Sweeping Promises On the Songs They Want to Soundtrack Their Funerals

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,’ 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.