While in Iowa over the weekend, my brother and I traveled to Iowa City to attend the joint birthday party that Ransom and Angie were throwing. It’s an hour’s drive east from Grinnell, a drive I’ve probably made close to a thousand times.

It was dark. My brother, in the passenger seat, cued up “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” on his iPod. I smiled for the entire duration of the song. I found myself entertaining the admittedly mundane thought I always do in the presence of great art:

How sad that people who died before this song was released cannot hear it.

But maybe they can—and for the rest of the song my only (mundane but worthwhile) wish in the world was this: that all the dead people I’ve known and haven’t known should be able to enjoy “Single Ladies”—and every other creation of equal or greater value.

Driving back, at 3 a.m., my brother put on Lost and Safe by the Books. I’d forgotten all about that album, and the Books, but 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway was the perfect time to be reminded.

“Be Good to Them Always” began and I immediately pictured an extremely specific location: the corner of Pierce and Damen, facing east, four years ago. Morning, summer. Taking a left at Penny’s and rounding the corner, hurrying to catch a train. Already sweating in my work clothes. I suppose song was in heavy rotation on my iPod.

The song’s lyrics—if you can call snippets of dialogue and field recordings lyrics layered over beats, cello, and Rhodes, all chopped into carefully reconstituted smithereens—those lyrics were unsettling then, and seem prescient now, on the perpetual cusp of national disaster.

Different music, different context, same mundane but worthwhile wish: that the dead should hear this music. At 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway that wish was transformed; it became less mundane, more desperate, both less and more specific—extrapolated out to address whatever amazing song might be playing, but now also invoking a singular departed.