By Chris Nelson

When it is a full-moon night and I am listening to the radio alone in my old Toyota pickup, I transform into the mysterious, famously raspy disc jockey from the ‘60s, Wolfman Jack. Suddenly I am inside the broadcast booth of a Mexican “border blaster” radio station, and myvoice gets gravely and low, growling and howling as I speak quickly in quips and catchphrases.

A song comes on, and I improvise a fast and loose, five-second introduction like, “What are the final words someone in a horror movie hears just before they die? Here’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ by Tommy James & the Shondells.”It goes on and on like that until a song comes up in the shuffle that makes my skin crawl, and immediately fall silent and press skip.

As hard as it is to kill my vibe when I am moonlighting as Wolfman Jack, I am always snapped out of the trance by a “deep-cut track,” which is a once great song that is now plagued by past grief and tarnished by yesterday’s tragedies.

My earliest deep cuts go way back, and a few of them are all-time classic rock hits: “Behind Blue Eyes” by The Who, “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum, and “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor. Those songs were ruined after a high school friend took his own life, and at his funeral he posthumously requested that those in attendance listen to the tracks together.

Another deep-cut is “Ultralight Beam” by Kanye West, a prayerful hip-hop song that was the first track on West’s seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo, which debuted just before he became unhinged as a human. The song is most meaningful to me because it is the soundtrack to a seven-minute film, a “black cinema” artwork that traces African-American identity through beautifully edited found and original footage: Love is the Message, The Message is Death by visual artist Jafa. Sometime in the last decade I saw the short film at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and after a few minutes of watching curiously, I sat crosslegged on the floor and watched it fully three times as tears streamed down my face.

Not too long ago I again wept in public after hearing a deep cut during a concert by queer, 6-foot-4, 300-lb folk musician Willie Carlisle, when he played a song I had never heard before: “Beeswing.” Originally written by Englishman Richard Thompson in the early ‘90s, the song is about a man’s fleeting, burning romance with a free-spirited woman that falls apart because of booze and bad decisions, and Willie Carlisle played his “squeezebox” accordion and sang the mournful tale with hypnotizing heartbreak.

When I hear “I Went to the Store One Day” by Father John Misty, I remember the night my father died. It was May 2015, I was moving out of Michigan to find a new home in California, and the song was playing as I laid on the bare floor of my empty apartment and told the redhead in my arms that I would miss her. Then I got into my packed van, drove west, and stopped in Chicago for the night to see my family, unaware that my cancer-sick dad was minutes away from dying, and everything was going to be very different.

Not all deep cuts are depressing, though, and it is as likely that warm, fond memories will make good songs even better. For example, “Acrobat” by Angel Olsen reminds me of a peaceful, quiet weekend spent alone, reading and writing in a cave on the southern coast of Spain, and “Tiny Bikini” by Amyl and The Sniffers has become the unofficial “pump-up” track for my two dogs before we go on mountain hikes together. If “Midnight City” by M83 comes on, I cannot help but feel good and dance like a fool, no matter how played out the song is.

When a song that makes me smile starts to play, it is easy for me to turn back into Wolfman Jack- hooting and howling, jabbing and jawing. I’ll even make up commercial spots for my sponsors, like “This year &SONS celebrates one decade in business… Remember ten years ago, way back when Post Malone was a patchy bearded rapper with cornrows who thought Grand Ole Opry was a prehistoric bird?”

Then an imaginary listener calls my request line and asks me to play "Harvest Moon” by Neil Young, but that song is a hard-pass, no-go deep cut, so I tell ‘em, “Bugaloo baby, that one cuts too deep! But if you still want me to plow your fields, let’s sow our sonic oats to Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ This is the Wolfman signing off for the night.

Love the songs that heal, feel the songs that hurt, and when all else fails, howl at the moon - awoo, bugaloo!”