Every once in a while I’ll think of my cancer music. It’s the music that accompanied me in 2018 when I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

What a strange, harrowing and beautiful time. I don’t like the cliches of cancer writing: I focus on the thrill of that near-death experience. In 2008 I knew my time might be coming to a close, and I wanted to fit in as much living as I could. I also didn’t feel like the art and love and sex and culture I was immersing myself in was a goodbye to those things. I have faith that they exist on the other side, with God. My 2008 soundtrack isn’t exit music for a film. It’s entrance music to heaven.

So I immersed myself in it. The artists from that time still bring me back there—Sade, Kurt Elling, the Twilight Sad, and Jon Hassell’s dreamy, holy Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. Hassell had started with Miles Davis but moved into electronica, ambient sound collages and quirky space echoes. Pitchfork nailed it: ”It’s electric-blanket music, isolation-tank music, lucid-dreaming music that moves as assuredly as if by the power of your own suggestion.” Perfect for the trip to the afterlife.