Steven LaChance Blog

“There’s someone found a letter you wrote me on the radio…”
— On the Radio by Donna Summer

There are certain songs that do not belong to the radio. They belong to a time. A very specific time. A version of your life that no longer exists, except in memory.

For me, one of those songs is Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

It came out in 1991, but it did not stay there. It followed me. Or maybe I carried it. I am not sure which is more accurate.

The first time it attached itself to my life was the day my sister died. There are moments that divide everything into before and after, and that was one of them. The kind of day that does not feel real, even while you are living it. The kind of day where your body is present, but something inside you has already stepped away.

“I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day.”

That line is not a lyric when you have lived it. It is a statement of fact. It is a memory that never quite settles. It is something you carry without asking.

After that, the song did not leave me alone. It came back in waves. Different days. Different losses. Different versions of the same feeling.

The early 1990s were not easy years. For those of us in our twenties then, life had a sharper edge to it. We were losing people. Not in distant, abstract ways. Not in ways you read about in the paper. We were losing friends. People we had just been laughing with. People who were supposed to still be there.

There was a heaviness to those years that is hard to explain now without sounding like you are exaggerating. But you are not. It was there.

And somewhere in all of that, the grief turned.

It does that sometimes.

It stops being quiet. It finds its voice.

And when it did, it sounded like Flagpole Sitta blasting at full volume.

“I want to publish zines and rage against machines…”

That was not just a lyric. That was anger looking for somewhere to go. That was the part of you that refused to disappear under the weight of it all.

Sometimes you needed that. Sometimes you needed noise. Sometimes you needed to scream.

And then just as quickly, it would shift again.

A car ride. A radio. No warning.

Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton on the way to my sister’s funeral.

I remember thinking, how do I get through this?

But you do.

You do not get stronger in those moments. You just keep going. One breath. One mile. One moment at a time.

Songs like Losing My Religion by R.E.M. were everywhere, carrying their own kind of quiet questioning. Unbelievable by EMF brought a different kind of energy, almost like a refusal to sink completely into the weight of it all. And then there was Vogue by Madonna, which offered escape, reinvention, a moment of control in a world that often felt out of control.

But Under the Bridge was something else entirely.

It did not try to lift you out of anything. It sat with you. It acknowledged the loneliness. The quiet realization that even in a crowded world, you could feel completely alone inside your own life.

And maybe that was why it mattered so much. It did not pretend.

There are other songs that carry their own moments. Promise to Try. Lightning Crashes.

Songs that arrive at the exact moment you did not know how to name what you were feeling.

The day my grandmother died, I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston came on while driving home from work.

I had to pull over. There was no holding it together. Just that voice, and everything hitting at once.

Those are the ones that stay.

There are other lines from other songs that still come back without warning. Fragments tied to a room. A phone call. A date that never feels ordinary again. The questions that never really have answers.

Did you have to leave me?
Did it have to happen that way?
Could anything have changed it?

Music has a way of holding onto those questions for us.

When I hear those songs now, I am not just hearing music. I am hearing a younger version of myself trying to understand a world that suddenly did not make sense. I am hearing the echo of people who are no longer here.

I do not listen to them often. Not because I cannot. But because I understand what they carry.

Some songs are like that.

They are not something you put on in the background. They are something you step into. And sometimes, without even realizing it, they were letters all along, written from who you were to who you would become.

And sometimes they sang about your life on the radio.

There is an irony in that, isn’t there?