#81, “Beautiful Ride,” Dan Bern (2007)

150 Favorite Songs: #81, “Beautiful Ride,” Dan Bern (2007)

The first time I attempted this project, way back in 2011 on Tumblr, “Beautiful Ride” was on the list at #150. At the time, I wrote about the magic trick that Dan Bern, who wrote the song for John C. Reilly to sing in the goofy music biopic parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, pulled off: “Beautiful Ride” is a parody of the “looking back at life and reflecting on mortality” genre (see also: “Not Dark Yet,” “Hurt,” “Hell Yeah”), which is a kind of song I love very much, but it’s also somehow good enough to work sincerely. There’s a winkingness to it, of course, because it’s a joke song in an absurdist movie, but it also hits. It’s hilariously grandiose—it opens with the lines “now that i have lived a lifetime’s worth of days / finally i see the folly of my ways” and starts its second verse with “as i stand on the precipice of death / my perspective is enormous”–but the point in the chorus just lands.

and then in the end, it’s family and friends

loving yourself, but not only yourself

it’s about the good walk, and the hard walk

and the young girls you’ve made cry

it’s about make a little music every day till you die

it’s a beautiful ride

That’s the sort of thing I was thinking about thirteen years ago when I wrote about “Beautiful Ride.” It all holds true still, but when my dad got very sick very suddenly a year and a half ago, it took on a deeper significance to me. Which is an objectively funny thing to say about a song that was written for John C. Reilly to sing in-character alongside tunes like “(Mama) You’ve Got To Love Your Negro Man” and  a 1965-era Bob Dylan parody called “Royal Jelly” that starts with the lyric “mailboxes that drip like lampposts in the twisted birth canal of the Colosseum / rim joy fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum / oh say can you see ‘em.” In the movie, when Reilly performs it, there’s a gag whee a guy in the audience dies suddenly, and then walks onstage next to the ghosts of Dewey Cox’s family for the rest of the performance. It ends with a freeze frame and then the words “Dewey Cox died three minutes after this performance.”

But my dad was a funny guy, and the things that spoke to me while he was dying in the hospital reflected that. He loved Dewey Cox, and I think if I had spent that week listening to “Let It Be” or “I See A Darkness” or “Not Dark Yet” it would have been too much for me. The space between sincerity and a good joke is a space my dad lived in a lot, and the irony inherent in “Beautiful Ride” made it possible to touch everything I was feeling without falling apart.

That week is all fragments and moments in my memory. I remember being in Indianapolis and spending all day sitting next to his bed in the hospital, and the emotions were all incredibly raw for my mom and my brother and my sister and there was a lot of fighting that didn’t make sense to me and also I had an assignment to cover the Austin City Limits Festival in Austin that weekend, and we knew he was not going to wake up before he died, and I realized I might end up staying in Indianapolis until the funeral and my role in the family dynamic is as a peacemaker and I needed space to feel my own feelings. So I got on a plane and came home, and that weekend I rode my bike to Zilker Park and sang “Beautiful Ride” while I did it, thinking about my dad in a place where I wouldn’t feel pulled to take care of anyone else’s feelings. I went to the festival and my friend Emily watched the Dixie Chicks with me and my friend Nadia watched Kacey Musgraves with me and I cried sometimes in the park and then rode my bike home and sang “Beautiful Ride” on the way, and approached something that resembled a fragile acceptance. A week later, I was back on a plane for the funeral and had carved out enough space to feel my own feelings about it that I could be there for other people.

And now, when I listen to it, and I hear Dan Bern sing this song he wrote for this silly movie, I hear my dad, too, a little bit, and I think if he’d had a little more time, he’d have arrived in a similar place.

and then in the end, it’s family and friends

loving yourself, but not only yourself

it’s about the good walk, and the hard walk

and the young girls you’ve made cry

it’s about make a little music every day till you die

it’s a beautiful ride