Mixtape: A Current Through the Flesh

Some people can write or read while listening to music. I can do neither. Music commands my full attention. It puts me into a meditative state that consumes me, and if I am to get anything out of it, I must don headphones and flake out on the couch while I am transported to an alternate plane of experience. So I recommend listening to these tracks on their own, preferably after reading the book.

I grew up in a household starved of music. My mother brought a few French language records with her as part of her trousseau, but like everything from her former life she avoided them as painful reminders of what was and what should have been. Every once in a while, I’d play one of her 45s on my crappy toy turntable with the quarter taped to the arm (IYKYK). Guy Béart’s “L’eau vive” is the most representative track. (Also, it never ceases to amaze me how chansonniers can sculpt French, with its rigorous grammar and formal vocabulary, into demotic pop songs.)

We didn’t buy a proper stereo till I was in my late teens, but it was in the basement where my father lived, so it was often inaccessible. Dad, who came of age on the wrong side of the Centennial year, was all O’Keefe stubbies and curling sweaters while my friends’ dads were bellbottoms and open-necked viscose. Consequently, there was some heavy Don Messer action going on at my place, for Dad hated with characteristic vitriol just about anything written after 1965. At some point around the age of ten I asked him if he had any favourite songs at all. He thought long and hard before answering with Marty Robbins’ “Cool Water,” which is interesting, as my old man only drank water passed through a still.

Dad and I did share some things. At some point he took a liking to Gordon Lightfoot, thereby introducing me to one of my all-time favourite albums, Gord’s Gold. Looking back on it, I can say that this is the only art that my father and I ever had in common. I am grateful as hell, for my life would have been impoverished without it. Dad’s big Lightfoot song was the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” but hands down my favourite Lightfoot track is “Sundown,” which combines self-loathing and a bass line that doesn’t let up. Perfection.

Oh, and here’s something else, and it’s too good not to share. For reasons unknown to science, Dad was enamoured of ABBA(!). Clearly he was no more immune than the rest of us to Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s sweeping harmonies and Benny and Björn’s shimmering production. The joke of course was that my father was about the most homophobic creature that ever existed, but was also thoroughly clueless about popular culture and therefore hadn’t the slightest inkling how fabulous ABBA really was. This is hands down my favourite piece of dad-related irony. “Take a Chance on Me” was in heavy rotation back in the day. I urge you to pop it on the jukebox in a cowboy bar while wearing a face full of glitter in my father’s honour.

Dad’s attitude to popular music led to some other interesting situations. As a middle-school rebel, I sought ways to get on his nerves, and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams by buying the heaviest, hardest, most headlong and flat-out intense album in rock-and-roll history: Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. To Dad, Rick, Roger, and the boys were just about the most over-the-top outfit since the Sex Pistols. He would get apoplectic on the subject, convinced that this kind of music was literally ruining my mind. So much so that during one of our many flights from his drunkenness, he hid all my albums on me, stuffing them in the back of my closet where I’d be out of range of their pernicious influence. Why he didn’t simply trash them is anyone’s guess, as is why during that same escape he placed a leftover meat patty in its Tupperware for me to find on my pillow. Some things are best left unquestioned. For a man who defied all logic, “The Logical Song.”

Finally rid of Dad through a divorce decades in the making, my mother had just barely begun to enjoy life before terminal colorectal cancer struck. In her twilight she took a liking to The Chieftains, to my own great joy, and had a fondness for the tremendous The Celtic Harp: A Tribute to Edward Bunting. From that album is “Planxty Bunting,” which we both loved so much that I selected it to be played at her funeral. It was the perfect music, as it is bright and celebratory, just like her.

When it comes to being emotionally and spiritually moved by singers, it is only certain vocalists who can transport me. Janis Joplin, Adele, Kate Bush, Björk, Tanya Tagaq, Ella Fitzgerald, Patsy Cline, Nina Simone, Anita O’Day, Tina Turner, Laura Marling, Beth Gibbons, Beth Orton, Fiona Apple, Amy Winehouse, Joni Mitchell. They can take me out of myself so I can see and feel and think things differently, more profoundly, more purely. It’s absolute resonance, 1000% temporal lobe stuff. At the risk of going hippie-dippy, I can say they inspire abstract thought, philosophizing, poetry, and direct awareness of the universe. As I steadily become dumber at day-to-day things, they allow me to become wiser in things of the soul. There is one defining characteristic which you might have noticed but which I haven’t explicitly stated—they’re all take-no-shit matriarchs who reveal facets of the Divine Feminine.

Of all these singers, Sinéad O’Connor stands alone. “Mandinka” and “Nothing Compares 2 U” impressed me when they first came out, but I never really paid attention to her until I heard “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” a few months ago. I was bowled over and had to hold back tears. This Loretta Lynn chestnut was reimagined and thoroughly reconfigured into a transcendent expression of angst by Sinéad on what is otherwise an uneven and ill-advised collection of covers, Am I Not Your Girl?. This track is exquisite. She never sounded so vulnerable. It is just about my favourite piece of music at the moment, and as part of the book’s mixtape, represents where I am now in life. I’ve got a low-grade obsession with Sinéad, and she infuses all the reading and writing I’ve been doing recently. Who knows, there could be a chapbook in it.

(Incidentally, I like to engage in mental games, challenging myself to come up with odd lists. Like, Things I’d Like to Do with Celebrities, which includes telling Tilda Swinton a joke that would make her snort with laughter, sitting in a room while Joan Didion smokes, or crashing a funeral with Peter Sellers. Add to that cooking Sinéad the finest omelette of her life.)

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Richard-Yves Sitoski is a poet, songwriter and performance artist. He was the 2019-2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario. His poems and reviews have appeared in literary magazines including PRISM, The Antigonish Review, Arc, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Train, CAROUSEL, Pinhole Poetry, Watch Your Head, The Windsor Review, and QWERTY. His one-person musical theatre piece, Butterfly Tongue, has played to sold-out houses. He is the Artistic Director of the Words Aloud Poetry Series and serves as Marketing and Publication Coordinator at Kegedonce Press.