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The night of January 5th 2023, Maura Healy laced up her Chuck Taylor high tops and hosted a massive party at TD Garden, Boston's big sports and concert arena.
It's so great to see all of you here tonight.
I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
She was celebrating some big achievements that day, being sworn in as the first woman elected governor of Massachusetts and the first openly lesbian governor in the United States.
So the headlining musical act at the party, it had to be someone good.
For Governor Healey, there was only ever one choice.
That's singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile performing her song, The Joke, at the inaugural ball.
There was one person I knew I wanted to have play, and that was Brandi Carlile.
I love what she represents.
I love her music.
I love what she's done, particularly for other women and women artists.
And so it was just completely surreal.
I don't know if I'll ever have that kind of an experience again.
Brandi Carlile's performance that night signified an important element of Governor Healy's background.
Through all of her firsts, her successes, her bruising battles, through the high and low moments in politics and her life, she's turned to music to help her get through.
Ever since she was a sporty kid growing up on the New Hampshire seacoast, Maura Healy has had a soundtrack.
From the Boston Globe and PRX, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
I consider myself a pretty politically engaged person.
I follow politics, plus I work for a media organization.
So especially in an election year, I try my best to stay informed.
No surprise, I am particularly interested in the experience of women who are in positions of political power and how their work affects their relationships.
That's why I wanted to talk to the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, because she is the first woman to be elected governor of my state.
And she has a longtime partner.
Her name is Joanna Lydgate.
She's an attorney who heads a nonprofit dedicated to protecting elections and democracy.
In the 14 months that Governor Healey has been Governor Healey, she's been at the center of fierce political battles over how to support the thousands of migrant families who've poured into the state and over affordable housing.
She's had neo-Nazis chanting anti-immigrant slogans outside her house.
Recently, she faced scrutiny for her decision to nominate a former romantic partner to the state's highest court.
Amid all of this, I reached out to Governor Healy's office to ask if she might be willing to talk.
Because this whole season is about help.
I wanted to know what kind of help she and Joanna get as they deal with the ups and downs of public office.
Their answer surprised me.
I guess I was expecting it to be a person. or maybe a community of people.
But what Governor Healey and her partner wanted to talk about most was music.
As someone who often turns to playlists for support, I understood, and I wanted to know more.
So I visited the governor and Joanna recently at their home outside of Boston.
We sat in their living room.
They wore matching slippers.
And over mugs of tea they talked about the ways music has been a big help to both of them in their lives, in their careers, and society in their relationship.
To be clear, this is not an interview about politics.
It's a story about a partnership with a lot of pressure put on it and how music helps them cope.
I want to talk about your musical educations first and how you got into music when you were young.
So, Governor, may we begin with you?
What's your first musical memory?
I think my first concert was Cool in the Gang in the Boston Common sometime like late 70s, early 80s.
It was a big deal.
So my music, you know, I'm born in 71.
So I really came of age in the 80s.
Proud of that.
Did you grow up in a musical household?
No, my dad played piano.
We all liked music.
I mean, playing sports, there was always music that you'd play to pump you up.
And that's sort of how I came to music.
Although I have to say, I was a cocktail waitress at a great club in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire.
Saw great bands there, folks on the way up, on the way down.
Everybody, from Joan Baez to Melissa Etheridge, to the Indigo Girls, to Southside Johnny and the Ashbury Dukes.
It was really a range.
And I loved, um, I loved doing those shows.
Joanna, I'm going to ask you the same question.
Uh, What are your earliest musical memories?
Well, my first concert was the Rolling Stones.
It's a really great first concert.
And my mom, when she was younger, actually played guitar and sang in coffee shops here in Boston.
And she did a lot of like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez.
So that was a lot of the music I listened to, you know, in the car on family road trips and really started going to concerts, you know, in my 20s and starting to I was living in New York at the time, discovering at that time young, new artists like Brandi Carlile, who was playing there a lot.
Some of the folks that we listen to now are actually people I've been listening to for gosh like 20 years or more now.
Long before Maura Healy was a lawyer or political leader, she was a basketball player, and a good one too.
She was captain of her college team at Harvard and she went on to play professionally in Europe for a couple of years.
You talk about playing music to, like, get you ready for that kind of thing, the revving up music.
What did you play?
I had a tiger.
I played for a little team called Hampton Falls.
We were the Tigers, so that was like our, you know, our warm-up song.
My high school team, we were the Warriors, so there's a There's a song, Warrior.
They still never get old.
If you ask any of us who played on those teams, they would still immediately give you some visceral rush of joy or something.
Especially of that era, those songs hold up for hype songs.
Yeah, and college for me, it was like, put on Madonna.
Just like, let's go.
I'm thinking about some of the artists that you've mentioned, and lyrics seem really important.
Some people are just like, They're not hearing it.
Some people are much more of the music than the lyrics.
And I'm wondering, in younger years, as you were growing up, meeting people having a more public identity coming out, if there were certain artists where, even lyrically, the messages they sent spoke to you.
You know, I think about when I was coming out in my early 20s.
And for me, it was really important to have the Indigo Girls.
This is the governor again.
I know it sounds cliche, but, you know, you're 20, 21, 22 years old trying to figure yourself out.
And the Indigo Girls really spoke to me.
Chasey Chapman really spoke to me.
I mean to the point where I went out and bought a guitar, of course, and started lessons and never really continued with them.
But, you know, I was I really needed music in that time.
I'm really glad you noticed that about sort of the songs that we like and the common thread of lyrics as really important.
And for me, I was an English major in college and thought a lot about becoming a writer.
And so for me, it's always been about storytelling and sort of poetry.
And I think that's what really draws me to particular musicians is the stories they tell.
When you began Elections, How did you want to incorporate music, whether it was in your personal life or in the actual events you spoke at?
Did you begin to think of it as something that accompanied your experience?
Well, I ran for political office for the very first time in my life to become attorney general in the state of Massachusetts.
And I was an unknown candidate.
I'd never been in politics.
I was a lawyer.
I worked in the attorney general's office.
But a lot of people thought it was...
Crazy that I was running and I was up against the establishment, but we were a gritty little grassroots team.
And one of the things you had to do is go to your political convention for a nomination.
And for that convention, I had to pick a song.
And it was like, oh, yeah, Sara Bareilles, Brave.
I love that song.
I still love that song.
I remember when we played it it seemed to resonate with a lot of people and it became my campaign song.
After that did you have other songs that you would gravitate toward when you ran and continued your career.
I'm the first woman to be elected governor in Massachusetts.
I'm also the first gay woman to be elected governor anywhere in the country.
And so...
Probably not surprisingly a lot of songs that we end up playing when it comes to my rallies are a lot of songs with strong female artists right,
Whether it's Pink or Taylor Swift or you know.
We could just go down through the list of like powerful girl rock anthems, right.
Are you two Taylor Swift people?
Oh, totally.
She's amazing.
She is amazing.
Yeah.
The talent of her songwriting and just you know the incredible athleticism of her performance.
Like, How can you not just be in awe of that?
In whatever way you're comfortable.
I don't know if both or one of you would like to take this question, but can you tell me the story of your romance and how long you've been together, and whatever you want to tell us?
We're both lawyers.
And so we met as lawyers in the attorney general's office in Massachusetts.
And ultimately fell in love.
And now I'm lucky to be with Joanna.
I don't know if she'd say she's lucky to be with me.
She's got a full-time career and is busy as a mom and doing all sorts of things in addition to being the first partner now of the state of Massachusetts.
So it's been a lot to take on this past year.
And I'm really lucky that she's put up with me and withstood the challenge of what really was a big year in office.
I would love to know, and maybe Joanna, you can take this like the role of music in your relationship.
Like when you started sharing songs, any concerns about each other's music tastes.
It seems like they match up quite nicely.
But tell me about that aspect of the relationship.
They do mash up, although I love to do karaoke and more.
I don't.
Not as much.
I like to lip sync karaoke with a group.
What's your karaoke song?
I mean, I'll do anything from the 90s, like any hit from the 90s.
I'm all over it.
Also, pretty much any Taylor Swift song, thanks to my daughter.
You know, I think music from the very beginning has been a big part of our relationship.
We always have kind of playlists that we share with each other.
And I think especially in a world that can be really intense and fast moving and sometimes chaotic you know having her in the job that she's in raising two kids i i travel a ton for my job i think we both find that music really grounds us and really calms us so you know sometimes if it's a tough day i'll literally just you know lie down for a minute and listen to a song it's kind of like my form of meditation um this job is governor and uh There's a lot of stress with that.
There's a lot of on-the-go.
There's a lot of crises.
There's a lot of great in it, too.
But I think that music just helps with the stress level.
The other thing is that with our schedules, we're so often ships in the night.
And we really need to organize around planning time to spend together.
And I think one of the things we've been able to do over the last year and during the campaign the year before was organize around concerts, just going to shows.
And that's been really nice, because we may be grouchy at one another or angry at one another, or we may be caught up with the drama or the stress of our individual days.
But I think it's really been helpful to us to kind of like get out to see live music, because there's nothing better than live music.
And it really takes you out of your head.
I love going to the movies.
And I have realized one of the reasons is my God.
It's like my only anxiety-free place because I'm in the story.
I'm in it, but also it would be rude to check my phone.
Like I'm following the rules by just being present and no one's looking at each other.
But live music is like that too, right?
I know people have phones out and they take, but it is a time to enjoy something with a lot of people, but there's anonymity in it as well, I would imagine.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I think it's people just being able to be in the moment, kind of carried away to somewhere else.
Sometimes for me, those will be like the best two hours of the month if we get to go to a show.
And in the dark, too, which is nice sometimes.
Because being in the dark swaying to a power ballad is the opposite of Maura Healy's life on most days.
Sometimes I get critiqued in the press over things that are my official actions that I take, decisions that I make.
Sometimes it's critique over things that are more personal.
You know, for me, I don't distinguish between the two.
I think, you know, for me, it just becomes probably a cumulative toll that I'm not even aware of.
I'm not really aware in the moment of what I'm absorbing.
But I know that for me and for my team, you're definitely taking in and absorbing a lot.
And so I think I try to, and always need to try to and need to, do a better job of recognizing that and taking a moment to reset.
When we come back.
Governor Maura Healey and her partner Joanna Lydgate share some songs that help them find those moments of reset.
In fact, they put together a whole playlist.
Spoiler alert, there are a lot of really good songs on it.
That's after the break.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of Okay, we're back.
So you've heard from Maura Healey and her partner Joanna about the role music has played in their life together.
But now we're going to take it a step further.
Because, when we sat down for the interview, they shared with me a 13-song playlist featuring some of their very favorite tracks.
I asked them to explain why these songs made the list, why they find them so meaningful.
Here's a sampling.
The first song on their list is You and Me on the Rock by Brandi Carlile.
Here's Governor Healy.
It's probably our relationship anthem.
This is a song that Brandi wrote for her wife, Catherine.
It's about faith and family.
It's about creating a home and building that foundation and that rock.
It's a song that we played a lot of times this year to get us through challenging times, and you know other times.
And it was really special.
We got to see and watch Brandy and Catherine perform it at my inauguration.
And when might a person want to turn that on?
I think this song is one that we back to actually again and again all kinds of different moments, whether it's just feel good song to play in the kitchen while you're making dinner, or a song to play in the car when you're driving.
And what were you gonna say?
I was gonna say too, when we may have a fight about something or we may be like going through a tough time and it's it's the kind of song you put on and it helps you like reset and remember what it's about.
The next artist on their list is Chris Stapleton.
Here's Joanna.
Chris Stapleton is someone we both love, really every song of his.
And we were really lucky to get to see him perform live, most recently here in Massachusetts with his wife.
They put on an amazing show together.
This song that we the song we probably go to the most is Starting Over, been a year of a lot of transition for us and our family and new beginnings.
And I think this song really speaks for itself.
This is a real feel-good song for me.
Just a song, a good reminder that, you know, it's all going to be okay.
This song also sounds like it could be good for people coming out of a breakup or just starting anything new.
I'm just looking to, you know, give listeners a real guide here for their own playlists.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I think it's coming out of a breakup or starting a new relationship and you know, just to help you know it's going to be okay.
Next up is Lori McKenna.
Lori is an acclaimed singer-songwriter from outside Boston who performs her own material, but has also written a number of hits for major country artists.
Here's Joanna again.
I would like to have put every Laurie McKenna song on this playlist, but instead I chose one song, which is Happy Children.
My kids are 10 and 12 and this year I think focusing on their happiness has really been a North Star for me.
Laurie calls it true North the song, and i think for me as a mom, remembering just to focus on, throughout all of the ups and downs and all the chaos and all of the demands and stress of her job both our jobs really just to remember the kids are.
The kids are okay.
The kids are more than okay.
The kids.
What's that line you like?
If you only get one thing, that's a given i hope you have happy children.
I get a lot of letters for the column from people who are just like balancing a long-term relationship and marriage and parenting.
And they are.
It's hard, it sounds like, so that seems like it's, And you're only as happy as your least happy child.
It's so true.
Another artist on the list with local ties is Tiny Habits, a trio out of Boston's Berklee College of Music.
They got their start singing in a stairwell of their college dorm.
Here's Governor Healy talking about their song... things.
Their harmonies are incredibly beautiful.
And this song speaks to how much the tiny moments really matter in a relationship.
And it's something I have to remember and do a better job with.
It's really not the big gestures, though.
Those are important.
But that's not going to make a relationship.
It's the small things and the tiny things that help you build the relationship that you want.
And That's why it's good for me to play this a lot and remember that.
I especially love this lyric where they say love is a verb, it's an action, it's not a film reenactment.
The next track on their playlist is Look Up by Joya Latakun, a singer-songwriter who grew up in Arizona as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants.
Joanna says they got to meet her when she performed in Boston last year.
She's such a talent.
I think she's got so many great songs.
This one, Look Up, is a reminder to take a beat when things are hard.
For us, I think that's been doing things like pausing and going for a walk.
Just trying to remember that You know, even when life feels hard she calls it a broken roller coaster that there's still sun.
And then there's Tanya Tucker and her song, The Day My Heart Goes Still.
The governor says she and Joanna saw Tucker perform at the Fresh Grass Festival in western Massachusetts and were moved by her story.
Tucker had been a big influence for Brandi Carlile and other artists, but she fell into obscurity until Carlile recorded an album with her and brought her back to the spotlight.
This is her comeback story, right?
And again, a huge credit to Brandi Carlile for bringing her out.
Finally, now she's been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and so it was super fun to watch her perform.
I don't think I'll ever get mine It's a song about love.
It's about living life with zero regrets, which I think is hard for a lot of us.
We carry a lot of regrets and a lot of baggage with us, or at least I do.
But I love this line in her song where she says but if the good Lord should come knocking at my door, I had everything I wanted and more.
And I think, wouldn't that be nice if we could all say that one day, right?
I wondered if you might speak to the unique circumstances of the kind of pressures that are put on the two of you that are not like what other people deal with.
Because it's not even like being a famous actor or celebrity where you're allowed to mess up in all of these public ways and be weird.
I'm asking because I legit don't know what some of the daily stuff you guys have to go through with that I wouldn't even think about.
I feel really lucky to have this job.
I'm honored to have this job.
It's also a job that does create a lot of strain on a relationship.
It's not normal.
I'll just say that.
You're constantly on, right?
And I think it's hard in a few ways.
One, I have very little time.
My time is so taken up with stuff on the job.
And that means that We really need to work hard to find time for one another and to preserve that space.
That is a challenge.
It is always a work in progress.
I also think it's just hard because it's weird if your partner is the governor.
You can't go out places.
You can't go out to dinner without people looking at you or or oftentimes coming up to you.
You can't turn on the TV without seeing my face on the screen or reading about me in the paper.
And I think that that just is a really kind of surreal and experience for one's partner.
In addition to everything Maura said, you're dealing every day with really big problems that impact a lot of people, and sometimes problems that don't have an easy solution.
So having a space to come home to, even if it's later than you'd like, and having some time to just relax, just having a space that's normal and calm, a space where kids still need to be put to bed and math homework still needs to get done.
And you're just listening to a song that maybe makes you feel comfort or calm.
I think that's been really important.
Definitely can come home depleted emotionally depleted, intellectually depleted, physically depleted.
And I think, you know, when you think about a relationship, like that's not a great recipe.
And so I think music helps.
It.
Actually it helps to be able to come home and play certain songs or just be in this space with certain kinds of music, just to help restore my soul, because I've got to do that in order to have a successful relationship.
I've got to make sure that my cup is full too, so that I can fill Joanna's and take care of that relationship.
Joanna says that one way they take care of their relationship is by working out together.
We also have a workout playlist.
Yeah, what goes on that?
Oh my gosh, that's like, I can't even.
That's very long.
That's like a mix, I would say.
Say it's like... It's more like your basketball jams from back in the day.
Yeah, it's a lot more rap and girl power songs, both of which we need to power through our workouts.
One thing they don't always do together fold the laundry, because apparently the governor doesn't need the help.
She's like Marie Kondo.
She really is.
She will go down and she enjoys going down to the basement to clear things out and organize.
That's an actual relaxation technique for her.
And folding laundry, which I'm so lucky for.
Her job in college was folding laundry in the field house.
That's right.
She's very good at it.
I think in a job like this, there's so much that's out of your control.
There's so much chaos.
There's so many problems, right?
That's why I'm really happy if I can organize a closet or do the laundry and it's, you know, a project done, tidy.
Okay.
At least I did that today.
I don't know where we were going, but Rosalita was on the radio.
This is wonderful.
Thank you so much.
I'm just excited to have a good new playlist.
So thank you for sharing.
Thanks for having us on.
We're going to end the episode with a song that comes courtesy of another Massachusetts-based artist who made Governor Healy and Joanna's playlist.
This is You're Gonna Want to Remember This by singer-songwriter Mark Irelli.
As Joanna put it, it's a song that really spoke to me about how fast everything goes by and how even the small moments really matter.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design, and mastering.
Maddie Mortel does our audience engagement.
Special thanks to Linda Henry.
Today's instrumental music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send a letter about your relationship questions to lovelettersatboston.com.
Find episode transcripts and more Love Letters content at loveletters.show.
My sister will say the only Taylor Swift song I like, or the one she likes most, is Are You Ready For It, which is a fine song, but it's a pop song.
And there's.
It's not saying that much, whereas I'm like turning on folklore and being like I'm going to take me to the lakes.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening. though.
