I’m glad to be home.
Being back in LA is welcome in ways I didn’t expect. While I love the road, returning here carries the soul satisfaction of finishing something. Despite its personal upheavals, I’m proud of the tour. While it wasn’t necessarily everything I wanted, it was everything I wanted to give fans.
This earned, even weary, fulfillment is what finds me in the dressing room on the night of the Breakup Tour’s final US show. I’m playing the Rose Bowl, the city’s famous stadium. It’s one more dream improbably within my reach. I haven’t gotten used to the magic of far-flung hopes realized. I hope I never do.
In a few months, I’ll start the international leg of the tour. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to spending some settled days here. I’m ready to return to my empty house, to make it mine. To write new music there. To find out what my next chapter will be.
First, however, I’m going to say goodbye to The Breakup Record for a little while. And I’m going to do it with my whole heart.
I put on my wedding dress, which no longer feels like Wesley’s. It feels like sixteen cities across the United States—enclaves of memory, stages where I split the kaleidoscope of myself open on other nights like this one. It feels like my fans, like the love I share with them. Where the dress once stood for romance, it now represents a different kind of relationship, the one I’m grateful to have with the people who have been touched by my music.
In the pre-show hour, I head into the greenroom. Everyone is feeling the way I do. I pick up on the pride combined with sentimentality immediately. It’s like walking in electric haze. The band isn’t joining me on the international segments of the tour, so the sense of finality is even greater. I shake everyone’s hands with sincere thanks for each. Kev, solemnly focused. Hamid, jumpy with excitement or caffeine. Savannah, headphones on until I come over. Vanessa, her fingers pattering endless rhythms on every surface in reach.
Finally, it’s showtime.
I walk to the stage, hearing the pre-show countdown and music. I let it speed my pulse, like the opening drums drive my heart itself. When the lights hit me, I beam at the stadium—at the people who’ve been there for me, who made everything possible.
The Rose Bowl is radiant. The view is distinctly Los Angeles, the mountains dusky pink past the high white rim of the stadium. On the edges of the floor standing room, the green of grass hides.
Endless flashing lights greet me. I allow only one single pang in my heart knowing Max isn’t one of them.
I kick off the show, determined to enjoy every second. Which I do. I race up the steep sides of “One Minute,” revel in the sweet swing of “Sacramento,” lose myself in the quiet of “Novembers.”
When I reach “Until You,” which has been hard for me to play since Max’s departure, I remind myself the song is no longer only ours. It’s found its way into other hearts, entwining itself with losses I’ll never know, feeding flickers of hope in private corners of other lives.
I strum the opening chords, still unwilling to play the song on piano. With Max gone, my own skill on the keys is not up to the performance I want to give, which left me with the prospect of having someone else play the piano part.
I haven’t wanted to, of course. I can’t imagine playing the song with anyone except Max. While “Until You” has found homes in endless other hearts, the way I hear it in mine is inextricable from him.
I picture him at Harcourt Homes, playing something old on his piano. Maybe he’s thinking of me. Is it pride or narcissism to imagine he might? It feels more like peace, the idea that his song will play on elsewhere, even if it’s one I will no longer hear.
I hope he’s happy.
While my chords fill the stadium, I decide happy isn’t all. I hope he knows I’ll always love him, in the way of loving my first favorite song. It stays in my heart even while my musical lexicon widens, the love changing form, with nostalgia, grace, and gratitude shaping it into something past pure passion. I want him to know he’s part of me now.
Instead of continuing into the intro of “Until You,” I strum open chords as I walk to the front of the stage, where I address the audience. While the cheering is unceasing, I feel the collective pause, something indiscernible shifting in the night. It’s like the whole stadium feels the edge I’m stepping up to.
“You know, I used to think all my heartbreaks were worth it as long as I got a new song to sing,” I say. “I love my art. I love writing breakup songs. I think we need breakup songs—I know I certainly do.”
I pause, smiling to my fans, letting them inside the joke. It’s the magic I work on every stage, the marvel of making intimacy out of places like this. I love it. I want everyone here, packed in with strangers surrounding them, to feel like they have a private pass into the hallways of my heart.
This morning I woke up wanting to make this show something special. With one performance, I can end one era of my career and open the door to another.
I shift the chords under my fingers.
“Until You” does not rise from my guitar. Instead, what forms is decisive, firmly sweet. With repetition, melody starts to sound like structure, like sentences into poetry. It’s no longer strumming. It’s a song.
Feeling the change, the crowd starts to shriek. “I’ll never stop writing breakup songs,” I say. “But I think I need to admit that I’m sort of tired of having my heart broken.”
I hear someone shout loudly enough to be heard. “You’ll be okay, Riley!”
Smiling, I play on. “I think next time I fall in love, I’ll write more songs like this one. Love songs,” I say. “This is ‘Unsung.’ ”
It’s the song I started in the desert a decade ago. I finished it yesterday, in the music room of my house in the Hills, in my own private emotional exorcism. I was feeling off whenever I set foot in my former favorite room because one of the only memories I have of it is when Max played “Until You” for me. I felt like he was still there, or should have been.
So yesterday, I let him in. Finishing the song he inspired with sunlight shining in on the piano, it was like I could feel him there.
I sing the opening lines. “You make days feel like nights of stars, when the pressure ends, when the sky is warm.” My voice floats over the crowd, who have lost it hearing me play something new. “You wrote with me in the dead of dark. Held me in your words, made me feel the spark.”
It’s hard. No, it’s fucking hard playing this untested piece. I have none of the usual struts I use for self-confidence. No one has heard the song. Not Eileen, not my mom. It has a newborn fragility—and it’s painful. It hurts to think of the feelings of love that haven’t faded from my heart, to remember writing some of this when we were together.
It hurts like I knew love songs could. I’m living out the very reason for my fear of writing them. Breakups remain forever. Love can vanish. I’m standing on one of the grandest stages of my life, singing what’s supposed to be the happiest song, full of sadness instead.
No, I correct myself.
Sadness is not the only feeling I find in this song, because it isn’t only about Max. It’s about myself, the Riley who dared to write it. Who dared to love. For the next few minutes, I’m her. Even though it hurts, it’s not a punishment. It’s just a complicated gift.
It feels right. It feels like hope.
Hope that one day, with someone, it’ll last. Because I’m worth it.