What do you think?
Rate this book
I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am
I Sing to Use the Waiting is a vital and affecting reflection on how popular culture can shape personal identity.
With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.
Structured like a mixtape, Pace juxtaposes their coming out with the music that informed them along the way. They recount how listening to themselves sing along as a child to a Disney theme song they recorded on a boom box in 1995, was when they first realized there was an effeminate inflection to their voice. As childhood friendships splinter, Pace discusses the relationship between Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford. Cat Power’s song “My Daddy Was a Musician” spurs a discussion of Pace’s own musician father, and their gradual estrangement.
Resonant and compelling, I Sing to Use the Waiting is a deeply personal rumination on how queer stories are abundant yet often suppressed, and how music may act as a comforting balm carrying us through difficult periods and decisions.
With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.
Structured like a mixtape, Pace juxtaposes their coming out with the music that informed them along the way. They recount how listening to themselves sing along as a child to a Disney theme song they recorded on a boom box in 1995, was when they first realized there was an effeminate inflection to their voice. As childhood friendships splinter, Pace discusses the relationship between Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford. Cat Power’s song “My Daddy Was a Musician” spurs a discussion of Pace’s own musician father, and their gradual estrangement.
Resonant and compelling, I Sing to Use the Waiting is a deeply personal rumination on how queer stories are abundant yet often suppressed, and how music may act as a comforting balm carrying us through difficult periods and decisions.
190 pages, Paperback
Published January 23, 2024
7 people are currently reading
245 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 17, 2024
Against expectations, I enjoyed the essays about the popular singers (Rihanna, Whitney Houston, Cher) that I don’t listen to. Their personal stories, which I didn’t know for the most part, were told slant (an appropriate word, I think, since the title of this book comes from a Dickinson poem) and they read as universal experiences.
The essays about the singers I didn’t know are more about specific songs, are detailed, and read to me as anecdotal. Depending on your background, I imagine your experience reading this work will differ from mine.
The essays about the singers I didn’t know are more about specific songs, are detailed, and read to me as anecdotal. Depending on your background, I imagine your experience reading this work will differ from mine.
February 28, 2025
This book dove into history of some queer icons and covered a lot of music theory that I was entirely expecting but appreciated! I think at times there was more fact giving than application to the authors story and how they interwove with one another! I think I would have appreciated a little more of that.
April 8, 2025
I love Two Dollar Radio - their books are always interesting and the voices so unique. This one is a case in point. A mix of music history essays and coming-of-age memoir, the book intimates the various ways these female singers influenced Pace's life and coming out as a queer person.
December 8, 2024
the hop along essay goes off
April 22, 2024
I wish I could recall where I heard about this because it certainly deserves more readers (and I know there are readers who need to find this!).
This resonated with me because I was familiar with most of the women they write about and I especially appreciated their discernment on the impact these artists had on them.
I read most of this in an afternoon, listening to the songs as I read about them.
I'm reminded, too, what a gift Two Dollar Radio is!
This resonated with me because I was familiar with most of the women they write about and I especially appreciated their discernment on the impact these artists had on them.
I read most of this in an afternoon, listening to the songs as I read about them.
I'm reminded, too, what a gift Two Dollar Radio is!
September 7, 2024
A collection of well researched, though personal essays about the women singers that mean the world to them. Some of the essays were amazing. Using female singers to speak of pride of queerness was well balanced. I really just liked his writer's voice and I was happy to go with them on these little journeys.
March 31, 2024
As a singer and radio DJ who dislikes his own voice, and a writer who struggles to articulate the power of music in his life, I feel immense gratitude to Zachary Pace for sharing these finely-wrought thoughts and feelings on some of their favorite singers.
May 18, 2024
This was recommended to me by a colleague and I really don’t think I’m the audience for it.
Pace structures this collection almost like a mixtape with philosophical musings and history lessons sprinkled in.
They start with their own self and relation to themselves as a queer person, notably writing: “At age fourteen, I ‘came out’ as bisexual; back then, the designation offered a buffer, permitting me to backpedal into the metaphorical closet in case the backlash proved too unbearable,” which REALLY resonated and I think is a common queer experience.
Pace then dives into Madonna and her devotion to Kabbalah/Jewish mysticism and the impact that had on Page as a teen/young adult. This is followed by the section on Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, and this section of memoir is focused on Pace’s early adulthood as a broke young professional trying to make it in NYC. Cat Power (Chan Marshall) is up next and Pace writes about how her soothing sound was a comfort during a tumultuous 2016, but really a comfort their whole life in the pursuit of “self realization”.
The “title track” is next and Pace writes about their anxiety and the relationship with music, particularly those catchy songs that get stuck in our heads. Pace poetically writes: “And when solitude feels too terrible, while I'm anticipating the next intimacy-if I'm so lonely, I'm scared the sadness won't ever subside I play a song. It reminds me who I am and how I want to be.”
Pace then dives into Rihanna and her upbeat pop tunes acting as a soundtrack for working in the big city, followed by Whitney Houston. Whitney’s chapter is really more of a mini-lesson on childhood psychology and religious persecution and homophobia and death.Up next is Mariah Carey, Fiona Apple, and Joanna Newsom and a reverence for their precise word choices. Then Cher and her identity as a mother and that impact on Pace.
Next is Pace’s essay on Nina Simone and their perceived androgyny, followed by a chapter on Laurie Anderson and William S. Burroughs and the idea that “language is a virus”. Pace compared this to the COVID-19 pandemic. The penultimate chapter is on Frances Quinlan, and their recent switch to using they/them pronouns, which Pace shortly after started using as well and the comfortability with that. Pace ends with Disney’s Pocahontas, specifically, “Colors of the Wind”, and the Eurocentric bullshit portrayed in it.
Honestly, this is a very personal piece of writing. Each chapter dives more into Pace’s psyche to the point where I felt like I shouldn’t even be reading it. It reads like a diary entry, like therapy, but by someone who gets caught up by their own experiences and then has to delve into research and truisms half way through a story.
I applaud Pace for their vulnerability but they lost me in several several places, especially towards the end talking about the queerness or androgyny of the raccoon from Pocahontas…?
Pace structures this collection almost like a mixtape with philosophical musings and history lessons sprinkled in.
They start with their own self and relation to themselves as a queer person, notably writing: “At age fourteen, I ‘came out’ as bisexual; back then, the designation offered a buffer, permitting me to backpedal into the metaphorical closet in case the backlash proved too unbearable,” which REALLY resonated and I think is a common queer experience.
Pace then dives into Madonna and her devotion to Kabbalah/Jewish mysticism and the impact that had on Page as a teen/young adult. This is followed by the section on Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, and this section of memoir is focused on Pace’s early adulthood as a broke young professional trying to make it in NYC. Cat Power (Chan Marshall) is up next and Pace writes about how her soothing sound was a comfort during a tumultuous 2016, but really a comfort their whole life in the pursuit of “self realization”.
The “title track” is next and Pace writes about their anxiety and the relationship with music, particularly those catchy songs that get stuck in our heads. Pace poetically writes: “And when solitude feels too terrible, while I'm anticipating the next intimacy-if I'm so lonely, I'm scared the sadness won't ever subside I play a song. It reminds me who I am and how I want to be.”
Pace then dives into Rihanna and her upbeat pop tunes acting as a soundtrack for working in the big city, followed by Whitney Houston. Whitney’s chapter is really more of a mini-lesson on childhood psychology and religious persecution and homophobia and death.Up next is Mariah Carey, Fiona Apple, and Joanna Newsom and a reverence for their precise word choices. Then Cher and her identity as a mother and that impact on Pace.
Next is Pace’s essay on Nina Simone and their perceived androgyny, followed by a chapter on Laurie Anderson and William S. Burroughs and the idea that “language is a virus”. Pace compared this to the COVID-19 pandemic. The penultimate chapter is on Frances Quinlan, and their recent switch to using they/them pronouns, which Pace shortly after started using as well and the comfortability with that. Pace ends with Disney’s Pocahontas, specifically, “Colors of the Wind”, and the Eurocentric bullshit portrayed in it.
Honestly, this is a very personal piece of writing. Each chapter dives more into Pace’s psyche to the point where I felt like I shouldn’t even be reading it. It reads like a diary entry, like therapy, but by someone who gets caught up by their own experiences and then has to delve into research and truisms half way through a story.
I applaud Pace for their vulnerability but they lost me in several several places, especially towards the end talking about the queerness or androgyny of the raccoon from Pocahontas…?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 30, 2024
The curse of the queer poet: to need to always be theatrical, always have some kind of affect that signals to the reader that the writing itself is queer. Style is the weapon of the homosexual, and style is written by him. There are many great gay prose stylists from Wayne Koestenbaum (cited in this book) to Oscar Wilde; Pace, unfortunately, is not one of them.
Pace writes with a maudlin self-consciousness that feels, at times, so mannered as to be insincere, and at other times so instinctual as be cringe-inducing. Zachary Pace whimpers over their tattoos, fusses over their voice, and their relationships with their parents, in ways that feel simultaneously rehearsed and under-performed. It's a prose style that feels like the community theater version of what someone with more practice and more verve would convince us is a Broadway opening night act. Pace's voice is trapped in the uncanny valley of style: not quite have one defined enough to be moving, and not quick lacking one in such a way that the reader might not notice. Pace's voice is obstrusive, but not inviting. Off-putting, but not off-putting enough to be enticing. There's a place that's worse to be than bland, it seems; rather than bland, Pace's voice contains the whiff of taste, but the whiff remains and whiff. Savor nothing; this book will leave you hungry.
Pace's subject and their opening essay is about queerness and listening to music, about how the voices of talented women singers mean something to young gays whose voices are often a tell that they are gay. Great. This is fairly well-trod territory (and a subject which I've written on before, too, so this review is also a self-reflective critique on my own thinking), and one which Koestenbaum, Pace's major interlocutor, does far more compellingly, and far more flamboyantly. Do we really need a Diet version of Koestenbaum? A Koestenbaum Lite?
The answer is no. These essays bear the traces of something interesting, and I wish Pace had worked more on crafting a narrative voice that moved, lyrically, through the mixtape-essay collection. Instead, there's a lot of cliched noise. A mixtape that has been played before, but this one has the vague sense that it's been pirated.
Pace writes with a maudlin self-consciousness that feels, at times, so mannered as to be insincere, and at other times so instinctual as be cringe-inducing. Zachary Pace whimpers over their tattoos, fusses over their voice, and their relationships with their parents, in ways that feel simultaneously rehearsed and under-performed. It's a prose style that feels like the community theater version of what someone with more practice and more verve would convince us is a Broadway opening night act. Pace's voice is trapped in the uncanny valley of style: not quite have one defined enough to be moving, and not quick lacking one in such a way that the reader might not notice. Pace's voice is obstrusive, but not inviting. Off-putting, but not off-putting enough to be enticing. There's a place that's worse to be than bland, it seems; rather than bland, Pace's voice contains the whiff of taste, but the whiff remains and whiff. Savor nothing; this book will leave you hungry.
Pace's subject and their opening essay is about queerness and listening to music, about how the voices of talented women singers mean something to young gays whose voices are often a tell that they are gay. Great. This is fairly well-trod territory (and a subject which I've written on before, too, so this review is also a self-reflective critique on my own thinking), and one which Koestenbaum, Pace's major interlocutor, does far more compellingly, and far more flamboyantly. Do we really need a Diet version of Koestenbaum? A Koestenbaum Lite?
The answer is no. These essays bear the traces of something interesting, and I wish Pace had worked more on crafting a narrative voice that moved, lyrically, through the mixtape-essay collection. Instead, there's a lot of cliched noise. A mixtape that has been played before, but this one has the vague sense that it's been pirated.
June 17, 2024
It's been too long since I've read a book discussing music, I'd forgotten how people talk about it-- the line between poetic description and insufferable pretentiousness is a fine one. Here the author walks both sides, sometimes giving me flashbacks to feeling almost held hostage in conversations with young men in liberal arts school, sometimes simply conjuring good imagery. I think I felt a little differently about each essay in the book. Sometimes I felt it was too focused on the author themself without a real bridge to the artist we're supposed to be connecting to, sometimes too much about the artist without a clear root in their personal history, sometimes the balance was just right.
I would recommend this to readers who liked books like Listen to This by Alex Ross.
I would recommend this to readers who liked books like Listen to This by Alex Ross.
December 26, 2024
I was excited about this read, but it let me down a little. From its intro, I thought it would be full of introspection about how music can shape the lives of queer people. This was partially true, but more of the text was spent meticulously documenting the discography and history of individual artists than talking about the implications of their work. I did learn a lot, especially about the artists I already had a fondness of or familiarity with, but I felt that I had to wade through lists of performances and names of albums to get to content that resonated. Perhaps I simply was not the intended audience.
June 4, 2024
3.5 I think the most powerful essays in this collection are those that are more straight-foward music criticism. I love a book that crosses genres and I also love learning about new music, so I did like the structure of this collection overall. Also, this book finally got me to listen to Cat Power and she really does have a pretty amazing voice.
May 6, 2024
Like, fine. Some of the essays felt like Wikipedia pages describing the chronology and anthropology of some of the singers’ work. Some of them felt very loosely connected to the singer named at all and were personal.
October 18, 2025
I'm biased on this one - it was written by my cousin-in-law. A really vulnerable and honest series of self reflections in the form of essays, I couldn't help but have Spotify open on the side while reading.
Read
September 27, 2024DNf page 20. Maybe the essays got better, but I was bored and found the first 1 1/2 essays I read more technical than personal. This one is not for me.
November 16, 2024
expected this to be about the musicians w a touch of the authors life but it was all about their life w a brief mention of musicians
August 31, 2024
My first foray into Two Dollar Radio publishing and it ends with a DNF.
As many have already indicated in the few reviews, this was a mess. Whenever they focused on the memoir, it was fine, but then they’d dive off into this unnecessary side trip of detailed information that never wove into his personal narrative and felt like they’d gotten lost or something. It’s a shame. I think with some quality directional edits this could have been good.
If you want a memoir mixed with excellent music and performance parallels and insights into the writer’s life, read Two Dollar Radio alum, Hanif Adurraqib’s A Little Devil in America.
As many have already indicated in the few reviews, this was a mess. Whenever they focused on the memoir, it was fine, but then they’d dive off into this unnecessary side trip of detailed information that never wove into his personal narrative and felt like they’d gotten lost or something. It’s a shame. I think with some quality directional edits this could have been good.
If you want a memoir mixed with excellent music and performance parallels and insights into the writer’s life, read Two Dollar Radio alum, Hanif Adurraqib’s A Little Devil in America.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews