> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hearingthings.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Sweeping Promises On the Songs They Want to Soundtrack Their Funerals - URL: https://www.hearingthings.co/sweeping-promises-interview-funeral-playlist/ - Published: 2026-09-11T13:11:16.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T13:11:16.000Z - Description: The husband-wife punk duo eyes German art song and hard-to-handle drone music for their final requests. - Author: Jill Mapes - Tags: Existential Playlist, Sweeping Promises, Feature, Interview, #4:3 [*Existential Playlist*](https://www.hearingthings.co/tag/existential-playlist/) *is an interview series where artists tell us about the music they want played at their own memorial service, delving into some of life’s biggest questions along the way.* --- Lira Mondal remembers the moment she fell in love with Yo La Tengo in such specific detail, there’s no doubting it was a formative music memory for the Sweeping Things vocalist-guitarist. At Hendrix, the small Arkansas college where she met her partner in life and music, Caufield Schnug, there was a cafe in the student center with “vestigial global cafe decor, a little bit rundown like your cool aunt’s living room, a little bit like Panera in the ’90s, with a small stage,” she describes. There, at a slam poetry night thrown by English majors, is where she first encountered YLT’s music, thanks to an upperclassman who resembled Henry Rollins. “He was so imposing physically, but he had such a gooey center. He recited this poem set to ‘[Green Arrow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=CjyEU6gStSU&ref=hearingthings.co),’ that instrumental piece with the crickets off *I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One*. It opened up something inside me that I didn’t even know had been locked away.” This was long before Mondal found herself in a husband-wife indie rock duo (sometimes rounded out with a third, drummer Spenser Gralla), much like Yo La Tengo. Over the last two decades, she and Mondal have made community wherever they’ve settled, from Conway, Arkansas, to Boston, Massachusetts, to Lawrence, Kansas (which they liken to Berkeley, California). Their home there serves as a recording studio, show house, and crash pad for like-minded Midwest punks. “Our running joke is that we want a friend compound, which—the way that things are going in the world—is probably going to be a necessity,” says Mondal. “We’re both kind of busybodies who love to be in the mix. We would be bed and breakfast hosts if not for this. When Caufield’s recording a band in the house, there’s a positive energy that’s carrying forth, and we want to be a part of that. It’s basically a prolonged social call, but it’s also mission-driven: we’re here to make art.” Before deciding on Lawrence, the pair went on research trips trying to find the right city to affordably build their weirdo music compound. Turns out they seriously considered Youngstown, Ohio, aka my own rust-belt hometown near the Pennsylvania border. “We almost bought a church in Lowellville,” says Schnug. “It was 100 grand for like 3,000 square feet.” Asked what was wrong with it, Schnug replied: “Everything. Plus I think we would have bitten off more than we could chew in terms of luring people there. Lawrence is the center of the country, a hub with lots of spokes leading to it.” Sometimes Mondal and Schnug are so busy facilitating and recording others’ music, it takes Sweeping Promises a year and a half to finish recording a new album. Such was the case with *You Say I Romanticize*, their recent third LP, where their incisive social critiques and even spikier guitars reach the peak of their powers. Mondal’s opera-singer training allows her to tap into a rarified space vocally; she is easily one of the best and most impactful singers in rock’n’roll right now. Her choral-focused picks below underscore her traditional training, while Schnug’s funeral picks lean more towards forced discomfort. Just like in song, their oppositional qualities fit together like imperfect harmony. --- ### Tony Conrad and Faust: [*Outside the Dream Syndicate* ](https://tonyconrad-sv.bandcamp.com/album/outside-the-dream-syndicate?ref=hearingthings.co)(1973) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/855985006895.jpg) **Caufield Schnug:** I don’t like the celebration-of-life thing, where everyone’s supposed to pretend to have a great time. I want something more emotionally tyrannical for my funeral. Everyone should listen to this very imposing and long album at least once in life, or in this case, death. Tony Conrad’s very existence is an insult to the idea of funerals, like he’s such an anti-monumental figure. His work is about marking and subdividing time, converting the “flicker” of rhythm into something bigger and rife with emotional after-effects. It’s kind of horrible to listen to, the repetitive snare drum, but it’s also a lovely piece of music. Making people listen to challenging music after I die—I just think that’d be hilarious. It would be a humorous choice to those of us with fiendish taste, but mostly, I think the insult would waft around the room. **Are there any other works that come to mind as “emotionally tyrannical”?** **Caufield:** Well, I also picked Flipper, which I feel like is pretty blasphemous and against the idea of funerals... --- ### Flipper: [“](https://youtu.be/h7SdOtXI5R8?si=iua16rlOQV%5FjeZMK&ref=hearingthings.co)[Shed No Tears”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQOsm63TKQs&ref=hearingthings.co) (1982) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/00602537211395.rgb.jpg) **Caufield:** Sorry to be this guy. This is one of my favorite tracks—a monument in a sea of punk noise. There’s this angelic side to Flipper that I find very beautiful… but it’s also very harsh and judgmental. They’re angry at death, but they’re angry at the rituals around death that sanctify and elevate. They’re keeping it real. The song contends with death in a semi-blasphemous yet truthful way. It sees death as a vestige or even credential of social power, which becomes positive only when one refuses to romanticize it. And of course you can hear the freedom of the howling guitar… I don’t think I would actually \[request this be played\] because it’d probably be upsetting. But I find the song comforting. **Lira Mondal:** If you go before me, Flipper’s what you’re getting. --- ### Yo La Tengo: [“Sugarcube”](https://youtu.be/h7SdOtXI5R8?si=iua16rlOQV%5FjeZMK&ref=hearingthings.co) (1997) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/191401187756.png) **Caufield:** I had to choose this paean to guitar, conceived in part by a husband-wife indie rock duo. I can relate! Lira and I met when I was 19\. So we’ve been together and making music for a long time, and listening to music together, and one of the things we always listen to is Yo La Tengo. We bonded hardcore over them. **I’ve often wondered what James \[McNew, YLT bassist\] thinks, what his perspective is, having played with Ira and Georgia for decades. They have such a chill energy about them, it’s kind of hard for me to imagine them fighting, you know?** **Lira:** Yeah, I feel like they’ve achieved domestic bliss. **Caufield:** They found the third. **Lira:** They found the third! **Between the band, hosting and recording other musicians in your home studio, and being together for almost 20 years… Do you ever have moments where you just go, *Oh my god, I need some space!*** **Lira:** Our joke is that we fight kind of often, in terms of musical decisions… **Caufield:** But in the relationship proper, we don’t have issues. **Lira:** Or maybe it’s this elaborate sublimation into musical decisions? Maybe you’re just not telling me? **Caufield:** No... you know me, I can’t *not* say something. **Lira:** I can’t *not* say anything, either. We talk about every little thing. --- ### Lou Harrison: [“Main Bersama-Sama”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fivTjJ81S60&ref=hearingthings.co) (1978) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/93228064329.jpg) **Caufield:** My relationship with gamelan is a dalliance, but it left a trace! I love the idea of an instrument that everyone plays together, and it’s not gate-kept by knowing how to play the instrument. I find Harrison’s teachings on the classical, ‘untempered’ scales of West Java \[Indonesia\] to be suggestive of punk values: communitarian, explorative, creatively inaccurate. Life-changing when you take the plunge! Plus I just think it’d be awesome to have gamelan music at a funeral. It’s primordial and lovely. It sounds otherworldly, like something that you should not be able to hear as a human. Everyone I ever took to a gamelan performance loved it. It blew their minds and made them think more expansively about music as a social event. --- ### Arvo Pärt: [“Magnificat”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4NY3iXMBTc&ref=hearingthings.co) (1989) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/6a2c62-20171205-arvopart.jpg) Estonian composer Arvo Pärt **Lira:** The things that really impact you in life, they never really go away. It may be clichéd, but I don’t care, it’s my funeral and I’m going to have choral music. There is nothing more meaningful to me than mingled voices reaching beyond the confines of the human body, unaccompanied, upwards and outwards. I’ve always treasured so much about singing in a choir—just all these little ways that an individual kind of wraps themselves around the music and around the people that they’re singing with in order to create this one thing. And I absolutely love choral music in particular that is reminiscent of Gregorian chant. I performed this piece my senior year of college. It gave me goosebumps then, and still does to this day. It is a patient and quietly demanding work due to a combination of sustained repetitive drone notes and bell-like dissonances. One of Pärt’s innovations was the concept of [tintinnabuli](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND6VMcwl5kw&ref=hearingthings.co), which is a bell-like quality from really small intervals stacked with really wide intervals in the arrangement. It’s creating overtones that also kind of evoke some sort of spiritual transcendence. Sometimes the voices come together like a burst of sunlight, where it all just coalesces. I think it’s such a striking piece. --- ### Richard Strauss: [“Traum durch die Dämmerung”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odKi1GcvtK0&ref=hearingthings.co) (Dream Through the Twilight) (1895) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/1900x1900-000000-80-0-0.jpg) **Lira:** German art song, another throwback to my college days. I performed this at a summer Lieder program in Austria and have remained transfixed by the hypnotic and mysterious interplay between music and melody. It’s clung to me all these years later like a rare perfume from an amethyst bottle. The text is a poem describing a lover’s languorous walk through twilit, jasmine-drenched woods on the way to meet their beloved. What an enchanting send-off. It could definitely describe a lover’s tryst, but I think it’s also very existential: I’m walking through the woods, and the sensory overload is taking me over, and I’m going to a place that I’m meant to go. I’m not lingering, but I’m not hastening at the same time. I’m taken care of in the hands of the universe. It would be so beautiful for other people to hear that \[upon my death\] and take that for themselves—like, *actually, no, your life is exactly the life that you’re meant to be living*. --- ### The Roches: [“Hammond Song”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuH43-ceKJ4&ref=hearingthings.co) (1979) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/mzi.sznpvcpf.jpg) **Lira:** Maybe it’s overkill for a funeral, but this is one of the most beautiful and tragic songs ever written, so full of complicated emotions, and delivered with the Roches’ virtuosic harmonizing. We made the mistake of putting on “Hammond Song” in the van one day and… well, it was my fault because I had the aux cord, and Caufield was driving, and we were somewhere beautiful, I think it was a green valley. And everyone started crying. I was like, *what have I done?!* **But a “Hammond Song” cry is a good cry, a cathartic cry.** **Caufield:** Robert Fripp’s guitar solo, too… **It’s so wild that he produced that album. The lore with them… Paul Simon was trying to make them famous. I’m curious when you first heard the Roches, because for me, it was like, *whoa, who is this*? Just like puzzled that I had never encountered this group before.** **Lira:** So that was a gift bestowed upon us by our friend Will Henriksen, who plays in Florry. He’s a violinist, he does vocals, and he plays in many bands. He is just such a gifted musician, we love him so much. He and his wife, Ari, we were neighbors in Somerville, Massachusetts. We didn’t know for the longest time until Caulfield recorded one of his projects, and then we became really good friends, and played in a couple bands together. It was on the way to a band practice that we were throwing around some of our favorite music, and he said, “Oh, have you ever heard of the Roches before?” And we were both like, “No.” And then he played us—it wasn’t “Hammond Song,” it was “[Big Nuthin’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbb5mSomdV8&ref=hearingthings.co),” their song about playing *SNL*. It was so bizarre, but so melodically rich and funny. And we love a family band, you know? --- ### GG King: [“Cul De Sac”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KoUSKBDwQg&ref=hearingthings.co) (2021) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/08/733102720100.jpg) **Lira:** An ode to mythologizing your street and remaining spiritually unbreakable in the face of encroaching dark forces. It’s such a beautiful testament to the power of the mundane as a form of resistance. Like, mowing your lawn is a meditative feat. But it’s a message of resilience without being resilience-thumping, because we have this thing about resilience in pop music—or any kind of music, really. G*otta keep going, brother, you just gotta hold on.* That’s like, the only message in pop culture. There’s so much darkness in GG King’s music at the same time, but again, it’s not gratuitous. He’s really clever about making punk that feels good, but is also very weird. His vocal delivery, too, is just so good! Venomous but also sweet. Note to my loved ones: Maybe just disregard the other songs I mentioned, play this one five times in a row, scatter my ashes to the winds, and call it a day.