Episode 211 - Jill Craig
WFNU Frogtown Community Radio Edit
Jill Craig’s Funeral Music Playlist
Your Funeral Music: Jill Craig’s Playlist of Life, Death, and Everything in Between
Introducing Your Funeral Music
“Welcome to Your Funeral Music, where we’re listening to the jams you won’t get to hear.”
With this signature line, host Michael Venske sets the tone for each episode: a space where guests share the songs they’d want played at their funerals. The project invites listeners to think deeply—and often joyfully—about mortality through the lens of music.
This week’s guest is Jill Craig, a Minneapolis neighbor who has lived in her charming 1908 home for 25 years. A music lover through and through, Jill came of age in the 1980s—a perfect time for MTV, synths, and iconic bands—and spent the 1990s seeing live shows across genres. Today, she still treasures music but admits it wasn’t easy narrowing down favorites for her playlist.
As Michael reveals, Jill’s funeral playlist stands out with the highest beats per minute among all guests so far—an energetic 131 BPM. In other words, Jill’s musical heartbeat is fast, happy, and alive.
Burial Ground by The Decemberists (2024)
To begin her setlist, Jill chose Burial Ground from The Decemberists’ 2024 album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
“We’ve been waiting a long time for a new album from The Decemberists,” Jill explains. “Their stories are all… I love all their songs and all their stories. And Burial Ground just seemed like a really good place to start.”
For Jill, the song resonates with its imagery of laying down in the earth and conversing with the departed. It reflects her personal wishes for her final disposition: cremation, but with ashes buried rather than scattered.
Organ Donor by Jeremy Messersmith (2010)
Next, Jill turns to a local favorite: Jeremy Messersmith. His tender, quirky track Organ Donor appears on the 2010 album The Reluctant Graveyard.
“I just love all his songs, like every single one of them, I can’t get enough,” Jill says. “This was one of the first ones I heard, and it just kind of reached out and grabbed me. When I walk through the cemetery, the song goes through my head. It seemed like a good funeral music song.”
Michael asks whether Jill herself is an organ donor (she is), and then pushes the conversation toward a deeper question: what happens at the end of life?
Jill admits she struggles with the idea of an afterlife.
“I have a hard time believing in an afterlife because I just don’t understand how the electrical energy in your body can keep going… But when you lose someone close to you, it’s hard not to believe. So I’m really conflicted.”
She wonders aloud about the contradictions: Would the afterlife preserve us at a certain age? Would we be reunited with past loves? What about those who never found happiness? The questions, she says, “don’t coalesce into anything that makes sense in my brain.”
Instead, Jill finds comfort in the idea of memories. Asked what age she’d want to be remembered as, she chooses 22—a time when she loved her work, dressed sharp in office skirts and boots, and even sported a Winona Ryder-inspired blouse straight out of Heathers.
Everybody Here Is a Cloud by Cloud Cult (2008)
From existential questions, Jill moves to something more atmospheric: Everybody Here Is a Cloud by Cloud Cult, from their 2008 album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes).
“Maybe that’s what the afterlife is like,” she reflects. “Everybody is just these clouds out there bumping into each other. If we’re made out of electric currents, maybe that’s somehow transferred into the clouds. Sometimes we’re crashing into one another in thunderstorms, and sometimes we’re doing our own thing on a blue-sky day.”
Cloud Cult is Jill’s favorite band of the moment, though she notes her “all-time” loyalty may still belong to R.E.M. or U2—groups that have accompanied her across decades.
Happy Phantom by Tori Amos (1992)
Jill’s next choice lightens the mood again. From Tori Amos’s breakthrough album Little Earthquakes (1992), she selects Happy Phantom.
“Picture someone becoming a ghost and being very happy and trying to inspire others to be happy,” Jill says. The track stood out on an otherwise dark, haunting album. “Most of it is very sad and scary, and then you just have this song about being a happy phantom. It’s always stood out to me.”
Asked if she has a favorite ghost in history, Jill admits she doesn’t—aside from the childhood staple Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Sound the Bells by Dessa (2013)
Next on Jill’s playlist is Sound the Bells, a moving piece by Minneapolis-based hip-hop artist Dessa, often performed with the Minnesota Orchestra.
“I thought about maybe when people die, we should all sound the bells,” Jill shares. “Find that as part of a celebration of life, just sounding some bells for them. A couple bells in each hand, and just ring them for a minute or two.”
Though she never played bells or percussion herself, Jill is a lifelong fan of their resonant tones—from church towers to orchestral performances. Her love for Dessa also runs in the family. Her 82-year-old mother is a devoted fan, and the two attend Dessa’s annual orchestra shows together.
One memory in particular stands out: a small concert in Moorhead, Minnesota. The outdoor show was threatened by rain, but Dessa herself rushed around handing out umbrellas to fans. “I got a picture of my mom with Dessa,” Jill recalls proudly. “It was pretty impressive.”
Find the River by R.E.M. (1992)
Few bands have shaped Jill’s musical life as deeply as R.E.M., so it’s no surprise their music made her list. From the seminal 1992 album Automatic for the People, Jill selected the closing track Find the River.
“It’s a beautiful song about kind of losing your way to find your way again,” she reflects. “Close your eyes, leave your path, find the river, leads you to the ocean… I just really like the song and all the lyrics speak to me. But I don’t know why exactly.”
Michael gently observes the emotional weight in Jill’s voice, and she admits it’s hard to articulate. “That’s okay,” Michael reminds her. “That’s why we have music. We don’t need to explain it. We don’t need to talk about it sometimes. We can just listen to it and feel it.”
For Jill, Find the River is less about answers and more about presence—allowing the song to hold the ineffable.
A Lifetime by Better Than Ezra (2001)
Jill then pivots to one of her favorite rock bands, Better Than Ezra, choosing their reflective track A Lifetime from the 2001 album Closer.
“There’s a line—‘that R.E.M. song kept playing in my mind and two-and-a-half minutes felt like a lifetime’—and that’s the one that grabbed me,” she says. “This one’s kind of the sing-aloud one for sure for me, standing on the hood of my car singing along to an R.E.M. song.”
The song narrates a life cut short, a theme Jill connects to despite not having experienced such a loss firsthand at the time. “I didn’t really know anybody whose life had been cut short, but I always wondered… how long my life would be.”
Cleopatra by The Lumineers (2016)
From Better Than Ezra’s rock storytelling, Jill moves to The Lumineers’ 2016 title track Cleopatra.
Her reason for choosing it is straightforward and poignant:
“The chorus. ‘I’ve been late for this, late for that, late for the love of my life, but when I die, I’ll be on time.’”
When asked if she believes in fate or predestination, Jill responds with complexity.
“I do a little bit. I always felt like I lived a charmed life… I had a good childhood, good high school years, I went to college, and then I spent my 20s going to live music. When I wanted to settle down, I met somebody I wanted to have children with. I wanted two children, one of each gender, and I had one of each. Everything went fine for a period of time.”
But life, she explains, shifted course.
“Now I feel like karma is kind of getting me back… Not necessarily for the worst, just different. I had a boy and a girl, but now I have two daughters, and that’s fine. I found the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and now I’m not. And that’s okay. That happened. It’s time to move on and reinvent myself.”
Jill is careful with her words: “I shouldn’t say karma’s coming to get me. It’s just… I felt like fate had things going for me in a certain way, and then fate changed around and played some different tricks on me.”
All the Rowboats by Regina Spektor (2012)
As the evening winds down, Jill brings forward All the Rowboats from Regina Spektor’s 2012 album What We Saw from the Cheap Seats. She acknowledged its place as an outlier on her playlist—different in tone but deeply resonant. She admired the instrumentation and the way the song anthropomorphizes inanimate objects in museums and galleries.
“They don’t really have an end to their lifetime,” Jill mused. “For better—or maybe worse—if you think of them as having a life, maybe they’re tired of people looking at them all the time.” It was a meditation on permanence, on being seen endlessly but never truly free. The conversation revealed how music can give voice to unspoken or even unsettling truths about existence and memory.
Jill at the Piano
This reflection opened into a personal connection: Jill’s own history with the piano. While Regina Spektor is primarily known for her piano-driven compositions, Jill shared that she, too, once played piano regularly. Her childhood instrument still sits in her home—out of tune but full of memory.
When she does sit down, she gravitates toward classical pieces and the harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel. “I have the Greatest Hits songbook,” Jill said with a smile. “Bridge Over Troubled Water is probably my favorite one to sing to.” That song, with its themes of comfort and resilience, provided a poignant bridge between her musical past and the present conversation about art, loss, and endurance.
Closing with Florence and the Machine
As the evening drew to a close, Jill’s final selection carried both gravity and playfulness: My Boy Builds Coffins by Florence and the Machine. Released on the band’s 2009 debut album, the song dances on the line between life’s inevitability and the artistry of care, with Florence Welch’s soaring vocals imbuing even mortality with vibrancy.
When asked if her choice was inspired by someone in her family working in the death-care industry, Jill laughed: “No. A better title might be My Boy Builds Urns, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring.”
Jill also shared the memory of seeing Florence live—barefoot, weaving through the crowd, reaching out to touch the audience. “She was spectacular,” Jill recalled. “Just incredible.”
Final Notes
And with Florence’s hauntingly beautiful anthem, Jill’s playlist came to an end. Jill’s selections charted a course through memory, storytelling, permanence, and the ways music helps us hold on—and let go.
At Your Funeral Music, each guest’s playlist is more than a mixtape. It’s a living document of values, emotions, and reflections on what it means to be human, alive, and remembered.
Special thanks to Jill Craig for sharing her jams and her stories.
