Songs in the Key of Life

How the playlist I made when I thought I might die turned out to be an inadvertent example of the recent #20Tracks viral prompt.

A couple weeks ago someone posted something that went a little viral on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and I’m going to write about that now, even though writing about something that happened on social media two weeks ago is like serving someone a ham sandwich you made last month. But bear with me, because this is about the playlist I made when I thought I was going to die.

The prompt was simple: Pick 20 songs that bring you “instant joy,” that “give other people the best insight into what stirs your soul.” Here we go:

As usual with these things, I started seeing lists peppering my feed with increasing frequency—first a trickle, then a flood; first just among my music-writer friends, then way, way beyond. At the time of this writing, this tweet from a guy with just 800 followers now has 23K retweets and has been viewed 22M times¹. Why would such a modest, vanilla prompt produce such a huge response? I have some theories. As it happens, I had made a very similar playlist somewhat recently, but for very different reasons. 

This was a few months ago, and I was newly discharged from the hospital, which I was admitted to four nights earlier after showing up to the ER with abdominal pain and learning the pain was caused by “masses,” an ordeal you can read all about here and here. Despite those posts tipping over 5K words, I didn't even manage to get to the four-night stay that followed from that admission. It’s a lovely little story all on its own, involving a wacky attending physician who was not my oncologist and who dressed like Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack; tender moments when Danielle would lie next to me in the hospital bed at night and we’d watch The Office; copious opiods (good band name); and a series of tests plus a surgical biopsy to nail down my diagnosis. On this last point, although the mercurial and less-than-trustworthy Dr. Dangerfield let it slip that I most likely had lymphoma, the official word from my oncologist was that it’d take about a week for the final results to come back from the biopsy, and so we left the hospital in this weird is-it-cancer-or-isn’t-it limbo.

Back at home a few days later, still in lots of pain and bedridden, I developed a 103-degree fever on a Saturday evening. Understandably concerned, we reached out to the on-call doctor at the oncology office to see if this was something that required medical attention. He informed us it did not, which set our minds at ease, and then blurted out something like, “Oh hey, I have the results of your biopsy here…” WTF? 

His tone turned somber as he informed us the tests confirmed “aggressive” lymphoma. Now, it turns out that “aggressive” in this context is jargon—certain types of cancers can either be “aggressive” or “indolent,” and this determines how you treat them. But we didn’t know this! And the doctor didn’t explain it—he didn’t explain much of anything, in fact. It was Saturday night and he was, he told us, away from his computer, without access to the full report, and was just reading the summary off his phone—but no need to worry about the fever!

When the call ended, Danielle and I lay there in shocked silence. After several weeks of worsening pain and nerve-wracking ambiguity, my official diagnosis arrived like a brick thrown through our window, with a note that said: “aggressive cancer.”

Shortly after the brick landed, my fever broke and I started sweating a lot, plus crying. This was it! The end of the road. Was I ready? I don’t think I felt ready.

Sitting there on the living room couch, with Danielle and our three dogs all competing to console/snuggle with me, I started making the aforementioned list, playing the songs one by one through a portable bluetooth speaker. It looks like this:

As it turns out, making playlists has basically been my job for the last 20 years. I’ll write about this some other time maybe, but for now suffice it to say I’ve thought about this particular activity quite a bit more than the average person. In that moment, however, I didn’t think about anything—I just wanted to compile the songs that brought me the most comfort.

I suppose a crucial piece of criteria was that the song brought me “instant joy.” Without the added reassurance I’d later get that even so-called “aggressive” lymphoma is one of the more treatable cancers, I thought I’d just been given a death sentence, and so joy was in short supply. For the same reason—yes, definitely, these songs “give other people…insight into what stirs my soul.”

In that moment, what most stirred my soul was to have its contents churned up like a snow globe’s, to sit there in dim light with my wife and dogs and marvel at the flurry of memories these songs shook loose. I suspect that may be what’s really underlying this prompt and why it inspired so many people to participate: Our “all-time fav tracks” generally have fuck-all to do with the chin-stroking of criticism or the currents of popular taste. They’re not employed as the basis for some argument or as a means to impress our friends. Rather, they serve as little treasure maps to our most cherished memories. Who needs madeleines when you’ve got the Magnetic Fields?

For example “Colors and the Kids” by Cat Power. This song found me in ’98 or ’99, during my stint at NYU, when I lived in a markedly less gentrified East Village (you could still buy cocaine on street corners—oh the glory of it all). Those were such heady times for me. College. New York. Drugs. Snowstorms. Somewhere in there I first heard these lines, sung by Chan Marshall over the loneliest piano chords anyone’s ever played: “It’s so hard to cope in the city/ Cuz you want to say hello to everybody/ It’s so hard to go into the city/ Cuz you want to say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Back then a friend of mine’s parents owned the top floor of a building and there was this time we put a trampoline on the roof—a trampoline on the roof of a building in Manhattan—and spent an entire weekend smoking weed and launching ourselves into the skyline, like so:

Yes, this is me.

For example “River” by Leon Bridges. This is the song my wife walked down the aisle to. It rained like crazy that day—like rain on your wedding day!—and so instead of doing the ceremony outside underneath the shade of a historically significant magnolia tree² as planned, we had to squeeze all our guests into a nearby barn, and so when Danielle emerged all glowing and resplendent, I and all our friends were variously sweaty and rain-soaked on account of the group effort it took to orchestrate this last-minute change of plans. But when the song came on everything got church-mouse quiet; all you could hear was the steady thrum of rain and these acoustic guitar chords and Leon Bridges singing, “Been traveling these waters for so long/ My heart’s been far from you/ 10,000 miles gone/ Oh, I wanna come here and give you every part of me.” Despite the unexpected deluge, everything worked out and now it’s one of those memories where it’s impossible to imagine things transpiring any other way—the calamity that was this rare mid-October rainstorm gave the entire proceeding a spontaneous significance it would have lacked otherwise. And the song is called “River”!

“Car” by Built to Spill isn’t tied to a specific memory exactly but rather a constellation of memories, a series of points that ties my high school years together—the smell of my friend’s cracked leather seats as he’d drive us up the 405 freeway to shows in L.A.; the wallop of my first hangover; the handwriting of the girl I lost my virginity to (hi, AKO!), whose lilting script denoted the tracklist on the mixtape that introduced me to this song.

I could go on and on. I’m sure you could, too, if you had a mix like this, which maybe you do thanks to the virality of that tweet. It turns out I’m not going to die—at least not from cancer, not this time. But I’ll always have this playlist. I didn’t need a Twitter prompt to make it, just a handful of tumors and a really poorly timed bit of news.

Now wasn’t that a nice ham sandwich?

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This is the Healings Newsletter. It’s sent out on Thursdays.

It’s written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs.

It’s illustrated by Abner Clouseau, whose pen name we apologize for.

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 “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

1. Let us note that storied music producer, complicated social media presence, and OG indie snob Steve Albini chose the Proclaimers “500 Miles” as one of his jams, and with good reason I might add.

2. The same magnolia that was, supposedly, the namesake for the song “Sugar Magnolia” by the Grateful Dead, a fact I never confirmed but that was used as a selling point by the folks who rented us the property, even though we are not now nor have we ever been, I feel it’s important to mention, fans of the Grateful Dead.