Grief over a relationship lost throbs deep in the soul, its incessant beats in sync with those of the heart. (“Love hurts,” to quote a song most everyone knows.) Though we long for it to end quick, the ache inevitably lingers, festers even, and soon enough recrimination and self-doubt tape themselves like Post-It notes to every reflective surface we pass. We blame the ex and ourselves in unequal measures, positive that if we’d just done this instead of that things might have worked out. The second guesses loom large, figurative barges of emotional cargo that we tow across the gulf of our heart.
Calista Garcia’s “Ghost,” a song long in the making, delves into the anguished aftermath of a romance-gone-wrong. “I initially got the idea for the riff while playing around backstage waiting to open for Rick Wakeman in 2021,” Calista told me via a DM. “I came up with the riff then words and melody for the first verse, but couldn’t find anything to match it. I came back to it in early 2023 as the story became clearer.”
Whether distance actually makes the heart grow fonder is up for debate. What isn’t: Time and distance lend perspective to both love and art. Too many young people tie their self-worth to their relationship status. Some, mostly young men, lash out when rejected. Others—young women, especially—lash themselves. Societal pressure molds us in ways we don’t recognize until long after the fact. The second verse speaks to, and I’m quoting Calista again, “being raised to please, raised to be loved, raised on fairytales (Cinderella and Miss America) so that things like acceptance/attraction/love feel like markers of character.”
In an Instagram post, she further explains that she “wrote this to grieve the younger inner girl who would abandon, shrink even break herself to feel loved. By grieving in music + fire + fury, it’s a reminder to never do that to her again.”
“Ghost” is a driving song in all senses of the word, traveling slow while navigating the backroads of memory, when everything we see reminds us of the ex, until hitting the onramp for the highway. That’s when it pushes the proverbial pedal to the metal and, too, excoriates cultural expectations. The arrangement fleshes out a solo rendition she posted to YouTube in last 2023, with the guitar motif as haunting as it is electric; she and Henry Ryeder, who co-produced, handle all the instruments except drums, which are played by Andres Valbuena, and strings, which are handled by Charles Stacy.
Last Thursday, after grooving to the song and its forthcoming album home, Animal Magnifique, the night before, I jumped into the car to pick up a late lunch/dinner—a 60-minute roundtrip. (As I sometimes joke, I am Diane’s personal DoorDash driver.) The [untitled] app used to share the music with me isn’t supported by Apple CarPlay, so I expected another recent obsession—Kassi Valazza’s From Newman Street—to pick up where I left off on Wednesday afternoon. Imagine my surprise when, instead, Calista kickstarted the engine that is my imagination. I played “Ghost,” played it again, and then the album in full.
We live in an age when too many new songs lean on generic tropes—both lyrical and musical—in hopes of sounding like what preceded it on the playlist. No one wants a listener to click “next,” after all. While that approach may earn an artist or band .003 cents per play, it rarely wins over new fans. Originality does that. Personality, charisma, and her writer’s voice are what turned my ears when it came to Calista back in 2021; “Ghost” expands upon all those qualities. The song reminds me of the closing lines of a Denise Levertov poem, “Emblem (II)”: “But there is too much grief. The world/is made of days, and is itself/a shrouded day./It stifles. It’s our world, and we/its dreams, its creased/compacted wings.”
The Old Grey Cat 
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