Death Is Not The End
Join host, singer-songwriter Lo Carmen, as she travels through the valley of death and emerges on the other side, exploring how we remember, eulogise and celebrate our loved ones, end of life navigations, mind-blowing death rituals and customs from all around the world , incredible innovations and futuristic options for after life planning, fascinating insights from Death’s door and examinations into the intersections of Art, Music, Life, Death and beyond. Artwork 'Surrounded By Your Beauty' by Craig Waddell. Original Theme Music by Peter Head. ©Black Tambourine Productions
Death Is Not The End
The Trees & Flowers & Creeks & Rocks Hold Your Face With Every Season
In this episode, Lo Carmen converses with songwriter and artist Will Oldham, aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, about how music can help us process and explore death and remember loved ones, dementia, funeral songs, tribute albums, recording with Johnny Cash, David Ferguson and Cowboy Jack Clement, strange dreams, parties in the graveyard and more.
The title of this episode is a lyric from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy song 'Missing One'.
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy Bandcamp here.
David Ferguson Bandcamp here.
Thank you to Will Oldham for permission to play excerpts from the below songs:
'My Home Is The Sea' (Sweeney/Oldham) from the album Superwolf by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & Matt Sweeney
'Hall of Death' (Madassane/Sweeney/Oldham) & 'Resist The Urge' (Sweeney/Oldham) from the album Superwolves by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & Matt Sweeney
'Cycles' (Judith Caldwell) from the album Ask Forgiveness by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
'Missing One' (Oldham) from the album Lie Down In The Light
'Death To Everyone' - (Oldham) from the album I See A Darkness
Thanks to David Ferguson for permission to play 'Boats To Build' from his album Nashville No More, written by Guy Clark & Verlon Thompson.
Thanks to Robyn Adele Anderson for permission to use an excerpt from her version of 'If I Die Young' (Perry) originally performed by The Band Perry
'Black Tambourine' (Carmen) from the album Everyone You Ever Knew Is Coming Back To Haunt You by Lo Carmen
Thanks to Lolo Lovina for permission to use their live porch recording of 'Bubamara' (Bajramovic)
Cover versions of 'Suzanne' (Cohen), 'My Way' (Anka), 'Aloha Oe' (Queen), 'When The Saints Go Marching In' (Traditional) performed & recorded by Peter Head.
Original 'Death is Not the End' theme and incidental music composed, performed & recorded by Peter Head.
'Death Is Not The End' sting, composed by Bob Dylan, performed & recorded by Peter Head
Répertoire licensed by APRA AMCOS.
Thank you to Craig Waddell for permission to feature his artwork '. Surrounded By Your Beauty' for 'Death Is Not The End'. See more of his work here.
'Death Is Not The End' created, recorded & edited by Lo Carmen
Black Tambourine Productions ©2025
©Black Tambourine Productions 2025 ...
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The human race has become pretty adept at finding solutions for our problems. When our bodies break down, we go to a doctor. We turn to plumbers when we want to fix leaky taps and mechanics when something goes wrong with our cars. But when something goes wrong with our hearts or we're grieving or lost or feel alone, we tend to turn to more mysterious places like songs. Lyrics and melodies that resonate can provide comfort and lift us up when nothing else works. Countless, timeless songs of Will Oldham, who also represents Bonnie Prince Billy, have helped many of us make some kind of sense of life, love, death and other swirling matters of the soul and the universe, while holding out a metaphysical hand along the way. So I reached out to the man behind the songs to see if we could have a conversation investigating life and death and the power of music to help process it all, At the time of our talk, Will had just released the 2021 Superwolves album, made with Matt Sweeney. He has released a bunch of other music since then, including his magnificent latest album, The Purple Bird, that definitely has a few songs we could have discussed here if we could have skated through time and into the future.
Lo Carmen:I feel like you've written lots of songs that have touched on death in one way or another.
Will Oldham:Yeah.
Lo Carmen:It's funny, it seems to keep popping up, doesn't it?
Will Oldham:It's just some place that we can naturally go because music immediately pulls us out of certain spaces and into an abstraction. And once you're in the abstract space, you come face to face with... The denizens of those spaces.
Lo Carmen:All the big stuff.
Will Oldham:Just hanging around drinking, smoking cigarettes, death.
Lo Carmen:Smoking cigarettes in the cosmos. I was listening to Hall of Death before, off your latest. That's a great one.
Will Oldham:Thank you.
Lo Carmen:Where did that come from?
Will Oldham:It may be the least worked on lyric that I can think of of any song because it was... We were gathering for a recording session in New York, and I got to town. I think we went over to the apartment of Mikey Colton, who's going to be playing bass, and we all got together. Instruments got plugged in, and people started playing, and then I just sat in the corner with my notebook while a song was taking form and put words down, and then we went into the recording studio the next day and recorded it. So I don't usually work like that.
Lo Carmen:Yeah, that's great. Fresh out of the box.
Will Oldham:Yeah, yeah.
Lo Carmen:It kind of reminds me of that great Brenda Lee song My Whole World is Falling Down.
Will Oldham:I don't know it.
Lo Carmen:It's just, it's a really kind of jaunty feeling song, but with a lyric that's kind of tragic. It's a wonderful opposition that brings it to a kind of really vibrant, strange, great place.
Will Oldham:Yeah, the song is addressing, I guess at the time my mother was still alive and she was, I didn't know, but she was coming to the end of a long 13 or 14 year relationship with dementia and Alzheimer's. And there was a period of time where I had found good caregivers who could stay in her house with her. And then maybe about five years ago, one of them, I was in Nashville working on some music, thought, you know, I could get away for a couple of days. And I got a call from, we have here, you probably have hospice there, right? Hospice care. Yeah. So we had a relationship with hospice care. And there was a woman who would come in addition to the caregivers that I had hired. There was a woman who would come and just spend an hour on Tuesday mornings with my mom and read.
Lo Carmen:Just as a friendly
Will Oldham:person. Yeah. And so I got a call from hospice and they said, and I was in Nashville, and they said, we've just got a message from your mom's house and your caregiver has died. And I was like, I don't know. No, there's a message that's not been communicated properly. So what are you saying? And they're like, yeah, that's our message is that your caregiver has died. I was like, no, I don't think so. But actually, that is what had happened. We don't know exactly what happened, but somehow she fell on– maybe she had a stroke, maybe she fainted, but for some reason she fell for, fell, fell backwards off some like three, three steps in the back porch and crushed her skull. And so then I tried and she was great. She was like,
Lo Carmen:was she a family friend? She
Will Oldham:had become one. She had become kind of one of my closest friends. Like whenever I, every time we just, we were close and, and she, so then I needed to, fill in some, you know, I needed to get somebody to help take care. And I found somebody who spent a year at my mom's house and was ultimately just chaotic and terrible. And so then I did what I didn't want to do, which was take my mom to a, you know, assisted living facility is what they call it, but it's really, you know, an assisted dying facility.
Lo Carmen:Yeah. Yeah.
Will Oldham:And it was one that was just a couple of blocks from her house. I could, I wheeled her over there. And, and by that point, apparently
Lo Carmen:she was aware.
Will Oldham:No, I don't think so. I don't think she was aware at all, but, but it is, you know, it's the last place. A lot of us want to see anyone that we know or love.
Lo Carmen:Yeah. It's tough stuff.
Will Oldham:And so that was kind of the, and, and then, and then, you know, didn't know, you know, part of me had the, the dark wish that she would be somewhat aware and would hate it so much that she would give up the ghost at some point. But it took a few years still. And, yeah, it was like going to visit her was very...
Lo Carmen:Confronting?
Will Oldham:Yeah, it was confronting and demoralizing and...
Lo Carmen:Not what you want for your mom anymore.
Will Oldham:Yeah, and just trying to, you know, like we're, if you're spending time with somebody who's in late stages dementia, you don't know who is there. You just kind of work on faith.
Lo Carmen:Was she distressed in her dementia?
Will Oldham:At that point, no. She had gone through a state, I mean, at that point she was, I mean, she hadn't, I'm not sure if she'd said an intelligible word in a few years. So it was impossible to know if there was something that we could call emotion or recognize as emotion that she was experiencing. But she's still my mother's body, right? Yeah. And maybe my mother's soul. I'm not sure I will know. So it's going... know again and again and again and again and again and again and again to see her or to see her physical body and to communicate with the staff and and just to whatever sit there and read a book or watch a movie with her do a crossword puzzle you know in her room or and then it
Lo Carmen:Just to be physically present. Yeah, and then
Will Oldham:ultimately to like, you know, her granddaughter is born, to bring the granddaughter there, because do you not bring her there or do you bring her there? I choose to bring her there, but I don't know if that, you know, is that a good decision or a bad decision? She didn't react. No. And so anyway, those lyrics came out because they're going over that kind of thing. And then when we went in to record it, the Mdu Mokhtar, who played some lead guitar on it, you know. Or Matt Sweeney said, tell Mdu what it's about. So I told him what it was about. I just said, it's about, you know, somebody in a nursing home. It's just a living facility. And he was like... That's the worst. Americans are the worst because they do that. They have no respect and no love for their loved ones. Because he's from Niger and he's like, we don't do that in Niger. And, you know, I didn't disagree with it. But in addition to being one of the quickest lyrics I've ever written, it was one of the, you know, it was the most distressing and painful, you know, recording sessions because because it ultimately and it's so it's it's interesting when people react to the song and talk about its its jauntiness and its liveliness because it's yeah you know it's just it's always like yeah there's always just i mean people don't really listen to lyrics i think uh you know kind of people don't listen lyrics that's just people don't listen lyrics yeah Yeah. So you can write anything you want. You can write anything you want in a lyric and you can get away with
Lo Carmen:it. You really can. And people just take whatever they need to hear. Yeah. Yeah.
Will Oldham:Yeah. Yeah. But it's the hall of death. So the hall of death, it's like when you're going down those corridors and you're seeing people just, you know, many of whom are evidently abandoned by God and family. And those are, that's what there's, always seem to be, and God bless all the people who work in those places.
Lo Carmen:Yeah, well, I didn't hear that at all. So
Will Oldham:one more time, I see myself here, a mountain of someone who's never death again But it's rough. It's rough that those places do exist. You know? Yeah.
Lo Carmen:Yeah. And, I mean, it is rough, too, that it's not more normalized, I guess, to know how to look after our family in those kind of extreme circumstances. Yeah. You know, it seems... Seems like the wrong thing to do.
Will Oldham:Seems like the wrong thing to do, yeah. You're looked down upon if you care for your folks, yeah.
Lo Carmen:In certain circles. I mean, in my circles, yeah. It's like they need professional help.
Will Oldham:Yeah.
Lo Carmen:They need people that know what they're doing. Have you ever written your own eulogy?
Will Oldham:No.
Lo Carmen:No?
Will Oldham:No. Are
Lo Carmen:you sure?
Will Oldham:I'm pretty sure. I don't think so,
Lo Carmen:yeah. I feel like... I've attempted my own eulogy a few times, like in a slightly tongue-in-cheek kind of fashion.
Will Oldham:Yeah. Wouldn't know where to begin.
Lo Carmen:Apparently Frank Sinatra hated singing My Way, but it became a hit so fast, not that he wrote it, but it became a hit so fast he had to sing it his whole life and he never really related to it.
Will Oldham:Yeah. Yeah. I suppose, yeah, there was a little... collection of sort of eulogy slash soliloquy songs that I put together in the early 2000s called Ask Forgiveness, where I covered songs that all seemed to be eulogy-esque, but in first person. They were summing up somebody's existence, but not my own, because they were all
Lo Carmen:other people's. So were they all eulogizing songs? the same person or a bunch of people? A
Will Oldham:bunch of people. I mean, it was a bunch of, you know, it was all different songwriters just sort of talking about I thought of it because one of them is a song by a woman named Gail Caldwell called Cycles that was one of Rick Sinatra's later hits, late 60s, yeah. That is, you know, it runs, it's like a, I'm going to say, though I feel strange about saying, you know, maybe where my way is Paul Anka's masculine eulogy, then Cycles is a feminine, it's written by this woman, Gail Caldwell, who was very... It's much more introspective. There's no bombast in it whatsoever. Life is like the seasons After winter comes the spring So I'll keep this smile wide open It's a gorgeous song. Yeah, I mean, Sinatra's is great. I grew up with his greatest hits, Volume 2, which included My Way and Cycles, and his version of Kermit the Frog's Being Green as well.
Lo Carmen:Fantastic. I'll have to listen to that one as well. have you had many people use your songs for funerals and tell you about it?
Will Oldham:Well, I'm not aware. I'm not aware of that happening, but once again, like on, on this new super wolves record that Matt Sweeney and I made, there's a song called resist the urge, which in the process of making it, I got in the habit in the past few years of asking my, putting a piece of paper on the wall and ask my wife to write song titles. And then I'll, have to see what I can do about making a song around the titles that she gives. And she had put up the unfortunate title of, uh, something like if I die before I wake, you know, and I was like, okay, well, what the fuck, where's that going to go? That's, it can't be fun. And I,
Lo Carmen:thanks honey.
Will Oldham:Yeah. And so then that's why I put this little refrain after most of the lines, which is resist the urge. Cause it's just the resist the urge to go to any of the places where, a songwriter would go or a listener would want to go or anyone would want to go with that phrase and try to think, well, where else can I potentially go with it? And it ended up being this song that when we finished the song, I thought and think like, oh, we've made our first funeral rock song. Because I attended a friend's funeral years ago, and there was a song there by– An American pop country band called The Band Perry. Do you know The Band Perry at all?
Lo Carmen:I know their name, but I don't know that I know any songs.
Will Oldham:I think they had a couple of hits, and one of them was called If I Die Young. And it's... It's so intense. It's kind of
Lo Carmen:upbeat.
Will Oldham:Wow, this is probably a market, right? I mean, I can't imagine the band Perry, maybe. Maybe their manager said, you know what? We could really make a lot of money. We
Lo Carmen:could make a
Will Oldham:month's worth. Yeah, because when we had this song, I thought, you know, I think that this song is going to be played at somebody's funeral sometime, somewhere, and it's built for it. It is from top to bottom. It's like... It is an unsinkable funeral song. And I have mixed feelings about it because it's a pretty positive song. It's definitely celebrating the life of somebody who's discussing passing over. But it's strange to be a part of a song that... I mean, and I knew it from seeing the title that my wife had given me. I just thought... This is, you know, this is going to be a dark thing. Yeah. But then I tried to, we tried to, I mean, and then Sweeney tried to uplift it even further with fairly upbeat music. It's really, you know, it makes you feel kind of good to hear it, but it's all about dying. If I should die before I wake Resist the urge, resist the urge Cry or falter for my sake I didn't die, I didn't die If you should wake and I'm not there Resist the urge, resist the urge I'm in your breath, I'm in your air I haven't gone away I'm holding you Singing strong and constant in your ear I may not be there bodily But in the wind I'm
Lo Carmen:here Amazing. I had a weird experience writing a song about imagining myself dying and just imagining all the shitty stuff that I've got. I don't have anything good to give to anyone. And I looked over and saw my tambourine. I went, oh, my tambourine's really good. Like, who would I give my tambourine to? So I wrote this song called Black Tambourine and recorded it. And then a friend of our family's died, an older woman, a singer, who had been incredibly formative for me. And I was given her old black tambourine. And it was quite a kind of spooky, amazing little coincidence.
Will Oldham:We ain't got long to go It goes down fast and it comes up slow
Lo Carmen:Yeah, I was looking up funeral songs, like what the popular ones are. And I was quite surprised, like Wind Beneath My Wings is like one of the very top ones. There's a Robbie Williams song called Angels that I don't know, but I'm going to listen to. That's also one of the very top ones. I think that there's definitely a big market for A really, really good funeral song. Yeah. We need one.
Will Oldham:Yeah. And the next question, obviously, is are funeral parlors good about paying royalties?
Lo Carmen:Ah.
Will Oldham:Probably not.
Lo Carmen:That... I'm going to make a note about
Will Oldham:that.
Lo Carmen:Surely they have to.
Will Oldham:Yeah, I'm trying to think of the songs. I just saw a program for my mom's funeral, and I know we did, Sweeney sang Suzanne, and there was another, because that was one of my mom's songs. So yeah, I wonder if the estate of Leonard Cohen made a royalty off my mom's funeral or not.
Lo Carmen:Well, I guess if Sweeney would have to put it on his live performance return.
Will Oldham:Well, here I think that you know venues are supposedly responsible we don't I mean in America there's so much more I'll say casual meaning that it almost doesn't exist like you do not catalog the songs that you perform at live venues and they don't unless maybe you're in Nashville or New York and they have a relationship to the ASCAP BMI you know royalty collection
Lo Carmen:agencies you do in Australia it's artists do it themselves
Will Oldham:yeah and in Europe as well and you know you yeah and you go there and then and you realize that The laws are likely in place in the United States, and they're just completely ignored. Yeah, right. I don't know if the funerals in Australia, though, yeah, if the funeral organist plays a song, does she or he have to then tell the funeral director, like, these are the songs that were performed here, and then do they have to pay the, I don't know.
Lo Carmen:I'm going to look into that. That's a whole new sideline to music. To discover. Have you ever had to sing at a funeral? Did you sing at your mom's funeral?
Will Oldham:I couldn't have sung at my mom's funeral. Emmett and I sang at my great uncle's funeral. My great uncle was a wonderful, fun man. And he was an amateur magician whose stage name was Can Do, which he spelled wrong. K-A-N-D-U, can do the magician. And yeah, he died maybe a decade ago, and Emmett was in town, and I guess someone said, you know, would you sing something? And so Emmett and I sang We'll Meet Again at his funeral, which was great. So as an amateur magician, I guess a tradition among the magician world is that a magic wand is broken, like at the pulpit, you know, in front of everybody. And so that was done. And there were also like magic tricks on everybody's seats, which was really neat. So you got to take home a souvenir, the kind of things that he would have brought to our birthday parties when we were children. And then also I have a slew of friends who are music therapists. And one of them named Brian Schreck, he works specifically in hospice music. but for children. And he was working for a while. Cincinnati is about an hour and a half away, and he was working at the hospital in Cincinnati. And he asked myself, another music therapist friend, Cheyenne Mize, and Emmett. Again, we went up there to the hospital, and every year they have one funeral recognizing all of the children who passed in the hospital that year. So we sang... A couple of songs there. And then I also sang at my friend's funeral, who I heard the band Perry song, If I Die Young. I did sing a song. We were on a beach in Indiana, on Lake Michigan, and sang a song there. That might be all of the... funeral. Oh, and my grandmother's funeral. My brothers and I sang. She spent some time in Hawaii. My mother was born in Hawaii. So we sang Aloha Oye and we sang Swing Low Sweet Cherry because that was
Lo Carmen:her favorite hymn. Gorgeous. That's
Will Oldham:beautiful. So a bunch.
Lo Carmen:Yeah.
Will Oldham:It's easier to sing at a funeral. I mean, I couldn't have sung at my mom's funeral. I just wouldn't have been able to handle it. But singing at a funeral is easier than singing at a wedding because the person you're so nervous to for somebody who's getting married. Like you're like, Oh, you're listening to me and I'm doing something at this important, you know, whereas the person who's passed away, they're just like, do your thing. You can't, you can't go wrong.
Lo Carmen:There is that. That's funny. Do you listen to music much to particular songs to sing up the memory of people that have gone?
Will Oldham:I mean, there was a, there was a song that I, that I made in the middle of my mom's descent into dementia that I would sing while she was still alive to sing up the memory of her, I guess. And then I guess after my father died, which was 15 years ago, like next week, I think, there's a song called Missing One that I made... that's on a record called Lie Down in the Light. That's like just a fully, a song of, you know, of memory and grieving. I know that missing me has just begun There's years to come And trying to sleep tonight Next to your kin Is fully lovely As I've ever been But I wouldn't trade my life For someone's millions And I know you left For a reason And the trees and flowers And creeks and rocks Hold your face with every season.
Lo Carmen:Beautiful. That's such a beautiful album,
Will Oldham:that one. Thank you.
Lo Carmen:What about I See a Darkness? That's a song that people seem to associate with thinking about death. Is that correct?
Will Oldham:Well, I mean, on that record, the I See a Darkness record, there's the Death to Everyone, which is far more death-centric. But, yeah, I think I see a darkness implies that there's still some living to be wrung out of life and, you know, some reason to, against certain odds, reason to hope that... There's
Lo Carmen:more to come.
Will Oldham:Yeah, there's more to come. The continuance has value, yeah.
Lo Carmen:Yeah. It must have been amazing to hear Johnny Cash singing that
Will Oldham:towards the end of his life. Yeah.
Lo Carmen:And it sounds like he was at a place where he knew he was approaching the end of his life. I wonder if the time in that song was smaller for him in the contemplation than it was for you when you sang it.
Will Oldham:Yeah.
Lo Carmen:Did you sing that? With him, I know you're on the record as well.
Will Oldham:Yes, absolutely.
Lo Carmen:Wow. How special.
Will Oldham:It was so special because, yeah, he was just, he was even, he had sung, he'd taken a pass at the vocal and he wasn't comfortable with where he was hitting the beats, essentially. And so he asked if I would sing it over the instrumental track that they had. And then he could use that as a guide. And then he still... Then he tried it with my voice. And he still wasn't... I don't... I mean, you can imagine, like, I could not hear any flaw, you know, because I was just so... You know, I couldn't even believe I was in the room. So I couldn't hear a flaw. I would love... You know, it will never happen. It maybe doesn't even exist, but I'd love to hear... that pass again that he did even with my voice or the one before, because each of, each of those that I heard, I thought sounded magnificent because they were magnificent, but he still didn't like it. But then when
Lo Carmen:wasn't hitting it for him.
Will Oldham:Yeah. So then, but they had put both of our voices up on the playback speakers and, you know, everybody kind of agreed that the voices sounded good together. So, so then the next decision was for me to go just sit, next to him in the vocal booth and just give him his cues for each line
Lo Carmen:like conduct johnny cash that's what i did
Will Oldham:i sat i sat you know we just sat like six inches apart uh you know with our knees six inches apart he would just look at me and i i would point to him you know and then and then i sang a harmony over his part afterwards
Lo Carmen:yeah amazing
Will Oldham:so yeah it was me yeah you can't yeah you can't imagine you can't even fantasize that something like that you know that's the kind of thing that
Lo Carmen:would happen
Will Oldham:yeah yeah yeah like I had a dream once where for some reason like I went into a bathroom and I like pooped all over the room and I think it was maybe in Sinead O'Connor's apartment and she came in and cleaned it all up you know And, like, that's the kind of thing that happens in a dream. Another thing that happens in a dream is that you conduct Johnny Cash singing, you know, that you sit next to him, you know, like Johnny Cash. You're like, I had this dream where I was sitting right next to Johnny Cash and he was asking me how to sing. A song.
Lo Carmen:And so I conducted it. And so I conducted it.
Will Oldham:I mean, right? That's just a dream. That's a story of a dream.
Lo Carmen:Are you sure you didn't dream it?
Will Oldham:I mean, there's a record that exists and people ask me about it, so that's the only evidence. Because it doesn't feel like any different from... Like last night I dreamed that I ordered a child's scoop of elderberry ice cream. And while the guy was preparing it, I walked into another room and it was a dark room. And some reason he put down the ice cream cone, came into the dark room, and put his arm around my mouth and was going to beat me up. And I woke up screaming. And I never have nightmares. I think it's because I'd had some melatonin right before bed. But... Like that's a, you know, that's as real to me as sitting in the room with Johnny Cash, like getting beat up by the ice cream vendor is as real to me as singing with Johnny Cash.
Lo Carmen:Wow.
Will Oldham:So, you know, Ferg. Yeah. Yeah. So David Ferguson in Nashville, we just, he asked me to make a music video for him for a song that he's about to release called Boats to Build. And it's a cover song written by guy clark and uh verlin a guy named verlin thompson and the night before my daughter and i went down to make the video i asked for who wrote the songs i didn't know who wrote the song and he said well guy clark and and verlin thompson i said well is verlin thompson still alive he said yeah he's still alive and he's heard the song actually he really likes it and and then he said and he has a he, he married a newscaster and they own a TV production studio and maybe they have a green screen and maybe we should shoot some of this video there. It's like, all right. So he called him and we, we went in and so we hung out with, with this guy, Verlin Thompson, who talked about the making of this song boats to build. And it was so wonderful because it was like him and Guy Clark. And they had a, uh, a friend who, who went, uh, whose wife got him, uh, uh, So it's this beautiful song. It's one of these soliloquy, perfect funeral song. Because it's like, I'm going to build me a boat with these two hands. It'll be a fair curve from a noble plan. Let the chips fall where they will, because I've got boats to build. And it's just sort of a summing up of life. And the writers had a friend whose wife... bought him a boat building course, like let him, you know, paid for him to go up to, to the state of Maine for six weeks and, and learn how to build wooden sailboats by hand. And, uh, yeah. So then while he was up there, they were talking and just saying, you know, well, where's our, where's our friend? Oh, he's up there. Or, you know, and then they just thought, well, let's write a song about this guy and where he's doing, why he's not hanging out with us. And then also, and then I guess part of the punchline was that his wife, uh, found another guy while she was slow. No, that
Lo Carmen:wasn't what I expected you were going
Will Oldham:to say.
Lo Carmen:That's like a sucker punch
Will Oldham:line. Yeah, exactly. But it makes the song all the more poignant because they're writing about, you know, this guy's, you know, like inner journey and what he's exploring, not realizing that his whole, you know, his whole life was being turned upside down.
Lo Carmen:Yeah, wow. So did you manage to green screen Verlin?
Will Oldham:Yeah, yeah. He was so wonderful and just charming, and there's a mandolin part of the song, and I think Ferg or Sean Sullivan brought a mandolin, or somehow a mandolin appeared, and Verlin just, you know, he played all the parts of the mandolin. We sat with my daughter and our friend Pete. Do you know Pete Townsend at all, the drummer? He's from Louisville, and he lives in Nashville. Yeah. But his two daughters and my daughter are, like, playing drums and mandolins and building boats out of Legos. And then we have a green screen.
Lo Carmen:Wow, that sounds great. And how beautiful to, you know, Guy Clark being dead but Verlin being alive and
Will Oldham:Ferg, obviously. Somewhere in between.
Lo Carmen:Somewhere in between. Bringing it all together.
Will Oldham:Yeah.
Lo Carmen:Time for a change Tired of that same old same Same old words, same old lines Same old tricks, the same old rhymes And it's days, precious days rolling and out like waves got boards to bend planks to nail charts to make and seas to sail i'm gonna build me a boat With these two hands it'll be a fair curve from a noble plan. Let the chips fall where they will, cause I've got boats to build. You curated Ferg's collection of Cowboy Jack songs and you met Cowboy Jack. Did you? Yeah, many times,
Will Oldham:yeah.
Lo Carmen:That's a pretty special way to keep someone with you, to bring someone to life, to make a tribute album
Will Oldham:to somebody. It was beautiful, yeah, because Cowboy, he didn't ever get as far as my mom did, but he had some dementia issues that were happening. And seeing Ferg's relationship to his, like, friend, mentor, employer, father figure, you know, musical partner, and just seeing him, you know, just treat him with such love and such care and such respect in those years while, you know, and then I'd drive back here and see, you know, and see my mom. But the first time, like I'd met Ferg on the Johnny Cash session, and then first time I saw him in Nashville, I... called him and said, I'm coming through Nashville. He said, well, let's meet here. And he said, and so we met just in the parking lot somewhere. He said, okay, get in the car. We're going to Cowboys. And so that was the first thing we did is we went to Cowboys.
Lo Carmen:That's like something that happens in a dream too.
Will Oldham:Yeah. And then we, you know, went in Cowboys office and, and they just pulled some guitars down immediately and started playing the, I'll be all smiles tonight by the Lubin brothers. So, so wonderful. Yeah. And just had so many great times with, with Cowboy, but, but Ferg's record, his, his, tribute to cowboy that has a little bit of cowboy playing on there as well as it's one of my very very favorite records
Lo Carmen:how long after he died did ferg record that
Will Oldham:he was working on it like in the final months of of cowboy's life because yeah cowboy has a part has a plays like a part or two on on a couple of songs i think he was
Lo Carmen:right so did he know did cowboy know the folk was doing it
Will Oldham:Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah, I think, I think so. It's hard to tell. Like sometimes, you know, dementia is not, it's not a straight line. It's not, you know, it's
Lo Carmen:really better than others.
Will Oldham:Some days are better than others. And in the course of the day or a conversation, it's all over the place. And so you have to just, you don't know if a memory is like, you know, landing in water and just sinking to the bottom, or if it's landing and sitting on the surface or landing in mud and getting stuck somewhere, what, you know, if somebody, and then if, if, if you forget something, you know, like you forget things all the time, it doesn't mean they're gone. So that complexity is, uh, you know, exponentially more complex when somebody has dementia because you're, you feed them information and you don't even know, uh, where, how far in it goes and if it sticks anywhere, if it relates to other things. Yeah.
Lo Carmen:Yeah. A little bit like conversations amongst musicians, really.
Will Oldham:Yeah.
Lo Carmen:Do you have a particular song that you'd like played at your funeral or songs? Is that something you'd like? The impossible question. Yeah. I
Will Oldham:mean, it's because it's about, you know, your relationship to Like, would they get it right? Yeah, like would
Lo Carmen:you leave
Will Oldham:directions? Yeah, I don't, you know, it's because it's so much up to the, you know.
Lo Carmen:Those that are left behind. I
Will Oldham:feel like death, you know, yeah, death doesn't belong to the dead. Death belongs to the living. So it would be, you know, I would, yeah, probably ask people to look to New Orleans or.
Lo Carmen:Yeah, that seems sensible. Would you ever have your ashes put into a record?
Will Oldham:Oh.
Lo Carmen:You can do that.
Will Oldham:Is that right? Yeah. That's an interesting thing. I think I may have some ashes left. I had my dad's ashes forever.
Lo Carmen:Oh, really?
Will Oldham:And I didn't know what to do with them. So I split them. I had them for my brothers. So I split them into three parts, and I asked a woodworker guy to make wooden boxes to put each one in because they were just sitting at my house. And after about a decade, I thought, okay, this is stupid. So I just wanted to get them theirs and worry about mine. And then I had mine. You know, my dad's ashes in a box. What
Lo Carmen:do I do? Yeah, what do I
Will Oldham:do? And finally, I just thought, there's no good reason to have somebody's, you know, for me, have somebody's ashes.
Lo Carmen:Flung them to the winds.
Will Oldham:Yeah, but even then, it's, you know, I don't, you know, my parents have gravestones, but I don't think about, I don't think that people are related to their remains.
Lo Carmen:No, I feel the same. But obviously, a lot of people don't.
Will Oldham:Yeah. And
Lo Carmen:I'm glad for cemeteries.
Will Oldham:Cemeteries are wonderful places to visit. And as historical records, they're amazing. But I don't ever feel like it's full of people. I just feel like it's full of history.
Lo Carmen:You know, Dolly Parton has said that she loves to write in cemeteries. Oh, wow.
Will Oldham:I didn't know that. She's
Lo Carmen:Yeah, when she used to tour in a bus in the 70s, she'd stop, go to the graveyard for a while to get a bit of peace and quiet and right.
Will Oldham:Cool. I
Lo Carmen:thought
Will Oldham:that was pretty. We're coming up on a holiday here, the American Memorial Day is this coming weekend. And there's something I learned about as a kid. I was looking into gypsy populations that used to live in Louisville, Kentucky. live and pass through. Because I found articles in the paper about people who claim to be the king of the gypsies.
Lo Carmen:Like Romany Gypsy?
Will Oldham:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Back in the 1970s. And my grandfather told interesting stories. He was an obstetrician. He told an interesting story about delivering a gypsy baby and how outside of the hospital, There were maybe 40 or 50 gypsies who just set up tents while they waited for the gypsy mother to give birth. And this was probably the 1960s. And then I think I went to the... Somehow I had heard that there were celebrations at a particular cemetery. It's a cemetery where I have some relatives. And it was always on Memorial Day. And it was just a few years ago, finally, I thought, I'm going to... go there and I'll go and I'll see my great grandfather's grave. And I will see if I can figure out, you know, see if the gypsies still party there. And I went and I saw the gypsy graves, including the, these like the king of the gypsies that I'd seen in the newspaper. Cause they, they adopted the guy, Joe name Mitchell was some of them. So it's this, it'd be a big Mitch Mitchell. And they'd have these huge ostentatious tombstones always with, uh, photographs or small cameos or little paintings of them glued onto the headstones. None of the other headstones in the whole cemetery have these except for the gypsy headstones. And I looked around for somebody who worked there and I said, do you remember when the gypsies used to come here on Memorial Day? And they said, oh yeah, we would just have to look the other way because they would be and we don't usually allow that. And And I said, well, does it still happen? They said, well, you never know. Every once in a while it still happens, but not in that way. And so then I said, can you help me find my relatives' graves? Yes, it's over there. Looking around the graveyard, and then I start to notice big SUVs with out-of-state plates pulling up to where the gypsy graves are. And I look over, and I see the woman who was talking to me about it. She looks at me, and she's like... points you know her eyes get big and she points like these are you know this is it and they were like then families of gypsies who were coming you know in in these big you know ostentatious suvs and setting up lawn chairs and sitting out there and it it wasn't you know as as uh crazy i think a celebration as as in times past but it was it was pretty magical to it to see the tradition carrying on. So maybe we'll go there on Monday now that I know that it happens and when it happens.
Lo Carmen:It's pretty wild to party in the graveyard.
Will Oldham:What a wonderful place to do it, you know, and I think it should just happen all the time as long as people clean up after themselves.
Lo Carmen:My friend Betsy was telling me about going to the Day of the Dead in Mexico back in the early 70s or mid-70s. And she said that families would turn up with like little portable TVs for the night, set up camp for the night and just plump the TV on top of the graves. Yeah,
Will Oldham:yeah. I think we have been in American culture and In a Western American culture, we've been shortchanged in our relationship to death, I feel like. There's a lot more going on there. It's
Lo Carmen:kind of been taken from us, hasn't it? It's become so formalized and people are cautious and aren't quite sure of what the right thing to do is instead of just knowing how to accept it as part of the great cycle.
Will Oldham:Yeah.
Lo Carmen:Well, I feel like I've taken lots of time.
Will Oldham:It's been great.
Lo Carmen:To go and kiss your
Will Oldham:baby. I do want to do that, yeah. Every terrible thing is a relief Even months on end buried in grief Are easy light times which have to end With the coming of your dear friend Death to everyone Alright, well you have
Lo Carmen:a great night and thanks so much for talking with us.
Will Oldham:Thanks for asking.
Lo Carmen:Now, as I promised Will, I have looked into whether funeral services actually do put in a report to the collection societies regarding which individual songs were performed at each service, and unsurprisingly, it seems the answer is no. Although they do have to purchase a license in order to play any copyright-recorded music at a service, how those funds are paid out or shared between copyright owners remains murky. The world of music copyright is a fraught and incredibly complicated area. As Hunter S Thompson once said, the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. Popular funeral songs such as My Way, The Wind Beneath My Wings, My Heart Will Go On and If I Die Young do, however, generate a lot of money via sales, streaming and other performances. I'm very grateful to Will and to Ferg and their labels for permission to play their music today. Thanks also to Robin Adele Anderson for permission to use an excerpt from her version of If I Should Die Young, originally performed by the band Perry, and to Lola Levina for letting me use a live porch recording of them performing Bubba Mowda. All music is licensed by Abra Amcos and the details of all the songs you heard today are available in the show notes. Original and theme music for Death Is Not The End was written, performed and recorded by Peter Head. He also whipped up the cover versions heard today. Our conversation was very lightly edited for time and clarity. Death Is Not The End is created, recorded and edited by me, your host, Lo Carmen, and produced by Black Tambourine Productions. After today's episode, you know the story behind the name. You can also find me on Substack at lowcarmen.substack.com. And if you'd like to hear more of my music, just get your Google on and I'm sure you'll find it. I'd love for you to hit the follow button wherever you listen to your podcasts and leaving a review for the show is very gratefully appreciated and helps us find more listeners, which can only be a good thing. Till next time, this is Low Carmen. signing off and remember death is not the end
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