My late brother and I lived in different cities, and we tended to have long and hectic phone conversations. Often, he talked and I listened, and many of his thoughts were about music. One day, he was imagining the best song to send at the end of a relationship. When hope was lost and all was ruined, what would be the perfect song to mark the finale?
I had questions. Would it be just one song? How would it be sent? If it went via WhatsApp, should there be an accompanying instruction to listen through quality headphones? You wouldn’t want it coming out all tinny from the phone. What if there was an inappropriate video? Would that create a distraction?
His tone was typical, tongue-in-cheek, satirical, yet serious, too. He was musical, could sing perfectly in tune, and had wide-ranging and eclectic tastes. He knew vastly more about music than I did. When we were kids, he spent years learning the piano with William Dart. (I dropped out after a month.)
My submissions were considered, dismissed; often they generated laughs. My first idea for a breakup song was Celebration, by Kool & the Gang. Anything that suggested madness, stalking, aggression, was clearly unsuitable. The anodyne and the sentimental were rejected. Comic songs were possible; these could suggest upbeat bullishness (onwards and upwards, good luck and farewell) although it depended on what you wanted to convey. There was the risk they’d be interpreted as a derisive fuck you.
It was the kind of loose, frivolous exchange that came naturally, wasn’t much thought about, and is now fixed as poignant memory. Occasionally, I climb my favourite maunga in Auckland, plug in my AirPods and run through those songs. Which is the banger, the one it would be perfect to send in any given situation?
There was the old sense of my brother as archivist and cataloguer, as boffin and expert. “It depends on context,” he would say. I snorted at his serious tone, while listening as usual, allowing him to run with his theme.
“One song,” he said, “can stand in the place of your silence.” I thought about it. “This song has a lot of work to do,” I said.
At our mother’s funeral the year before, The Carnival is Over had been chosen to accompany a photo montage. As the pictures flashed up, something went catastrophically wrong with the audio. The beautiful melody was reduced to a nightmare of crackles, buzzing and static.
The funeral director, Mike, took the glitch hard. He told me that when it went haywire, he’d wished the ground would open and swallow him. (This terminology seemed apt.) Mike was good at his job, smart, with a military bearing; the audio faux pas was a mortifying affront to his meticulous planning.
A journalist caused offence afterwards by reporting, inaccurately, that the grandchildren had laughed. This didn’t do justice to the collective agony, more writhing and wincing than mirth. The audio was restored in Mike’s commemorative video. It was a good choice of song, searing when played alongside the family album.
Months later, a relative confessed to me: our pew had been next to Mike’s funereal sound system, and we’d all been rather squashed in. He believed he might have sat on one of the cables.
At my brother’s funeral, one of his friends from a work singing group farewelled him with a lovely waiata. He would have approved. It depends on context, he said. Whether you’re remembering someone, breaking up or getting painfully dumped, which song is the perfect expression of loss? What’s playing as you delete the contact, archive the chat, say goodbye to the loved voice forever?
