(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 7 November 2025 20:43, UK
It’s one of the ultimate questions you can ask anyone, music fan or not: Just what sombre hymn, mournful ballad, or ‘good innings’ pop gem do you hope scores your mortal send-off?
As well as a stiff corpse slyly opening an eye to ensure sufficient grieving, such is the farewell tune’s utmost importance in honouring the deceased’s legacy that one can imagine a marbled cadaver shuffling to the Bluetooth speakers, interrupting ‘Ave Maria’ in a clouded, eye-rolling huff, before playing Limp Bizkit’s ‘Rollin’’ as specifically requested and returning to the coffin, picking up a dropped limb in the process.
There’s a reason we always open our Quick-fire Questions features with it. One’s favourite song is usually next to impossible to answer, let alone most loved album or even artist in general, but when faced with the funeral soundtrack query, often the anguish of sifting through a lifetime’s worth of songs is swiftly parted to reveal the one number that seems, in whatever unexplainable ways, to wrap up the ultimate sentiment and meaning of your life.
It was a question put to Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland. Alongside his starring turn in the 24 series and countless feature roles since the early 1980s, Sutherland has forged a respectable second career for himself in the US country world with a string of rootsy storytelling songcraft and folk rock flourish, counting three albums under his belt. Despite an evident love of music, Sutherland confessed to having thought little of the anthem he predicted playing as his musical final bow.
“Oh, I haven’t thought about that!” Sutherland exclaimed to NME in 2021, “I spend most of my time thinking about the tombstone; I haven’t considered the song. Maybe Bruce Springsteen, ‘Born to Run’, or ‘Racing In The Street’. I think those songs would have encapsulated, on some level, my life.”
From Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, respectively, Springsteen’s mid to late 1970s heyday with the trusty E Street Band will always stand as ‘The Boss’ defining era in the eyes of many of his fans. Greater commercial conquer would follow, with 1984’s Born in the USA a gargantuan Billboard monster thrusting the gang to instant stars of the MTV era, but it’s the two aforementioned albums that best realise the blue collar lyricism and middle-American drama and optimism, forging a lifelong, devoted fanbase.
They’re understandable picks as both numbers are charged with classic Springsteen lyrical grabs of deindustrialised escapism, yearning for better hinterlands and richer vistas that beckon with daydream allure in the midst of your crummy, dead-end job or suffocating small-town claustrophobia: a reverie that grows ever more pertinent in the contemporary economic wasteland. While the pedigree of Sutherland’s acting father surely afforded a significant leg-up, such a road to prove his mettle likely afforded a deep affinity with the themes that ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Racing In The Street’ thunderously encapsulate.
It’s a great choice and will likely cast a moving gravitas across any chapel service, deterring any undead attempts at wresting the Spotify playlist from the funeral celebrant’s hands.
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