Yesterday I finally finished the post saying Goodbye to Duke that I started Sunday while doing a full blown #CryBabyCast—a tried and true tradition on the mighty #ds106radio. I was a mess this weekend, and frankly I’m still a bit wobbly. You can hear it right away, I start the show with a blaring, post-punk wail fest with “Katina” by Unwound off Fake Train (1993). Turns out Unwound is my go to in the event of crisis and emotional release, which makes a good case for them still being my favorite band EVER!
WAIT, WAIT, WAIT. PLEASE, DON’T GO! STAY!
Thanks to some bad automatic Apple Music song mixing and some lucky serendipity that was followed up with “Look a Ghost” off Leaves Turn Inside You (2001).*
Look a ghost came through the door
from a thousand years before
This was followed-up with the show intro where I’m already almost breaking down at various moments. I tried to setup the Duke tribute show with some words, but quickly retreated to “Lady Elect” off Repetition (1996). This is a relentless, cyclical musical rumination on loss. Some of the lyrics are once I always come back to, not to mentioned the music:
Leave it to yourselfTo find it somewhere elseSafe outside of timeMartyr of a kind
Add to that this:
They asked me why you diedI knew the reason whyInstead I gave a lieJust came to say goodbye
This song set me off, and I come back in hot after it with all kinds of existential angst. Hold on to your hat! From there I try and pull back out and calm down with two tracks off their 1994 masterpiece New Plastic Ideas. Possibly my favorite song of theirs, “Abstraktions”:
No lyrics to quote here given it is an instrumental, you just have to put on those headphones and float away. Soon enough you will be grounded by the snares and pounding bass drum to open up “All Souls Day” —Sara has arrived to complete this insane trio.
Don’t cross your fingers if you’re afraidCause nobody sings on all souls dayI won’t pray!
Or….
Don’t want to die so soonDon’t really think I willWon’t dwell on it, for the present do I kill
More relentless driving of bass and guitar to the center of my soul. Finishing with perhaps the most disarming of any song on the album “Envelope.”
I’ll shed no tears for the wasted yearI spend waiting hereDon’t know what I’ll doWhen you leave and don’t see you for a year
The whole idea of time passing and coping, it’s a song I’ve listened to endlessly when going through at least one breakup in my emo 20s. And let’s face it, this was a breakup from my bestest buddy. At this point, and we are at minute 36:00 of the show, I change gears a bit and reflect on the fact that the last few weeks have been pretty intense. Especially given I almost died roughly two weeks ago. I’ve already blogged that story, but I figured it might be worth an oral telling for the record. So there’s a pretty good 10-minute tale about how I almost fell of a cliff on the coast in Oregon and how the CUNY mafia saved my life. Hence, I cued up Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” given that Boone was serenading me with this one as a reminder that they saved my life!
After this tune I reflect a bit on that coastal trip to Oregon with the CUNY mafia. The constant music coming from Luke and Boone was my finest memory of our time together. Bursting out into songs I only half remember the lyrics to turns out to be one of my favorite pastimes. Luke was quietly picking away at The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” for a bit before I picked it up, and once in the groove I realized how much I love that song and how hard it is to sing.
Follow that up with The Police’s “Walking on the Moon” which came on the radio while Boone and I were picking up a pizza dinner for the house. The song came on and we start singing our hearts out—it was fitting not only for some of the lyrics, but we had already been talking quite a bit about the Police that weekend.
Some may sayI’m wishing my days awayNo wayAnd if it’s the price I paySome sayTomorrow’s another dayYou stayI may as well play
After that I moved the show back to its original focus, a tribute to Duke, by capitalizing on Apple Music’s algorithm and cueing up The Police’s “I Can’t Stand Losing You.”
After that I return to Unwound’s The Future of What to finish off the show with “Natural Disasters”:
We’re getting old
from what I’m told
Does life depend
on wreckages
This weekend was a definite wreck. And I’m getting old from what I’m told, but ds106radio is #4life.
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*You can go from Unwound’s first to their last album and they still speak as clearly and poignantly. Their music was always changing but that sense of speaking directly to me never did. To have an artistic output as consistent and relatively pure as that makes a great case for their ongoing relevance to future listeners.
I’ll listen to the recording later when I’m not pretending to work. But I love the way music finds a way of telling the stories of our lives. That’s what makes #ds106radio #4life
Ain’t it the truth, I got into some real storytelling on this one and it just seemed so natural because it was all so raw. Stories hold it all together, even when we’re not.
Definitely gonna find the recording on this one and share the space with you on time-delay.
It’s interesting, with everything I’ve been through in the last year, it’s been hard to give myself permission to lean into doing a #CryBabyCast. Everything had to be a little more intellectual and artful. And that’s OK. My practice and yours are allowed to be different.*
But every time you blog and name a practice like this, it expands my imagination of how I can use the station. Whether or not I do it, it’s good to see more options. So once again, I thank you.
*Actually, I’ve drafted a bunch of #InMyFeels casts and I think the act of sitting with those feelings and songs long enough to figure out what I really wanted to share was both interesting and healing. I’m glad I wrote the “stop the clocks” playlist when my Dad died, and I’m glad I broadcast the “let me tell you about my Dad through songs” radio wake. And maybe I couldn’t get to the second without the first.
Thankfully there’s no right way to do the ds106radio, and that is why we love it. I went into it because I needed it, but it kinda became both a release and an indirect wake for the Duke (not to mention all the others). I told more stories about the fateful weekend of slipping off a cliff a couple of weeks ago than I did Duke because I wasn’t up to taking it head on emotionally, but it felt really good to mourn through the music—which it sounds exactly like what you were doing. The storycast for Duke will come, but for now having a place to go and vent via sound was enough. No safer place than the radio.