Vision + Mission
Vision
People are able to connect with music that reflects and informs their own grief and keep the stories of loved ones alive through listening to and creating music.
Mission
Sharing the stories about the artist’s experience with the death, the person who died, and the process of creating music from a place of grief.
Principles
- Experiences around grief are influenced by more than just who, how, and when. Race, racism, gender, privilege. income, culture, and others determinants influence how people think about and experience their grief.
- Sharing the experiences around grief can help inform and create a safe place for others to learn about and share their own feelings. For that reason, songs we share are written about the death of someone in the artist's life.
- As much as possible, the stories we tell are written using the artist's own words.
- We are not music critics.
- We are not professional mental health or social work professionals. Therefore, we do not provide advice or imply diagnosis.
About Death Jams
Hi. My name is Travis.
Death Jams origins
Through all the deaths in my life, through all the big life changes, I have sought out music to help explore emotions, to keep me present and aware, to put words to my experiences, and find comfort in hearing that others can relate. Death Jams is a playlist that started, after my mother's death 23 years ago, with The Offspring's "Gone Away" and R. Kelly's "I Wish." I continued seeking out, collecting, and learning about the music of artists writing about losing loved ones. They were first members in my virtual, grieving peer group. Death Jams has lived as radio recordings on cassettes, CD-Rs, iPods, and now lives all in one place on a hard drive and (mostly) on Spotify.
My grief story
I share a few characteristics with a lot of people - many people in my life have died, often sooner than they should have, and music is a powerful source of comfort and a way for me to safely connect to feelings.
My story starts at 15 when my mother died from cervical cancer. Despite support that formed around us, my mom’s death carved away and modified pieces of me that I am still learning about decades later.
This story was recently book-ended with the death of my father. At the beginning of the COVID lock-down, 23 years after my mother’s death, my father died from heart failure and complications from radiation treatment he went through 10 years earlier.
Within those years I spent time exploring the world of grief and death. While it has not been my professional pursuit, death and grief defined a large part of my growth and have helped me develop a drive to learn how to talk with others.
My mom and me c. 1995. Her hair grew back curly after the chemo.
