Don’t Go Yet – Living Room Choir

Teaching/Learning track:

Parts:
1: Don’t go yet, don’t go yet, don’t go yet…
2: …Don’t go yet, don’t go yet, don’t go yet
3. Stay a while longer, stay here with me
4. When will you wrap your arms around me? When will I, when will I hold you again?

In the depth of isolation, 2020, with a baby growing inside me and my partner in the next room, I leaned into the ache of missing literally…almost…everyone I knew. So much. So indefinitely. This was a time I should have been surrounded by loved ones – as we all really should always be, perhaps most of all during times like a first pregnancy. But my community (Living Room Choir) was still very present in my life, via digital connection, and the folks who gathered on Zoom every week had banded together to crowd source a looper so I could still sing with them in harmony.

This was early on in my looper journey, but I was just starting to practice a new form of musical meditation, where I sat down at my desk, turned off my brain, and sang my feelings into the machine…generally I wasn’t ever worried about whether it would become a song, but oftentimes, these meditations did. This is one of the earliest ones.

“Don’t go yet, don’t go yet, don’t go yet…”
The first line, feeling my loves ones slip away out of reach, beyond the walls of my homey confines.

“…Don’t go yet, don’t go yet, don’t go yet”
A second voice.
This one made me smile, and tear up… because it indicated someone else was out there.

It was only me, at the time, of course, but when the vaccines rolled in and the intensity of the early pandemic ebbed off, and LRC started coming together again for in person singing (now with my baby in tow), this was one of the first songs I taught. Hearing it in 3D, in a variety of voices, all of whom had been through their own versions of longing, missing, and isolating from their loved ones, was a sweetness beyond measure.

This song continues to grow in strength; it has been taught at several large gatherings and is beginning to travel. Hold your loved ones close, whether you can do it in person or not. Music reaches beyond the physical realm, but when we can embrace each other in the physical realm – especially while singing – that is truly a unique gift.