FOUND: DEAD HOARDER’S 1970 SCRAP PAPER PLAYLIST

Guest author Lancelot Schaubert shares the story of finishing a lifelong musical project of his father's.

Good morning!

Today we’re lucky to have Lancelot Schaubert here sharing the story of his father- or rather what his father left behind. It’s a story that’s sure to resonate on multiple levels.

There are a few inarguable truths about our existence. One: music is life. And two, no one gets out alive; at some point, most of us have—or will have to— deal with the aftermath of loss. The bereaved will be left to sort through a loved one's belongings, including their music collection.

Our music says a lot about us. It telegraphs our tastes and how we like to spend our time. Sometimes (like in my case), that manifests itself in a block of actual records. The ones I inherited from my dad were, for the most part, unsurprising. I knew what I was getting, yet they still offered glimpses into who he was- not just before someone called him "dad," but outside of that. "Parent" might be a defining title, but it's not an all-encompassing one.

On the other hand, my stepdad’s collection has proven to be a nonstop ride of wonder. As in leaving me to wonder, how did I not know he liked (insert artist here)?!, or what on earth led him to pick up a copy of that?

Physical media makes this a relatively straightforward exercise, and you can choose to do with it what you will. Maybe you have a yard sale. You could give a few records away and keep a few. Maybe this becomes fuel for a long-running family feud.

Or you could box them all up and ship them 1800 miles to your right as I did, and have them now sitting about 10 feet away from where I'm typing this.

In an era of iPods, Spotify, and streaming, this becomes a murkier, more abstract exercise. Playlists and devices take up an exponentially smaller space but raise much larger questions.

Do you follow the account as a way to keep them alive in your heart and ears? Who owns that data? Can you even access it after a certain point?

Following the death of their father, Lancelot Schaubert and his sister faced a third choice; their father had taken on the gargantuan idea of cataloging every song he ever loved. Ever. Decades worth of tracks as a memory exercise saved for posterity in a neatly packaged playlist.

Seems easy—and portable-- enough, right? Except he passed midway through the project. What Lancelot and co. were left with were decades worth of sparks and flickers of inspiration, song titles written on scraps of paper, on fabric, on just about any piece of material you can imagine. Fragments that, if reassembled correctly, would go a long way toward telling them the story of who their dad was.

Still, that's a daunting task. What to do with all of that? Toss it in the dumpster or take on the mammoth job of finishing what Dad had started? If you're thinking this is a massive undertaking, trust your gut.

Below is the story of the choice they made and the path(s) they took to get there.

And with that, I’ll get out of the way, and let Lancelot share his story.

KA—

Your father lost a father, that father lost, lost his.

— Shakespeare, Hamlet

At the end of the pandemic, my music-loving father died of COVID. And cancer. And kidneys fried from the COVID medicine we asked the doctors not to use. I have a much heavier essay about my journey called Daddy Issues Are Overrated, but for today, you need to know that when Dad died he was a recovering hoarder. Recovering, not recovered. He still had two full garages (one attached to the house, one independent), a packed third bedroom, and collections of collections ferreted away in every corner, nook, and shelf.

It took two forty-foot dumpsters and about five estate sales plus tons of trips to my siblings’ houses, plus the road trips and flights back to my meager apartment in NYC.

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One of the things he collected was vinyl, antique radios, cassettes, and CDs before it was cool. I’ve only known one other person who could beat him on that front: Paul Pelkonen, the late, beloved NYC opera critic of Superconductor, who died at 43 here in Sunset Park, had a music library that rivaled any college. Dad had this one leg up on Paul: he was born in 1956, so he lived through peak radio, peak vinyl, and peak music times. He turned 20 in 1976, the year of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, December 1963, Play that Funky Music, Bohemian Rhapsody, Take It To the Limit, Shake Your Booty, That’s the Way I Like It, and Rock and Roll All Night. I can’t list them forever; we’ll never get to the playlist:

See, Dad was working on a novel with me when he died. A podcast with my brother, woodworking with my sister, a novel with me. It was to be a cowritten sequel to Bell Hammers (you can get a sad taste of that one via the excerpt that sold to the New Haven Review here, or a happier taste via the first chapter here). Anyways, our cowritten novel would feature his ribald construction stories on a union job site. Blue collar hijinks.

He thought he died a failure on several fronts, but especially writing.

How often we underestimate ourselves: the true irony of reality is that it’s more beautiful, more good, more true than you could ever imagine. It’s our hateful cynicism, shame, and fearful self-preservation that lead to our culture of death. Not our wonder. Never our wonder.

Believing he died a failure included his completed page count on his debut novel.

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What Dad didn’t realize — what I wish I could have articulated clearer to him while he lived — is that if you fill hundreds of journals 25% of the way, you still end up with enough material for two novels. He wouldn’t let me glance at any of the journals, see, only what he’d typed. You don’t have to finish a single journal to be ready. You can simply hoard dozens of half-finished journals and still have enough for a novel. The process does not matter. That’s the thing with ADHD combined with perfectionism: you tend to think there’s some morality to how things are done.

They’re amoral, care tasks and executive functioning tasks, but dad spent most of his life around women who treated care tasks and executive functioning tasks as some kind of moral prescriptivism: as if there’s a right way to do the dishes, morally, and you’ll go to hell if you do them any other way. There’s a right way to file your taxes (instead of it being okay if you left a few dollars on or off the table), a right way to order your calendar (rather than simply doing whatever it takes to keep the appointments most important to you and most important to those you’re convicted to care about), a right way to list and achieve tasks towards a big project (rather than simply doing whatever it takes to get the next right action step done).

The only morality in care tasks is descriptive, like all virtue ethics, but especially where cleanliness and completion are concerned: it’s that you decide to do them however the hell you can. “However the hell” is the moral good, for you and you alone, simply because it’s better to do any one of them, to do said task halfassed, than to never do it at all. If it’s worth doing anything at all, it’s worth doing badly. And then less badly over the years. The folks who say if it’s worth doing anything, it’s worth doing right the first time? I know novelists who have been crippled for a decade or more because of that thinking. I want to grab these guys by the scruffs of their neck and shake them and say, “Don’t you see how precious little time you have?!”

You might die of cancer tomorrow like my dad did, and then it’ll be your kid writing songs about the experience.

Test it while you fly, do it scared, do it half-assed, do it better the next time, revise it for the tenth-anniversary edition, whatever. Dad had plenty of material to both start and finish his first novel. Especially one co-written with me. Plenty of notes. And the unfortunate side is that without his mind as a key, I don’t know what, “Teddy and the dog boat story,” means. I don’t know what, “John in the riverboat with the kerosene fire” is, though I have some ideas there. I can’t discern half the pranks in there, which is about as tragic to me as never having a full repository of all the nonsense George Clooney pulled on folks over the years.

Would that I could understand the context to all of his notes: there are anecdotes so crass he was afraid to tell me and my brother.

But you know what else he’d completed even though he thought he’d died a failure?

His goal to create the ultimate playlist of every song he’d ever loved.

We learned very early on, as we purged his rotting house of all the collections he’d hoarded, that Dad would suddenly remember a song he liked from his childhood or that he had on vinyl or heard on the radio and would take the nearest Sharpie and write it down. He wrote song titles and artists on scraps of wood board, on the backs of lotto tickets he’d never thrown away, on sheet metal scrap and t-shirts, in the pages of a thousand journals and spiral notebooks he started and never finished. He knew he needed these precious singles of his written down somewhere; he simply never took the time to compile them all into a list. You know, a list of the play variety.

He probably still thought in the back of his mind that he needed to pay $1.29 for each single yet again for digital download, and so he thought he’d never have a spare grand lying around for the project. Remember: Dad’s generation and Gen X had to rebuy all of their music for four different waves of technology, and the inflation-adjusted price of a Beatles album is $88 in 2025 dollars. That sort of thing got in the way of this particular finished project. We almost started throwing them away immediately, and then I turned to my sister and said, “Start a Spotify playlist right now, add the song the moment we find it, and then and only then junk it.”

So we stuck Sis in the cleanest room with her newborn, and she got to work on this.

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The easiest thing was the song list because the man wrote — his entire life he wrote — musicians and song titles in, most often, sharpie or contractor pencils he’d sharpened with the proto Ur-knife from every survivalist story. Tile scraps had song titles. We found song titles on old newspapers from famous sports games (like the time the Dodgers lost money moving from Brooklyn to L.A.), scrap siding, cardboard ready to ship via eBay, the margins of the novels he’d started to read, the backs of checkbooks, and gobs and gobs in these spiralbounds that hid the jobsite hauntings of his inner mind.

Almost every single one of them was saved from the wreck. Songs we would have forgotten. Songs gobs of people don’t even know about. We’re slowly adding to it, too, as we remember songs he would sing to us as kids. Some of them didn’t age well-- most did--but we’re trying to save them all.

Here’s the playlist. I recommend using “shuffle” because the order is basically the order in which we found the scraps. Or, if you want the authentic feel of cleaning out the musical detritus of a recovering hoarder who lived through peak 20th-century music, listen to it straight through:

Note: The preview link only shows the first 100 tracks. The playlist is currently at 362 songs total and growing, or roughly 20 hours long.

By the way, draft one of the novel I’m co-writing with my dead dad is done. Each chapter begins with an epigraph — the artist and title of one of the songs from this playlist, so it’ll be the playlist for the novel too: a 1979 disco heist; 11 carpenters try to steal 1.3 million gallons of oil overnight from an oil terminal in Southern Illinois. The novel’s working title is Captain Hook, INC and it’s a sequel to Bell Hammers.

I hope the playlist gives you the joy it gave us. Have fun, and let me know in the comments what you’d add, what you discovered, and what you’re listening to — I’m chatty, so I’ll respond as long as responses come in.

The fictional version of Lancelot’s dad shows up as “Bren” in Bell Hammers, which is best consumed in audiobook format (Lancelot narrated it himself). You ought to subscribe to Lancelot’s substack here:

If you publish your own Substack, edit a journal, or host a blog, Lancelot is a free and open collaborator and will happily pen guest posts on any number of subjects. He’s also starting to shop around for literary agents this summer for a pipeline of six fiction manuscripts.

Thanks to Lancelot for sharing his story and to you for being here. Have you had to deal with your parent’s record collection? In the era of playlists over physical media, what do you think this might look like in the future? Sound off in the comments!

This is part 1 of 2. Stayed tuned for Part 2—when Lancelot takes us on a road trip!

Kevin—

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