Riding waves and weathering life’s storms with surfer-turned-writer Jamie Brisick

This transcript was generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. Please excuse any typos or errors.

 

Jamie Brisick  00:00

I was pursuing professional surfing, and yet there was this other thing going on that was the opposite of the sunshiny Malibu Barbie world that I was in.

 

Sophie Bearman  00:23

This is Life in Seven Songs from The San Francisco Standard. I'm your host, Sophie Bearman. This week, I'm joined by Jamie Brisick, a professional surfer-turned-writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Guardian, among many others. But before all that, Jamie was the quintessential So-Cal kid, with hair so blonde it was basically white, who loved to skateboard and dreamed of making surfing his full time job. Jamie relentlessly pursued and achieved that goal, but at the same time, his brother's life was spinning out of control. That would become the first, but not the last, life-shattering tragedy that Jamie has endured. Jamie hosts his own podcast called Soundings, which is about surfing, and he is currently working on a novel. Jamie Brisick, thank you so much for joining me.

 

Jamie Brisick  01:18

Thank you, Sophie.

 

Sophie Bearman  01:20

Jamie, when did you first discover surfing? And if you remember, what did it feel like that first time out on the water?

 

Jamie Brisick  01:26

So I kind of first got into it on a family trip to Hawaii at Waikiki. I was 12 years old, and my brothers and I were given sort of instructions, loose instructions, by a Waikiki beach boy. He sent us out on these soft top boards, and we just sort of went for it. And I remember getting a couple of waves and gliding along and having that like whooshing feeling. The water was clear enough to where you could see these kind of blues and the coral reef going by beneath and it got under my skin. And I remember it got not only got under my skin while riding, but there was a strange kind of afterglow where we were staying in a hotel room, and I probably, like, shared a bed with my brother at the time, but as we went to sleep that night, it was, it was still in my body. It was this visceral thing where I was sort of like, 'This, this thing's like, completely taken hold of me.' 

 

Sophie Bearman  02:15

You mentioned sleeping in the same bed as your brother. You had two brothers growing up. So tell me, where did you grow up and who did you grow up with?

 

Jamie Brisick  02:24

I was the youngest of three, born in Hollywood, then we moved out to Westlake Village, which was a new suburban community with homes in Model A, B or C. It felt really kind of vanilla. And at a very young age, probably seven or eight years old, I was riding a skateboard. And the skateboarders I admired in skateboarder magazine, which was out at the time, were the Dogtown skateboarders. And they were very, very rebellious. And my brothers, it was like our default was to be rebellious. We were really little punks. We were spoiled, entitled little punks, but it was like a point of pride to disapprove of all the things around us, and skateboarding and surfing were kind of our ways out of it. And then it turned to punk rock from there.

 

Sophie Bearman  03:04

Let's go to your first song, Sideshow by Blue Magic. What memories does this song bring up for you?

 

Jamie Brisick  03:10

I want to say this was a song that I'd heard somewhere, maybe like KHJ AM radio. But I really loved the sound, and I was attracted to the diversity of Los Angeles, and the song represented more the nightlife, I suppose. I mean, it has a sort of soul, R&B sound to it, and that was, it was a draw to something that felt outside of what was in the house. I don't know. I feel like a lot of my life has been trying to get to things that are not kind of attainable within my safe little world.

 

Music  03:41

[Sideshow by Blue Magic plays]

 

Jamie Brisick  03:59

Incredibly sad song, and I didn't know it at the time. And by the way, Sophie, I want to say that, like going through these songs was such an incredible way inward, I suppose. Or just, you know -- and I've written personal essay and I've written memoir pieces, and this was that same kind of like inner mining, trying to understand yourself. And when I listened to this, I thought, 'Wow, this song in it's kind of like tragedy. It's almost like being this harbinger for things would come later in my life.' I listen to this and think, 'Oh, the kind of seven or eight or nine year old or what--' I don't even know what age I was. I was in elementary school, I know that. '--was leaning towards something that was more melancholic than, like, upbeat and happy.'

 

Sophie Bearman  04:41

Right. It's amazing how we can look back at a song and see entirely new layers and meaning.

 

Jamie Brisick  04:47

Yeah.

 

Sophie Bearman  04:48

I also want to ask, how did your parents feel about having three boys all into skateboarding and surfing?

 

Jamie Brisick  04:55

I think they loved our level of passion. I mean, my parents, I think, had -- and my dad especially -- had very sort of conventional hopes for us, which was like, go to college and do all the right, safe things. And the surfers, skateboarders were like -- they were sort of long hair, less employable, maybe barefoot, a lot of weed, a lot of beer drinking. And it's really hard, you know -- it's important, I think, to contextualize surfing back then as opposed to now, because now it leans closer to a kind of a mainstream American sport, but at the time, it really was like on the margins and counter-cultural. And so when my parents saw us kids get into surfing, they were really concerned, you know? So it was like we were falling in with a bad crowd. And yet there was this incredible passion. And the thing that I realize now, and I think my parents would have seen this, while it wasn't maybe doing homework and studying English literature or history or whatever subjects we would have been studying, it was desiring to get better at something. There was something hopeful in that, I think. And they recognized that.

 

Sophie Bearman  05:56

I understand that your dad planned a trip to Europe to instill some kind of like culture and history. Can you tell me that story?

 

Jamie Brisick  06:03

My dad -- my dad was raised in New Jersey, right across from Manhattan. He went to Notre Dame. He was very academic. I remember at one point he said, 'You know, you kids.' He said, 'I grew up with seasons, and much of the year we were, we were summoned indoors by the weather, and that's where we read books and we watched movies on TV or in the theater, but that's where we had this kind of time to study. And you kids are just playing in the sun all year round, and you have to make sure you cultivate that other side of yourself.' So we went to Europe in 1979 as a family and traveled around Europe for about a month. And at the very end of that month, we were in England, in London, and my brothers and I saw punk rockers. They appealed to us maybe the same way the kind of Dogtown skateboarders did, but a different aesthetic, obviously. But they were doing something that seemed very appealing. And so we found our way into punk rock from there.

 

Sophie Bearman  06:55

So the trip kind of backfired in that sense.

 

Jamie Brisick  06:58

I think it did, yes.

 

Sophie Bearman  06:59

So your second song, then, I think this takes us there. It's The Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. So why'd you choose that one?

 

Jamie Brisick  07:08

So at the end of this month-long trip through Europe, we are flying back to LA out of Heathrow in London via JFK. And my parents have our tickets, and we realize we're going to be sitting right next to this guy who looks kind of like Sid Vicious. He's got spiky black hair, he's pasty white skin, his T shirt's all torn up. He's got like, a chain around his neck. And so the entire flight from Heathrow to JFK, we're, like, hitting him with questions. We want to know everything. And so when he got off the plane, he was carrying records with him, and he realized he had two copies of Richard Hell and the Voidoids. As he departs, he goes, 'Look, I got two of these. You can have one.' And he gave it to us. So we basically fly the leg from JFK to LA, get back to the house, and the very first thing we do is put on this song, The Blank Generation. And this became, kind of our like theme song anthem, moving forward into basically the beginning of our teens. 

 

Music  08:07

[Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids plays]

 

Jamie Brisick  08:19

I love it so much. I've always listened to lyrics very closely, and so much of the punk rock stuff really spoke to me because it had this defiance, rebellion. I mean, a lot, a lot of it was maybe whiny and complaining when I listen to it now. But it was disenchantment, but a healthy disenchantment, I think. It was like it was just a thing that you -- at that age, you did. I look back on it and think, 'What an entitled little punk you were. You know, a middle class kid with loving parents like, what more could you want for?' But I do recognize wanting more experience and wanting to taste life more so than what was available. 

 

Sophie Bearman  08:53

What was the first punk show you ever went to? 

 

Jamie Brisick  08:56

The first was Iggy Pop at the Stardust Ballroom. I was 13. I was with my older brothers and some friends. And as a little kid, it was, it was frightening. It was like, it was like being in the haunted house when you're seven or something. What was scary is there were hard drugs going around the LA punk scene at the time, and so there are people that were maybe nodding off, or, you know, they were somewhat lifeless. I remember moving through the crowd and running into like bodies that were sort of laying about on the floor. I thought they were dead, and later I would realize that it was probably heroin or some opiate. 

 

Sophie Bearman  09:29

Wow. One of your seven songs is from Iggy Pop. It's The Endless Sea. How would you listen to this song?

 

Jamie Brisick  09:36

I had a portable eight track player that my brother had sort of handed me down, and I would listen it right next to my pillow, and you'd shove these big eight track tapes into them. And they were much bigger than cassettes. And I had two. I think one was a David Bowie record, I'm blanking on the title of it. I remember the songs from it. And there was Iggy Pop New Values, which I just listened to non stop. And I was 13, 14, and just kind of really finding myself, I suppose, and feeling adolescence very intensely. Feeling all the hormonal stuff. Feeling desire. All this stuff was moving around. And this music was just one. It was fantastic to romanticize it. It was, it was, it's interesting the way, when I listen to it now, I'm right back to being 14 years old and feeling all the stuff I was feeling.

 

Music  10:26

[The Endless Sea by Iggy Pop plays]

 

Sophie Bearman  10:29

Did the punk rock scene feel compatible with the more competitive surfing lifestyle, though? And what about your brothers? Because at first, for a while, they're surfing with you. Did they keep with it as well? 

 

Jamie Brisick  10:55

Well, you know, it's interesting. We just listened to like, what is maybe another ballad or a kind of really emotional, introspective Iggy Pop song. But a lot of Iggy Pop's music is much more revved up. The punk music revved me up. And there was -- there's a thing that a lot of surfers do, and probably a lot of athletes do, which is, like, pre-game or pre-heat, you have your headphones on and you use that music to just get you in the zone. And so I did a lot of that with punk. But the punk lifestyle that was maybe more destruct -- I won't say destructive. That's unfair, but it was more involving night -- nights out. There was more partying. I'd moved away from that. The music was still my thing, but going to the shows seemed almost in conflict of getting up at 6:30 in the morning to be at the ocean at first light, you know?

 

Sophie Bearman  11:40

Yeah.

 

Jamie Brisick  11:41

My middle brother Steven, we were in it -- a lot of it together. My oldest brother Kevin, really moved away from surfing and into the punk scene. And then at that time, there was a real -- there were some real destructive elements in the punk scene, and he found his way to some really bad drugs and... But yeah, that so there was a kind of delineation, or fork in the road, or whatever you want to call it. We went different ways.

 

Sophie Bearman  12:04

Do you remember having glimpses of him kind of disappearing into that world while you're, you know, headed the other way?

 

Jamie Brisick  12:10

The way I remember it, and this could be the writer in me romanticizing, but as I remember it, my brother was sort of descending into drug addiction, and the more he did that, the more I saw surfing as my way out. The dream to be a pro surfer was like this magic carpet away from the stuff going on in my family that was really tough. My brother was nodding out at dinner sometimes, and it was really rough. And it's hard to even -- I feel almost disloyal to him to even speak about it in this form. But that was what was happening. And my response to it was basically to go into my bedroom and do 50 push ups, which was contributing to my athleticism that was going to get me out of this whole thing. When I think about it now, I was doggedly pursuing professional surfing, and when I look at the whole aesthetic of the 80s, there's like this bubble gum kind of gloss to it. We know the music from the time we -- there are music videos with surfers in it. I was in some of them. It all looks so kind of happy and sunshine-y. And yet there was this other thing going on in my life and in my family that was so the opposite of the like sunshine-y Malibu Barbie world that I was in. And then I turned pro, and I was sponsored by Quicksilver. I started in 1986. I went to Australia for the first time. Quicksilver bought me a plane ticket, and it was really like joining the circus in some way. You know? You -- and we were a big extended family. We really looked after each other. It was just incredibly fun. And it was, I think, the stuff that I was trying to fight off or in denial of that were so scary and confrontational to me with my brother and what was going on at home, I had this incredible escape.

 

Sophie Bearman  13:55

I understand that you heard some of the worst news about your brother that one can possibly here when you were back in the States at a surf contest in San Diego.

 

Jamie Brisick  14:05

Yeah.

 

Sophie Bearman  14:06

Are you comfortable telling that story?

 

Jamie Brisick  14:08

Yeah, I've been on tour for about a year and a half, and I'd gone to South Africa for a couple of events, and then I'd arrived back to California and went straight to the contest, without seeing my family. Competing in the contest -- had my biggest result to date. It was at Oceanside pier, and I remember people were knew my name and were cheering for me from the pier. And I was looking up, and people were shouting for me, 'Go, go, go.' And then I came in and was signing autographs. And this was all new, and it was a big deal to me. And I think -- I look at it now and again, there's a real bubblegum gloss to it all, but I look at it now and these were big moments for me. These were realizing this dream of mine. And then the next day, I got a lift up to Malibu with a friend. There was an amateur contest there, so it was a little bit like I was -- I was like the guy that went off to college and I returned to high school, and I was lapping up all the praise. And people were like, 'Good job.' And they'd known that I'd done well, and they'd known that I'd become a pro surfer. And suddenly this guy comes up to me and goes, 'Your brother's dead.' And in the midst of this puffed up moment, I think I thanked him for telling me that with like a smile that I had yet to drop from my face. And then called my mother and learned that, yes, I could tell immediately that, just by the way, she said, 'Hello,' that that was the case and -- and there it was. Yeah, yeah. 

 

Sophie Bearman  15:30

How did your brother Kevin's death impact or affect your life at that point?

 

Jamie Brisick  15:35

It was the first time I ever dealt with anything of that sort. I mean, I think in many ways, my life had been so great up until that time, and I was trying to feel it all. But I think I had this sort of armor. When he died, I was wearing that armor so thickly that I didn't know how to feel. It was sort of, I was like blocked. I was kind of like this jock guy that was not going to let it in. And so I went to his funeral. You know, his funeral was probably -- I had to, I had to skip a contest. And I think I was actually probably pissed off that I had to skip a contest. That's -- that was, like the depth of where I was at at the time. And then the tour, the pro tour, continued about a week after his death. And so I went on -- off to France, and I was on a really good run to kind of make what was the top 30, back then, was what you did to qualify and make get the big sponsor dollars and be a surf star. But as it happened, I lost the very first heat in France, and I went out that night and got very drunk. And I hooked up with a girl in a stairwell. And so began the next like five weeks of my rollicking tour through Europe of just total denial. But there's a song by Bob Dylan called I'll Remember You, and it's a very sad song. And I remember I bought the cassette tape in France on this tour where I was running away from my brother's passing. He died three weeks ago. I kind of was in denial of it -- out every night, drinking, or trying to focus on the contest. And then I bought this cassette tape, and I put it into my yellow Walkman and listened to it through my headphones. I was in the back of a car, and I just started sobbing quietly because there were friends around that I didn't want to see. But I remember driving by these trees, and they were kind of like stuttering as we passed, the way trees -- lines of trees do when you're in a car, moving car. And there was a lyric in there, I think it's, 'When the something blows through the piney wood.' It just felt like every lyric was written for me and my experience. Like every single lyric applies to what I was going through. 

 

Music  17:40

[I'll Remember You by Bob Dylan plays]

 

Jamie Brisick  17:57

I didn't know I was in denial, but the song arrested me and cracked me wide open. I started crying, and I was with three friends who were having a great time, and I almost felt guilty to bring sadness into this moment, so I was just kind of like wiping my tears away, ashamed of myself. I mean, it's like -- Bob Dylan unknowingly kind of allowed me to go into something that was going to be a huge thing in my life through this song. And yeah, that song did so much for me, and to me, it's a big one.

 

Sophie Bearman  18:35

It's time for a quick break. Coming up, Jamie finds his way from surfing to writing. Stay with us.

 

Sophie Bearman  19:03

So how did you end up getting into writing?

 

Jamie Brisick  19:06

So I did five years on the, on the ASP World Tour. I was jumping on so many airplanes to chase events around the world, and I lived on the northern beaches of Sydney, and it was wonderful. And in 1991, there was a recession at that time, and the industry was tightening its belt, and so my sort of team captain, guy at Quicksilver said, 'You know, we can't afford to pay you anymore. You're on your own,' basically. And I was heartbroken. And then I ran into a friend of mine, Andrew Kidman, who was the editor of waves magazine based in Sydney. I ran into him surfing one day, and I said to him, which was true that, 'Hey, you know, the entire time I've been a pro surfer, I've always kept diaries, and I'm interested in writing, but I'm a dilettante, and I would love to work at the magazine or contribute stories if you ever have any opportunities.' And he said, 'Oh, you know, your timing is perfect. The magazine's doing really well. We've got lots of advertisers. And I actually am budgeted to get an associate editor in there, and you'd be perfect. You, you can learn. I'll teach you how to do it.' It's funny, because when my pro surfing dream ended, I thought, 'This is the end of my life, and you can kind of kill me now, because I did the thing I wanted to do.' And then when I started working at the magazine and learning that there was so much in the world that I'd almost denied myself in the service of being an athlete. Suddenly the world is just so alive, and I didn't see it before. So I was like 25 starting this new thing. And I was a little behind the game. I had friends who'd graduated college. My college was basically traveling as a pro surfer, but I was so enthusiastic and trying to kind of overcompensate for my lack of formal education by just reading everything I could. And I think the kind of more wooden, desensitized jock part of myself was giving way to a more thoughtful, sensitive person that I'm hopefully more of now, I think.

 

Sophie Bearman  20:58

So fast forwarding in time now, in a couple years, you become the editor of Surfing Magazine, probably in your early 30s, and you chose another song, The Wild Kindness by Silver Jews, that I think speaks to that era. So tell me about that one.

 

Jamie Brisick  21:12

So after Australia, I lived in Venice Beach for a time, lived a very bohemian existence, probably like a trying-too-hard bohemian existence. But I really wanted to write, and I was just interested in artists, and I found my way into that world. Then I got the job to be the editor of Surfing Magazine, which seemed really prestigious at the time, but when I got into it, it was much -- I was spending more time with Excel spreadsheets. It was too much for me. I just -- I was -- I didn't have the temperament to do it. My escape was smoking a lot of weed, going surfing and kind of writing my own stuff. And I found the band The Silver Jews. David Berman.

 

Music  21:49

[The Wild Kindness by Silver Jews plays]

 

Jamie Brisick  22:04

I love it so much. What David Berman was doing, both in his songs and on the page, because he had published poetry, it just animated the world for me in a way that I needed. And again, I working for Surfing Magazine was wonderful, but it was in San Clemente, and there was a certain homogeny to the world that I was in. I felt like it was too much surf. As someone once called it, 'The Bro-muda Triangle.' You can't get out. And so I think I found escape through great music, and thus the Silver Jews.

 

Sophie Bearman  22:33

So after Surfing Magazine, it sounds like maybe you were not actually loving being the editor. You decide to move to New York City, and that's where you meet a woman who would become your wife. Tell me about her.

 

Jamie Brisick  22:44

Her name was Gisela Matta. And Gisela was from Sao Paulo, Brazil. She was a director of TV programs for MTV Brazil. She had done a travel program for a while, and she was going to Europe to make a pilot for a TV show she was pitching to MTV, and she passed through New York, and I met her through my friend Vava, and we really liked each other. And she went on to Europe. I couldn't stop thinking about her, and I pursued her. And about three months later, we were in love. Two years later, we got married. We lived in New York, and we had an incredible life together. We made a lot of stuff together. We were inspired by our work and we were we paired so nicely. We shared space so well together.

 

Sophie Bearman  23:26

From what I understand, it seems like at some point your marriage sort of started to fall apart. What happened?

 

Jamie Brisick  23:32

I fell in love with someone else is the brutal answer. And there was a sort of ennui, you might call it, we maybe were growing apart. I didn't technically leave the marriage, but I guess I left the relationship. And I was in this terrible place of feeling like my life is out of balance, but I still loved Gisela and wanted everything to be okay with her. And right in the mess of this, I get a text from one of her friends saying, 'Call me now.' And I called her and sobbing through the phone, she said, 'She's gone. She's gone.' I said, 'What do you mean she's gone?' And she said, 'She's dead.' And she was riding her bicycle home from dinner at a friend's in Rio de Janeiro, and she was hit by a bus and thrown. They were taking X-rays for a broken hip, when in fact, she was bleeding internally, and by the time they realized the extent of it, it was too late.

 

Sophie Bearman  24:21

Oh, my god.

 

Jamie Brisick  24:23

Yeah.

 

Sophie Bearman  24:24

I know that you shared a song that you said was lodged in your head in the months after Gisela's death. So what did you choose?

 

Jamie Brisick  24:31

So there was a surf film. It was in the early 70s. I want to say 74 maybe it was 76 but it's called Morning of the Earth. This film was a big deal, and it has this wonderful soundtrack. And when I learned of my wife's death, I went to Brazil right away. I was on a flight that night. And I arrived to see her family, and the next thing you know, I'm at her funeral. And this song just stuck into my head and became the tune in my head that I just grabbed onto to kind of maybe, you know, keep me afloat in some way. Or some kind of, some way of not facing, or not being able to face -- it was my dissociation. This thing that happened was so horrible, and the song was -- it was like this thing I could kind of grab onto, like a being in a stormy sea and just grabbing onto some buoy that'll keep you afloat. That's what this song felt like to me.

 

Sophie Bearman  25:26

This is Day Comes by G. Wayne Thomas.

 

Music  25:29

[Day Comes by G. Wayne Thomas plays]

 

Jamie Brisick  25:48

I didn't realize this. The year after my wife died was the toughest year of my life by far. And yet, 12 years on now, it was like one of the most beautiful years of my life as well. It was a combination of grief. I had a feeling of, 'I'm not sure how much longer I want to stick around here,' as in, life. I was like, deeply broken and disheartened or what have you. But I also saw this incredible beauty to being so completely sad and broken. So much of what we give value to in the world didn't apply to -- I felt like it didn't apply. Like I -- just looking around at what people cared about seemed so totally superficial. It's hard for me to find the language of what I felt in the wake of my wife's death. The words fail. They don't get close. But it was such an incredible beauty. I don't know. I distinctly remember when my brother died, and I learned of his death, and I'd come off the surf contest that I described to you earlier. I, I was -- I had to wait for my parents to pick me up, and I climbed this hill near Malibu because I was trying to avoid people. So I climbed this kind of scrubby slope, and I sat on a big boulder in my Quicksilver sweatpants, and I was wearing patent leather, red Adidas high tops. And I remember looking down, and I'm like, looking at my shoes and trying to think, 'What does this mean? My brother's gone?' And I remember looking at my shoes, going, 'Look at you. You're -- you're a clown. You're a clown with all these logos.' I had this giant Quicksilver logo down the stripe of my pants. And I just thought, 'This is -- is this what it is?' And I don't -- obviously, that was in that moment. I don't think the same way today, and I do have clothing with logos on it. And red patent leather shoes can be cool. But I think in those moments, it really made me think about what's important.

 

Sophie Bearman  27:38

Yeah, it's like the fog clears, and all the BS of life is just whatever.

 

Jamie Brisick  27:43

Yes, you just nailed it, Sophie, and that's funny because I used pretty much that same description when I've thought about it and tried to describe it to friends. 

 

Sophie Bearman  27:51

Yeah, when you described where you were at when your brother Kevin died, you mentioned that you could have gone home, but you were wrapped up in your career and didn't make that trip. Or, you know, both these deaths, they were so sudden, and you're just living your life. I guess what I'm getting at -- it's sort of a tricky question -- but how do you forgive yourself for just being human and or do you carry guilt around, like how you maybe were acting around both of those times?

 

Jamie Brisick  28:19

No, I definitely did, and maybe still do. I mean, I think in many ways, these specific events have shaped me more than anything else, and my path forward has been trying to make peace with all of that, because I think that there has been guilt. And I can -- I mean, there's a version of the story where I was a terrible person who left my wife and then she died. And then there's another version of I was a selfish motherfucker, and I was probably called that more than once by my brother before he died, because I was hard on him and was disappointed to watch what he was doing to himself. And so, yeah, I've done a lot of therapy. I've done the Hoffman process, I've done psychedelic therapy, I've done kind of all the stuff, and I think I've found a good place. But there's no real clean answer. And it's, it's not that my life is mired in all this stuff. I'm actually really upbeat a lot of the time. And I also think that there's a thing that happens where there are people on other sides of the world that would listen to me right now and go, 'Oh, you think you know what a tough life is? You have no idea, you, you know, upper middle class American, white boy.' But I know what I've -- I'm working through. And what I have found is that I think sometimes these things that are quote-unquote sad or heartbreaking or tragic or what have you, have actually given me more carpe diem than anything. They've made me realize how fragile it is, and they've actually given me this exultant thing of like, just enjoy every bit of it, you know?

 

Sophie Bearman  29:46

Yeah. So your next song, your last song, definitely gets at this idea that the tragedies of our life are also opportunities to celebrate life. And it's called Dress Sexy at My Funeral by Bill Callahan. So tell me why you picked this one.

 

Jamie Brisick  30:01

Bill Callahan, I love so much. One of the great lyricists of my lifetime, for sure. And it was so hard to pick one of his tunes because I have spent so much time with with his music. But this one I like because it's about a guy anticipating his passing, and he's telling his wife to dress sexy, which one would argue that's an incredibly sexist notion unto itself. So that's a whole nother story. There's a level of performing here, I would imagine, on Bill Callahan's part. But he wants his wife to basically mention at the memorial in her eulogy the great sexual exchanges that they've had, and that's what was incredibly humorous to me, and fun.

 

Music  30:44

[Dress Sexy at my Funeral by Bill Callahan plays]

 

Jamie Brisick  30:56

It's quite funny, huh?

 

Sophie Bearman  31:02

It's very funny. Say a little bit more about why you chose this one. 

 

Jamie Brisick  31:10

I guess it's the idea that someone who's contemplating his death and he's saying to his wife, 'Tell them about the great fucks we had,' basically. Is that what we remember in those times? You know, is that -- like in a romance, in a great love. And I say this because I've been thinking a lot about this, because I've been writing a novel that is a love story, so I've been thinking about it in a way that most people don't probably have time to or want to. But I guess it's that thing of -- the fact that he's contemplating death, and he's saying, 'Go. You're a sexy woman to carry on with your life.' Sex might be like the minor part of this story. The bigger part might be just life and death and the regeneration of life.

 

Sophie Bearman  31:52

In a way, what he's saying is like, 'Yeah, I'm gonna die, but go on living your life because I loved you when you were alive and you were hot and sexy, and you also have to live your life.'

 

Jamie Brisick  32:02

Yes, and in many ways, when I was in my deep, deep grief and really wondering whether I wanted to stick around and If no, then how to exit, I remember life started to take turns -- take some turns for the better. I remember thinking about the Buddhist notion of remaining curious. To see, like, who could you meet tomorrow? Or what email might come into your inbox that might make you want to hang out for a little bit longer, right? And so I think as my life got better and I found my way through deep loss, deep grief, what I remember coming to mind frequently was life regenerates. Life is generative and regenerative. And when you think it's over, it's so often not. And it's about to do something that will totally blow you away.

 

Sophie Bearman  32:50

I want to read you back something that you've written and then and ask a question on it. You wrote, 'I was 26 with a head full of Jack Kerouac.' You list some other authors. 'My heroes had lived storied lives, often heaped in suffering. The suffering part was an abstraction, but I knew I wanted the stuff that results from it, the wisdom, the depth.' 30-some years later, you've been through a lot of suffering, so I'm curious, what would you tell your 26-year-old self about that desire?

 

Jamie Brisick  33:16

I mean, in some way, yeah, I was, I was gonna say, Be careful what you wish for, of course, but no, I mean, I guess -- but I would also probably place a hand on his shoulder and go, 'But, you know, it's all okay anyway.' I mean, I don't have any children, but I have a niece and a nephew who I love and I'm very close with, and I remember saying to my nephew, 'Look, as long as you live, everything's going to be okay. Just live.' A lot of the things that may be regarded as mistakes or poor choices will just lead you to some new thing. And if you, if you can find it in your heart and mind to frame it differently and go, 'It's all experience.' When I was seeing a therapist after my wife died, I remember my therapist saying, 'We get it so wrong. We think we're supposed to have these happy lives. It's not. If you start to think of life as just a learning experience, you're actually living an incredibly good life, you fresh widower. You have no idea how lucky you are to be a widower, because if it's about learning and having experience, you're in the thick of it.' This is way more exciting than just having a humdrum like, God forbid, boring time. You know? It may not be pleasant now, but you're going to learn things from this that you would never learn if you'd taken a more safer path or whatever. These things that seem like misfortunes in the moment will kind of edify you and help enlarge you as a person.

 

Sophie Bearman  34:35

I'm really going to sit with a lot of what you're saying. So thank you so much for sharing your seven songs.

 

Jamie Brisick  34:40

It is my pleasure.

 

Sophie Bearman  35:07

Life in Seven Songs is a production from The San Francisco Standard. If you enjoyed this episode, you might like to go back and listen to my interview with David Sheff, writer and father who suggested that I interview Jamie, and I'm very glad that I did. Also, if you haven't already, please subscribe and like the show. It makes a big difference for us. Our Senior Producer is Jasmyn Morris, our producers are Michelle Lanz, who also mixes the show, and Tessa Kramer. Our theme music is by Kate Davis and Zubin Hensler ….and Jess Hutchison created our show art. Our music consultant is Sarah Tembeckjian. Executive Producers are Griffin Gaffney, Jon Steinberg, and me. As always, you can find this guest full playlist at sf.news/spotify. I'm Sophie Bearman. Thank you for listening and see you next time.