There was a time when I didn’t believe in love. That’s not true, exactly. I’ve always known love was real, because if it’s not, there is no ontology worth the sweat. 

I’ve felt love’s sting many times, and each has felt like the first, in my life if not in plant and animal history. I taught myself to live in fear of love, a conditioned ambient dread that curdled defensively to bitter resentment. I knew love was real, and I feared it was not for me. 

Love won’t save you. But love will find you. The harder you hide, the more cruel, sexy fun it will have with you when it does. The only way to live with love is to embrace the agony and absurdity of it long enough to get to the fountain of gushing synesthetic joy in the center. That is, to become a romantic.

To be a romantic requires going to war with your cynicism and misanthropy. It means allowing yourself to love everyone, to believe that people matter, that the epochs and events of all our lives have, yes, meaning. 

This allows you to release your own gooey center of exuberant, hilarious epiphany slime and blow wads of absurd magic in the faces of all those in thirst of celebration and hope. Romantics, you see, are rare, and there is untold power in that scarcity. There are so many openings for romantics. We need them. We need you.

Being a fully qualified romantic does come with some trivial inconveniences. It requires developing a sincere and at least medium-well-informed appreciation for classical music. This may seem arbitrary, but it’s non-negotiable. 

You simply can’t live a full emotional life without fully absorbing a symphony or two, preferably with some spicy, saucy, steamy, dreamy companionship, if you know what I mean, and I think you to, or rather, I feel it.

If you’re the sort of romantic who refuels on tales of good conquering evil, love conquering all, and the power of forgiveness making all of eternity its humble, obedient bitch, you can do worse than Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovksy, a Russian  composer with the synesthetic and storytelling  instincts of a more cerebral Walt Disney. And as for his music, you’re already soaking in it.

If the ballet “Sleeping Beauty” isn’t Tchaikovsky’s most famous work, it’s only because he has a lot of hum-dingers. Tchaikovsky composed “Sleeping Beauty” between 1888 and 1889. The chips were down, following the success of “Swan Lake,” and he left it all in the game.

Tchaikovsky’s composition was part of a collaboration with choreographer Marius Petipa and the director of the Imperial Theatres, Ivan Vsevolozhsky. It was based on a fairy tale that had gone through a number of fractal variations, all of which PIT’s piece pulled from. Lush, melodic, and playfully evocative, it is distinguished by its use of recurring leitmotifs as characterization and by its freewheeling appropriation from Western composition and Russian folklore.

The story is grossly, deliciously, deliriously romantic, if a bit far-fetched. Aurora is a smoking hot princess, so she gets haters, including a witch who curses her to be pricked with a spindle sleep through her own love life. An ardent prince refuses to refuse the call of fate, they hook up, and all is forgiven because all is full of love.

The whole ballet clocks in at around four hours. Andre Previn’s recording with the London Symphony Orchestra is perhaps the best known and loved, and it’s fine, but Herbert von Karajan’s with the Berlin Philharmonic is so exquisitely, sumptuously lush that for me there was no going back. 

Because I’m an artist and this is how I engage with things, I created my own cover version, Frankly, I’m shocked you haven’t. At the same time, I acknowledge that, for me, it’s not his best work, which is “Eugene Ogenin,” and it’s far from my favorite piece of music.

You never know when love will track you down. For me, it happened in my bed, wearing boxers and an eye-mask, on a therapeutic dosage of ketamine, listening to an unrepentantly romantic and emotionally messy Bleep mix from the Mexican electronic composer Murcof. 

The whole mix is wonderful, weaving ambient-bittersweet textures with ‘80s new wave pop jams. Most importantly for our current purposes, it introduced me to Night Things, a shocking before-and-after experience I assumed I’d never get again from new music.

Night Things is a dark-romantic, quasi-lite-goth indie-rock band from Los Angeles that was called Badlands until someone presumably forced them to change it. They’re both uniquely good-looking, which might make you hate them. In that case, they also have their own mythological, cosmological world-building exercise revolving around their lyrics, learning more of which will probably not make you start liking them and may further entrench your hatred. If you haven’t invested at least one weekend and several thousand bucks into “Dream Work,” you’re not the first person I would expect to dig Night Things.

I don’t care. I wouldn’t care if you paid me. Their signature anthem, such as it is, is “Sleeping Beauty,” and it’s so shatteringly gorgeous it renders everything else irrelevant, in this and all other possible worlds.

By the time I realized “Sleeping Beauty” was not just a perfect pop song, a mix of icy 4AD-isms and Brill Building ache, but also a product wrought from human hands, it was too late for me to care about that. At a time when I was still going through the Reservoir Dogs of divorces and had just logged my first darkly farcical post-marital breakup, “Sleeping Beauty” made my heart want to believe in itself again.

“Sleeping Beauty” by Night Things is unlikely to outlast Tchaikovsky. It may not even last a century. But it will if I have anything to do with it, because it’s one of my favorite pieces of music, on a short list, and I am a romantic, which means my feelings are infallible and my opinions are objectively correct, in every case. The warrior’s heart is always broken, because the warrior is never wrong.

Night Things made me feel as if my feelings will survive and thrive for a century, at least. Suck it, cynics; you’ve got nothing on that. How does it feel to be a self-made loser?

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