After my husband died, I struggled to listen to music - but now I find comfort in the songs he loved
Happy or sad, music lives in the very marrow of my bones. So on the day my husband, Brad, died almost two years ago, the music he left behind died in me too.
A man who couldn’t hold a tune or strum a chord but whose knowledge was encyclopaedic, Brad embodied music. His appetite for musical discovery was insatiable; his collection, like the impact of his passing, immeasurable. When we met in 1996, he began gradually installing a new catalogue into my psyche: ambient, Americana, rock, folk, a little blues, a lot of country, much of it outside the mainstream. Brad slid songs into my soul like coins in a jukebox – stacking a playlist, building a library.
It started on the day of our first date. We were colleagues at a Melbourne radio station, where Brad was the program director. He’d slipped past my desk in the afternoon, dropping a cassette tape of music he’d compiled, with instructions to play it while getting ready for dinner that night. I listened intently for messages in songs I’d never heard before as I dressed – like Belinda Carlisle’s I Wouldn’t Be Here If I Didn’t Love You: “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care / I wouldn’t waste your time or my time in a love that’s going nowhere.”
Months later, when Brad left some weeks ahead of me to take up a radio post in Sweden, he’d arranged the delivery of another cassette to my office. James Taylor’s You Can Close Your Eyes spoke of his love in absentia – our geographical distance.
As we settled into the groove of our relationship over the years, abroad and back in Australia, I routinely rose to Yo-Yo Ma, or the tinkling compositions of George Winston. Most evenings we’d doze off to Brian Eno’s atmospheric Music for Airports.
Sunday mornings were reserved for a tortured Kris Kristofferson “comin’ down” from a hard night on the booze; the evocative Guy Clark for car trips. John Prine slotted in anytime and anywhere, his observations of the human condition both whimsical and melancholy.
The default was Maurice Jarre’s title theme to the 1965 film The Collector. Those foreboding orchestral strains would follow me around the house like a bogeyman; the melody was Brad’s signature whistle. He’d requested the dramatic opening for his funeral.
Related: Almost two years after my husband’s death I’m still grieving – but I’m also living in his honour
Brad got a kick out of playing songs that were as sad and cheesy as a Brad Paisley lyric. I’d groan, roll my eyes, then exact revenge by singing – Lucinda Williams, The Chicks – loudly.
The cupboards at home are still stuffed with compilation CDs Brad made over our 25 years together. Like miniature artworks, each song a masterful stroke segued into the next, like the gradient colours of a sunset. The CDs often contained “hidden cuts”, mostly filthy but funny parodies by the likes of Bob and Tom. It wasn’t unusual to find one in my handbag or on the car seat as I left for work.
Music was Brad’s love language.
For much of the past two years since he died, the predominant soundtrack has been silence.
In grief, it hurt too deeply to listen to Brad’s music. It brings him back into the room, where he is everywhere but nowhere. Each time I tried, everything within me squeezed in pain. It felt impossible to separate the man from the music.
That is, until recently, when my yoga teacher’s dharma talk opened with this: “You are never alone with sound. Sound is a companion. It fills the empty spaces between us.”
It’s been easy to listen to the music I’ve long loved, separate from those songs which Brad lived and breathed. I’ve made my own musical discoveries, too. But I know resurrecting Brad’s inimitable playlist is vital to reuniting with his spirit.
I started with Tom Waits and The Blue Nile, then moved on to Brad’s fellow Canadian favourites: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and the recently departed Gordon Lightfoot and Robbie Robertson. He revered Leonard Cohen, whose lyrics shepherd me through the darkness: “Ring the bells that still can ring … There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
Listening to Brad’s music lets the memories in – and that makes me miss him more. But it’s also opening my heart to familiar feelings of love and promise.
I’ve now circled back to where it all began, with James Taylor: “I can’t sing the blues any more / Oh, but I can sing this song / And you can sing this song, when I’m gone.”
Play the music, I hear Brad whisper. Even though it makes you sad. Because music takes you to places.
I have a vast catalogue to work through.
Margaret McNally is a Perth-based freelance editor and writer. Her late Canadian-Australian husband, Brad McNally, was a veteran radio broadcaster who worked in Australia, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, Italy and the Netherlands
