I met Veruni on November 11, 1994. My band, Violent Femmes, played at a club in Baltimore called Hammerjacks. This is your typical greasy rock club.
While we were performing that night, I noticed this incredibly beautiful woman staring at me. This is not unusual in my line of work, but she definitely caught my attention. But I was on stage and I was a little busy, so I couldn’t invite her for a beer.
A few minutes after the show ended, she walked into the dressing room. Now, the mechanism for this to happen is that our sound guy is not in the house. She walked up to him and asked if he could sign her CD, but he invited her to meet us backstage in person. He had no idea we had been making eye contact all night.
We chatted for a while and Gordon, the band’s frontman, asked for her phone number. She said, “I’m going to give it to Brian and you can take it from him.” I think her choice was clear.
The word “literally” is used by too many people now, but I literally I remember thinking to myself, “I could spend the rest of my life with this woman.” I don’t know if it was falling in love or just an observation, but it was true.
So I said, “Why don’t we go out and have a cocktail or something?”
She drives this little Honda Civic, so we get in the car and start driving to the bar at my hotel, but she gets too nervous and pulls off the road. We got there alive, had a few drinks, exchanged phone numbers and that was it.
At the time she was getting her PhD in etymology from the University of Maryland, and I was a touring rock musician living in Milwaukee, so I didn’t think it was going to go much further. But she’s so charming, funny, bubbly, charismatic, and you just don’t meet someone that wonderful very often.
We kept in touch but weren’t really thinking about dating or anything official.
In 1995 she accepted a postdoctoral position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She said: “I am starting a new life in New York and I will be there for the next three years. What are you going to do in the next three years?”
I’m sitting in Milwaukee, and my life is pretty precarious. I was looking for direction, and she, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, said to me, why don’t you come to New York and live with me?
So that’s what I did: In 1996, I packed up and moved to New York.
I was there, she was in the world of science. Everyone she worked with thought she was crazy for giving this “uneducated” rock musician a chance. I do have a high school diploma, but the only time I use it is to get her to tell them I have it.
We have been together for almost 30 years and I think one of the reasons for its success is Veruni’s dedication. She is a very modern woman, but her approach to relationships is also very old-fashioned. She takes this very seriously. As a touring musician, I had a pretty lavish love life before meeting her, but she set a great example for me of how to behave.
Music has always been the most important thing in my life, and then I met her and our relationship became the most important thing.
music never have Take a back seat, but it can. Varuni taught me that devotion is crucial and that it is being together that matters – not what we are doing or where we are doing it. As long as we carry that relationship with us wherever we go, united with each other, we can do anything as individuals and support each other. I think this is enough.
