If you listen to your iPod on shuffle play, and you’re in the right meditative state, I swear it can speak to you like the voice of God. For one thing, these are your tunes. If they didn’t have something to say to you in the first place, you had no business putting them on your iPod.
OK, it’s a free country and you can do what you want. But I don’t put whole Beatles albums on my iPod, and there isn’t a Beatles album I don’t love. What I put on my iPod are just those tunes, by the Beatles or anyone else, that say something that matters so much to me that I don’t mind if I hear it over and over again.
The result is that I’ve got about 450 special tunes on my iPod, enough of them to give me the illusion in shuffle play of a random soundtrack, but each of them loaded with a personal message that—depending on what’s happening in my life on the particular day that the particular song jumps out at me from the mix—have the potential to crush me where I stand.
For example, when my friend David died of cancer I held my composure through the yearlong illness and final three months in the hospice and the entire memorial service. My breakdown moment didn’t come until I was sitting in the airport the day after the service waiting for the plane back home. I was listening to my iPod, and each time a song came on that I loved but had never talked to David about, I’d wonder if he had heard that one.
Talking with David’s family about him at dinner the night before, I realized that comparing notes on books, movies, and particularly music was what David and I did for a friendship. When Springsteen’s Born to Run album came out he sat me down, put it on the record player and made me listen. When I discovered he had not tuned into Little Steven’s Underground Garage radio show, I took him to the website and made him listen. Repeatedly, the music that mattered to him mattered to me, and vice versa.
So I’m running my iPod in the airport, counting the songs that I could have asked him if he’d heard had he been sitting beside me. As I listened I got up to walk down to the Starbucks for a snack and Dylan came out of the earbuds, singing an old song, one he didn’t write and David didn’t hear, an Appalachian murder song called Delia.
They knew something about grief management in the mountains back then, because there were plenty of sources of it, so many that sometimes you just let go and created your own. There was a whole class of songs—The Willow Garden, Knoxville Girl, Delia—about murder. First you’d kill your girlfriend; then you’d write a song about it.
In Delia, it’s not the singer who did the killing, it was some other rounder, and Delia took too many chances herself, for that matter. “Delia was a gambling girl,” the singer explains, “she gambled all around. Delia was a gambling girl, she laid her money down. All the friends I ever had are gone.
“Delia’s dear mother took a trip out West. When she returned, little Delia had gone to rest. All the friends I ever had are gone.
“Delia’s mother wept, Delia’s father mourned. Wouldn’t have been so bad if the poor girl died at home. All the friends I ever had are gone.
“Cuddy’s looking high, Cuddy’s looking low. He shot poor Delia down with a cruel 44. All the friends I ever had are gone.
“Man in Atlanta is trying to pass for white. Delia’s in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight. All the friends I ever had are gone.
“Judge says to Cuddy, ‘What’s this noise about?’ ‘All about them rounders, Judge, try to cut me out.
“Cuddy said to the judge, ‘What might be my fine?’ Judge says, ‘Poor boy, you’ve got 99.’ All the friends I ever had are gone.
“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You loved all them rounders, but you never did love me.
“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You wanted all them rounders, never had time for me.
“All the friends I ever had are gone.”
I didn’t make it to the Starbucks or even to the end of the song. I was sobbing after the second stanza.
