Letters
A song pulled you through something. You can't always say it out loud. You can write it here.
Letters is a public archive of short writing addressed to specific songs — what they held you through, what you found inside them, the moment they became permanent. Open to any song, any artist. Human-reviewed before publishing.
Write a letter → · Pearl Jam entry point
Dear Release, my brother was killed seven years before I was born. I never met him. The first time I heard you I was fifteen and something in me understood that you were about a brother singing to a brother and I felt I had been let into a room that was meant for our family. I pl…
— anonymous · 2015 · read full →
Dear Wishlist, I am a thirty-eight year old woman in Mexico City and I wish I had been brave at twenty. I wish I had told the people who mattered that they mattered. The song does not pretend any of that is fixable. It just lists what one might want. That has been enough for me o…
— anonymous · 2022 · read full →
Dear Yellow Ledbetter, my mother and I never agreed on much but we agreed on you. She would put you on Sunday afternoons and we would not talk and that was the closest we ever got. She died in November. I have not been able to play you yet. Soon.
— anonymous · 2024 · read full →
"Black" — Pearl Jam
Dear Black, I was nineteen, sitting in my college dorm, and I had just been left. The first three minutes of you sounded like every quiet evening of my future and the last two minutes sounded like every thing I would not say to her ever again. I have made peace with both since th…
— anonymous · 2003 · read full →
"Just Breathe" — Pearl Jam
Dear Just Breathe, you played the morning my dad started hospice. I was making coffee in his kitchen and the song came on the speaker he set up forty years ago. He came in and stood with his hand on my shoulder. We didn't say anything for the whole song. Then he made the toast.
— anonymous · 2021 · read full →
"Sirens" — Pearl Jam
Dear Sirens, you were playing the night I told my mom I was queer. The song held the silence after I said it. She held me a moment later. I have never felt so seen by either of you.
— anonymous · 2018 · read full →