“He took the road to heaven in the morning.” RIP to Shane MacGowan, principal singer and songwriter for the Pogues, and the poet laureate for the modern Irish diaspora. Though he was born and (mostly) lived in and around London, his childhood experiences in Tipperary seemed to inhabit him as profoundly and completely as did Dublin to James Joyce, who left Ireland as a young man.

With a super-talented group of players behind him, Shane wrote dozens of beautiful and incorrigible booze-infused songs on themes of wanderlust, bittersweet romance, camaraderie, Irish social history, political indignation and London street life. His songwriting compromised a universe unto itself: this was a guy who could make the demolition of an old greyhound racetrack (“White City”) sound mythic (Oh, the torn-up ticket stubs of a hundred thousand mugs/Now washed away like dead dreams in the rain”).

The same goes for “Sally MacLennane” which covers an entire lifetime in 2:40. MacGowan sings the tale of Jimmy, who “played harmonica in the pub where I was born” (brilliant) and goes off to America to make his fortune while the narrator grows up to tend the same bar. Jimmy eventually returns to a very changed homeland and you come to realize that the fateful walk to the train station is in fact a funeral procession.

So let’s sing Shane “a song of times long gone” and remember him well, as he remembered the world around him in a way that touched so many so deeply.

—Rick Ouellette