In this special column for Atwood Magazine, I explore the impact of one artist and album across the range of my experience in one city or across several cities. The aspiration is that you will resonate with my experiences and how they might intersect with your own life in deepening our understanding and reflection on a particular artist and album in our contemporary world.
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Experiencing the trifecta of New Order’s albums ‘Power, Corruption & Lies,’ ‘Low-Life,’ and ‘Brotherhood’ through the beautiful mind of Christina S. in New York City was a remarkable way to view the intensity of the world – and yet, this was also a journey that would intimately reflect the tensions of emotional romantic life in our extraordinary love.
This column is a continuation of the Music & Cities installment from 09/25/2025!
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Stream: ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’ – New Order
I was deeply in love with Christina S. through our intensive three-month relationship – one that was deeply embedded in the cold winter interiority of upstate New York, where the lake effect snow would drench us in a winter wonderland.
This was the dream-state of my relationship with Christina where we could remain ensconced within the echoes of The Cocteau Twins amidst the twilight and a heaving snow-laden sky in her private lair.
As the spring burst in April that year, I went to New York City for the first time with the love of my life. Driving with Christina from Syracuse to New York City was a very intimate and revealing experience as we spoke of our hidden fears and desires from our youth and into how we both inhabited very alternative ways of living life in a glimmering darkness that was far removed from anything mainstream. As we began our descent into spring, Christina had begun to shift her listening habits to New Order, and while their music had not yet dramatically impacted the U.S., she was entirely mesmerized with their 1983 landmark album Power, Corruption & Lies, which was entirely unlike any other kind of music.
New Order was born out of Joy Division amidst the suicide of Ian Curtis, and with Bernard Sumner taking on the helm as the vocalist, with their first 1981 album Movement being transitional, this 1983 album was revolutionary through their innovation in electronica. The scintillating melodies were still immersed in the peripheries and darkness of existence, but in a manner that was about the internal tensions of life being also simultaneously heard in the nightclubs. During that spring in NYC, it was actually a trifecta of New Order albums that had become Christina’s obsession, this one along with 1985’s Low-Life, and the album that would become bittersweet for me – 1986’s Brotherhood.
Christina was entirely hooked on New Order, and so began a very different journey in our relationship. That night upon our arrival, we stayed with her friends in a beautiful loft in the village, and as we descended into the night, she was intimately bonded with her kindred spirits as we bounded into a nightclub where we were engulfed in New Order’s seismic worldwide anthem “Blue Monday.”
For the very first time, I had drifted into the background for Christina, and our societal emergence troubled the remarkable interior world that we had created.
It was a very odd experience since it was almost like New Order’s LP Power, Corruption & Lies providing a strange mirror of our relationship during that spring break week in NYC. It was also so very abrupt to shift from the snow-laden winter dream of our cocoon in upstate New York to the chaos and intensity of being in spring time Manhattan where we were immersed in the lives of Christina’s friends with barely a moment of the breathtaking solitude of our own world. The opening song “Paradise” of Brotherhood intimately captures my exact feelings about Christina in that April of 1987:
If we left this town,
we could walk the earth together
If you let me down,
I will live in you forever
I want you, I want you,
I need you, I need you
I want you, I want you,
I need you, I need you
If we could find a home,
we could go through time together
If we could hold our own,
devastate the night forever
There’s no place where we can’t go
There’s no place where I have been
There’s no limit I can show
There’s no level in-between
Jolene, I could have seen you there
Jolene, I need you everywhere
It was an intense and overwhelming continual sensation that I needed Christina everywhere, as the world that we had created was without limits, but here in Manhattan, this metropolis had imposed cracks on our perfect bubble. It was a strange tension since we knew that at some time we needed to leave the town of Syracuse so that we could explore this remarkable world together, yet there was no way of anticipating that Christina would inhabit a different dimension of herself amidst her friendship circle in this city.
Being in NYC for the first time in the late ’80s was an immensely dramatic life-altering experience in so many ways. Experiencing the trifecta of New Order’s albums Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-Life, and Brotherhood through the beautiful mind of Christina S. in New York City was a remarkable way of viewing the intensity of the world – and yet, this was also a journey that would intimately reflect the tensions of emotional romantic life in our extraordinary love.
The urban life entwined with group friendship dynamics had impacted the beautiful perfection of our incredible and so very immersive emotional and physical entwinement in being with each other.
My feelings were deeply mirrored in the tenor and lyricism of New Order’s song “The Village” from Power, Corruption & Lies, as they expressed:
When a new life turns towards you
And the night becomes the day
We shall remain forever
Everyone who meets this way
Oh, our love is like the flowers
The rain, the sea, and the hours
Oh, our love is like the flowers
The rain, the sea, and the hours…
From the very first moment of glimpsing Christina, she had entirely dramatically altered my world, and within days I was born into an entirely new life – where the hours and days had become timeless as we had eclipsed any measurement of time. Here in NYC, time had started to register within the cacophony of a social drone that had intruded upon the seeming impermeable nature of our own private universe. At times, I was walking the streets of the lower East Village adrift in my own thoughts and I felt like my being was about to collapse. The intimate fabric of our relationship had begun to unravel and alone in NYC I felt that I had entered into the darkest period of my life.
The tension in our relationship is embodied within the feel and fabric of New Order’s song “Face Up” from Low-Life:
You were me and I was you
This world of ours it felt brand new
You took me a little further…
I heard it all before, I’ve heard it all before
I can’t hear it anymore
Your hair was long, your eyes was blue
Guess what I’m gonna do to you
Oh, how I cannot
bear the thought of you
I said, oh, how I cannot
bear the thought of you
We were young and we were pure
And life was just an open door
I said oh, oh, how I cannot
bear the thought…
Oh, how I cannot
bear the thought of you
I said oh, oh, how I cannot
bear the thought of you
We were young and we were pure…
Christina and I were indeed so young and pure and we had created a remarkably dark and intensive love in our relationship that was an incredible universe to deeply inhabit. Yet, relationships can become intractable at this young point in one’s life and that in many ways remains a real tragedy. My love for Christina was and still is so immense and I miss her within every waking breath.
As I continue on my own mortal journey, my soul remains left at that bohemian clothing shop all those years ago on Marshall Street in Syracuse in that very first moment where I met Christina. In that moment I experienced one of the most radical transformations of my life wherein it really was possible to create a magical dream world with one other person. We were able to imagine an alternative universe that was our own creation, and it was nothing like on earth – the most intimate forms of emotional, cerebral, and carnal liberation in her extraordinary world.
I miss you my snow princess.
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