Everybody Talks About Death
By Brittany Menjivar
As a reporter for pop culture website The Young Folks, I often interview bands—and bands often talk about death. Here are some of their perspectives for your perusal. —Britt
Garrett Russell of Silent Planet: If I meet somebody at a signing, I love it when I’m like, “Hey, how are you doing?”, and instead of being like, “Oh, I’m great!”, they’re like, “Terrible. My wife just left me,” or “My mom has cancer,” or “I haven’t been able to eat in three days.”
Jessy Bergy of Story Untold: I had sleep paralysis last night. I was pretty much thinking that someone was choking me, so I woke up, punching the walls in the van. I have a bunch of sleep disorders. I sleepwalk and shit.
Ian Holubiak of The Worst Humans’ iPhone notes:
-“Nihilism and realism are two sides of the same coin. One gets you wasted; the other just wants to make a point.”
-“The emptiness of most things makes it hard to drown yourself in them.”
-“Given the current status of our social landscape, I’m afraid we’ll all die from an earthquake very soon.”
-“Those who have died before me are the only ones who caught a real break.”
-“I’ve been calling weed ObamaCare because I’m unable to afford health insurance.”
Drew Silverman of Shy Beast: The first song that I [arranged] with my first band was called “Grinning Skull on the Mantle.’
David Tenczar of Shy Beast: Can a skull not grin? I feel like any skull is gonna be grinning.
Antiboy: I really connect with [Sylvia Plath’s] Fever 103, which is a poem challenging that we only become real after death. I actually have “too pure” and “for you” tattooed on my outer and inner thigh, respectively, on my right leg, from the line “I am too pure for you or anyone, your body hurts me like the world hurts God.” I think it’s one of her many beautiful and haunting depictions of the utter madness she experienced as a tortured soul on this Earth before she took her own life. It inspired a musical I wrote called “Too Pure,” also.
Andy Gill of Gang of Four: I think one of my favorite films is a film from the ’40s called with David Niven in it. It’s called A Matter of Life and Death. It’s this weird, surreal sort of fantasy. David Niven plays a British fighter pilot during the war, and he’s flying, and he’s been hit by enemy aircraft stuff. And the plane he’s in, it’s catching fire and it’s coming down, and he’s talking to the radio operator on the ground, and they fall in love in the last minutes. And then he crashes. And suddenly, this guy who’s dressed in a 17th century French outfit appears and says to David Niven, who’s lying on the beach, “Excuse me, but you have to come with me to heaven.” And he goes, “What are you talking about?” And he says, “You are dead. Come with me to heaven.” And they go off to heaven and everybody who’s ever died is here in this cour room. And they have to judge whether he can live or die, ’cause he’s borderline. And somehow the radio operator gets involved, and they are operating on his body in real life. And then there’s a staircase, which is the “Stairway to Heaven,” which Led Zeppelin wrote about.
Sean Bonnette of AJJ: My buddy John Martin’s rabbit that he had when he was a kid got eaten by meat bees.
Will Gould of Creeper: We were doing karaoke with Neck Deep in Savannah upstairs [at a karaoke bar]... And downstairs, there was a drive-by shooting, so we had to hide behind the bar.
John Floreani of Trophy Eyes: In the midst of partying… I found myself in this mental state where I was like, “I don’t really wanna be here anymore. I’m just tired of waking up.” Depressed. So I was sitting in the car with my friend one day, and I was telling him… and he thought, Maybe if I speed at the fence at the top of this hill in the car, that’ll scare it out of him. And it kind of did. He sped at the fence. I was like, “Ah, fuck!”, and he slammed on the brakes, and he was like, “Don’t say that if you don’t actually mean it.” I was like, “Well, I guess that’s true.” I didn’t know I felt that way.
Nick Ventimiglia of Grayscale: My grandma passed away, so I have this big candle on my leg that says “The flame is gone; the fire remains.” That’s actually lyrics from a band called The Dear Hunter.
Keith Murray of We Are Scientists: Maybe four or five years ago, I got really into this documentary that’s on YouTube. It’s called “The Winged Beatle,” and it explores the pretty rote and rudimentary and hackneyed conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney died midway through the Beatles’ career and was replaced by a stand-in. I’m not really that interested in that theory, but the documentary itself is so harebrained. It’s very odd and kind of poorly made, so that’s incredibly gripping and entertaining. But at the very end, it ends with a cliffhanger. Like, it literally makes a declarative statement either way about the Paul McCartney thing. And to be honest, I don’t even remember whether they had decided that it was or was not Paul McCartney. I just remember that it ends with a freeze frame of… I think, like, a briefcase being thrown and the question “Or was he?” It threatened that there was going to be a Part II, but there never, as far as I know, was a Part II. So my conspiracy theory is that the Beatles people people killed this documentary filmmaker. That’s a conspiracy I’m beginning right now.
Luke Spiller of The Struts: [If I could be any fictional character], I would be the bloke who crash-lands on the island of Wonder Woman. I’d be her boyfriend. What a great life that would be—to know her and then forever be held in her heart so she could never move on.
Adam Slack of The Struts: But you’d be dead.
Luke Spiller of The Struts: Yeah, I know. But in the spirit realm, you’d be like, “Yes. She’s still into me.”
Jon Fratelli of The Fratellis: You have no way of knowing what bliss is unless you experience the opposite of bliss. Can you imagine a life that was just 24 hours a day, seven days a week, total bliss? No; that would be particularly dull. We all think we want that, but we don’t really want that. We would be so bored. And heartbreak is the opposite of bliss, so it’s something to dive into the middle of and be curious about rather than to run away from.
To my surprise, Dead Can Dance did not talk about death.