It was pretty hard making the mix, honestly. My first cut of options included 75+ songs and I had several false starts in designing how I would curate the mix. Then came actually writing about the mix which was agony in and of itself. I spent hours trying to articulate this particular convergence of my relationship to my father, the music he introduced me to when I was a kid, the music I have found on my own since, and this through-line of our shared ecstatic-full-body-joy in listening to music that, literally, moves us.
Just under the deadline I slipped in the words and songs I had managed, immediately grieving the songs I can't believe I had forgotten to consider and finding the *perfect* words I had been begging for days and hours before. Cue the classic artist's despair.
Fast forward a few weeks.
Yesterday, during the midday show with arguably my favorite DJ (it's hard for me to say that, like I'm excluding the others from the awesomeness they are), Cheryl Waters, talked about rushing home from Thing Festival out on the peninsula since she didn't want to miss any part of sharing listener's mixtapes this week. I had tuned in as I often do in the mornings, but on this particular day, I was motivated since I was curious about who's mixes they would play and what music and stories other folks sent it.
A little over an hour into her show, she started on my mix. Hearing her read my story, hearing my words she had been moved by, it was almost too much. For 30 minutes our story and our songs were shared with an audience that I know comes to us from around the world. And in that small twist of synchronicity unfolding, my best friend, so very new to losing her own father, could listen to my songs of love and grief while driving around and shopping for cemetery plots for her own father, giving her and her family a space to smile and cry in turn.
These are my words and songs: (and you can listen to it here on the KEXP archive for another few weeks by selecting August 26th and starting at 11:10am).
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My father died a year ago this September, and I realized in the wake of his passing, that I had passed through 17 years of adulthood without ever taking one photo of just the two of us together. Not one. And I am a professional photographer. This fact speaks far more to the complicated nature of our relationship than any negligence I have in documenting my life.
Grief is a strange season and this past year has taught me much on the nature of regret, loss, and forgiveness. But this is not a mix about any of those themes in particular, nor of my father’s troubles or addictions, or even the undeniable light he carried within him which he often battled as fiercely as the darkness. Nor is this a mix about my story as his daughter, growing up and out of his chaos.
Instead, this mix is the intersection of all those things, a musical portrait of sorts -- the last one I have of us, really. It contains key moments of our (limited) shared history, significant songs to either or both of us, and the music that helped me contend with the complicated nature of our lives and the slow years of his dying.
This mix celebrates the deep dark (down)sides (side 1) and the bittersweet beautiful (up)sides (side 2). It marks where we started, where we were at the end, and the peace I’ve discovered in the wake of his passing. This mix manifests his passion for music I see running through my entire life and cling to ever so tightly even as I let him go.
Grief is a strange season and this past year has taught me much on the nature of regret, loss, and forgiveness. But this is not a mix about any of those themes in particular, nor of my father’s troubles or addictions, or even the undeniable light he carried within him which he often battled as fiercely as the darkness. Nor is this a mix about my story as his daughter, growing up and out of his chaos.
Instead, this mix is the intersection of all those things, a musical portrait of sorts -- the last one I have of us, really. It contains key moments of our (limited) shared history, significant songs to either or both of us, and the music that helped me contend with the complicated nature of our lives and the slow years of his dying.
This mix celebrates the deep dark (down)sides (side 1) and the bittersweet beautiful (up)sides (side 2). It marks where we started, where we were at the end, and the peace I’ve discovered in the wake of his passing. This mix manifests his passion for music I see running through my entire life and cling to ever so tightly even as I let him go.
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Side 1. Deep Dark (Down)sides
1. Floating in the Forth -- Frightened Rabbit
2. Love Will Tear Us Apart -- Joy Division
3. Slack Jaw (Echo Mountain Sessions) -- Sylvan Esso (I played this version as my contribution at his Memorial)
4. Wandering Star -- Portishead
5. Reckoner -- Radiohead
6. St. Ides -- Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
7. Doomed -- Moses Sumney
8. Cymbal Rush -- Thom Yorke (wish I had switched this out for All for the Best by Thom Yorke)
9. Long Way From Home -- Lumineers
10. Song Sung Blue -- Neil Diamond
11. Landslide -- Fleetwood Mac
12. Hallelujah -- Jeff Buckley (some else led us in a sing-a-long of this song on his guitar at my father's Memorial)
Side 2. Bittersweet Beautiful (Up)sides
1. Scenic World -- Beirut
2. Someone Great -- LCD Soundsystem
3. Wake Up -- Arcade Fire
4. Hoppipolla -- Sigur Rós
5. This is Heaven to Me -- Madeleine Peyroux
6. 8 (Circle) -- Bon Iver
7. Us -- Regina Spektor
8. Cecilia -- Simon & Garfunkel
9. Midnight City -- M83
10. Perfect Day -- Lou Reed
11. No Shade in the Shadow of the Grass -- Sufjan Stevens
12. Scythian Empires -- Andrew Bird
13. River -- Leon Bridges
My cover:
Cheryl's DJ notes:
Texing the DJ booth in my crazy enthusiasm:
