Vol. 34: The Things We Would Lose If Music Disappeared
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Listen to the audio edition of DMM Vol. 34 below.
When Dad died in 2019, I was responsible for putting together the music for his visitation.
At first, I approached it the way I assumed most people would. I started looking for songs that felt appropriate for a funeral home: soft, sad, reflective music.
The problem was, that didn’t sound like Dad.
I pictured upbeat rock ’n’ roll blaring through his car speakers while he tapped his hand aggressively off the steering wheel.
As I was putting the playlist together, I remembered something Dad had told me years earlier. He had come home from the funeral of one of his colleagues. I asked how it went, and he said, “Oh Ryan, it was awful.”
He described people screaming and crying throughout the service. I don’t remember his exact words, but I remember the point clearly: he didn’t want that for himself.
That memory helped me make a decision.
Instead of building a playlist around what people expect to hear at a funeral, I built one around what Dad would have wanted to hear. I called it I Love You Dad. It contained 61 songs and ran for four hours and one minute.
Some people may have found it unusual to hear Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” coming through a funeral home sound system. But I knew Dad would have loved it.
The music that keeps people close
For a moment, music can bring you closer to a person, even if they’re no longer with us.
That’s what the playlist did for me. It brought a little of Dad’s energy back into the room.
Photos and stories keep people with us too. Music just seems to reach a different part of the memory.
Music remembers the small things
Music has also preserved parts of my own life that I probably would have forgotten.
Just over 100 days before I became a father for the first time, I recorded a song about the anticipation of it all. I was excited, nervous and trying to imagine what it would be like to meet my daughter.
One lyric went:
“Impatiently waiting for you baby, can’t wait to see your face. Still a hundred plus days until your due date. Mommy picked out paint for your room. No toxic fumes, so when she do it it won’t hurt you.”
There’s no chance I would remember that detail today if I hadn’t put it in a song.
Another lyric has held on to a different moment:
“Though the day’s getting closer, it seems so far away and the gifts keep coming, check what D bought you today. A Please Mum bucket hat, with a vest to match. Jenny bought you your first Teddy, I know you’ll like that.”
Without that lyric, I wouldn’t be able to tell you who gave my first daughter her first teddy bear.
That’s the thing with music. It becomes a diary set to a beautiful backdrop. There’s probably no truer way to experience nostalgia than to press play on a mixtape you made when you were fifteen. Nothing triggers memory more than music.
Well, not for me at least.
Music helps us remember
When I was in school, I had another use for music.
If I had to study something, I would turn it into a rap.
An assignment on Romeo and Juliet? No problem. I still remember part of the rhyme I wrote and handed in 36 years ago:
“Romeo and Juliet, a play by Shakespeare
Born April 1564 was the year
The tragedy of love, that’s what this play’s about
Romeo and Juliet had no doubt
That they loved one another, but they couldn’t be smitten
’Coz to love a loathed enemy, it was forbidden.”
That’s about as much as I recall. Not bad, I suppose, considering I haven’t seen a copy of those lyrics since the day I handed in my Grade 9 English assignment.
Shout out to Ms. Pratt for the A.
I can say with certainty that without music, there is no way I would be able to recall a lot of the things that I’ve committed to memory over the years. Not all of them are things that I necessarily want to commit to memory, to be honest, but that’s another story.
It’s even helped me in games of Trivial Pursuit several times throughout the years.
That’s why we remember commercial jingles, television theme songs, nursery rhymes and lyrics from records we haven’t played in decades. A melody and a beat can make room in our heads for things that plain facts often can’t hold onto.
Music gives history a sound
The same idea applies to the world beyond our own lives.
When we think about Woodstock, we don’t only think about a farm in Bethel, New York, in August 1969. We think about the sound of the era. We think about half a million young people gathered around music, idealism, protest and the feeling that their generation might be able to build something different.
The social movements of the 1960s came from far more than music. The civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement and the counterculture were responses to racism, violence, inequality and a country deeply divided over Vietnam.
Music helped people find one another.
It gave people a shared language. It carried ideas from one city to another. It gave demonstrations and gatherings a feeling that could travel further than a speech or a newspaper headline.
“We Shall Overcome” became inseparable from the civil-rights movement because people could sing it together. At Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” turned a familiar national song into something that sounded like the tension and pain of the moment.
Sure, the 60s still happens without music. The injustices were real. The protests were real. The people demanding change were real.
Woodstock, though, doesn’t become Woodstock without music.
Punk doesn’t sound like a rejection of the old rules. Disco doesn’t create the same places for people to gather. Hip-hop doesn’t give generations of young people the same way to document where they lived, what they saw and what they wanted to say.
Music gives history a soundtrack. It gives us another way to understand how a moment felt while it was happening.
The things we would lose
It’s easy to take music for granted because it’s always there.
It’s in the car, in the grocery store, at weddings, in restaurants, at sporting events and in the background of our best and worst days. We use it to celebrate, study, work out, drive, grieve, fall in love and sometimes just to get by.
Take it away, and we lose far more than records, concerts, radio and playlists.
I would lose the memory of Dad tapping on his steering wheel.
I wouldn’t be able to tell you who gave my daughter her first teddy bear.
I would lose the song that takes me back to those 100 days before I became a father. I would lose Ms. Pratt’s A.
Take music away and I still have the stories. But Dad’s steering-wheel rhythm, my daughter’s first teddy bear, Ms. Pratt’s A and the nervous excitement of becoming a father are all a little harder to reach.
Music has kept each of those moments within arm’s length.
That seems like a lot to lose.
Listen to the Playlist
I Love You Dad is the 61-song playlist I made for Dad’s visitation. It runs four hours and one minute.