Nobody wants to be the person who gives a lukewarm grade to a grandfather’s record about a baby who lived for one day, and I suspect that’s half the reason albums like Close to Fire: Roman’s Anthology Release Part I get covered in such a hushed, reverent voice. Tony Tripi, who records as TRIPI, made these ten songs after his grandson Roman died the day after he was born, and the standard write-up for that kind of story is a hug in paragraph form. I’d rather treat it as a record, since he put it out for strangers to hear, and the interesting part is how many choices he made that could have gone badly.

The rock-and-soul template he picked, with Springsteen and Clapton as the usual touchstones, is a smart match for the subject on paper, because both of those guys built careers on turning private loss into songs a whole room could sing back. It also comes with a trap. Big choruses, warm organ and a band locked in tight all make a song feel consoling by default, and consoling is not always what grief feels like. The album’s own pitch lists anger right next to tenderness and hope, and anger is the one I’d be watching for, since this genre sands it down faster than anything else. A record like this lives or dies on whether the band is allowed to sound as messed up as the man writing the songs.

Most songs about a lost baby come from the parents, so a grandfather’s version starts from an odd and underrated seat. A grandparent grieves twice, once for the child who’s gone and once for the grown kids who have to live through it, and there’s no helplessness like watching your own family hurt with nothing to fix. If Tripi is writing from that spot, as a man who can’t repair anything and makes songs because songs are what he has, the album has a reason to exist that doesn’t overlap with the thousand other grief records. It’s a point of view rock rarely bothers with, since the dead child usually belongs to whoever’s at the microphone.

What I find most interesting is the running order, which looks like it was put together by somebody who knows exactly how badly the thing could go. It opens with Charlie’s Song, written after a conversation between Tripi‘s daughter and another mother who had lost her child, so the first thing you hear isn’t about Roman at all. A man with a loss this fresh starts his album by looking at somebody else’s, and I think that’s the most generous decision on the whole record. Then it swerves straight into Can’t Keep a Good Man Down for Long, a groovy, upbeat song about getting back on your feet, and the whiplash is real. You can read that as clumsy sequencing or as honesty, since people laugh at funerals and catch themselves humming in the car a week later. I lean toward honesty, with the warning that anybody who sits down for the whole thing is going to get thrown around, which presumably is the idea.

The two covers are where he takes the biggest risks, and they’re the two most famous songs on the tracklist by a mile. Putting Tears in Heaven on an album about a dead child is either the most obvious move available or the bravest, because Clapton wrote it for his own four-year-old son and the song plays at so many memorials that it can sound worn smooth. Hearing it from a grandfather, with Mike DelGuidice beside him, at least turns it into a conversation between two men who know what the song costs, which beats the usual tribute-night version. The closer is the other gamble, a bluesy Somewhere Over the Rainbow with Jessie Wagner out front. Ending a deeply personal record on a song everybody already knows, sung by somebody else, means Tripi gets the last word by giving it away. The song is a lullaby about a place where trouble dissolves, and a blues coat turns the question from whether anywhere like that exists into whether you’re allowed to want it. Whether that lands as relief or as an easy exit probably depends on how much you’ve got left by track ten.

The guest list changes what kind of record this is. Nearly two dozen musicians played on it, and the songs about lost children get passed around, with Emily Grove singing Ronan and Jack Daley showing up on Life Without You. That makes the whole thing feel less like one man alone at a piano and more like a wake where the band got invited and everybody takes a turn at the microphone. It also quietly solves the problem these albums usually have, which is that a single voice carrying a whole record of mourning gets tiring fast. Passing the songs around lets the sadness change shape from track to track.

Anthology Release Part I promises a sequel, and I’d trust that more than a clean ending, since nobody finishes with this in ten songs and a record that pretended otherwise would ring false. It’s a promise and a marketing hook at once, and I don’t mind either.

This is a record for a quiet night and a full run-through, and it makes more sense that way than shuffled. It’s earnest to the point of risk, it trusts other voices with its pain, and it doesn’t pretend to wrap anything up. For classic-rock people who like a story attached to their songs, that’s worth sitting through. Anyone expecting a tidy cry will feel short-changed.