music Says the Things We’re Afraid to Say
The Iowa Years
Both of my daughters went to college in Iowa. One was a Hawkeye. The other was a Cyclone.
So for several years, I spent an unhealthy amount of time driving across the state of Iowa — which, if you’ve never done it, is a beautiful place to have a complete emotional collapse.
One cold winter day, I was driving to pick up my daughter in Ames.
Now, I have a long-drive ritual.
For at least the first stretch of any road trip, I keep the radio off.
Not because I’m deeply disciplined.
Not because I’m trying to become one with the universe.
But because I’ve learned that if I leave the radio off long enough, my brain will usually cough up whatever nonsense it’s been storing.
Regrets.
Random memories.
An unfinished argument from 2007.
One of the many stupid things I’ve said in my life, replayed in full surround sound.
You know. Healthy stuff.
So there I was, somewhere past Dubuque, rolling west on Highway 20 — which, by the way, is one of the flattest, straightest, most aggressively uneventful drives in human history.
Second only to Nebraska.
Highway 20 across Iowa is not a road.It’s a dare.
You can basically set the cruise, loosen your grip on reality, and wait three hours before you even need to think about turning south toward Ames.
The Playlist That Got Me in Trouble
Eventually, boredom won.
I turned on the music.
And not just any music.
I went straight to the official playlist of “middle-aged man driving alone with no witnesses.”
Journey.
Bob Seger.
Peter Gabriel.
Fleetwood Mac.
U2.
Just absolute emotional irresponsibility.
And then it happened.
Somewhere out there in the frozen Iowa wilderness, The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” came on.
Now listen — I’m not here to defend myself.I am simply here to report the facts.
And the facts are these:
I was alone in the car.
No audience.
No fear of judgment.
No one around to tell me I was singing like a divorced man at karaoke night in a Florida retirement community.
So naturally, I did what any emotionally stable adult would do.
I started belting it.
Not singing.
Belting.
And as I often do with songs I love, I started thinking about the lyrics.
Then, as if that wasn’t dangerous enough, I started imagining what it would be like if someone were singing those words to me with that much sincerity… that much ache… that much tenderness.
And somewhere between the melody, the harmonies, and Susanna Hoffs doing whatever mysterious thing Susanna Hoffs has done to the male population for forty years…
I completely lost it.
I’m talking about a full emotional ambush.
One minute I’m driving through Iowa.The next minute I’m sobbing across the plains like I just got broken up with in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation.
It was absurd.
And also… weirdly honest.
By the time the song ended, I just sat there blinking at the road like I had been spiritually mugged.
Then I did the only reasonable thing.
I played it again.
And again.
And again.
By the fifth listen, the song had taken everything I had emotionally available for the week.
So I turned the music off and drove the next hour in total silence, staring at the road ahead like a man who had just discovered he may have more feelings than he originally budgeted for.
Why Do We Do This?
And that’s when it hit me:
Why do we do this?
Why do perfectly normal people — men and women who would never say certain things out loud in regular life — suddenly become startlingly honest when a song comes on?
Why can music get past us so easily?
Why do songs sometimes say what we can’t?
Because if we’re honest, most of us have had some version of that moment.
Maybe not on Highway 20.
Maybe not with The Bangles.
But most people know exactly what it feels like to have a song tell the truth before they’re ready to.
And that raises a bigger question:
Why does music feel more honest than we do?
When Music Tells the Truth
There’s something strange about music.
People will sing lyrics with full emotional conviction that they would never comfortably say in an actual conversation.
A man who answers “How are you?” with “Good” and a shoulder shrug will somehow scream an entire chorus about heartbreak, regret, loneliness, desire, shame, or wanting to be loved like his life depends on it.
A woman who would never walk into a room and announce, “I miss who I used to be,” or “I wish someone would finally see me,” or “I’m more fragile than I let on,” will sing those exact words in traffic with alarming emotional precision.
And not ironically.
Fully.
That should probably tell us something.
Because this is not just about nostalgia.
It’s not just about catchy melodies.
It’s not just about Fleetwood Mac’s supernatural ability to make people stare dramatically out of windows.
It’s deeper than that.
Songs have a strange way of slipping underneath the version of ourselves we normally manage.
The polished version.
The functioning version.
The version that answers emails, folds laundry, pays bills, smiles at people, and avoids saying anything too revealing before 9:30 a.m.
Music gets underneath all of that.
And when it does, it has this irritating tendency to tell the truth.
More Than Just a Song
That’s what happened to me in the car that day.
It wasn’t really about “Eternal Flame.”
At least not entirely.
It was about the fact that for four minutes and a few seconds, a song managed to get past my normal defenses and touch something I hadn’t fully put into words.
Something tender.
Something unguarded.
Something lonely.
Something hopeful.
Something that still wanted to be deeply known and deeply loved.
And if we’re being honest, that’s probably why certain songs hit people so hard.
Not because they’re just “good songs.”
But because they somehow reach the parts of us that everyday life usually keeps buried under schedules, sarcasm, routines, notifications, obligations, and whatever low-level emotional avoidance strategy we’ve all quietly agreed to call adulthood.
A lot of people don’t really talk about what they carry.
But they’ll sing it.
And once you notice that, it gets hard to ignore.
Because maybe a lot of secular music is doing something most people don’t realize.
It’s not just entertaining us.
It’s confessing for us.
What We’re Really Singing About
That may sound dramatic, but think about how many songs people love are built around the same basic themes:
I miss you.
I want you back.
I hate what I’ve become.
I ruined something good.
I want to be chosen.
I want to be forgiven.
I want somebody to see me.
I want somebody to stay.
I want peace.I want home.
That’s not shallow.
That’s not random.
That’s the human heart with the volume turned up.
And maybe that’s why certain songs never really go away.
Because they don’t just entertain us.
They expose us.
They find the pressure points.
They put words to things most people feel but rarely say cleanly.
The Divided Heart
That’s especially true in a world like ours, where a lot of people have become very skilled at functioning… and very disconnected from themselves at the exact same time.
We know how to stay busy.We know how to joke.
We know how to scroll.
We know how to keep moving.
But a lot of us are not nearly as whole as we look.
We are often more divided than we realize.
Part of us wants intimacy.Part of us is terrified of it.
Part of us wants to be known.
Part of us is working overtime to stay hidden.
Part of us wants love.
Part of us doesn’t trust it.
Part of us wants peace.
Part of us keeps choosing chaos.
And songs have this maddening ability to sneak into that divide.
That’s why a melody can hit harder than a conversation.
That’s why a lyric can feel uncomfortably personal.
That’s why a song you’ve heard fifty times can, for some reason, absolutely wreck you on a random Tuesday in February.
Because every now and then, music catches us off guard and reminds us that beneath all the noise, all the distraction, all the image management, and all the emotional duct tape we use to keep ourselves moving…
there is still a heart in there.
Still longing.
Still searching.
Still aching.
Still trying to find language for things it doesn’t fully understand.
Why Theology Belongs Here
And maybe that’s why people return to certain songs over and over again.
Not because they’re trying to hear the song.
But because they’re trying to hear themselves.
And that may sound like a strange place to bring theology into the conversation — but honestly, it shouldn’t.
Because theology goes far beyond what happens inside churches or what gets said in conversations with priests and pastors.
At its core, theology is about the human person.
It’s about desire.
Longing.
Love.
Fear.
Shame.
Communion.
The ache to be known.
The ache to be chosen.
The ache to come home.
And if that sounds dramatic, just ask yourself this:
Isn’t it true that a single song can absolutely knock us down no matter how strong we think we are?
Some of the strongest, most successful, most emotionally guarded people in the world can still be unraveled by four minutes and twelve seconds of the right song.
Why?
Because music has a way of reaching places most of us spend a lot of time trying not to visit.
And if you look at that through the lens of theology, it starts to make even more sense.
Because Christianity has always insisted that the human heart is not random.
That ache in us — the desire to be seen, chosen, loved, understood, received — is not weakness.
It’s not sentimentality.
It’s not just emotional instability on an Iowa highway.
It is a clue.
It points back to something original.
What We Lost… and Still Remember
Before shame.
Before hiding.
Before all the inner fragmentation we now take for granted.
There was once a version of the human person that was not divided against himself.
A version of man and woman capable of being known without fear.
A version of the heart that was not constantly split between longing and self-protection, desire and suspicion, vulnerability and defense.
We were made for communion.
We were made to be known.
We were made to be received in love.
We were made to live from a place of inner unity.
And ever since the Fall, we have been living with the ache of having lost some of that.
Which means a lot of what we call “music” is often something deeper than entertainment.
Sometimes it’s memory.
Sometimes it’s homesickness.
Sometimes it’s the soul reaching for a language it hasn’t forgotten, even if the rest of us has.
Why Bohemian Rhapsody Still Hits
And maybe no song does this better than Bohemian Rhapsody.
That may sound dramatic, but I’m not sure any song in popular music has done a better job of sounding like a human soul in conflict.
Not a polished soul.
Not a healed soul.
Not a spiritually organized soul.
A conflicted one.
A fractured one.
A soul that sounds like it knows something has gone wrong… but cannot quite put it back together.
That’s part of what makes the song so hard to shake.
People have spent decades trying to “figure out” Bohemian Rhapsody as if it were some giant lyrical puzzle.
And maybe some of it is.
But I think part of the reason the song has survived for so long is much simpler than that:
It feels true.
Not because every line is easy to explain.
But because emotionally, it feels familiar.
It sounds like guilt.
It sounds like confusion.
It sounds like someone caught between what they’ve done, what they fear, and what they can no longer control.
In other words, it sounds a lot like us.
Why We Keep Singing
And maybe that’s why people still sing it at the top of their lungs fifty years later.
Not just because it’s theatrical.
Not just because it’s brilliant.
Not just because it’s fun to scream “Bismillah!” with a group of strangers.
But because underneath all the opera, chaos, drama, and genius…
the song feels strangely personal.
It doesn’t just sound like performance.
It sounds like confession.
And maybe that’s why songs like Bohemian Rhapsody don’t fade.
Not because they’re easy to explain.
But because they sound like something we recognize:
A divided heart.
A restless mind.
A quiet sense that something isn’t right… and hasn’t been for a long time.
The Man in Iowa Wasn’t the Point
And maybe that’s also why a grown man can be driving across the frozen plains of Iowa, minding his own business, when The Bangles come on and suddenly he’s emotionally unfit to continue operating a motor vehicle.
Because sometimes a song slips past all the normal defenses.
Sometimes it gets underneath the noise, the routine, the image we try to manage, and touches something we forgot was even there.
Not something fake.
Something original.
Something buried.
Something still reaching for love, for peace, for communion, for home.
We don’t always have words for what we carry.
But every once in a while, a song does.
And when it does, we don’t just listen.
We remember.
And then, usually with more confidence than talent…
we sing.
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