The day before my dad died, too young, from a succession of cancers, I worked up the courage to ask him if he’d mind haunting me. For all his life, he’d been an atheist and steadfast scoffer of all things spiritual. Only the fact that he'd liked talking to the hospice chaplain, who took one look at his long hair—and the enigmatically impish smile he'd developed in his waning months—and refused to buy that he wasn't some sort of mystic, finally emboldened me to confront him on the subject. Naturally, that was the day he lost the ability to speak at all, and when he listened, he was far away in the arms of Morpheus. The next morning, he was dead. It didn’t stop me from making my request. “You can be as dramatic as you like,” I said to his vacated shell, still half-prepared for him to wink at me. “I mean, I’m a known witch; I can handle dramatic. But I feel like it should be in music. Music would make a lot of sense.”
NOW MY OLD WORLD IS GONE FOR DEAD / AND I CAN’T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD
I was almost literally born into music. Not only did my dad play guitar when I was younger, making our house a popular party spot in the 70s and 80s, but we had to have had the hardest working stereo in Madison, Wisconsin. And almost as soon as I could walk, I was the house DJ. They put me to work retrieving albums, and eventually putting them on the turntable, because I had this curious talent: if a record was in our collection, which took up a whole wall, the minute somebody suggested a song from it, I would see the cover in my mind and go right to it. (I wish I still had that memory; I’d be the nerdiest sideshow attraction.) And Dad never did cease latching onto new music, a voracious disposition I inherited and carried into adulthood. Right up until his final months, I was sending him new cuts, or he was sharing something with me. Until hospice began (thankfully in his own home) and he was too sedated to concentrate on music anymore. The last album I sent him that I know he listened to was Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO. It included one of our favorite songs off their album Eldorado, whose cover is one I’ll never forget.
Because things had gotten pretty bad by then, it was Mom who texted me: “Dad says ‘It’s great and now I Can’t Get it Out of My Head.’” Juliana Hatfield had given us a brilliant album, but because nostalgia made me too sad at the time, I only cherry-picked songs off it. It wasn’t until a couple weeks after Dad died that I listened to the whole thing, because he very emphatically wanted it to be heard.
THE SECRET MESSAGES ARE CALLING TO ME ENDLESSLY
It started at the coffeehouse. That was the first place I went when I was ready to be in public, or in truth needed to be there, surrounded by living, noisy people. I usually have headphones on when I’m anywhere like that, because I have ADHD as well as a musical habit and if I have writing or editing to do, I need my carefully curated instrumentals to be louder than the in-house music. (There is no ‘background music’ for me.) But that day, I was compelled to listen from the start to the playlist the baristas had going. Dad had quite obviously hijacked their Spotify. The Shins, Fleet Foxes, Beirut. All bands I had turned him onto, which he'd mentioned in the last month. I know, all coffeehouses are aware there's a goodly amount of Gen Xers out there for whom they must program such a channel. Still. The Beirut song was "Santa Fe," and given my deep relationship with that city, I did not take it as a coincidence. But what really got me was the very suspicious random oldie that was thrown into the playlist: ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down." At that point, I laughed out loud. Okay Dad, I thought, I can take a hint. It was time to give the record its due. And it didn’t take long, on my long walk home, for me to feel well and properly haunted. By the time I got to the middle of “Secret Messages”, I was vibrating with otherworldliness.
Here’s the thing: I never loved ELO, nor did Dad, and you’ll be forgiven if you have zero affection for Jeff Lynne’s brand of Baroque artifice. Most people can’t help but love “Don’t Bring Me Down” whenever they hear it; I swear it’s hermetically crafted to be loved. Growing up, the only album we really listened to was Eldorado, largely because of one song: “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head.” (That, and all future links here, are to Hatfield’s version from her YouTube channel.) It has the most unapologetically fantastical lyrics: “Midnight on the water / I saw the ocean's daughter / Walking on the waves she came / Staring as she called my name.” There was no way a future fantasy writer and esotericist wasn’t going to get majorly shaped by that song. There are others; there’s a whole mood to that album, in part conjured by the Wizard of Oz cover. But it took me this long, thanks to Hatfield’s choices on Sings ELO—10 songs from a catalog spanning 30 years—to see the occult everywhere in the band’s lyrics. I started to hash out a whole conversation with Dad: is it just me, in this time and space thinned by grief, or does enchantment and the supernatural thread through almost every song there?
BLUEBIRD CAME TO ME TONIGHT / WAITING PATIENTLY FOR LIGHT
There are overt cases, of course, “Strange Magic” being at the top of the list. There is a full-on haunting in “Bluebird Is Dead”. Other flickers of the Otherworld/Underworld are more subtle. There are a couple ELO songs that feature the word “twilight” and it always feels like a stand-in for Hades—a faded realm where one can look but not touch, and certainly not be heard. Juliana Hatfield’s treatments, still multi-tracked and synthesized but deeply stripped down from the originals, seem to accentuate the feeling of sometimes wistful, sometimes desperate liminality. “Telephone Line”, with its deceptively laid-back doo-wop chorus, seems to capture a frustrating séance in progress: “Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time / I'm living in twilight”. The same sense of thwarted, urgent communication resounds in the album’s exquisitely rocking highlight, “From The End Of The World”: “I sent a dream to you last night / From the end of the world”. Messages are not just continually breaking down in Jeff Lynne’s songs. They are breaking up on a boundary between what is seen and unseen. But never what’s real and unreal. The ocean’s daughter is real, and unforgettable. And Bluebird is dead, but not silent.
I was smiling, if tearful, at Hatfield’s choice of a closer: “Ordinary Dream.” Like most of her selections, I’d never heard it before. But it was utterly apt. What I’d been working on in the coffeehouse were final edits to my first novel, a fantasy with a musical setting. Dreaming is half of what I do for a living now. And Dad, who didn’t get to hold that book before he moved on, seemed to agree that the message in this song, at least for us, had found its way: “I'm sailing on a troubled sea / Watching you as you watch me / In an ordinary dream.” I don’t believe the sea is particularly troubled, though, where he is. It’s necessary for me to believe, after the years he suffered, that he’s nowhere at all. Until he returns, as by magic, in a song.
Sun Hesper Jansen (they/she/he; @sunhesper on Instagram) is a shapeshifter and storyteller residing in Madison, Wisconsin. Sun is the author of the novel To Tune the Beast (book 1 of the Coruscar duology), the Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry/art collection Fairy of Disenchantment, the fantasy novelette Away from the Machine, and has had stories and poems published in a variety of anthologies and online journals. You can find a full listing of publications on their blog, Fairy of Disenchantment: A Literary Life with MS.