Every family I ever sat with thought their song was different. It usually wasn't.

This weekend I asked you one thing. Pick the song they'd sing in the car. Over 2,000 of you answered. Tonight we're reading them.

No guest. Just me and you. The car songs. The ratchet songs you're haunting your family over. The bottle of water in the fridge nobody touches. Why most eulogies are boring and the one rule that fixes yours. And ask a funeral director anything.

Homework before you leave: back up their text thread, save their voicemail somewhere besides your phone, and write your song down.

If tonight is heavy, call or text 988. Someone's there.

Who sang in the car at your house? Name and song. Put it in the comments.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Welcome to The Mortals Live
1:03 Every family thinks their funeral song is different
3:32 Why I said pick the car song
5:31 The ratchet song: put it in writing
6:53 The freezer, the water bottle, the shoes by the door
9:02 Skip the resume: one story for the eulogy
10:37 Tonight's homework: text thread, voicemail, your song
11:55 Day 24 of starting over
15:21 Doom scrolling vs long form
19:18 Your funeral questions: suits, socks and glasses
24:42 The deathbed exercise: find your guiding light
32:36 Why funeral music defaults to the template
40:21 Coming home from LA and the family that changed me
53:29 Do the thing you love
1:02:51 This season of The Mortals
1:05:51 Burying the dead and why I keep showing up

The Mortals Live. Every Tuesday, 7pm ET.

👔 OOTD and the link. Tonight, I'm wearing: https://shopltk.com/explore/nathanmorris
Dressed for a funeral. Ready for a car-song sing-along.

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She couldn't sell 50 tickets on the other side of the world. Then the promoters canceled the whole tour. Her parents already had flights.She sat in a hotel room crying and asked herself one question. "What am I even doing?"One year later, 20,000 people in Australia sang her song back to her.Tonight is the first night of the new Mortals. Every week I sit down with a singer, a band or a comedian on the day their tour rolls through Louisville. We talk about the part nobody posts. Then you and I talk about it together.My first guest is Julia Cole. I caught her at Headliners Music Hall on night one of her first headline tour. We talked about almost quitting, a pair of crutches at the Opry, and why 10,000 views is 10,000 people in a room.Then I'm going to do something that scares me a little.Drop it in the chat: what's the closest you ever came to quitting?Live every Tuesday at 7pm ET.👔 OOTD and the link. Tonight, I'm wearing: https://bit.ly/4yQJ2ZgDressed for a living tribute. Nobody's getting buried tonight.🎙 Guest: Julia Cole (@juliacolemusic)"Love You To Death (Deluxe)" and her new single "Pushing Daisies" are out now everywhere.🪑 Coming to the chair:Officer Eudy, Nov 4Britton Emert, Nov 10Tim Timmons, Nov 13Touring through Louisville and want to sit down? booking@nathanmorrismusic.com- • •🖤 STAY CONNECTED🎵 Stream "Names I'll Never Lose": https://vyd.co/namesillneverlose⭐ Members-only content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0rrl2tcQlqgkkQgMR9f_0w/join🌐 Website: https://nathanmorrismusic.com✉️ Feel Anything newsletter: https://nathanmorrismusic.beehiiv.com📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nathanmorrismusicTikTok: @nathanmorrismusicInstagram: @nathanmorrisX: @nathanmorris

Last week's show was rough. I fumbled. A lot.

This week I figured out why. I overthought it. Weeks of treating my content like a math problem made it stiff and careful. My content got buns. Polished falls flat.

I learned the fix in the funeral home years ago. When a family plans a service, they bring two kinds of pictures. The church directory photo. And the shoebox. People always stand in front of the shoebox.

We also talked about The Comeback Room. I'm going to ask artists about the night they almost quit. First up is Julia Cole, night one of her Love You To Death Tour at Headliners in Louisville.

Your homework: send the ugly text. The one you've rewritten nine times.

Who's in your shoebox photo?

If today feels heavy, call or text 988. Someone's there.

The Mortals is live every Tuesday at 7pm ET on YouTube @nathanmorrismusic.

Join The Mortals, my supporter community: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/supporters
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At 10:15 on the night of April 14th, 1865, a president was carried into a stranger's back bedroom and laid diagonally across a bed that was too short for him. The most powerful family in America spent the next nine hours exactly as lost as every family I've ever sat with in a small room, hours after the phone rang.Because here's the truth nobody teaches you: in the first hours after a death, power doesn't help you. Money doesn't help you. What's left is just people in a room, not knowing what they're allowed to do.Tonight I'm walking you through it — hour by hour. Who to call first. What you do NOT have to decide tonight, no matter what anyone tells you. What the funeral home is going to ask, and what you're allowed to say no to. What to say to your job. What to say to your kids. The stuff nobody put in a pamphlet, because there is no pamphlet.I've been in that room over a thousand times — the first hour after someone has died. Same hands that used to hold a microphone, now guiding families through the worst night of their lives.If you've ever gotten that call — the one that rearranges the furniture of your whole life in one sentence — type a 1 in the chat. I want to see how many of us are in this room together tonight.You are not supposed to know what to do. Nobody does. Tonight, I'll tell you the truth about it.The Mortals Live — memento mori made warm. Look at death, so you can live louder.———🖤 STAY CONNECTED🎵 Stream "Names I'll Never Lose": https://laylo.com/nathanmorris⭐ Members-only content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0rrl2tcQlqgkkQgMR9f_0w/join🌐 Website: https://nathanmorrismusic.com✉️ Feel Anything newsletter: https://nathanmorrismusic.beehiiv.com📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nathanmorrismusicTikTok: @nathanmorrismusicInstagram: @nathanmorrisX: @nathanmorris🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/4595061185642496

I have a confession. I watch strangers mow their lawns on YouTube. On purpose. For fun. When I was going through the hardest stretch of my life and rebuilding, I mowed. A lot. Just months before, I owned a major funeral home company. Then I started helping a friend with 67 yards. That turned into 87. Big yards. Small yards. Messy ones with weeds in the beds. This episode: what those straight lines did for me, and what I learned being the guy in the grass-stained khakis. What's your lawn? The thing you do when your head's too loud. Tell me in the comments. The Mortals is live every Tuesday at 7pm ET on YouTube.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Pre-show

2:24 My confession: I watch strangers mow lawns

6:38 67 yards, then 87: mowing through the rebuild

12:29 The guy in the grass-stained khakis

16:24 What's your lawn? The thing you do when your head's too loud

28:41 The abrupt undoing: from funeral home owner to builder

34:07 "Why don't you just quit?"

45:01 Names I'll Never Lose

48:38 The War of Art & my grandfather's double Windsor

57:46 Victory in suffering & the voice that says you don't matter

1:07:06 What a million Spotify streams actually pays

1:14:22 Keep showing up

What I'm wearing tonight: https://on.ltk.com/+pEWhnITXSoTULE3__NCYXg

Join The Mortals, my supporter community: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/supporters

━━━━━━━━━━

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He was 22, a new dad, drowning in debt, and standing on the wrong side of the rail on the Golden Gate Bridge. The only reason he's alive today is that a highway patrol sergeant named Kevin Briggs happened to be assigned to that bridge, and walked up, and stayed for 92 minutes.

Tonight we talk about that story, and what it means for you. Why the people we should worry about are never the ones crying. Why "strong" is just the word we use for people we've stopped checking on. And why showing up, even flat, even empty, even going through the motions, might be the most important thing you do all year.

I'm a funeral director. I've stood in the room after. So when I say I'm glad you stayed, I mean it.

If tonight moves you, get us to 20 members and I'm doing a members-only live. The membership button is right under this video.

If you're struggling, you don't have to do it alone. Call or text 988. Someone will pick up.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — glad you stayed

2:00 Two men named Kevin

4:00 Kevin Berthia and the coat he wore

8:30 A NICU daughter and a $250,000 bill

12:30 March 11, 2005 — over the rail

17:00 Sergeant Kevin Briggs, the Guardian

22:00 92 minutes — "the compassion in your voice"

27:00 The photograph, and staying alive vs. healing

34:00 Why the mundane is the whole point

41:00 Names I'll Never Lose — my own 3 a.m.

52:00 Your names, my music, and showing up anyway

———

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A funeral director's answer to the machines.

AI tribute generators are everywhere now. Upload a photo, answer three questions, and out comes a eulogy. Clean. Fast. Forgettable.

But here's what the machines will never know: the way someone's voice changed when they talked about their mother. The laugh that came out of nowhere at the arrangement table when a family remembered something small and beautiful. The silence that tells you more than any paragraph ever could.

A real tribute isn't assembled. It's built by someone who sat across from the grief and paid attention.

In this episode, Nathan talks about what gets lost when we hand the most human moment of a funeral to a prompt — and why the directors who still write by hand, who still listen first, will always matter more than any tool that autocompletes a life.

This one's for every funeral director who's ever stayed up late getting the words right.

———

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You never met them. You never shook their hand. So why does it feel like you lost a friend when the news says they're gone?nnThis week on The Mortals, funeral director and singer-songwriter Nathan Morris sits with the grief nobody gives you permission to feel — the artist whose songs raised you, the voice that was in your kitchen for fifteen years, the stranger whose passing put you flat on the floor. It's called parasocial grief, and it is not a malfunction. It's love that only had to travel one way.

From a child's headstone found buried under a backyard deck, to an English village that tended an enemy airman's grave for nearly 86 years, to the signs we swear come from the people we've lost — this is a night about the names we refuse to put down, and why looking straight at death is how we learn to live louder. Bring someone with you. Drop a name you still carry in the chat — we're going to say them out loud.

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