Folk-punk and the way it handles loss and grief is something I want to think about more carefully.

The best folk-punk songs about loss are not primarily sad. They contain sadness, but they do something with it — they put the loss in a larger context of community, of shared experience, of continuing life. The emotional register is closer to wake than to funeral: the sadness is present and honored, but it exists alongside music and food and people talking and being alive.

This approach to grief has political dimensions. Folk-punk's working-class and marginalized communities experience certain kinds of loss at rates that other communities don't — poverty-related death, police violence, addiction, the specific losses of people who were never going to be protected by institutional safety nets. Music that can hold that loss without sentimentalizing it or making it feel exceptional is doing important work.

The folk-punk songs about loss that I find most lasting are the ones that don't make you feel sorry for the person who died — they make you understand why that person mattered and what it means that they're gone.