At the second annual Believer Festival in Las Vegas, where the theme was “Desert Songs,” I was tasked with respectfully cornering people to ask them this question: “What’s a song you’ve returned to over and over in your life?”

It felt a little bit like holding a flashlight steady for someone who was looking for something in a dark closet. Many people chose a song that made them feel something: powerful, or vulnerable, or sexy, or alive in an alter ego (“My song let me be an asshole,” said one person). Some said they’d been walking around with feelings that didn’t exist until they heard the song. Some could not settle on a song but could locate something urgent they needed to express about their relationship with music—an intimate relationship, like one with a living person.

This is a question worth asking people in your life, whether or not you live in the desert. You’ll get to temporarily accompany people to a place they need to keep alive—a high-school classroom, their church on Sunday, an internal mystery, a reliable freedom. For cartoonist Thi Bui, it was the cardboard box she’d sit in with her little brother when they were kids, singing Paul Simon songs. When she told me about this box at the festival, she remembered exactly where it had been in her childhood living room. That cardboard box has long since disappeared. The music hasn’t.

—Mari Brown

BARRY JENKINS
[Director, Screenwriter]

Song Discussed: “Requiem for Dying Mothers/Requiem String Melody,” Stars of the Lid

BARRY JENKINS: I was in film school, I was trying to expand my world, so I would go to a record store, and they had this bin of “experimental discs,” and they were, like, ninety-nine cents, so I would get ten bucks every week and just go grab random things, trying to find music for my movies. And I found this song in the bin.

THE BELIEVER: So you put it on and… what happened to you?

BJ: First of all, it wasn’t antagonistic. ’Cause a lot of things in the experimental bin could be antagonistic, you know, from a sound standpoint? Like aggressive art-noise, found-sound kinda shit? This was very inviting. And so… my guard was let down, and then I guess, halfway through the track I realized I was riding this emotional wave. There was a tension in the song, but I felt at peace. And, I don’t know, I guess I just like heavy moods?

BLVR: When you listen to it now, what are you using it to do?

BJ: You know, it’s not that time stops when I listen to this piece, but there’s a...