St. James Infirmary (Gambler’s Blues), by Louis Armstrong
In the book, this is the song that August Sweeney, our gargantuan, titular chef, plays on a loop over and over the night he calls his lawyer and changes his will, an act that kicks the whole story into motion. It’s a song about visiting a morgue to see your girl: “I went down to St. James Infirmary/To see my baby there/She was stretched out on a long white table/So cold, so sweet, so fair.” Then he sings about what to do with his body when he dies. It’s a gloriously funereal version of the song, slow and sure as the sweep of a pendulum on a clock tower. It’s not a song about fear, but about fascination.
Burial Blessing, by Johnny Flynn and Robert MacFarlane
The Moon Also Rises is a miraculous 2023 album by singer/actor Johnny Flynn and author Robert MacFarlane, the Radagast of British nature writing. Most of the songs are about death and rebirth, but this is the one I listen to when I want to run through a fucking wall. The song is a full-throated roar in the face of death, a lush catalogue of human burial ritual, all of which Flynn, accompanied by a chorus, implores us to do to him. “Bury me there in the old hearths glare/Bury me deep in the dunes by the sea/Bury me under the open air/Bury me in the roots of a tree.” The singer yearns to join with the earth again, to return to us “in the undertow, where the brambles grow.” The song charges forward, never stopping, but always returning to one commandment: “Be not afraid!”
Spirit in the Sky, by Norman Greenbaum
My favorite thing about this is that the best rock song about loving Jesus was written by a Jewish kid named Norman Greenbaum. The story goes that he was listening to Porter Wagoner sing gospel, and thought, “yeah, I could do that.” He knocked the lyrics out in 15 minutes, and it became a hit (Greenbaum’s only one, but dayenu.) I’m Jewish, and think a lot of us are mystified by the certainty devout Christians seem to have that “when I die and they lay me to rest/I’m gonna go to the place that’s the best.” To be Jewish is to immediately distrust anyone selling certainty, but also, I think we’re lying if we say we don’t envy the gentiles who walk through life with the conviction that God has their back. We know better. My grandfather used to say, “I know we’re the chosen people, but maybe we could be a little less chosen?”
Prayer (Oh Doctor Jesus), from Porgy and Bess, by Miles Davis and Gil Evans
In high school I used to sit in the dark of my room and listen to this and go into a full-ass trance. It builds like nothing you’ve ever heard. From Davis and Evans’ exquisite Porgy and Bess album, this is the closest jazz has gotten to capturing God in a box. There are no words, only the susurration of the band under Davis’s trumpet, and the theremin Evans introduces to pair with the horn as the music crescendos in gathering waves. It is stupid for me to try to describe it. It’s 4 minutes and 39 seconds long, and to listen to it is to feel the shadow of death pass over you, and emerge unharmed.
Atlantic City—Live at First Union Center, by Bruce Springsteen
The epigraph to this book could have been “everything dies, baby, that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” I didn’t actually get into Springsteen until I was a dad; read into that what you will. But this song just floors me every time. Then there’s the fact that the speaker’s reckless abandon mirrors August’s. Springsteen’s character is who August thinks he is, even when at he’s at his most wealthy and powerful. And when I listen to him sing it live, it feels like superhuman somehow—you can’t believe he’s this good. This book has a lot to with fame and celebrity, and I find that there’s a deep satisfaction in hearing a galactically-famous person like Springsteen fully demonstrate why he deserves that fame.
The Old Churchyard, by Offa Rex
For sheer infatuation with the reaper, the entire death metal genre has nothing on old Appalachian hymns. There’s a whole genre I’ve taken to calling “God I can’t wait to die and get out of here.” Olivia Chaney’s rendition of this one transfixed me when I first heard it. I sang it to both of my sons when they were babies. Which I realize is a little fucked up, since it’s about craving death. But it’s just so lush. The final lines are “I rest in the hope that one bright day/Sunshine will break through this prisons of clay/And old Gabriel’s trumpet and the voice of the lord/Will wake up the dead in the old churchyard.” My firstborn’s name is Gabriel, so named because he could wake the dead. When I sing it to him—and I still do—I never really get through that last line without breaking.
Say Hallelujah, by Tracy Chapman
This one’s just joy: “Say hallelujah! The bucket is kicked, the body is gone.” It gives mourners the thing that they feel they cannot do—and can’t, for the moment, imagine ever doing again: be happy. August Sweeney isn’t just about a chef, but also the woman taking him apart, Dr. Maya Zhu, a pathologist for whom death is an everyday reality. It is her job to be rigorously unsentimental about death, because there are always people to mourn and praise, but there’s only one of her. But in forcing herself to be unsentimental she’s walled off the parts of herself that can feel joy, too. The novel, ultimately, is about how even across the barrier of death, August manages to help her restore that part of herself.
Memphis Soul Stew, by King Curtis
This is also a book about glorious, elaborate, indulgent food. It’s about a man with cooks with soul, and a woman who doesn’t believe there’s any such thing, but if there were, the way to it would run through the mouth and tongue. I spent time working in a Michelin-starred kitchen to research this, and this song, which is a recipe for “Memphis Soul” (“Gimme a pound of fat-back drums”) is just about the best kitchen bop I’ve ever heard.
The Rubberband Man, by the Spinners