I grew up in a world of conviction. I was the school chaplain, leading prayers before football games, inviting classmates to talk about Jesus. I helped start See You at the Pole and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I didn’t just wear the uniform—I helped stitch it together.
Belief, as it turns out, isn’t always forged slowly. Sometimes it changes in an instant. Sometimes it takes just four minutes.
I was fifteen, riding in the backseat of a car on the way home from a family vacation in Colorado. Headphones on. Mountains sliding past the window. I’d bought an album because of one song—“Cool Like Dat.” It felt smooth, intelligent, effortless. But it wasn’t that track that changed me. It was the one that followed: “La Femme Fétal.”
At first, I was just listening. Then something shifted. By the second verse, I wasn’t hearing a song anymore—I was inside a story. A young woman navigating an unwanted pregnancy. The weight of politics. Economics. Judgment. Fear. Not presented as an argument, but as a lived reality.
And then came the lines that cracked something open:
“They don’t really give a damn about life
They just don’t want a woman to control her body or have the right to choose…”
It stopped me cold. I had never heard that idea spoken aloud—not in my school, not in my church, not in the circles where “pro-life” was simply assumed, not examined.
The verse kept unfolding:
“If Roe v. Wade was overturned, would not the desire remain intact?
Leaving young girls to risk their healths, doctors to botch and watch as they kill themselves…”
I restarted the track. Then played it again. I don’t remember exactly how many times I looped it, but I remember staring out the window at the passing mountains and realizing—quietly, unmistakably—that I no longer believed what I believed an hour earlier.
There was no debate. No internal courtroom. Just a sudden clarity that arrived fully formed. In that backseat, somewhere between one verse and the next, my entire understanding of abortion—and women’s rights—shifted. Not because I was convinced, but because I was shown.
I didn’t announce it. I didn’t make it a moment. I just carried it with me. But that small, private shift did something larger: it opened a door. A door to questioning. To listening. To letting beliefs be provisional instead of permanent.
That song didn’t just change my mind about one issue—it changed my relationship to certainty itself.
I’m grateful for Digable Planets for that, even if I was never their intended audience. I was a white kid from rural Oklahoma, steeped in fundamentalism, riding home from a family vacation with my headphones on. But art doesn’t care about demographics. It finds readiness. And my ears were open.
I think often about how easily that moment could have passed. In another universe, I skipped the track. I stayed with the comfort of what I’d been handed. I held firm to the foolishness of youth and the safety of unquestioned belief. I can almost picture that version of me—older now, but unchanged. Certain. Closed. Miserable in a way that feels righteous.
But I didn’t skip it.
I listened.
And sometimes, that’s all it takes. One song. Four minutes. A crack in the wall. And suddenly, the trajectory of a life bends—not loudly, not dramatically, but forever.