The Mortals

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 o...

More than 300 booths on the funeral convention floor this week. Not one of them sells the 2am phone call. The NFDA convention is in Charlotte right now, and the closing keynote is called 28,000 Days. So tonight I said the things that don't get said out loud on that floor. With respect. I love this work. The Funeral Rule only requires a written price list when you walk in the door. The FTC called f...

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 rul...

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 o...

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 o...

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, powe...

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...

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 c...

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 s...

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 th...

This week on The Mortals Live, we walk through what a visitation at a funeral home is really for. Not the version you see in movies. The real thing. Why we gather, what it does for the living, and how showing up for someone in grief is one of the most important things you will ever do. Then it gets personal. I share the night I almost became the one on the other side of that room. The night everyt...

Before my new single "Names I'll Never Lose" drops Friday, I wanted to give you the other half of it. Fifteen years as a funeral director taught me something almost nobody gets to see: exactly how much one ordinary life adds up to — because I'm standing there on the day the world does the subtraction. In this episode I tell you about a man I'll call Ray, who spent his whole l...

There was a stretch of time where I did not want to be here anymore. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, tired, hopeless way. I want to tell you how I got there, because I think a lot of you know how it happens. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens in pieces. It happens the way erosion happens — you don't notice the ground leaving until you're standing on nothing. My friend and bus...

Last night The Mortals Live did something it's never done before — we went live on two platforms at once. Katharine and Chris of As The Hearse Turns pulled up a chair, and what followed was the kind of conversation only people who've stood on both sides of the arrangement table can have: the real weight of this profession, the stories that stay with you, and why talking about death openly...

He was blinded as a child, preached and sang on Texas street corners for coins, and died penniless in the ashes of his own burned house. They buried him in a grave with no name. Thirty-two years later, NASA bolted his wordless, three-minute song of grief to the side of the Voyager spacecraft and launched it past the planets. Tonight, Blind Willie Johnson's voice is the farthest-traveling human...

"Pick a lane." I've heard it my whole life — funeral director, musician, divorced dad, creator — like one of them has to cancel out the others. Tonight I'm done apologizing for being all of them. This is The Mortals Live. Every Tuesday, 7PM ET. We open with a story of someone the world mostly forgot — tonight it's Gordon Parks, who refused to be just one thing his whole life...

Tonight on The Mortals: the funeral songs that undo an entire room — and the one thing almost nobody thinks about. It's not which song you play. It's when. A funeral director and songwriter on grief, the music that says what we can't, and how you keep showing up when life hands you a season you didn't choose. Pull up a chair. 🖤🎵 The new song, "Just Me, Just You" → laylo...

He was blind. He was self-taught. And for nearly thirty years he stood on a sidewalk on 6th Avenue in Manhattan dressed like a Viking — cloak, horned helmet, spear — while the city hurried past and called him a curiosity. His name was Moondog. What almost no one rushing by understood was that the man on the corner was a serious composer, building orchestral works in his head and on paper, year aft...

A funeral director on what happens after you put something into the world and the room stays quiet. The story of Sixto Rodriguez — who released two albums into total silence, went back to demolition work for 25 years, and never knew that across the ocean he was a legend — and why we have to stop creating in hope of applause. On music, grief, and any goodbye you finally say out loud. 🎥 Watch: yout...

There's a man who never had a near-death experience. He had something more honest. He had a slow death he could watch coming. And he wrote it all down before the cancer took him at 37.His name was Paul Kalanithi. Neurosurgery resident at Stanford. Eight months from finishing the longest training in medicine. Diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer he'd never earned. He went back to the operating room...

0:00 Cold open — sit down, grab the tea 2:00 Opening statement: October 1956, Chicago — Vivian Maier walks down a sidewalk 6:00 The 150,000 photographs nobody ever saw 13:00 Why did she do it? The question I keep sitting with 15:30 The room with the door closed — this episode's thesis 17:30 My grandfather, the double Windsor knot, and the mundane that mattered 23:00 Grief as fuel — what Vivian and...

0:00 Welcome back — and the boo-boo from last week 2:45 The garage sale that worked because the sign said "good stuff, not junk" 7:00 Caramels, ASMR, and stepping outside the comfort zone 10:30 Derby week chaos in Louisville — and the 8:47 PM start time 14:15 Opening statement: Margaret, Earl, and the room after the room 24:00 Funeral directors don't hum in empty chapels (except they do) 32:00 The...

0:00 Welcome — three weeks in a row 2:40 Opening statement: the person who shows up on a random Tuesday 8:15 Why presence costs something — and why nobody eulogizes it 13:00 The first transfer I ever did — the hoarder's house 22:30 My brother sat for ten minutes and didn't say a word 28:00 Patterns, mundane fundamentals, and why showing up matters 34:00 The funeral home as the most alive place I w...

0:00 You came back — Holy Week opens 3:15 Opening statement: the table the world holds its breath for 8:00 Your "chair" stories from last week 12:30 Terminal lucidity — the last normal night 18:45 Good Friday in funeral service 23:00 The boy in the suit at the graveside ("Is he in the box?") 28:30 Holy Saturday — the most underrepresented day in grief 33:15 The family who made a list of "weekend j...

0:00 Cold open — why I'm doing this 3:30 First inaugural live: who this room is for 8:45 The smell of a funeral home, and what it means 14:20 The widow and her husband's chair (the story) 22:10 Grief lives in the small things, not the flowers 28:00 Q&A — what would you say to someone you've lost? 33:40 Why I write songs from this work 40:15 Acoustic performance — Feel Anything 50:00 Closing: kindn...