When feeling somber or when confronted by events that may be hard to process or interpret, Michael Blachly reverts to what he calls his comfort music: songs that were meaningful to him when he was evolving into the person he would become.

On Memorial Day, Blachly was grilling and exchanged messages with a best friend from high school. The friend was grilling, too, and listening to contemporary R&B. But Blachly was playing songs that were important to him when he was a young man trying to understand the war in Vietnam, racial bigotry and assassinations; they are singles in the soundtrack of his life.

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