Christina Meadows
Audio Feed
Old State House Food Court
Hartford
July 7, 2026
It’s July in Hartford, which means a season of live music featuring some of the very best talent in the state has kicked off. In addition to the jazz fests and the town green concerts, your humble food court is hosting some great musical acts as well.
The Audio Feed concert series brings live music to the Old State House in downtown Hartford on Tuesdays and Wednesdays through the end of September. Tuesday’s concerts are usually held outside, but the continued crazy weather brought the music Tuesday into the nearby food court.
The series kicked off with Christina Meadows, a 23-year-old performer who uses her acoustic guitar to accompany her soul-baring lyrics. Meadow’s voice has a rich, earthy tone that’s reminiscent of English singer Dido. While her style is melodic and restrained, her voice easily carried over the din of people ordering and eating.
One of the funny things about hearing someone half your age sing about love and desire is realizing that time does very little to aid our emotional understanding. There are always arguments, breakups or missed opportunities we look back on and wish we’d handled differently, no matter how much “experience” we’ve gathered between fuck-ups.
So for me, looking back on a lifetime of loves and loves lost, Meadow’s song “Crowns” isn’t an ode to youthful rebellion and an us-against-the-world attitude. When she sings about burning the world down and staying together, I think about all the times I’ve been in a relationship that’s going nowhere, when I’m really not sure if I even still like the woman I’m with, but I don’t want to be anywhere else but right beside them. Yeah, I wish things had gone differently, but even as our shared world crashes around us, stay with me, please:
Won’t you stay with me tonight
Watch as we give the world a fright
Let them think we’re the last ones here on Earth
And it turns turns turns
While it burns burns burns
There is no way out
The other part of growing older with love is that it gets no easier to control the raging torrent of other emotions that love unleashes. Happiness and pleasure are given, but so are jealousy, insecurity and possessiveness.
Controlling emotions is impossible, because we’re going to feel what we feel whether we like it or not. Managing those feelings is slightly less impossible, and the one thing that can get easier with age: 20 year old me yelled in relationships; 40 year old me still feels like yelling, but saw all the problems that caused younger me, so I (usually) keep it to just the feeling.
So bad news, Ms. Meadows. You’re going to be having the experiences you wrote about in “Jet Plane” for the rest of your life, but what will change is how you respond to them:
You’re driving me insane
I need some Novocain
To get me out this rage
Yeah yeah yeah
I feel like I’m in hell
Can someone give me help
Can you get me out this cage
Before I go insane
This is what love is though, the willingness and ability to take the good and the bad, in our partners and ourselves, and to work through it together. Meadows’ music describes the raw, powerful emotions of youth and love, but they always have a positive bend towards them. They’re not break up songs, but rather manuals on how love endures even through challenging moments. Her music shows that both her talent and her wisdom are far beyond her years.
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Jamil goes to check out a puppet retelling of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
