Episode remastered, re-edited and extended for 2025!
“Time is so different when you’re a teenager,” Matt Fishel reflects whilst talking about his first boyfriend. “We were probably only together for about four to six months, but at the time it was like six years.” It reminded me how early relationships carve themselves into us with an intensity that later love often fail to match.
Matt’s song “Soldiers” was inspired by the death of this first boyfriend But listening to the track it’s something beyond mourning. I hear the recognition that some connections transcend their brevity, that certain people imprint themselves so deeply that their absence becomes a permanent presence.
The Archaeology of Intimacy
“When somebody who you’ve been intimate with and had a really intimate, close relationship with dies, you’ve had a physical connection with another human being that no longer exists in that form.”
There’s an archaeology to intimate relationships, layers of shared experience that accumulate in the body as much as the mind. The way someone kissed you. How they slept beside you. The specific weight of their hand in yours. When that person dies, those sensory memories become artifacts of a world that no longer exists.
And this was something I very much identified with Matt, remembering my own experience with Kevin, a lover who died in the mid 1990s from a HIV-related illness.
For queer people, this loss carries additional complexity. Often these early relationships happen in secret, without the social recognition that might provide scaffolding for grief. Who do you tell about losing someone the world didn’t know you loved? How do you mourn a relationship that officially never existed?
The Mathematics of Teenage Intensity
Why do those early relationships feel so overwhelming, so definitive? Perhaps it’s because we encounter them with no frame of reference, no protective cynicism, no awareness that love might be survived.
Matt describes his first relationship as “wild and very horny and very fun and very intense.” I love that lack of emotional regulation, that willingness to be completely undone by another person. Whereas later love often carries insurance policies such as thought-out exit strategies, emotional hedging, the knowledge that we’ve survived heartbreak before.
But teenage love arrives uninsured, catastrophically honest about its own importance. “I’m never going to find another gay relationship ever again,” Matt thought when it ended. At the time, this probably felt like accurate prophecy rather than dramatic overstatement.
The Complexity of Memory’s Editing
Years later, when Matt reconnected with his first boyfriend, their relationship had been edited by time into something more manageable. “It was lovely to see him and catch up on his life,” he recalls. The wild intensity had settled into affectionate nostalgia, the kind of gentle friendship that sometimes emerges from the wreckage of passionate young love.
Then death arrived, and suddenly grief has a way of restoring original intensity to experiences we thought we’d processed. “Everything comes flooding back,” Matt explains. The careful distance we maintain from our past selves collapses when that past becomes permanently unreachable.
Tribute as Time Travel
Creating “Soldiers” allowed Matt to return to that teenage intensity without being destroyed by it. Art provides a unique and melodic form of time travel, allowing him to revisit past emotions with present understanding. The song becomes a vehicle for holding complexity: love and hurt, obsession and hatred, all the contradictory feelings that define intimate connection.
“My first boyfriend who I was in love with, I was obsessed with. He was a very special and interesting creature. I then was hurt by who I hated and I was such complex emotions. But every one of them was extreme.” This emotional honesty feels rare in popular music, which tends to smooth over contradiction in favour of cleaner narratives.
The Democracy of Grief
Matt’s relationship lasted only months, ended badly, and had been reduced to friendship by the time death intervened. And mine with Kevin was a beautiful few weeks across a summer in Philadelphia. By conventional standards, these might not qualify for profound grief.
But grief operates by its own logic, independent of relationship duration or social recognition. The intensity of loss often correlates more with the depth of physical intimacy than the length of emotional connection. Bodies remember what society considers forgettable.
“Soldiers” insists on the democratic nature of grief, and that is the right to mourn any connection that mattered to us, regardless of its apparent significance to others. This feels particularly important for queer people, whose relationships have historically been rendered invisible or trivial by mainstream culture.
In creating this musical tribute, Matt doesn’t just honour his first boyfriend, but I think he validates the grief of anyone who’s lost someone the world didn’t know they loved. Sometimes the most radical act is simply insisting that your feelings matter, that your loss deserves recognition, that your first love was real regardless of how it ended.
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