P.A.Kane

Thanks for clicking onto my site and considering my book. The Last Playlist: A Sonic Epitaph (TLP) is unique in the realm of memoir writing. It combines a music playlist with personal essays for a trans-dimensional reading experience (wow, man) that is sometimes fun, sometimes uplifting, sometimes heartbreaking. Right at the start here an astute observer might ask—who are you to write a memoir? The short answer, of course, is nobody. But it’s more complicated than that. Writing this book was motivated by the death of my mom. Even though I was in my thirties when she passed I found that I didn’t know her beyond a typical mother/son relationship, which greatly saddened me. I didn’t want that for my own children and since we always bonded over music I thought to write some stories about my life linked to songs I found meaningful. Combined into one package these songs and their corresponding essays make up TLP. Also, when I pass from this world, this playlist—the last playlist—is to be ...

Over the last year I've read the three-thousand page, four volume set of Robert Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson." In the final volume, Caro does an in depth profile of John F. Kennedy. I came away from this profile not only with more knowledge and understanding of Kennedy, but also extremely impressed with the man. Last year when Bob Dylan released "Murder Most Foul," which chronicles the assassination of Kennedy I wrote an essay without fully understanding what was lost that November 1963 day in Dallas. So today, May 24th 2021, on the 80th birthday of America's greatest artist, Bob Dylan, I thought I'd repost that essay. On April 4, 1968 at 6pm, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. I was a six-year old white kid, in an all white neighborhood and only had a vaguest notion of him. I knew he was an important man, but didn’t understand the words associated with him. Words like civil rights, n...