My Funeral Mix

I’ve had a playlist kicking around on my computer called My Funeral Mix. It’s tucked in amongst My Workout Mix, Spring Skiing Mix, and a mix called Christmas In The Kitchen. I still prefer to call them mixes over of playlists.

I began to consider this grouping of songs the first time I heard Keep Me In Your Heart, by Warren Zevon. It came on NPR while I was doing the dishes and I bawled my eyes out. It started My Funeral Mix and made me aware that I had finally matured to a point in life when songs cease to be distractions and become captured moments of emotion. I was twenty-five and the disc playing in my car was Bad Religion’s, Suffer. Until hearing Keep Me In Your Heart that afternoon on the radio, music was to me only about volume and frustration, the shaking off of the day and planning for the night.

My Funeral Mix sat mostly empty for a long time. I’m not predisposed to bouts of morbid thinking. I’m thirty-eight years old now and still show no signs of an approaching midlife crisis. Eight years ago, at a young and fit thirty, I heard I Can’t Wait To Get Off Work, by Tom Waits. I’d heard the song before. Small Change is one of the very best albums by the legendary thinker, songwriter. This time, perhaps five years ago while camping, I played the song again. I felt like I finally wanted to feel the way that Waits felt when he wrote it. I wanted to care about someone the way his words described caring. It made me consider, for the first time, that pushing people away for sport was not likely to result in the meaningful companionship that Tom was singing about.

It is seemingly inappropriate to include Sinking Ship, from the original motion picture soundtrack, Once, after mentioning the great Tom Waits and all the gutter perspective that he shared with kids in the suburbs while we listened to him on our yellow Sony Sports Discman. There is, however, an innate wholesomeness to both songs that cannot be denied. I watched Once with my parents on a weekend when I was home from pursuing my master’s degree. By then I had purchased Waits’ entire catalogue, much of it on vinyl. Still reeling from Kerry’s defeat by W in the 2004 presidential election, the approachable love that wouldn’t last between Guy and Girl provided a bit of the squishy romance that I would never admit to appreciating in front of my post-grad friends. Now Waits and Once share a mix secreted away on my MacBook Air, waiting for my death so they may share the stage.

I don’t clearly recall the first time I heard Pet Sounds. It’s like the White Album or Kill’em All, they’re just parts of growing up. These days I am an Audible commuter. I get my twenty-five minutes of the literati with a double-red-eye five days a week. But last year I experienced the one and only day without my phone in a decade. I don’t recall if the cable didn’t charge the thing or if there was a power outage, but my phone would not read to me. I scanned the radio for mindlessness. Instead, I heard a well-informed introduction to I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, by the Beach Boys. I had long known of Brian Wilson’s tortured genius, of his misdiagnosed madness, and that together they created one of the greatest albums ever recorded. The introduction said as much, and then the DJ mentioned preferring In My Room, also from Pet Sounds, because the DJ had a cool room or something, and didn’t we all miss our rooms in high school? I recalled being fifteen and trading in my bed for a long couch because I was never able to sleep, and a couch would be more comfortable to sit up in all night while my family slept. I had two desks, one strictly for schoolwork and one reserved for creative works of poetry and fiction.

My room now, my home office, is far more whimsical than my high school bedroom ever was. I’m comfortable in my office-room and now, when I go to bed, I sleep the deepest most restorative sleep imaginable. Everything got better when I decided, late in my thirties, that I’m better off alone, not at parties, not at bars, not hosting cocktail evenings, but sitting alone and not taking myself as seriously as I used to. Now I love being in my room, I just wish that, long ago, somebody had suggested that maybe I just wasn’t made for these times. Maybe that’s why I overcompensated so much. Perhaps it’s why I hated everything. It’s why I subjected myself to unnecessary pressures until I couldn’t sleep and felt I had to work in one place, and play in another.

The National came along just when a lot of us needed them. I had been consuming a steady diet of Radiohead since Pablo Honey was released in the early nineties. Ten years later, doubled over with cynicism and punk-rock-values, The National’s, About Today, was an apology, an admission, and a quiet anthem all at once. The question, “how close am I to loosing you?” Was one I’d obsessed about outwardly through my twenties. More recently I added it to My Funeral Mix because I finally thought about it inwardly. I spent my immature years losing myself and not knowing what I was supposed to be doing instead. Then I constantly felt disappointed in the myself that couldn’t figure that out. Now I hear About Today, on soundtracks and in coffee shops and I quietly give myself a knowing nod. I check in with myself, and I move on with my day.

There have been times when, even after gaining the great enlightened clarity that I don’t fit in and I’m best keeping to myself, I still sometimes wish somebody would check in with me. I refuse to drop my stoic appearance when in public. I’ve added a beard, a ball cap, and dark sunglasses to my upturned collar and corner-of-the-room public persona over the last ten years. It may be getting out of hand. I do anything to obscure the truths I’m only just now coming to terms with, the ones about who I really am. During the dark times, as I assume my funeral will be for those who attend, I turn to Lucinda Williams. In her song, Are You Alright, she makes listeners like me feel like she genuinely cares about the answer. She is exhausted, you can hear her swaying to the brushes on the snare drum, she is already sad, like she knows the answer is, “no,” but you still never doubt for second that she genuinely cares.

In the hopes that death is a beginning as much as it is an end, this lifelong atheist concludes My Funeral Mix with Sturgill Simpson’s, Welcome To Earth (Pollywog). I do this for two very conscious reasons. The first is obvious. I hope that death leads to a new life, a new understanding, or a new phase of existing and I want Sturgill to be the father figure who welcomes me to it. He is an artist who’s every album is brimming with wisdom. At the same time, he seems like a really cool guy and would likely be a calming presence after experiencing the death of my human body.

Secondly, for those who know this song, 2:43 into the piece, after everybody has climbed to the very heights of sorrow while mourning my loss, Sturgill keys into a full-on horn accompaniment swinging-joy melody that will crack smiles all over the room. As I lay in my box, piled in my urn, or bagged as renewable compost, mourners’ hips will uncontrollably begin to sway to Sturgill’s crooning. Drinks will have to be poured. After only about thirty minutes of mandatory playlist listening, at the request of the dearly departed, everyone’s moods will shift from death to life and from tears to laughter. I’m thirty-eight. Hopefully there will be plenty of time to update this list and rethink my imminent demise. But for now, by this soundtrack, my death doesn’t seem like such a scary thing, and that’s helpful in a way.