Don Juan by Mac DeMarco

If you know me, you know I absolutely love the Don Juan folktale. I have written countless essays and analyses of the story as it appears throughout the past few centuries, have seen Mozart’s operatic treatment of it live, and even made it the focus of the play I wrote and codirected for Winter Scenes last year. The story of Don Juan is, at its best, a story about an evil man and those who deal with him, with the focus of the story often falling on the few people who still genuinely care about him. At the end of the story, Don Juan meets a fiery death at the hands of Hell, resulting in a very bittersweet moment. Yes, he was evil, and it is good he is gone, but at the same time, those who genuinely cared about him grieve what he could have been. This instrumental song does a really good job of capturing that strange, bittersweet, quietly melancholic feeling, with a touch of nostalgia for all that might have once come to be.