My musical awakening came in 1994. A friend’s brother gave me a cassette tape on Nirvana’s In Utero, and I put the tape in my Walkman and rode my bike around the neighborhood, blaring “Scentless Apprentice” and “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” as I careened down the road. I started listening to them a few weeks before Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. As with many teenagers growing up in the 90s, Nirvana spoke to me and opened the door to so much more, including bands such as Mudhoney, The Wipers, The Melvins, and backwards to blues singers such as Leadbelly. I remember when the Rolling Stone issue came out following Cobain’s death and my friend lifted the copy from the school library and gave it to me.

Nirvana, for me, serves as a touchstone for a pivotal moment in my life, as a moment when I started to expand and explore music, art, and the world. Along with Nirvana, Kids in the Hall served as an artistic touchstone. Growing up, I didn’t know any openly gay or lesbian individuals, and Kids in the Hall, specifically Scott Thompson, served as my introduction gay and lesbian individuals. Nirvana served as my introduction to ally ship and fights against toxic masculinity, look at a song like “Mr. Moustache.” Each of these groups, in their own ways, planted seeds that continue to grow to this day.

It’s no wonder that both groups had such an impact on me considering that they were connected as well. Cobain was a huge fan of Kids in the Hall, and one year following Cobain’s death, in the series finale, Scott Thompson, playing Buddy Cole, burns down his bar while a photo of Kurt Cobain as a child sits on the counter. Kids in the Hall met Cobain and Nirvana at one of their last shows, and Thompson went backstage. They exchanged numbers, and Cobain was on the guest lists for the Kids in the Hall’s tour shows.

Comedy helps to heal wounds, and one of the most moving songs that Keep going back to, again and again, when I think about Cobain is Bruce McCulloch’s “Vigil” from his 1995 album Shame Based Man. McCulloch’s comedy and delivery stand out to me in its dryness and cynicism, its presentation of the tragic in a dark comedic shroud. Songs like “Eraserhead,” “That’s America,” or “Daddy’s on the Drink” all do this for me, but it is with “Vigil” that the sincerity of McCulloch’s comedy comes through for me because, just like Cobain’s emotional growl at the end of the cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, you can hear the wrenching in McCulloch’s throat throughout the song.

The song staggers in its opening as the guitar hits first and gives a brief run, but without any clear rhythm while McCulloch intones, “Vigil. I don’t know what a vigil is. I have some idea, though, that it involves candles.” The grasping guitar, looking for some sense of clarity amidst the tragedy serves as a searching for stability, a searching for grounding. The song finds its rhythm early on, swelling with guitar, drums, and organ as McCulloch goes through his feelings upon arriving in Seattle hours before the vigil for Cobain.

McCulloch ruminates about death and vigils, the remembering of those who have passed. At that point, I had not, like McCulloch states in “Vigil,” “been to a funeral,” at least one that I could recall. Cobain’s death served as the first moment when mortality hit me. He was eleven years older than me. In fact, even today, as I write this, he would still be in his 50s, not even cross into his 60s yet.

Even though he was in Seattle, McCulloch states that he couldn’t go to the vigil; he couldn’t “see beautiful seventeen year old children in dreadlocks, white hippies celebrating dark death.” The reality of Cobain’s passing hit home; the struggles that Cobain endured which led him suicide impacted a lot of people. Near the end of the song, McCulloch comments, “Don’t get me wrong. Someone sad and crazy had done something hideous and left a lot of stronger people behind. There was not a lot else to be said.”

“Vigil” oozes with McCulloch’s cynicism; as he puts it, “Cynicism is my whiskey. And I had a few.” Cynicism and staring in the face of the tragedy helps up to cope. Comedy serves, for me, as a defense mechanism, as a means to deal with situations that exist outside of my control. I have to laugh or I’ll break down. I have to look, sometimes, at the absurdity of a situation. Other times, I have to be dry and deadpan, making myself laugh, if no one else does, in order to see myself through. “Vigil” does this through the mixture of pain of Cobain’s death and the quick asides such as McCulloch commenting that he’s never been to a vigil but the closet he’d come before that point was flushing four turtles down the toilet in the 1970s. These moments allow us to feel the pain and laugh at the same time, to confront the tragedy.

The song ends with McCulloch taking a run along the ocean. During his run, he stops by some logs that someone had arranged to spell, “Bye, Kurt.” At this moment, McCulloch sings, “I took a breath, looked up at Seattle and wondered what didn’t he see. And if I’ve ever been to a vigil, I guess that was it.” McCulloch communed with Cobain in that moment, he grieved, in his way, and McCulloch’s grief, while different from mine, makes me think about my own grief. I never knew Cobain personally. He was a celebrity, yes. Yet, he opened so much for me, just as McCulloch, Thompson, Kevin MacDonald, Mark McKinney, and Dave Foley did.

In grief, we look for reasons for what happened. We look for ways to move forward. Eulogies and vigils are for the living, for the future. They speak to what lies ahead while reminds us of what lies behind. “Vigil” is for McCulloch. “Vigil” is for me. “Vigil” is for those who remain. Everytime I listen to it, as I get older, it doesn’t just remind me of Cobain. It reminds me of others I have lost, of the past, but also of the future and the fact that I am still here, moving forward.