FUNERAL PLAYLIST

In this essay collection, Gorham, the founder of Sarabande Books, reviews her life’s losses through songs that helped her to understand them.

The author writes that she was collecting melancholy music long before she thought that it might serve as a suitable playlist for her inevitable funeral. After all, there are many times in life when a sad song is necessary: “No life in its many stages is without bereavement,” writes Gorham in her introductory note. “And, whether it’s the thunder and brilliance of Mozart’s Requiem, the sultry, somber notes of Nina Simone’s love song, or the simple Irish melody of ‘The Parting Glass,’ elegiac music gives us access to deeper regions of thought and imagination.” Those are just three of the dozen songs that have informed Gorham’s sense of mortality; Vivaldi’s “Winter,”  for instance, reminds her of foolish risks she took as a teenager in Switzerland, and of a Vespa crash that nearly killed her husband. Jeri Southern’s version of “Dancing on the Ceiling,” from the musical Ever Green, allows her to consider how death and life are inversions of each other. The author effectively ruminates on the uncanny marriage of music and loss across multiple genres, from classical to blues to folk rock, and even some unrecorded, diegetic melodies. The call of the mourning dove—perchoo-oo-oo-o, in Gorham’s rendering—is the sound the author associates with her mother’s illness and death from cancer; her mother’s absent-minded hum, “a stay against chaos, a modest argument against death,” gets a brief chapter. Music is famously a difficult art form to capture on the page, but Gorham has the imaginative vocabulary to succeed at it; she also has a talent for the succinct, poetic observation: “A song is a living thing that occupies a body very briefly,” she writes. “Either it dies from lack of use, or it moves along through the centuries evolving, as generations come and go.” Overall, these essays are perhaps a bit too free of incident to be completely captivating, but there are many thoughtful passages that will stick in the mind.

A melodic medley about music and memory.