Mike Ayers - One Last Song: Conversations on Life, Death, and Music

BY JIM JAMES

Life is sometimes so very beautiful. You just cant believe how beautiful it all is!!! And so many days I feel so lucky and I am so glad to be alive, with the breeze in my hair and the sun on my face. Laughing with a friend... glowing in a lovers touch. Knowing that someone truly loves me and sees me for who I really am. Family. Listening to or making beautiful music. Those things that make it feel so great to be human and alive.

Im not frightened of dying. In fact, there have been so many times in my life that I wished I were dead. There have been times I felt so much physical or mental pain... I felt so alone and lost that I just wished that it would all end, or that if some magic doorway suddenly appeared in the middle of the street I just happened to be walking down... and I looked through it and saw another world... I would just go ahead and walk through... see if it was any easier over there in that other world, cause god damn, it is fucking tough down here sometimes.

Dont get me wrong, I dont want to die. There are so many things I still wish to experience, if I am lucky enough to get to do so. Having a child. Making more music. Making more love. Making more laughs. How many more times? How much longer will I get? Can I keep it together?

There were times when I felt so alone and so desperate that I thought, Fuck it. But I never had the motivation, when it came right down to it, to actually literally leave this world.

Thats when I knew that what I was feeling, as terrible as it may have been, was not nearly as strong as what some of my loved ones must have been feeling when they really said fuck it and literally left this world. I wonder what song was their last and if they knew that it was at the time?

I have written songs about several of those people. Some of those songs the dead sang to me in my dreams, and I awoke knowing they wanted this world to hear them.

I have had many close friends and acquaintances die before their time. Either by their own hand or by the hand of fate or the universe or whatever you want to call itI have seen a lot of young people die. And of course, each time I thinkit could have been me.

But then I always think of my fathers wordsthat when its your time to go, its your time to go; theres nothing you can do about it. He loves to say this. It brings me great comfort. So I dont worry about it too much.

I think this question about the last song youd want to hear is a very interesting one, as it shows us how much we all have in common on this subject of death. No matter what label the world tries to put on a person, or what belief system one does or does not ascribe towe can all find some common ground in death... and we should be using that to find more common ground in life.

Although all the musicians in this book have completely different answers, there is a through line of beauty and creativity when thinking about death that we all share, because, in this beautiful way, death itself is our final act of creation. Every aspect of ithow one dies, when one dies, what type of ceremony one does or does not want, how one wishes to be buried or not buried or set afire at sea in a Viking funeral, their ashes then collected and scattered around a hard-to-find tombstone in the middle of a forest with only the single word weird carved upon its face (thats mine)... There is something so creative and artistic about death. Even in the most seemingly routine and normal deaths, there is such beauty and mystery. I will never forget watching my grandfather die after having lived a good long life, surrounded by his family at ninety years old, taking his final breaths, all of us thinking each breath was the last, until... finally... it was. And after that final death rattle his body turned from human into something more like a tree or stone, meant to return to nature right before our eyes, to become a life source from which some new being will begin again. So natural and mysterious and surreal and completely normal and circular, like the moon or the sun or the earth itself, we go round and round... as we end this round to begin the next in some way we will never be able to fully understand. I am quite certain this book will provide inspiration not only in the way you think about your final wishes, but in the way you view your everyday life and creativity, with all its small births and deaths.

Music is such a special thing because it never dies. A song is this eternal vessel that, once born, can never be killed. I think about all the dramatic scenarios, like all the power being wiped out, or all the instruments being gathered and smashed upthatd be okay! We could still sing! And even if singing were not permitted, we would still sing inside our hearts and minds. Even if there were no humans... songs are spirits that float on the breeze, drifting from this world to that, sung by every creature imaginable in familiar tunes and keys and those we cannot even begin to imagine in scale and structure so bizarre.

Because of recording technology or concert set lengths, we tend to put time limits on music... but music has no real duration. There is no beginning or end; you could have any song forever, and you could sing it a million different ways. Songs drift down into our souls from space and other dimensions and float up into our hearts from the earth beneath our feet. What could be more natural than music? Music is God. God is love. Love never dies.

How do I want to die? I bet youve asked yourself that hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of times over the course of your life. I ask it of myself all the time. All. The. Time. Why do we do this? Why are we obsessed with death?

Is it simply because its so unknown and thats super scary and we as human beings are not content with living and breathing until we know everything? Think about it. For thousands of years, human beings were just existing on earth, eating things, having sex with each other, killing one anotherbasically the plot of Game of Thrones, forever. But while we humans have been running around doing these things, a constant hovering over us was the moon. The moon was up above, just hanging out, doing its gravitational-pull thing to make waves in the ocean... but honestly, not much else. But then humans at some point decided, hey, they wanted to go to the moon. Fly into outer space, land on it, and plant a flag. They werent content to just let it be. Humans were basically like, Wow, that moon is just hanging out, and, well... fuck that. Well show it whos boss