Funeral Music
I’ve thought too much about what songs should be played at my funeral. Why? I’m in pretty good health. I’m not too old. One of my jobs is to listen as carefully as I can to people who are sick or dying, which may be a factor. Like a lot of people who love music — like that idiot in the car beside me with his windows rolled down and his stereo cranked up — I want other people to hear what I hear, which may be a factor too. My friend Ken died. He had the same job, was not too old, and was in pretty good health until he got sick. Ken knew the difference between J. J. Johnson and Robert Johnson. It’s about time I put some of this on paper.
I have never got around to compiling my funeral playlist, although I have managed to find the time to make CDs in honor of cars, girls’ names, blasphemous songs, top-forty radio songs from 1972 (a five-CD extravaganza!), and songs about walking (“Walk on By,” “I Walk the Line,” “Walk Like an Egyptian,” etc.). It is probably not lack of time that has prevented getting my funeral list down. As Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy sings “I don’t need a doctor to figure it out. I know life’s passing me by.” So it’s about time that I put some of this down.
I’m not the only one thinking about funeral music. When I sent this essay to Jon, Ken’s friend and mine, he replied with a list of the songs he wants at his funeral, which is attached like a codicil to his will. In Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Rob, Barry, and Dick name the best death songs, in memory of Rob’s Laura’s Dad’s death. That very awkward triple possessive phrase seems to me to convey the quality of misplaced ownership that runs through High Fidelity, as it runs through some relationships and many music collections. Maybe planning your own funeral music is a last stab at trying to own the space between people that is never really under your control. And Hornby, it turns out, has thought out the funeral playlist for himself. In 31 Songs, he says he wants his mourners to hear a live version of Van Morrison’s “Caravan” when they meet to finally contemplate his life. Everyone remembers the opening scene of The Big Chill when the little church organ starts to play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” So maybe revealing my pathology in a list of funereal pop music is not too aberrant.
There are problems in finding the perfect pop song for a funeral. For one thing, a song’s meaning may not be found in its words. Maybe that shouldn’t matter; people choose hymns for sentimental reasons more often than theological, I suspect. Nick Hornby notes that the words of “Caravan” are not actually about death at all (the most memorable part being “laa laa la-la, la-la la”), but they convey something about life, and the music captures something in his soul. Hornby also hears God in the second verse of Rufus Wainright’s version of “One Man Guy,” which goes to show either that finding the divinely apt moment in pop music reveals personal idiosyncrasies or that God chooses odd moments to reveal himself to atheists.
Jon too has picked songs that aren’t really about anything universally relevant to the bereaved. Unless you find Leon Russell singing, “I hope you understand but I just had to get back to the island” — a deeper metaphor than is probably intended. However, the song has attached itself to his life in a way that makes listening to it a sharing of something personal. I am planning to be there when that song plays, although it is just as likely that it will be Jon at some other chapel doing the listening and I will be finished with doing altogether. Most of us who gather to say goodbye will know that there are a couple of important islands in Jon’s life, and so we will find those words relevant in their own way. Or John Fogerty singing, “Put a candle in the window ’cause I feel I’ve got to move,” which would be maudlin and insufficient if it were not for the music, that voice, and the connections to Jon’s person that make it matter.
Then there are awkward words. Hornby worries about what the people at his funeral will do when Van starts to introduce the band. My problem is that the lyrics that best convey what I want to say to my friends are often found in songs about bad relationships and breaking up. Ignoring whatever that may say about the state of my closest connections, it is troubling that I need you to hear the phrase that struck me as exactly right and ignore and forgive the parts that are out of place. Essentially, I need you to read my mind. That is a common problem with the impulse to share music and stories. “I want you to read this” so often means “I want you to experience what I experienced when I read this,” which is asking for something rare. And so for my funeral list I have suppressed the songs that too greatly strain good sense and decorum. Elvis Costello’s “All This Useless Beauty” is out. Too bad, the chorus sums up a world view that is close to my heart with near- perfect irony, reverence, and resignation — the view that some of the best moments in life are those in which we can apprehend at once both life’s beauty and its complete lack of any given meaning or redeeming purpose. “What shall we do, what shall we do, with all this useless beauty?” Unfortunately, those lines anchor the complicated story of a pretty ugly relationship.
Or the problem of the Clash. The Clash have never performed a song that was in any way appropriate for a sacrament. But I would be happy to think that you listened to them in the car on the way home. The Clash have it all — passion, anger, righteousness, and humanity played really loud, a connection to a good time in my life (nineteen), and not incidentally a connection to almost everyone else who has found his way into this essay (Ken, Jon, Hornby, his character Rob, John Cusack, who played Rob in the movie). Human connectedness is the other theme that I want to permeate my funeral. Connectedness is a virtue that “All This Useless Beauty” undermines, and that won’t do. Funeral songs have got to have it all. So here is my list.
“John the Revelator,” by Son House. I am not a religious man, but I may be a carrier. I don’t think it is biblical content that makes this song feel right, anyway. Son House makes the consonants sound like vowels, rushes and truncates the words. There isn’t much content — it’s the blues. The one-man call-and-response sung against the bare instrumentation of two softly clapping hands is passionate and lonely and yet engaged with the articles of the singer’s faith and with his audience. Especially the audience, because this song is sung to someone, maybe someone who needs convincing, and I would rather have this played at my funeral than any hymn that I can think of. I guess this is my “Caravan.”
There was a time when I would have wanted Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die.” Except it would have been Blood, Sweat, and Tears’ “And When I Die,” because I was a teenager, and had never heard of Laura Nyro. She was seventeen when she wrote it. The idea that so appealed to me — “And when I die, and when I’m gone, there’ll be one child born in this world to carry on” — is an idea for teenagers. It assumes that the great tragedy of my dying is the loss of me and this will be remedied by the birth of another little rebel in my image. As Jim Cuddy also sang, “I don’t think that anymore.” Or as Bob Dylan said, strapping on his electric guitar at the Royal Albert Hall concert twenty-five years earlier, “It used to go like that. Now it goes like this.” Someone else said that when he lost his religious faith he was left for the rest of his life with a “God-shaped hole in the universe.” The image stuck with me. Ken’s death will leave a Ken-shaped hole in my universe. It is a hole about the size of a person, which I will tolerate. Imagine what a Ken-shaped hole looks like to his kids or his parents or wife. There are bigger holes yet to come for me. So sure, when I die there will be the loss of me, but that’s not the tragedy. It takes growing up to realize that the tragedy of a death is all those people walking around with holes in their universes. And one child born in this world to carry on is a good thing, but it’s beside the point.
“Shine,” by David Gray. “Shine” is a gift for those who cared enough to come say goodbye. It starts at a relationship’s end, and offers redemption in shared promise. Promise (not a promise, but hopeful possibilities) can be shared by those who can no longer be together. “Dry your eyes. We’re going to go where we can shine” means dry your eyes and go do something amazing. Ken left messages for his friends that made us feel something like that, and it makes me happy to think of passing it on.
There are songs and artists you hear unexpectedly, and sometimes the moment stays with you. I remember the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the car radio with the same clarity as when I heard on another road that Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles. I could tell you which stretch of highway I was on and what the weather was like. No doubt part of the appeal of “Shine” is that I first heard David Gray sing it when I had not heard of him, when he was an opening act at the El Mocambo. It was the first time Lynn and I had been out alone together since the birth of our first child a year earlier. Gray was young and surly, cursing at the sound coming up through the floor from the bar below. The music was lovely, and I was very excited to be on a date again. I went out and bought a cassette the next day and listened to it a lot. That album was hard to find for quite a few years, which made it more special, like a good secret that you want to share.
“One,” by U2. The story of this song, as I heard it, is that the band was not getting along and the music was bad. They fought and left the studio angry. Maybe it was over. Bono came back the next day with a song that says that our salvation is found in caring for one another. They played it and everything changed. “We’re one, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.” My funeral friends will need to ignore the accusations. I don’t really intend you to squirm through “Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?” The message of fellowship, however, is worth the squirming.
“Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen song, but in the version sung by John Cale, an arrangement that is heartbreakingly simple and beautiful. This is a song that in the first place is about the power and beauty of music, and in the second place about discord in actual relationships (“I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord but you don’t really care for music do you?”). It is sad and resigned, and somehow the music and the repetition of the hallelujahs manages still to celebrate.
Maybe there’s a God above, but all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
It’s not a cry you can hear at night.
It’s not a pilgrim who’s seen the light.
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.
Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
Celebration that transcends pain and disappointment rather than ignoring it is precious.
Four songs are probably more than a funeral can stand, but on the trip home I hope you listen to the version of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that Warren Zevon recorded while he was dying of cancer, and “Lean on Me,” and “Stand by Me,” and anything by Van Morrison where he tells you to turn up the radio. There isn’t enough time for all the music. Nothing fills that hole.
