No. 108 - Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” changed my life

Rebecca McNeil on parental terror (and courage)

Sep 19, 2025

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 4 min read •

I lived in a city for fifteen years and then, one day, I didn’t. We moved to the suburbs with our two-and-a-half-year-old. For six months, I danced in my new suburban interiors like Barry Keoghan in Saltburn. Then I was pregnant again and bodies piled up in freezers on TV. I already never saw my old friends and I couldn’t make any new ones.

But good news! I wasn’t sad. I was busy. And my busyness included constructing infinite playlists that I never played. Built from Facebook Rolling Stone articles, Shazam-ing movie closing credits, and the Peloton Gods’ EDM dreams, I kept adding. Eventually, the cloud was full of songs and I was filled with a buzzing, electric, and consistently ominous feeling running throughout my body.

I’d heard about postpartum depression. In 2020, I discovered postpartum anxiety. I didn’t want to sit down. I would breastfeed a newborn in the crook of my arm, standing up. If I didn’t sit and rest, I reasoned, the “disruptive” thoughts about this new baby would go away. Disruptive is a kinder word for disturbing. At a time when the world was locked down and I was meant to be “nesting,” I tried to shop away, eat away, exercise away, and rearrange the furniture in all kinds of ways to make those thoughts go away.

I still wish I could organize away the terror of being a parent. When my oldest child was very young, we wore shoe covers every time we picked her up at daycare. And then, one day, another baby died, right there, in a very clean, very well-organized room.

Staring at the form in the pediatrician’s office for the two-month check up, I had to answer my own self-assessment honestly. It wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine. And no amount of cleaning the house would make this go away. I needed help. When I looked at the baby, I felt vulnerable and terrified, like I assume all moms do, but there was no calm, there was no joy to relieve me. For almost a year, happiness was a dog’s tail. It followed me but I could never catch it.

Meditate, my therapist said, and then I needed music again. At first, I stretched or did yoga through meditations with great playlists. My body was still too anxious for rest. Until, one day, it wasn’t. But I still wanted music in the background of my silence.

When I heard “Cranes in the Sky” by Solange, sitting criss-cross applesauce on a yoga mat, I just liked how she sang, “Away, away, away.” It swayed prettily in my ear buds. I bookmarked the meditation and months later, I did it again. This time, I cried a little, enough that my cheeks got wet, and it was no less pretty, no less smooth, but I understood it. I listened more. One of the scariest parts of recovering from postpartum anxiety is stopping and listening and being mindful when your body is telling you to run. When anxiety wasn’t clouding my mind entirely, I heard her song and I felt recognized.

At a friend’s birthday dinner four years after my postpartum anxiety went dormant, a friend admitted that she admired me for leaving our small rural hometown to live in a city. Another mentioned she thought it was great that I waited to have kids and we laughed about the “geriatric” label applied to the pregnancies of our late thirties.

For years, I’d been questioning my decisions, wondering if I’d done this to myself, if I had set myself up for The Great Anxiety of 2020. Now, I realize that when I was mentally “not okay,” those experiences informed my recovery. I was still that person who moved overseas, not knowing anyone, alone, and I was still that person who built a life and a career and a family on my own timeline, in a new place, away from home.

My baby’s five now. Today, when I look at him, I feel soft and strong at the same time. When he came, I lost myself. But I got through it. I came back. I love my children equally and without measure, but no one has given me more courage, more reason to be proud of myself, than my second child.

Solange wrote “Cranes in the Sky” eight years before it came out. Maybe it took her eight years to get the sound just right. Or maybe she needed to stop, to listen, to understand. Maybe she needed time to feel stronger so that she could publish her song seeing, most days, a clearer sky around her, just like me. ◆

About Rebecca

Rebecca McNeil is a former journalist, current marketing executive, and vegetarian leaning foodie. She prides herself on great karaoke choices and eclectic playlists that include everything from Yacht Rock to house but 90s/early 2000s hip hop is still her favorite genre of music.

Instagram @ubiquitouskalesalad

⭐ Recommended by
Tracy McKenna (No. 080)

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