The most joyous portrait of love I’ve ever heard

The story of the album Tête-à-Tête, by Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson

I’ve listened to this album at least half a dozen times over the last few weeks. It reliably brings me to tears. It’s literally the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, and I feel compelled to share it as widely as I can.

1973: Annea Lockwood arrives at Hunter’s Electronic Music Studio in NYC. She’s there to cover for its director Ruth Anderson, who is going on sabbatical. Annea and Ruth immediately fall in love, starting a romance that would last for 50 years.

1973-1974: Annea and Ruth talk regularly on the phone while Ruth is on sabbatical in NH. Ruth secretly records their conversations, capturing hours of hellos, goodbyes, sighs, flirting, courtship, and—most of all—laughter.

1984: Ruth records Resolutions, her last electronic piece. It’s deeply minimalist, starting with high-pitched and mildly discordant tones, which descend into an equanimous hum over 17 minutes. This becomes the first track on the album.

Resolutions is one of the most psychoactive pieces of music I’ve ever heard, and I seek this stuff out. It’s like someone managed to take an audio recording of formless jhana. It’s the perfect palette cleanser, setting up the rest of the album.

Worth noting that Ruth was a Zen practitioner and a student of psychoacoustics. She deliberately crafted psychoactive sounds. Annea said of Ruth’s work: “They slow me down to a state in which I’m just at peace. She intended that with them.”

Back to 1974: Ruth layers clips of their phone calls—mostly laughter and short phrases—over sad, dreamy piano interpolations of old love songs. She gives this track, titled Conversations, to Annea as a gift on cassette. The two promise to listen to it again when they’re older.

The laughter in Conversations is wildly contagious. It’s just two women, deeply in love, giggling back and forth for a solid ten minutes. My first listen, I laughed until I cried. It became the second track, and received the most praise from critics.

2005: Ruth and Annea get married in Canada, shortly after the legalization of same-sex marriage.

2019: Ruth dies of lung cancer. Annea grieves at their home in upstate NY. She finds she’s unable to listen to music. But she sits on her deck enjoying the sounds of crickets, birds, and distant traffic.

2020: Annea begins making field recordings of local sounds, composing a track titled For Ruth. She finds the forgotten tape of Conversations sitting on a shelf. She combines her field recordings with clips from their phone calls to create a chronology of their romance.

For Ruth is the most beautiful track on the album. It’s a soft, quiet landing after the intensity of Resolutions and the raucous laughter of Conversations.

The album ends with Annea telling Ruth, “Good night. I love you.” Ruth replies, one last time, “Bye-bye, darling.”

---

Listen to the album:

Track 1, Resolutions

Track 2, Conversations

Track 3, For Ruth