{"id":40808,"date":"2025-08-02T02:27:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T02:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/40808\/"},"modified":"2025-08-02T02:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T02:27:11","slug":"josh-pike-on-bodies-death-and-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/40808\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Pike on bodies, death and music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gee, I\u2019m sorry, Josh; that\u2019s a huge loss. She died from heart failure, but had dementia for 14 years. It\u2019s hard to see a loved one go through that and go, \u201cThere is a God.\u201d But we memorialised her through music. I was fortunate to have played with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra a couple of months ago. The last song we played was What It Means to Be Alone (Catherine)<\/a>. It has a long, seven-minute meandering at the end, a musical representation of a slide into dementia. That was a great emotional catharsis for me.<\/p>\n

DEATH<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve landed on \u201cDeath\u201d and we\u2019re already talking about your mother\u2009\u2026 It\u2019s interesting: I didn\u2019t get a big sense of catharsis when she passed away and I was really worried about that. I actually went to see a counsellor and was like, \u201cI feel like there\u2019s something wrong with me.\u201d But, actually, I\u2019d just incrementally been grieving for a really long time.<\/p>\n

That makes sense. It was such a mixed bag of emotions. There was relief there as well. Whereas, recently, a friend who was much younger passed away and that just felt so\u2009\u2026\u2009I don\u2019t even know what the word is.<\/p>\n

It feels unfair, right? [Nods] It\u2019s not the natural order of the world. Old people die; that\u2019s to be expected. But yeah, this was shit.<\/p>\n

How have these losses affected how you live your life? Even when I was in my mid-20s, two friends of mine passed away: one from cancer and one from\u2009\u2026\u2009well, nobody ever knew. Those losses informed the song Memories and Dust. It really made me think about how I wanted to live my life. And it made me throw my hat in the ring with music.<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

Does it make you reflect on death? Especially since having kids? It absolutely scares the shit out of me. It\u2019s FOMO, basically. I don\u2019t want to miss out on these amazing things that my kids will do. I\u2019m a curious person, so I want to see what\u2019s going to happen.<\/p>\n

Do you have any funeral requests? [Laughs] I totally do. When I was 10, I was in England with my family and Enya\u2019s Orinoco Flow was really big.<\/p>\n

Oh, that\u2019s a banger. Absolutely! I remember we were walking across this Tesco\u2019s car park and I was singing the song and I said to my mum, \u201cI want to have this song played at my funeral!\u201d Apparently, I skipped across the car park like, \u201cI can\u2019t wait \u2019til my funeral!\u201d And because I want to be a man of my word, I want it to be played.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gee, I\u2019m sorry, Josh; that\u2019s a huge loss. She died from heart failure, but had dementia for 14…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-40808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}