My Last Dance
Five songs to play at my post-cremation wake
I fell into reading The Vinyl Room by Andrés Celati because I enjoy the author’s unique approach to exploring records, music culture, and the lived experience of vinyl listening and collecting.
Of particular interest to me were his efforts to describe the way music intersects with memory and life. So I was thrilled to participate in his Vital Records Series. My guest post there will go live on March 8, at 11 AM GMT (3:00 AM PST).
Andrés limits his contributors to just three records, but here on my own dancefloor, I’m happy to share with you the EP version of that list. There are five songs on this one. It’s the full playlist.
Three Five records I want played at my afterparty
There are just five songs I’ll request be played while my friends take a pinch of my ashes and sprinkle them beneath a well-lit disco ball.
Tame Impala - Let It Happen (Soulwax Remix)
The pandemic is over, and I’m 47 years old. As I shove candles into the buttercream frosting of my daughter’s eighth birthday cake the viscerality of the task reminds me that it’s been eight years and several months since I last slept with my wife.
I’m married, yet intensely lonely. I’m wondering whether I have it in me to “stay together for the kids” as friends have done. That would require another 10 years of celibacy. I’m wondering if I’m really going to blow up my marriage of over 20 years. These impossible math questions have swirled about in my head unanswered for at least three years.
That weekend, after the birthday party, I spontaneously decide to attend a music festival, drop acid, and dance my questions, a process that involves letting my body find through movement the answer to questions that stumped my mind.
And then it happens.
In the middle of the all-day dance party called Despacio, the DJs put Tame Impala’s Let It Happen (Soulwax Remix) on the turntable, and the song on that 100,000-watt soundsystem picks me up and turns me round, pointing me in the right direction:
I heard about a whirlwind that’s coming ‘round
It’s gonna carry off all that isn’t bound
And when it happens, when it happens (I won’t be holding on)
So, let it happen, let it happen
The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build a Home
‘Cause, I built a home
For you
For me
Until it disappeared
From me
From you
Building a home for my family was something I had to do.
As a newborn, I was brought home from the hospital into a home that my father had built himself from foundation to roof. He was a skilled carpenter and builder. He was also a violent alcoholic, so he tragically (but figuratively) destroyed the home he’d built by making it impossible for my mother to live in it with him anymore. In the middle of the night, she decided she’d been hit for the last time, and succeeded at leaving him, bundling her three children aged six, four, and two into her getaway vehicle at 3AM one winter morning.
I lived in that one home for the first six years of my life. Over the next 11 years, I lived in 19 other places, but none of those places ever felt like home to me.
So building a home, and then not repeating history by sabotaging it, was a personal quest of great importance. Here are my two children breaking ground in the dirt on which the home was built. Though I did almost sabotage it by initiating divorce, I’m happy to report that my kids are still living under the roof I built for them.
My kids have this home I built, until it disappears. It won’t go away today, nor tomorrow (I hope). But as this song so eloquently reminds us, everything becomes dust. Even the stuff we build out of stone or out of “forever” vows.
Capy - Manncool & Trol2000 edit of Capone - Music Love Song
A year after my decision to pursue divorce, the prophetic lyrics of “Let It Happen” have proven true. Like Dorothy, I’ve been sucked into a whirlwind of my own making, my everything uprooted. Routines shattered. Tears shed. Lawyers hired. Children knocked dizzy by the energy of our cracked nucleus. I’m fundamentally unmoored but also very much alive.
In the storm, I’ve found a community of fellow seekers. We meet on dancefloors for marathon-length parties a few times a year in locations such as Ibiza, Ghent, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, and Miami.
One of these parties -- happening just once or twice a year -- is Despacio. The dancers all have their favorites that they hope the DJs will play, but many of them look forward to “Capy,” an illegal vinyl pressing of an unauthorized edit of Capone’s Music Love Song by Manncool & Trol2000. The song is so iconic that some members of the community wear t-shirts emblazoned with the song’s chorus, hoping that it will be played.
When the song lands, the dancers look each other in the eyes and sing the lyrics to each other.
The Talking Heads - This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
Another one on the theme of home. These lyrics do something I love. Though they’re simple they avoid cliches, using language that remains fresh and new in a genre that’s seen so much cheesy dreck.
The lyrics summon a feeling of home and love with language that’s presented in eight stanzas of varied rhyme schemes that start with structure and fall into organic irregularity, like the beating of a weak heart afflicted by disorganized beating:
ABCB
ABCB
ABCB
ABB
ABCD
ABCB
AA
ABC
ABCB
DEBFE
I could write several thousand words on the poetry of this song, but I’ll spare you and cite just two of my favorite lines from the song.
Is there a more perfectly romantic notion than finding someone you can ask to “sing into my mouth”?
Can you imagine a better death than being loved until the end?
Love me ‘til my heart stops
Love me ‘til I’m dead
RECORD: PACHANGA BOYS TIME (15:15)
On January 1, 2026, John Digweed played this song for me (and several hundred others) at Stereo Montreal on the occasion of John Digweed’s 59th birthday. The distinctive match/lightning-strike at the beginning of the song made my knees buckle. I wasn’t ready to hear one of my death party tunes on that magical dancefloor.
I did what I had to do to survive the moment. I put on my sunglasses, held my partner tight, and ugly cried while I imagined the monster time that would inevitably eat everything I love, including, eventually, my ability to dance.
Some years later -- none of us reading this right now know how many years, exactly -- my ashes lie in an urn as one of my loved ones lowers a needle onto the record, chosen for this moment by me because it’s a memento mori in a tidy package, a 15-minute opus that makes time stand still even as it slips and keeps slipping into the future. Minutes flash by, then years pass, all in the span of 15 minutes.
OUTRO
I’m counting on my friends to throw an afterparty for me where these songs are played for the last time. As one of my loved ones takes “Let It Happen” off the record player and prepares to drop the needle on “Capy,” I hope that they’ll get on the mic and read aloud the script I prepared for this moment. It’s my final request.
Grab a little baggie.
Take a pinch of ash from the urn.
Put the ash in the baggie.
Smuggle it onto one of my favorite dancefloors.
(Don’t act shocked. I know some of you have snuck baggies in before.)
Drop a pinch of me into the center of the dancefloor.
If you’ve smuggled me into Panorama Bar, you’d be putting my Arsch Asche on the Tanzfläche, and that’s some kind of poetry right there.If you’ve smuggled a pinch of me into Pikes, Despacio, or Stereo, sprinkle it right under the ball. And then ...
Dance on me.Dance with me.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Let it happen.”
The DJ will then be instructed to turn it up until my bone fragments rattle in the urn like dice in a cup. My bones take one last tumble under the disco ball.
Wonderful stuff. So enjoy this pairing of tracks and life tales. Fantastic to stumble upon your Substack. Thanks for the music and words - super awesome 🤩