Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay is filled with inspiration for both writers and teachers of writing.

Ander Monson wrote of the book:

“The lyric essay is at heart a freaky space. The lyric essay is resistance to norming forms. The lyric essay is characterized by leaps: through white space, between different registers of meaning, between ledges of one kind of thinking or writing or genre and another. The lyric essay does not hide its stitches or its seams. What it seems is what it is. The lyric essay is disjunctive and refuses to be simplified for your convenience. The lyric essay is unruly and dislikes boxes. Like Super Happy Fun Ball we do not taunt it. Like a jart, we throw the lyric essay in the air and close our eyes and wait for it to fall. It could pierce us or something else. That it’s sharp means it works, that it reveals. I mean it’s dangerous. It’s risk. It’s that and these and all of this. Read instructions before application. Use The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay with care.”

In their own words, here is the editors’ and contributors’ Book Notes music playlist for the anthology The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay:

Heidi Czerwiec, Co-Editor: “Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches

Like the cover image for this Field Guide, lyric essayists are crows and magpies, collecting shiny interesting bits and collaging them into something marvelous. The first time I heard the song “Frontier Psychiatrist”—composed entirely of samples from such sources as John Waters’ Polyester, recordings of comedy bits by Wayne & Shuster and Flip Wilson, and a 1968 orchestral and vocal performance by the Enoch Light Singers—I giggled all the way through it, which is how I react when delighted. Music critic Matthew Horton’s description of it equally applies to many of the best lyric essays: “busy, daft, composed of countless unconnected parts, yet somehow entirely natural as a whole.”

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, Co-Editor: “Your Ghost” by Kristin Hersh

Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost,” from her 1994 debut solo album, Hips and Makers, is about a haunting, a loss or absence so powerful it becomes palpable. Not the jangling post-punk edge of Throwing Muses, or the reverbed ferocity of 50-Foot Wave, but something that hybridizes the emotional intensity of both bands into something new, something lyric, something stunningly vulnerable. Here, Hersh’s voice is unadorned, a raw wild honey that’s all sweetness and sting, accompanied by a simple background of acoustic guitar. She is Orpheus, with his lyre, padding down a darkened hallway, ready to “wake your ghost.” Poetry, song, and image all awaken, blur, complicate, and clarify the narrative in this liminal space between worlds, and Hersh, the singer/artist/writer, is unafraid to cross between the overworld and the underworld. The chorus consists simply of Hersh repeatedly singing “I think last night / you were driving circles around me” surprisingly harmonized by Michael Stipe, until everything becomes pattern, repetition, and visual poem as elegy, invocation, and resurrection.

We also invited contributors to this book to suggest songs that they felt captured the lyric essay quality or strategy that was the focus of their piece in the Field Guide. Many thanks to those who played along! Their picks are below:

Camille T. Dungy: “Shockedelica” by Prince

The ways Prince can weave narratives, tones, and influence to create such splendor of strength and tension while remaining ultimately playful never ceases to amaze. And the is song also braids in multiple vocal registers, all produced by the same voice. Prince name checks his alter ego. Listen carefully and you’ll not that he pitches his voice at a different register when Camille comes on mic. What an object lesson in telling more than one story from the same mind, much like the braided essay. 

Sarah Minor: “The Problem With Your Daughter” by Lord Huron

Lord Huron’s album Lonesome Dreams came out the year I started writing my visual essay “Into the Limen” (an excerpt of which appears in this book), which would take me another 5 years to complete. I wrote another piece from the same collection by staying up all night in the University of Arizona library, listening to the album on repeat. Once I was also a daughter with a problem, a kid who put words to what the family passed wordlessly. “Into the Limen” explores that kind of in between space as both a subject and a visual metaphor-—the wee hours and doorjambs where lyric essays seem to be able to reach their tendrils.

Diane Seuss: “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” by Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” makes broad use of the present tense via concrete details from the point of view of an alienated speaker. It contains a newspaper story, and rain, and rain-drenched hair, all of which appear in my model poem from frank: sonnets, and then the cathedral bells call Vega’s speaker back to a nostalgic past, a beloved “you,” and a picnic, but time’s pressure comes along in the form of the train the speaker must hurry to catch in the song’s present tense. Vega first recorded it a cappella. It was then remixed by the duo DNA, and it became a dance club hit. I love the notion that Vega wrote the song using tried and true narrative strategies, and then DNA brought the beat to the party. This is an example of the process of literary influence and improvisation, playing between forms.

Rowan McCandless: “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane

I love to write while John Coltrane, a Black jazz artist, plays over my stereo system. This song, “My Favorite Things,” reminds me of the memories I collect, write about, and collage together. The way he weaves experimentation and improvisation inspires me; how he is able to take this song, a white musical piece, and transform it to become his own. 

torrin a. greathouse: “Lateralus” by TOOL

Many of the same qualities that drew me to Alice Fulton’s engagement with fractals are the very same qualities that underlie my interest in progressive and experimental rock/metal. In particular, this track by TOOL embodies a complex utilization of fractal logics. Organized around the Fibonacci Sequence, “Lateralus” is at once winding and deeply structured. To name only a few of the constraints the band employs, the syllables in each line of the verses correspond to numbers within the sequence, while several of the lines occur at moments that align with the Golden Ratio. Despite this complexity, the lyrics of the song urge listeners to embrace randomness and a lack of control, to “swing on the spirals of our divinity and still be a human.” It’s hard to imagine a more valuable imperative for the application of fractal poetics than that.

Chelsea Biondolillo: “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead

Like a great essayist, one called upon to balance research, memoir, and no small amount of fine art, Radiohead is a band of many talents—from infectious earworms (“Creep”) to soaring cinematic epics (“Exit Music for a Film”). I saw them play in Portland in the 1990s for a couple of bucks and have been a fan ever since. One thing they do incredibly well is weave disparate parts into complex sonic wholes. “Paranoid Android” is a stellar example of this—we start in a subdued ballad, Yorke’s voice full of longing, then after two verses, wander into a starker bridge with a snarl. Suddenly we’re in a banger—guitars and drums thrashing. The song seesaws through these two sides, keening and rage, which seem as different as oil and water (or image and text), and yet…the result is cohesive, nuanced and moving. Just like a killer lyric essay. 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil “Homegrown Tomatoes,” by Guy Clark

I double-dog dare anyone to listen to this song and not have a big goofy grin on your face: “Plant ‘em in the spring, eat ‘em in the summer / All winter without ‘em is a culinary bummer.” As I tend my vegetable garden, I find myself humming this song while I’m checking for pests and plucking off any leaves scorched by the brutal Mississippi sun in late June. And if you can’t grow tomatoes at home, please do treat your tastebuds to getting your summer tomatoes from a local farmers’ market, I beg of you. What a bounty and burst on your tongue. My wish for you is that this song opens your heart up for a little joy, a few hours (days?) barefoot, no socks, wider possibilities and shapes for your food odes, and the taste of a summer day on your tongue. 

Natanya Pulley: “It’s In Our Hands” by Björk

I prefer the live version because of the choir of Inuit women—in particular the youtube live version, because you get to see the choir and it’s a better recording—but the studio version is also wonderful. Listening to Bjork always feels like entering an environment-–which is my favorite part of writing and reading as well. It’s not pure escapism, which allows us to disconnect and hurdle ourselves into a new realm, but living in the art is a commitment of the senses to be present in another’s voice, audio textures, and rhythms. I crave this and it is how I understand my own experience of writing. I chose “It’s In Our Hands” because of the layering of beats and the anaphoric returns it offers—the delightful surges and deep pulls of it. But also because of the possibility shared in the lyrics. We all need the hope that is inherent in seeking possibility—especially at a time when it is very easy either to escape to safer places in our minds or to churn in a political reality that seeks and has succeeded in dehumanizing sentient beings and sacred earths. I also suggest looking for the live version performed at the Royal Opera House in 2001 because of the performance’s joy and energy.

Ching-In Chen: “Sound Patterns” by Pauline Oliveros

I can think of no musician who had a greater influence on my time in Houston where I wrote the lyric essay “Elgin” (included in the book) than the musician and composer Pauline Oliveros. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening technique reflects my own method of paying attention to the landscape of my neighborhood, including the nighttime song of incessant frogs. Oliveros’ improvisational compositional strategies also deeply influenced some of my closest collaborators.

I chose “Sound Patterns,” created for a cappella mixed chorus in 1961, because of the movement that the work makes from white noise (created vocally using consonants “sh” and variations) to ring modulation (changing the vowel content) to percussive envelopes using the various instruments of the body (tongue clicks, snap fingers) and filtering through muting, as discussed in Heidi Von Gunden’s The Music of Pauline Oliveros. These techniques create transformations from section to section, a journey through the variation and mixing of techniques, much like the leaping between segments in the lyric essay.

Katrina Vandenberg: “The Long One” (medley, side two of Abbey Road) by The Beatles

The first time an editor asked me to write a 4,500-word essay for a magazine, I froze: that was nearly half the length of a book of poems. But I said yes, thinking that, even though I didn’t know how to write a piece that long, I knew how to write forty-five words one hundred times. From there I delved into the exciting process of figuring out how to sustain a lyric over longform. What worked for me was writing a series of fragments around my subject, knowing that I could eventually edit and arrange them to make a whole. I think of this process when I hear The Beatles’ arrangement of eight fragments, arranged into a cohesive sixteen-minute suite. I print out my fragments and arrange on my studio floor, using scissors and Scotch tape, and find the process satisfyingly analogue, like playing vinyl.

Julie Marie Wade: “On the Air” by Girlyman

In the final passage of my lyric essay “Third Door” (excerpted in the book), a disembodied voice, representing my parents speaking in unison, eschews the vision I’ve rendered of them as contestants on a game show during the time of their courtship in the mid-1960s: Come now, we were never On the Air. As it happens, several years after I wrote this essay, I bought all the CDs I could find by a band called Girlyman, a folk trio I had heard open for Dar Williams in Pittsburgh and whose sound and lyrics I loved. The first track on Girlyman’s album Little Star is fittingly titled “On the Air,” and even the sound of the song without the lyrics evokes the era of my lyric essay.

The speaker in the song is a game show host, disgruntled now in the new era of “On Demand.” He reminisces about the years of his televisual reign—”Back when Bob Hope was king / Back when every choice felt right / Back when life was black and white”—which hearkens to a time of certainty and (false) binaries that my parents also embraced. Lyric essays, of course, are about what happens after we surrender those black-and-white illusions, when color comes in—and with it, so much ambiguity and complexity regarding our identities, our choices, and our dreams.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Seth Fleisher’s novel The Farther Shore is a deeply atmospheric and profound debut.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“A compelling novel inspired by the pioneering naturalist Eugène Marais and his son, Charles, who was abandoned in the name of science…This is an absorbing work of historical fiction and an impressive and welcome debut.”

In his own words, here is Seth Fleisher’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Farther Shore:

Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford said that the secret to being a successful novelist is never to have kids. (He didn’t put it precisely this way, but that’s always been my read of what he meant.) In any event, I have two. And at the time I started researching and then writing my debut novel, The Farther Shore, the two were on the smaller side. I also had a relatively full-time job with the World Bank Group that kept me busy and regularly traveling abroad. It struck me on more than one occasion that trying to write a book, raise great humans, and save the world might be mutually exclusive goals. Ten years later, having achieved two out of three feels like cause for celebration.

Every evening my wife and I took turns putting our kids to bed amid endless requests for one more song or one more book. Then, when they were finally settled, I’d steal away to Au Coquelet to work on the novel, alongside my regular late-night dinner order: a grilled chicken, mushroom, and jalapeño sandwich—an order that never got old—and a single pint of whatever happened to be on tap that night. Au Coquelet was one of the only establishments in downtown Berkeley open past midnight. Alas, it was also a COVID casualty—my favorite writing haunt has since been replaced by condos.

I rarely listen to music when I write. It distracts me from the rhythm and musicality I strive to build into prose. Plus, I have an internal playlist that rarely stops, even when I try my best to quiet it. 

Here are some of the internal tunes I recall being on replay in those early days, some directly relevant to the novel, and some, well, less so. 

Lake Street Dive: “Hypotheticals”

The novel begins with a hypothetical of sorts, or more precisely, a counterfactual: What if the protagonist had made one different decision? He might have salvaged a life. He might have saved his father.

Old Crow Medicine Show: “Methamphetamine”

That father—one of the two protagonists in the novel—is inspired by the historical South African naturalist Eugène Nielen Marais. In the novel, Marais is a morphine addict, as he was in real life. And while meth and morphine are drugs of completely different classes, the link feels salient. Plus the false cadence at the end of the chorus of this Old Crow tune still leaves me breathless each time I hear it. 

Jason Isbell: “Children of Children”

This Jason Isbell song is an exploration of inheritance: what parents unintentionally transmit to their children, and the baggage children carry without ever having consented. In the novel, Marais is so devastated by personal tragedy that he abandons his infant son and disappears into a remote African forest where he studies and lives among a troop of chacma baboons. He is intent on discovering the origins of memory as a way of understanding his own psychic suffering. Decades later, that son, Charles Marais, now a professor of Buddhist history at Harvard, finds himself trapped by his father’s research—which has been co-opted by university faculty for sinister ends—and constrained by his own genetics.

Fokofpolisiekar: “Hemel op die Platteland”

The first song in Afrikaans ever playlisted on 5FM, a national South African radio station. At the time, it enraged conservative Afrikaners. Fokofpolisiekar is an Afrikaans punk band whose chief project was tearing apart white Afrikaner nationalist and religious identity, dismantling notions of inheritance—as the novel also sets out to do.

Richard Wagner: “Kaisermarsch”

Okay, this was not actually part of my internal playlist. It’s the one composition on this list that appears in the novel. Wagner composed Kaisermarsch in 1871 to crown the new German Empire. In 1935, as Marais’s son gradually comes to realize that senior leaders at the university are flirting with Nazi ideology, he confronts a band of students performing this Wagner composition in Harvard Yard, and things get ugly.

The New Basement Tapes: “Kansas City”

Topically, this one is not directly related to the story. But when Marcus Mumford takes on Bob Dylan, the result is perhaps the greatest earworm in the history of roots music. After hearing Mumford play this one live, it didn’t leave my internal playlist for at least a year.

Johnny Clegg: “The Crossing (Osiyeza)”

 A white South African musician who croons in English and Zulu about crossing over to the other side, channeling western folk rock traditions while conjuring southern Africa. This theme of crossing over is embedded within the title of the novel, The Farther Shore. It comes from a curious line in the Buddhist Dhammapada: “Let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of the present and cross over to the farther shore.” For the novel’s protagonists, the crossings are both literal and metaphorical, as they travel the globe to find each other—and themselves.

Del McCoury: “I Need More Time”

A plaintive cry by one of the godfathers of bluegrass for more time to live. For me, it was a plea for more time to write. The two, I suppose, are not unrelated. But the song also forces us to consider how we choose to spend the shockingly few moments we have on this planet. Charles Marais, reflecting on this question, chooses to leave behind everything he’s built over decades in search of a more meaningful life.

Leonard Cohen: “Going Home”

Ultimately the novel is a story about the vast distances we’ll travel—across decades and continents—to find our way home. And Leonard Cohen merges Buddhist and Jewish identities with some of the most glorious poetry ever set to music: “He wants to write a love song / An anthem of forgiving / A manual for living with defeat.” Isn’t this also what Charles wants from his one precious and heartbreaking life? What all of us do?

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Seth Fleisher is an American author whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, the Journal of Anthropological Research, and elsewhere. Based in Berkeley, California, he has worked with the World Bank Group and other NGOs in more than 40 other countries, and co-founded a U.S.-based democracy initiative to counter the rising tide of authoritarianism. A former Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Seth did Ph.D. work at Harvard in Buddhist social history, a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and a B.A. in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. The Farther Shore is his debut novel. You can visit him online at @sethfleisher and sethfleisher.com.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures brilliantly shares an illustration for each page of Melville’s classic n0vel, and this new edition celebrates Moby-Dick’s 175th anniversary next month.

The Atlantic wrote of the book:

“Woven of equal parts visual mastery and creative bravery, Moby-Dick in Pictures is a treasure in and of itself, one that not only pays homage to Melville, but also reimagines what it means to embark on a modern-day epic voyage of creative restlessness.”

In his own words, here is Matt Kish’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Moby-Dick in Pictures:

Over the course of 543 days, from August 2009 to January 2011, I created 552 illustrations for Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. What led me to this endeavor is long and rather complicated, but the short version is that I had recently turned 40 years old and was consumed by the fact that despite two decades of work as a self-taught artist, I had never experienced any kind of measurable success. I was very close to quitting art permanently but decided to attempt one final idiotically ambitious project before putting the brushes down for good.

Moby-Dick was one of my favorite novels and had fascinated me for most of my life through multiple readings. I had always been a visual reader, vividly picturing the events of whatever story I was reading in a kind of internal, cerebral movie theater. Intuitively and perhaps rashly, I decided my final chapter as an artist would be to create one illustration for each of the 552 pages of the Signet Classics paperback edition of Moby-Dick.

At that time, my partner and I were living in one room of my in-laws’ house, so my “studio” was a small walk-in closet with no windows and barely enough room for a drawing table and a shelf for art supplies. I painted the interior a bright turquoise blue to remind me of the warm seas I had loved as a child, and began.

I used found paper like pages cut from old books, charts, maps, and things of that sort. The illustrations would function as a kind of visual parallel of the novel in that my ink and paint would float over the lines and words already on the paper allowing the viewer to see multiple images and connections at once, similar to the way that Moby-Dick can be read as an adventurous whaling novel, an allegory, a history, a myth, and so much more.

The project became a journey I never expected, and changed my life forever. I began with hope, excitement, and a laugh, but over time fought against self-doubt, isolation, and despair. Illustrating the final chapters felt almost hallucinatory because I had inhabited the novel for so long, and so intimately, that at times the world of the Pequod felt more real to me than my life.

Working in solitude, alone in a tiny closet, would have been maddening without music. I listened to a lot over those 543 days, but the tone and content changed as I moved through the novel. This playlist is a rough approximation of my emotional state from the first “Call me Ishmael” through the final “another orphan.”

“Electric Counterpoint III: Fast” by Steve Reich

I mentioned the warm seas I had loved as a child, and in my memories, these shores have become someplace almost magical and fantastic. Time has almost certainly distorted reality, but in my mind, I can effortlessly relive the feeling of warm sun on my skin, hot sand between my toes, the diamond-gleam of the cresting waves, and the deep blue of the ocean. Reich’s piece, with the bright guitar notes, brings me back to those childhood days wondering about the endless possibilities hidden beneath and beyond the waves.

“Jason and the Argonauts” by XTC

Even though I began the illustration project as a 40-year-old, at the time I still thought of Moby-Dick as a kind of American myth, complete with heroes, monsters, and a sea-journey quest. I could easily imagine the Pequod and the Argo in the same milieu, and Ahab was Jason and Zeus, hero and villain. This sense of wonder was essential in giving me the drive and the resolve to live in Melville’s book artistically and emotionally. This song, with the constantly swelling and ebbing guitar and hints at strange places beyond the horizon embodies my state of mind at the beginning.

“Do It Again” by the Kinks

I settled into a daily rhythm fairly quickly, and that was fine, for a while. Each morning, before my day job, I would read and re-read and re-re-read the page of the novel that I was to illustrate that day. All day, I would think about that page, what it suggested to me, what it provoked in me, and how I saw it. Over the hours, an image would develop and I would slowly but continually refine it. By evening, with the image fixed in my mind, I would enter the closet studio and work furiously with the few hours I had before nightfall, trying my best to record the image from my mind to the paper. And this would repeat, day after day, week after week, month after month. Each morning brought a new page, a new beginning, and the same task, the same process. Do it again.

“Ship of Fools” by World Party

I began to feel like something was wrong. In my real life, I had no time to do anything beyond sleep, eat, work at my library job, and make art in the evenings. I saw my friends less and less. I saw my spouse less and less. I saw the sun, and the sky, and the outside less and less. I began to feel more and more like I was a member of the crew of the Pequod, walking the decks with the sailors, mates, and harpooneers. And I knew what was coming. I knew the end of the story. What had I gotten myself into? And where would this take me?

“Drunk on Salt Water” by Xela

About halfway through the project, my grasp on reality became tenuous at times. I thought about ships, white whales, oceans and blood as often as, if not more than, eating dinner, mowing the lawn, or talking to my spouse. The feeling was new, and strange, not yet uncomfortable, but not pleasant. Xela’s bizarre, hypnotic instrumental, with its dry as a bone percussive loops and ghostly tones epitomizes the shifting fever dream of my reality.

“Good Morning Captain” by Slint

For the first time, I began to resent the project, its demands, and what it was robbing me of. Just as this song is about a losing one’s childhood, innocence, and happiness, I could feel myself slipping away and being forced by circumstances to become something I never imagined or wanted. When the singer whispers “I’m trying to find my way home. I’m sorry. And I miss you…I swear, I’ll make it up to you” leading into his agonizing, repeated howl of “I miss you” all I could think about was my spouse, how much I longed to be with them instead of alone in a closet chasing monsters.

 “Vaulted” by Reigns

A simple, quiet, piano-centered instrumental piece, accompanied, appropriately enough, by the soft dripping of water and the distant sounds of glacial ice rumbling and cracking. I was alone. That was it. It didn’t feel good, but it had taken root in my heart. There was only one way out, and that was to finish the work. I was resigned to this. It didn’t bring peace, but maybe it brought clarity.

“Is There Anybody Out There?” by Pink Floyd

By December 2010, I had hit the bottom. The Ohio winter was closing in, ice and darkness were far too present, and even though I was nearing the end of the novel, it still seemed so far off and I knew it was filled with nihilistic fury, destruction, and death. And while I was still resigned to finishing the work, a cold black depression took root. I understood that everything I was feeling and everything I was fighting was the result of my own choices and actions. My isolation was nearly total, and yet I was the one who had put up those walls, closed the doors, and hidden away.

“Never Going Home” by Xela

Another haunting, isolated instrumental. I was in the final stages of the project. The end was near. Strangely though, over the previous 500+ days, as my perceptions of reality flickered between my waking life and the Pequod, I had come to see the characters that I had been thinking about and drawing as not only real people but also companions. And I knew that very soon, I would be drawing their deaths, by drowning or by violence, and saying goodbye. I think that as my isolation increased, the constant presence of Queequeg, Starbuck, Ishmael and the rest became a comfort. And I knew that the journey had changed me, revealing parts of myself and aspects of reality I may have been happier not realizing. I was never going home again.

“Peaceful Repose” by Vincent Diamante (from the “Flower” game soundtrack)

The ending came quietly. There was guilt. I had willingly accompanied the men of the Pequod to their deaths, and had been callous enough to make a permanent visual record of it. And all with the undeniable comfort of knowing that I could and would safely step away, back into life. But, much more painfully, I had walled myself off from my friends, my life, and my spouse for more than a year. And for what? Was it worth it? I still think about that, to this day. But, in spite of this, I did feel some unexpected peace. The work was complete. The story was over. When I finished the final illustration, I put the brush down and cried. I was finally free.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Matt Kish is the illustrator of the recent reissued Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Tin House/Zando).

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Linda Kass’s novel World News from Waverley High is a transportive coming-of-age story.

In her own words, here is Linda Kass’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel World News from Waverley High:

World News from Waverley High is set against the backdrop of national unrest and some of the most vital music ever created.

Music has always been a focal point for me, so it felt essential that the soundtrack of the era permeates this story. The Sixties produced music that was socially inseparable from the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the cultural upheaval of the era. The music wasn’t just a soundtrack. It was part of the argument. It became both the mirror and catalyst for the movements of social change. During the November 1969 Second Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the biggest turnout of its kind that Washington had ever seen—described as the size of two Woodstocks—rock and folk performers galvanized demonstrators gathered across from the White House as Pete Seeger led the crowd in singing Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” When I learned about this real scene, I knew I had to include it.

In reimagining this consequential historical period, I knew I would weave in moments where music grounded the story, made it feel authentic and come alive. This was one of those moments.

My novel begins with Sly and the Family Stone. In fact, four of the sixty songs included in World New from Waverley High are by this rock-pop-funk band that emerged from the Bay Area in 1968, preaching a message of peace and equity. Sly and the Family Stone was the first racially integrated band in rock history. Their hit and the title of my second chapter, “Everyday People,” reflected their ethos, a protest song wrapped in joy. Released in November of 1968 and the band’s first No. 1 hit, the song is a plea for peace and equality between differing races and social groups. It suggests we celebrate our differences, with “different strokes for different folks” which became a well-known catchphrase. It is this idea, that it makes no difference what group you’re in, that narrator Lena Rosen shares when she says, “Waverley’s energy comes from all of us, thrown together with different socioeconomic backgrounds, different religions, different races.”

Toward the end of the second chapter, the Beatles song “Blackbird,” is featured. Written by Paul McCartney in 1968, the song was primarily a metaphor for the Civil Rights Movement. McCartney was deeply affected by news of the 1960s race riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. Rather than explicitly writing a localized political protest song, McCartney veiled the lyrics, writing it as a message of hope and empowerment to Black women facing racial oppression in the American South, using the British slang term “bird” for girl. Lena’s growing friendship with Derrick Wright, a fellow reporter for the school paper who is Black, leads to a conversation about music and Lena is surprised by his interest in this song. Derrick tells her he heard McCartney on a radio interview talking about the song and how he dedicated it to people affected by discrimination. Derrick said he felt a calmness when he listened to the song and remarked how that was odd given that it was racial tension that inspired the lyrics.

By the spring, Waverley High experiences a bomb threat and then the nation experiences the well-known series of bombings in an elegant brownstone in Greenwich Village, near Lena’s grandparents’ home. Protests are going on everywhere, even close by at Ohio State University. Lena calls her sister, Sylvia, attending a college in northern Ohio, to make sure she’s safe and to try to understand what college students are thinking. After a girl answers the dorm’s house phone, she leaves the phone cord dangling and Lena hears someone yell, “Play a new LP!” Lena hears the needle scratch vinyl, and an electric guitar slowly plays two notes followed by a quiet pulse-like drumbeat. “There’s something happening here. But what it is ain’t exactly clear.” While Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” originated on a Hollywood street corner, its amorphous lyrics allowed it to become a universal anthem for the anti-war movement and 1960s counterculture. It remains an enduring classic about youth, generational friction, and protest.

Ben King’s 1961 classic, “Stand by Me,” is a powerful anthem about loyalty, companionship, and finding strength in numbers. At its core, the song conveys that if you have a trusted person by your side, you can endure and overcome any of life’s hardships. Because of its message of unwavering solidarity, the song was widely adopted by Civil Rights activists in the 1960s. There’s a cool garage band in my novel called the Halcyons who play a concert for peace for their high school and surrounding community in early 1970. As the school year draws to a close, Kerry Ross, Halcyon’s lead guitarist and Student Council President, strums the solo in Rich Kohn’s garage (Rich is the band’s drummer and concert organizer) while Lena and a few others gather and listen. It reminds Lena of the friendships forged at Waverley and the realization that they may be listening to the Halcyons for the last time.

During a weekly Current History class, where the textbook is Time Magazine and discussion covers national and world news, students lament over the death marches and nationwide protests. Lena makes an emotional plea for it all to stop, and the classroom becomes silent until Derrick steps in. “It’s all in the music, man. Those songs tell our story. I mean, listen to this piece on Pete Seeger’s new album called ‘Bring Them Home.’ The words. They’re an explicit retort to this senseless war.”

The music of the 1960s transcended mere entertainment to become a cultural force, helping shape collective consciousness during one of America’s most transformative decades.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Linda Kass’s playlist for her novel Tasa’s Song

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

LINDA KASS began her career as a magazine journalist and correspondent for regional and national publications. She is the author of three previous works of historical fiction: Tasa’s Song (2016), A Ritchie Boy (2020), and Bessie (2023). Her fourth novel, World News at Waverley High, was just released and includes a soundtrack of the era’s iconic music. A longtime civic leader, she is the founder and owner of Gramercy Books, an independent bookstore in Central Ohio. Linda lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find her online at lindakass.com

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

James Elkins’s novel Stories, Like Illnesses is truly uniquely told and a mesmerizing treatise on memory and self.

In his own words, here is James Elkins’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Stories, Like Illnesses:

This is a wonderful site. I love the difference between authors who have favorite songs on deep background, giving them the feeling of their life, and authors who play particular songs in their head while they write, or the difference between authors who cite songs in their writing, and authors who hide them. My work is an outlier in all this, because it centers on music, and there’s music in the book—actual sheet music, which can be played or just seen on the page. That’s not to say I don’t have a playlist in my mind, and my book has references to some of those tracks—Dylan’s My Back Pages, the Grateful Dead’s Ripple—but the music in the novel is very different.

The book is the story of a person who’s undergoing a crisis.  He keeps a diary of his year. At the end it’s all too much for him, and something happens (I won’t say what). Then, forty years later, we meet him again, aged over ninety. He has just been down in the basement and rediscovered his notes from that year. He reads them, hoping to relive his past—but he fails to remember much of anything that’s in the notebooks. He’s forgotten places, events, and even people. But as he reads, he realizes that he has taken the feelings he had for those people and places, and found them again in the music he plays on the piano. He has been living alone, playing the piano for forty years, and he sees that some of the music he plays lets him relive the emotions of the past without remembering the particulars or even the people.

He sets out to write notes to describe what he’s discovered. The book Stories, Like Illnesses has notes at the end, written by the elderly narrator. In different sections, he retells the stories of the book as music. His notes create a parallel text, a second text, in which the stories you’ve read in the book are retold as music. The older narrator says this is true portraiture, very exact in its emotions, not distracted by the actual people and events. It’s my attempt at a new kind of storytelling.

The composers and pieces I mention here are all real, but none of the music is theirs. It’s reminiscent of the original composers’ pieces, but it’s changed, because it’s the way the character remembers the music. That’s why I don’t have a Spotify list: you can go and find the original pieces, but they aren’t the ones in the book. These videos are the only place to hear the music that is printed in the book, and played, in my imagination, by the old narrator.

1. Like all five of these, the first video is only an excerpt of the pages where the narrator talks about Rosie, a woman he had an affair with forty years earlier. The place she had in his mind was taken by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The narrator talks about Martinu’s lovely naïve music, which is very simple, but tends to evaporate, like Rosie evaporated from the narrator’s life.

2. Nikolai Medtner was a conservative Russian composer, a friend of Rachmaninoff. The narrator associates his melodies with perfect midsummer days in his very distant youth. He grew up in Watkins Glen, New York, and had a briefly idyllic childhood that he now rehearses by playing passages of similar simple happiness in Medtner.

3. Catherine was the narrator’s co-worker when he had a job in Guelph, Ontario, before his crisis set in. She was prickly and aggressive. The narrator associates her with Leo Ornstein, a wild modernist composer. Like the others, the piece here, called Suicide in an Airplane, is a real one, which however only exists in fragments in Samuel’s mind.

4. Iannis Xenakis is a favorite of listeners who like experimental postwar music. He was a mathematician, and composed pieces far beyond the capacity of most performers. This excerpt is about a piece called Mists, which asks pianists to play at several different speeds simultaneously. It reminds the narrator of his life during the year of his crisis, when many voices impinged on him and tore his attention in different directions. The music here begins like the real Mists, but most is my own composition.

5. Anton Webern was Schönberg’s most important student. As the narrator says, he composed very short pieces because he was trying to compress the excesses of old-fashioned music like Beethoven or Brahms. He didn’t trust what they wrote; he needed music to be purged of sloppy emotions. The narrator is reminded of Webern when he reads a chapter of his old notebooks describing how he had once tried to understand his own family by comparing them to the parts of a microscope. If he only managed his microscope properly, he thought, he could control everyone’s emotions. The comparison, Webern to microscope parts, is meant to conjure the hopelessness of containing emotion.

I hope these are interesting. They’re only small windows onto the novel, but large windows beyond the novel and back to the original composers.

also at Largehearted Boy:

James Elkins’s playlist for his novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

James Elkins is Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an art historian and critic as well as a recognized authority on the experimental use of images in works by W.H. Sebald and Anne Carson to Claudia Rankine and Teju Cole. Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York and for the last twenty years he has lived, studied, and taught in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books on fine art and photography which focus on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. 

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Bradley Sides’s novella The Volcano Keeper is a moving fable of family and love.

The Southern Review of Books wrote of the book:

“Beyond clear-eyed descriptions of the world Charlie inhabits, the deeper beauty of this story is the way grief and life spin together like a thaumatrope (a spin art toy) to create a picture of love.”

In his own words, here is Bradley Sides’s Book Notes music playlist for his novella The Volcano Keeper:

It was August of 2023. My wife and I were leaving Mount Rainier National Park and headed toward Crater Lake National Park. I was processing all the grand beauty I’d observed from the past few days—this was the first time I’d seen a volcano, after all. Tyler Childers was on in our vehicle, as he often is, and there were volcanoes—majestic, terrifying, awe-inspiring volcanoes—surrounding us. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have. A new book had been conceived.

For the longest time in my pre-writing phase, I sat with only the image. There was a volcano. There was a volcano. There was a volcano. But, then, it hit me. Finally, music was there, too, and the stories Tyler Childers was telling reminded me of my rural home. All of it. The laughter and joy and grace and loss and love. I had my inspiration for the world inside The Volcano Keeper, and I knew exactly where Charlie Melvin, my book’s protagonist, and his cattle farm, garden, and creek would be—exactly where all of his family, friends, and neighbors would be, too.

Without music, this book wouldn’t exist. I’d just have a volcano, but with no place to put it.

Here is the playlist to take you into The Volcano Keeper’s fictional Lynnville County, Alabama and the people who live there:

Tyler Childers’ “Universal Sound”

It’s the song that took me home—and the one that also helped find Charlie Melvin, the protagonist of my novella, his. “Universal Sound” really is the song of my life, and I think this book is the most me I’ll ever write.

Iris Dement’s “Let the Mystery Be”

So much of The Volcano Keeper is about belief. How it shapes us. How it enriches us. How it haunts us. This is my go-to song for contemplating belief.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s “Dreamsicle”

I structed my novella as a series of vignettes to reflect the hazy, brief, and fragmented reflection of memories. Isbell, with his Alabama history, helps me go back to the past—and to imagine Charlie’s, too.

Adrianne Lenker’s “Free Treasure”

I love Lenker’s work, both as a solo artist and with Big Thief. “Free Treasure” has to be on this playlist because it so tenderly looks at the value of love. The song feels like a celebration of those relationships we hold dear. I imagine some of the family scenes in The Volcano Keeper being like treasured photographs, and this beautiful song is what I hear in the background.

Mavis Staples’ “Sad and Beautiful World”

So much of The Volcano Keeper is about how we process grief. For Charlie, the beauty of the natural world is one of the ways. It’s a sad, sad world, but there’s so much absolute wonder and beauty.

Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It” (feat. MJ Lenderman)

There’s a lot of water in my book, and I promise you, each time I listen to “Right Back to It,” I’m floating in the creek.

Watchhouse’s “Old Ties and Companions”

Time is fleeting, and we have to hold on to those we love. They won’t be here forever. The Volcano Keeper explores this idea more, and this song from Watchhouse captures that feeling so movingly.

Sierra Ferrell’s “Lighthouse”

Love, in its best form, can help us find our way. Charlie is lost a lot in my book. He’s searching and searching and searching. He believes he finds the titular object Ferrell sings of.

Valerie June’s “With You”

Valerie June’s “With You” is one of the greatest love songs ever written. I’ll believe that until I die. It’s a celebration—of love and of life. While The Volcano Keeper certainly has sadness and darkness, I hope, at the end of the day, it reads like a celebration.

Brandi Carlile’s “You and Me on the Rock”

I have to add one more great love song on here. The Volcano Keeper is set on literal rocks that keep expanding as the story goes further and further—and the love gets deeper and deeper.

Kacey Musgraves’ “The Architect”

I don’t want to give away too much of my book’s ending, but, as I’ve said, the journey of Charlie’s life is so much about belief. Who/what guides him? Does he even a guide? Musgraves’ “The Architect” asks these same questions…

The Avett Brothers’ “Murder in the City”

“Murder in the City” has one of my favorite lyrics of the band’s catalog: “Always remember there was nothing worth sharing / Like the love that let us share our name.” For a book so focused on family, this song has to be on this playlist.

Sturgill Simpson’s “Panbowl”

I imagine most of us have those songs that just make us tear up each time we hear them, no matter how many times we hear them. Welp, Sturgill Simpson’s “Panbowl” is one of mine. It’s so full of loss and longing and sadness and pain, but it’s mixed with so much love and beauty that it feels like it’s a whole damn album (or novel) in itself.

Sarah Kate Morgan’s “Heaven In My Mind”

I can think of no better song than the folk gem “Heaven In My Mind” from the incredibly-talented Sarah Kate Morgan to match the ending of The Volcano Keeper. This song transports us with such peace and beauty, and that’s the very thing I hope the ending of my little book does, too. 

also at Largehearted Boy:

Bradley Sides’s playlist for his story collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood

Bradley Sides’s playlist for his story collection Those Fantastic Lives

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Bradley Sides is the author of two previous short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, a 2024 Book of the Year finalist at Southern Literary Review. His writing appears at Chapter 16, Electric Literature, LeVar Burton Reads, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Southern Review of Books, where he also serves as the host of “The Southern Summer Book Club.” He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife, and, on most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College. His latest book is The Volcano Keeper.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is an unforgettable, moving novel about forbidden love in Appalachia in the early 1900s.

Bookpage wrote of the book:

“Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is a story of love between people that society says should not love each other . . . . The South, and the rural South in particular, is often flattened in stories. Here, the pain, beauty, danger and community of life in a small Southern town are all on full display. Amos, Tom, Paschal and Maeve find their voices as they fight for what matters―for the land, for their home and for their hearts.”

In his own words, here is Silas House’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Tulip Poplars:

Into My Arms – Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer (written by Nick Cave in 1997)

The novel takes place from 1918 to 1976 so this song came out long after that (this version in 2017) but it was the foundational song for my writing of this novel. I played it every single time I sat down to write and it helped to put me in the mindframe I needed to write a love story, which is the main way I thought of this novel from its beginning. It’s a perfect love song because it is so incredibly romantic and full of love but never strays into sentimentality. And the way it folds in religion also serves this book as well. Besides all of that, the vocal delivery from sisters Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne is absolutely transcendent, as is the production by Teddy Thompson.

Little Darling Pal of Mine – Lucinda Williams

This song works for a gay romance because no pronouns are used for the person being sung to. Amos sings it at a gathering early on in the novel and he could have easily been singing it to Tom without anyone knowing. Although it’s using “pal” to suggest a friendship the romance in it is clear. The Carter Family’s version is perhaps the best known but I’m partial to Lucinda Williams’ version.

Be Thou My Vision – Choir of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh

The Episcopal church is important throughout this book so I listened to a lot of choirs singing classic hymns while writing those scenes. There’s something transportive about the vocals that put me in those scenes in a dreamlike way, so I hope that happens for the readers who listen to these songs as well.

You’ll Miss Lots of Fun When You’re Married – John Philip Sousa, Paul Sperry, and Irma Vallecillo

I did a lot of research on music of the 1920s, especially songs that might have been sung in speakeasies and in gay gathering places. This was one of the more popular ones and it certainly applies to both Tom and Maeve’s situations since they are thrust into a marriage unexpectedly and not totally by choice. Plus, it’s fun to listen to and really helped me to enter the spaces of the night clubs of New York City during the time period.

I’m Always Chasing Rainbows – Charles Harrison

This song also helped me to get into the New York City scenes easily. Today many of associate rainbow imagery with the LGBTQ rights movement and Pride efforts and the lyrics of this song work perfectly with some pivotal scenes in the novel.

My Buddy – Henry Burr

This is a famous song that has so much gay innuendo in it that I’m convinced that the writer meant it as a gay romance, so I had to use it. The use of the term “my buddy” is just so coded and unusual for a romantic song, and even if it wasn’t intended that way it certainly works for this book. So many gay couples at the time had to pretend to be “just friends” or “roommates”.

Cielito Lindo – Los Panchos

I wanted this to be a novel that shows rural America in a different way. I think readers expect that the rural South, and particularly Appalachia, is a place populated solely by poor white folks but in this novel there are people of color and immigrants because that is true of the place during this time period. One of the groups that brought influential music into the region during this time were Mexican laborers who came to work in the vegetable and tobacco fields at the time as part of the Braceros program. I love the scenes with these workers, especially when they gather at night to play the homesick music of their homeland.

Gymnopédie No. 1 – Erik Satie, Phillippe Entremont

I think of this as the love score of this novel, and I played it repeatedly while writing it. There are few pieces of music that are more romantic. Since the piano is a central image from the very beginning of the novel it works well to have this piano-based score as a central theme of the book. One of my favorite scenes in the book shows Tom being so heartbroken by listening to this song that his wife realizes he is in love with someone else—the person who bought him the record. I loved writing that scene and certainly listened to the song dozens of times while doing so.

Just One Look – Doris Troy

The book covers a long period of time—more than sixty years—so as we get toward the end of the novel I am able to bring in songs from the fifties, sixties, and even early seventies. This is one I thought worked well for a scene where the lead characters are visiting a gay bar for the first time. It’s another romantic song that feels upbeat and very much of the time period, so it enables me as the writer and others as the readers to easily travel to that time.

All My Trials – Peter, Paul and Mary

This is a novel about two couples whose love is legislated. Their romances are illegal in the time and places where they live. Neither of them are able to marry for most of the time the book covers. They face incredible obstacles and dangers to be together. They know that their love could lead to them being killed. I find this song so moving and it made me think a lot about what these couples have to overcome just to be who they are. It shows up late in the book but is nonetheless epitomizing of the theme throughout.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Silas House’s music playlist for his poetry collection All These Ghosts

Silas House’s playlist for his novel Southernmost

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and one book of creative nonfiction. His latest book is Southernmost (June 2018), which has been long listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a top ten Southern bestseller and in July 2020 his first three books were reissued with new supplemental material, including new forewords, author notes, and a family tree.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Awarded the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize (judged by Alexandra Kleeman), Adam O’Fallon Price’s Objects of Desire offers stories of unforgettable characters at dark crossroads in their lives.

Alexandra Kleeman wrote of the book:

“Tremendously funny and deeply felt, Adam O’Fallon Price channels the voices of characters suspended between crisis and catharsis, hovering somewhere above rock bottom, wandering the maze of their own desires and dreams. In their tenderness, these stories demonstrate the special power of the short form to hoist up the heaviness of life, to give lightness and wit to what would drag us down. But in their pathos, the struggle of Price’s characters to see their way to being a just-slightly better version of themselves, they give heft to experiences that we might otherwise prefer to discard, illuminating a rare and peculiar kind of beauty.”

In his own words, here is Adam O’Fallon Price’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Objects of Desire:

I can’t listen to music when I’m writing, especially music with vocals. Jazz and classical are sometimes okay in the background, but pop/country/rock/etc.—forget about it. I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m a songwriter as well as a writer: music is simply too distracting—my attention is immediately split between the critical work of the writing, and the act of listening critically to a piece of music. I doubt I listened to a single piece of music during the writing of the stories on Objects of Desire, my forthcoming short fiction debut. Reading many of the Largehearted Boy entries, I’m very envious of people who can listen to music while writing—mixing those two pleasures seems like a blast.

Short stories and songs, especially pop songs, are very similar forms. Both are capable of structural perfection (unlike the novel, an essentially imperfectible form). They also both encode a kind of structural narrative, a logic into their writing, that a good version makes immediately clear to the audience. Having spent the last fifteen years at work on the stories in Objects of Desire, alongside the songwriting I’ve done with The Mayflies USA, I’ve thought a lot about how to craft a successful piece in each medium—and the overlaps between the two.

The following is a list of perfect songs that feel similar, from a craft perspective if not necessarily emotionally, to some of my favorite classic short stories.

“Rock the Casbah” by The Clash / “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” by Kate Braverman

One approach to hooking a reader or listener  is simply to repeat the hook over and over. “Rock the Casbah” seduces us by insisting on the chorus, insisting on the opening guitar riff, and insisting on the fact that Sharif does not like it—many, many times. Likewise the cyclical descent into addiction in Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” and the sinister Lenny who keeps appearing and appearing like a bad dream the story’s protagonist can’t wake from.

“Wichita Lineman” by Jimmy Webb / “Helping” by Robert Stone
The most basic currency of narrative is cause and effect, the sense that one action leads to the next. Robert Stone’s “Helping” is a tour de force in the art of consequentiality, and we mercilessly track the way each scene in Elliot’s day brings about the next: an appointment with a lowlife who talks about Vietnam triggers Elliot’s PTSD, his PTSD triggers an alcohol relapse, the relapse causes his wife to say she’s leaving him, their fracture causes him to threaten a stranger with violence, and so on. Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman,” written by the great Jimmy Webb, has a similarly linear, causational structure; each quick change seems to summon the next shift in the harmonic structure, and, like a good story, the song has taken several ninety-degree turns and ended up somewhere unexpected before we’ve even realized what’s happening.

“Get Lucky” by Daft Punk / “Dog Heaven” by Stephanie Vaughn

There are narratives that take you on a linear journey forward, like “Wichita Lineman,” and then there are songs that feel like circular trips, a walk around wooded lake in which you keep returning to the same pleasant spots again and again. Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” with its four endlessly revolving chords, is this kind of circular tune. Certain stories also rely less on consequentiality and more on a circular, associative logic. The great Stephanie Vaughn’s “Dog Heaven”—and many of the stories in her wonderful collection Sweet Talk—operates this way, returning over and over to the same themes and ideas, each time digging deeper into their essence and meaning.  

“Dry the Rain” by the Beta Band / “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

Great songs and stories often have a funny way of focusing in as they go along, taking their seemingly trivial premise seriously, and, like life, accruing gravity as they careen toward their ending. In Carver’s “Cathedral,” an offhand anecdotal story of a blind man’s unwanted visit becomes a beautiful recounting of the somewhat awful narrator’s moment of empathy and grace. Similarly, in “Dry the Rain,” what begins as a rather silly mumbled ditty about dirty clothes and dust transforms, inexorably, into a head-nodding anthem of hope.

“Jealous Guy” by Donny Hathaway / “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel

One shared feature of classic songs and short stories is the way they often grab you immediately—they know what they want to do and waste no time doing it. It’s not always true—there are slow burns, of course—but many of the classics have something signature encoded into their DNA, and you can hear/read it from the first note and word. Donny Hathaway’s vastly superior version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” insists on itself from the first thump of the kick and bass and wobbling piano, and then Hathaway’s searing vocals seal the deal: we must listen, and listen again. Likewise, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” immediately establishes its central theme and spine with the opener, “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting… make it useless stuff or skip it,” reeling us into its narrator’s tale of her best friend’s tragic death.

“Orphan Girl” by Gillian Welch / “Emergency” by Denis Johnson

Sometimes a story or song showcases a voice so fresh and real and compelling that it’s as if you’re reading a book or hearing music for the first time. Most artists are, in their way, a composite of their favorite artists. But every now and again, the occasional artist seems to hatch from an egg, fully grown, in possession of a voice that is immediately and distinctly their own. “Orphan Girl,” from Welch’s first album Revival, showcases both her intimate alto and a rare skill for writing songs that seem to have always been in the American songbook. Denis Johnson, meanwhile, came along in the early 1980s as a kind of palate cleanser for the staid American lit at the time, muscling in with his tales of Midwestern spiritual junkiedom, like “Emergency,” a singular story that no one else could have written.

“I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)” by Nick Lowe / “Show Don’t Tell” by Curtis Sittenfeld

Some artists, on the other hand, seem to have digested the entire American canon or songbook, reproducing their version of it with such verve and style that you have no choice but to buy in. “I Knew the Bride” is an evergreen example of Lowe’s diverse mastery of songcraft, giving the listener a surprisingly sad precis of the titular bride’s loss of youthful spirit to age. And Sittenfeld’s “Show Don’t Tell” is a classic coming-of-age story, a roman-a-clef based on the author’s time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and journey to success—nothing groundbreaking, but done with such deadeye skill and sharp humor that we cannot help but submit to the story.

“Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap / “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin

Finally, there are stories and songs that offer their audience something utterly complete and comprehensive, compressed into the space of a short story or song. Both “Hide and Seek” and “Sonny’s Blues”—in completely different ways, of course—offer the lucky reader-listener something huge and emotionally complete, one in four minutes and the other in twenty pages. Reading stories and songs like these, I’m convinced that these are the only two artforms that, in such a limited span of time, can make us feel that we’ve been presented with a life in its entirety.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Adam O’Fallon Price is the author of two novels, The Grand Tour (Doubleday 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (Tin House Books 2019), which won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, and a collection of short stories entitled Objects of Desire, forthcoming in October 2026 from Autumn House Press. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, VICE, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, EPOCH, and many other places. He lives in Carrboro, NC and teaches fiction writing at the University of North Carolina. He is the bassist in The Mayflies USA.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Erin Belieu’s career-spannimg poetry collection Cocklebur showcases her inimitable talent for ever lyrically capturing darkness through whimsy.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Span­ning her four-dec­ade oeuvre, [Cocklebur], the spark­ling sixth col­lec­tion from Belieu (Come-Hither Hon­ey­comb), cap­tures her propuls­ive lyr­i­cism and trade­mark ima­gistic dynam­ism. Here is Belieu’s fully real­ized poetic voice singing clearest and most poignantly in self-pro­claimed ‘early dot­age’—’a sav­age trick.’ . . . Read­ers will find this scin­til­lat­ing and mem­or­able.”

In her own words, here is Erin Belieu’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Cocklebur:

Two conundrums were built into my effort for the lovely Largehearted Boy: this playlist for my latest book, Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, Oct 2026) meant feeling my way through much of a lifetime’s poetry and music, and where they’ve intertwined most significantly for me. That’s a lotta years. Lucky for you, I finally accepted that I couldn’t include all 500 songs that insisted they needed to be on my list.

The other challenge stems from the autobiographical fact that I was once the girl who worked at the record store for years and briefly pointed myself in the direction of rock journalism as a career path before finding my way to Boston to study poetry. In that context, making this list was both the most writing fun I’ve had in a good while and self-inflicted torture for a music nerd.

What’s reflected here is the music that first shaped me into a poet and songs that have specifically been in conversation with my six poetry collections as I was writing them. Most of the choices are songs that have stood the test of time, which is fitting given the project that is a new and selected, cutting down, sometimes ruthlessly, to the essential.

“Books of the Bible”—various artists

As an antsy child, who believed maybe one in twenty things any adult told me, I dreaded my weekly Presbyterian Sunday school. But the morning we were taught the “Books of the Bible” song, I roused from my stupor with a feeling I’ve never forgotten. “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy...”

I’d no idea what our teacher was talking about, but when I heard her sing “Doot-uh-ron-o-meeeee,” the complex bounce and rhythm of it, I was stunned. The strangely mesmerizing colors of its sound; how extraordinary words suddenly seemed. I tried the taste of it out loud for days, randomly stuffing it into sentences. I remember this song giving me the gift of my first poetic response to language around the age of five.

Aretha Franklin—”Ain’t No Way”

Early memory of my friend’s dad playing this song at the neighborhood’s happy hour where our parents got sloshy on Manhattans and fluorescently pink wine while we played around them in the yard. I remember full stopping in the middle of a game of Ghost in the Graveyard just to listen. My first awareness of the potential nuance and profound power of voice and phrasing. No surprise here—whatever Aretha served stayed served.

Guys and Dolls—”Adelaide’s Lament”

My father scraped up college tuition playing trombone in pit orchestras for out of town musicals. In my childhood, he’d play their cast albums for me, telling the shows’ stories between songs. I know much of my poetry’s sense of rhyme, syntax, and rhythm is influenced by those brilliant early and mid-20^th century songs. One vivid example (as Adelaide details her hypochondria caused by her boyfriend’s failure to put a ring on it):

You can spray her wherever you figure the streptococci lurk
you can give her a shot for whatever she’s got, but it just won’t work
If she’s tired of getting the fish eye from the hotel clerk
a person can develop a cold…

The delayed completion of the syntax! The syncopation of its language! I still marvel at a perfectly executed triple rhyme (see E. A. Robinson’s “Eros Turannos” for an evergreen banger of an example). It’s like watching a figure skater land a triple axel, requiring the same degree of difficulty.

Glen Campbell—”Wichita Lineman”

For me, born and raised in Nebraska, country music (I mean good country music) was threaded into my daily life: floating from windows, the background music in any store. The Johnny Cash Show and Hee Haw were in our regular TV rotation when frequently visiting my grandparents out in the state’s far western panhandle. A particular favorite in terms of poetics are the lines in which Glen Campbell sings “and I need you more than want you/and I want you for all time…” which is a great example of how deeply affecting a completely rhetorical line can be. No sensory sparkles to hide behind—just the risk of earnest longing constructed with a propulsive wordplay that recontextualizes the meaning. I think of this when a line I’m working on is in rhetorical mode and I’m trying to dig the energy from what doesn’t offer the shiny beads of figurative language.

X—”Johnny Hit and Run Pauline”

Given my mildly misspent youth, there are many candidates for the punk songs that haunt my work, but probably X more than most influenced my sense of narrative drama and speed in a poem, and my early interest in the corrupted corporeality of the gothic. X was one of the best storytelling bands of the era. Despite some if its appealing intensities, the punk scene I swam around was (unsurprisingly) a brutal space for teenage girls. While I had the snake brain instinct not to get too far out on the ledge, I saw many young women end up face down. Much of my budding feminist consciousness developed in reaction to the violence I saw and heard during the late 80s and had me actively seeking out women’s voices (Patti Smith, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney) in response to that testosterone tsunami.

Bob Dylan—Idiot Wind (Bootleg #6)

“Idiot Wind” is a song I’ve known since I was a teenager. But it wasn’t until hearing the Blood On the Tracks bootlegs years later that I felt this song’s authentic pain, akin to listening to an artist perform surgery on himself. There it was—the regret, complicity, sorrow, as well as the furious anger he’d flattened into one bitter flavor on the version he chose for the album. I’d never felt the depths of that song until then because Dylan hadn’t originally trusted his listeners (and himself, I’d guess) with the most honest draft of it.

Dylan’s original mistake is something for which I have great sympathy. It’s not easy to make good choices when you’re bleeding out. But the cautionary difference between those two versions came to my mind when choosing the poems for the selected part of my collection. In my books Black Box and Cocklebur, there are poems that for me now exist as (mostly) healed wounds, and I recoiled from showing my reader those scars, even while knowing the art of them meant they had to be in Cocklebur. The truthful version of “Idiot Wind” is a song in the purest confessional mode, an autopsy sawing through bone. But as is seen in Dylan’s failure to choose the most complex and revealing version of the song for his album, such self-dissections come with a dear price, one Dylan was not yet ready to pay. A corrected mistake in Dylan’s case, but the evolution of “Idiot Wind” keeps me asking my poems, no matter their subject, “Where is the lie? Where is the truth?”

The Raspberries—”Go All The Way”

Besides being one of the most musically sophisticated three minutes of pure power pop ever recorded, and its charmingly ecstatic joy at getting laid—a fine rock-n-roll tradition, and a poetic one too —I’ve always loved that the woman participating here (in the 1970s no less, peak era of rock stars adopting their girlfriends) is so clearly consenting to getting it on. And the singer (Eric Carmen), literally WHOO-HOO-ing at his great good luck, is so unabashedly smitten with her. No tedious emotional taxidermy of the cool boy’s pose. No maidenly dithering about whether she has the right to want what she wants and ask for it. Just sex as joyous, sex as a soul restoring good. How mutually delightful. As someone who’s written throughout my six poetry collections about the pleasures and erotics of living in a human body, particularly a woman’s body, there’s an unusual sex positivity and emotional wholesomeness to this song in which the woman is clearly in charge of her own choices and pleasures.  

Billie Holiday—”I Loves You, Porgy”

(Here I use the name as listed on her recording, though Holiday chooses to change the Gullah/Geechee dialect pronunciation of “loves” to “love” when singing it for her own good reasons.)

If I can write a poem with the distinctness of phrasing, depth of character, and truthful vulnerability of this song, I will go to my rest happily. This isn’t necessarily Billie Holiday’s “most important” song (because how could we ever choose that?). But for me, it’s the one in which the genius of her vocal interpretation shines through the song’s dramatic narrative with the most bespoke artistry possible. The singularity of Holiday’s artistic consciousness is profound. To embody the craft that captures your particular mind and soul so thoroughly and dimensionally that you’d never be mistaken for anyone else—for me, that’s the definition of poetic voice.

Etta James—Stop the Wedding

I love all of Etta James unreservedly. But from a poetry perspective, this song especially demonstrates how to start a subtle sound pattern in a poem, keeping the bubbles low, then letting it come to full boil at the end for maximum impact. In this case, James spends much of the song in a melancholic middle gear, with tantalizing nods throughout to the roof shaking places her voice is promising to go. She’s edging us toward what becomes the fully realized pattern in the end, finally blasting the church doors off their hinges with, “NO. NO. NO. NO. DON’T DO IT! STOP THE WEDDING!,’ releasing her monumental vocal power that’s been seeded throughout the song. It’s not only her legendary voice but the satisfying completion of that pattern that thrills her listener. And it’s one way to think about how we build structural integrity into free verse poems.

Give me a time machine and one of the first places I’ll go is to a performance of James singing this live in 1962. The official recording of “Stop The Wedding” quickly fades on her voice at full throttle about 10 seconds after she unleashes it. This is a musical felony in the first degree to me, and whoever made that call on the production should still be doing time. Oh, to have been in the audience when she burned that church all the way to the ground.

Dwight Yoakam— “Johnson’s Love”

Among the great inheritors of that good country music I mentioned before, Dwight Yoakam is my favorite. His album Hillbilly Deluxe is one I still listen to all the time. I briefly lived in Athens, Ohio, close to the part of Appalachia where Yoakam’s family is from, so I’ve seen up close both the beauty and desolation of which he sometimes sings. His song “Johnson’s Love” was especially influential to my second poetry collection, One Above & One Below, in that it got me thinking about the idea of high lonesome as a vocal construction and mode of storytelling; how one might attempt that effect with words alone. That led into deep dives with Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, and later, Alison Krauss. Hence, my longer poem in that book titled “High Lonesome.” The atmospheric layers of both lap and pedal steel on this track are crushing. And when Yoakam’s velvet and steel twang hitches into the plaintive tremble of Hey, hey, Maureen...sweet Jesus. I will take that man any day, with his hat on or off. 

Bruce Springsteen— “Nebraska”

When the Springsteen’s Nebraska album came out, I’d lived away from home long enough for my poems to want to turn around and look at it again from the distance of memory. Both the song and album strongly influenced my sense of the mythmaking of landscape, how landscape at its best is an active character in a poem. I’m always interested in where a poem is happening and how that shapes or interacts with the speaker’s psyche (Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg” is a memorable example of this). That an artist famously from the Nebraska opposite world of New Jersey could channel the darker undertow of my state so intensely and correctly, summoning the banshees of my somewhere that is others’ nowhere, the accomplishment of this remains astonishing to me. The Boss is one of my people.

Aimee Mann— “Ghost World”

Aimee Mann has been a big influence on me, both her brilliant songwriting and how she handles her business. Mann’s hard won, long term survival as a woman artist—along with her unwillingness to keep her mouth shut about an industry that constantly questioned her worth and appeal—I’ve found inspiring, and, as the youths say…relatable. Hard to pick just one of her songs, but “Ghost World” I think about often, given my poems’ long interest in portraiture: the signature deep character work she does with it in such a compressed space. Smartly sardonic, soulmate to the underdogs, the deepest and darkest kind of funny, no one captures the directionless malaise of our present Americana—the “raw towns we believe and die in,” as Auden has it—better than Mann. “Ghost World” gives us a portrait of the girl America disposes of daily, the one giving the speech at graduation but too broke to go to college. Two verses that float through my head frequently:

Everyone I know is acting weird
Or way too cool
They hang out by the pool
So I just read a lot and ride my bike
Around the school

and

12th of June, a gibbous Moon
Was this the longest day?
I’ll walk down to the bay
And jump off of the dock and watch
The summer waste away

Add in her voice, that to me sounds like an angel who’s maybe a little exhausted by their immortality, and her songwriting range that moves easily between wry deadpan and unvarnished sincerity, well, yeah. Aimee Mann is one of my heroes.

Otis Redding—”These Arms of Mine”

This song is my final answer to that impossible question with which music junkies torture each other: “What is your choice for greatest song ever recorded?” It occurs to me that throughout my books, from my first collection, Infanta, all the way through to the new poems in Cocklebur, the poets’ ancient work of wooing is a constant motif in my poems. Yearning, longing, rejecting and being rejected, the beauty and troubles of sex and connection, the loneliness of being a person, the rip tides of relationship that can leave us choking on a throatful of sand or pull us under completely—this has been the stuff of poetry since the first person ever thought to arrange words into a love incantation or exorcism. Redding’s song is incomparable to my mind as the greatest pulse and depth of eros, the most intense down badness, anyone ever committed to tape. And it appeared on a mix tape I received once, which did its work of catching me in its spell, ultimately leading to the wonderful surprise of my son. If that doesn’t demonstrate the power of music’s poetry, and this song particularly, I don’t know what else does.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Born in Nebraska, Erin Belieu earned an MA from Boston University and an MFA from Ohio State University. Belieu’s work focuses on gender, love, and history, filtering wide-ranging subject matter through a variety of theoretical frameworks. She often addresses feminist issues and uses poetic conventions and street talk. Belieu is the author of many books of poetry, including Come-Hither Honeycomb (2020); Slant Six (2014); Black Box (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; One Above & One Below (2000); and Infanta (1995), selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series. Belieu coedited, with Susan Aizenberg, the anthology The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (2001). Belieu has received admiring reviews for her poetry throughout her writing career. Book critic Dwight Garner in The New York Times says “Belieu is a poet who can’t abide pretension,” and “She’s a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O’Hara, to Deborah Garrison, to Tony Hoagland.”

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Daniel Pope’s novel Go Help Yourself is an endearing debut, the Pacific Northwest slacker novel of the year!

John Keene wrote of the book:

“Corbin Taylor Moore, the Seattle-based anti-hero narrator of Daniel Pope’s rollicking debut, is a weed-smoking, pill-popping, self-critiquing twenty-something experiencing something of a mid-life crisis. It doesn’t help that his mother, a famous self-help author, barely understands him, that he struggles to connect with his coworkers or soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, or that a crow hauntingly appears the day of his crash-out, followed by a murder of crows as events progress. A brilliant send-up of our contemporary late neoliberal moment, Go Help Yourself captures the vicissitudes of Millennial life today and brings a vibrant new literary voice to readers.”

In his own words, here is Daniel Pope’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Go Help Yourself:

Life Signs by Water From Your Eyes

Rachel Brown’s deadpan delivery combined with Nate Amos’s chaotic and unrelenting guitar lines in the verse mirrors the contrast of ironic distance/inner emotional volatility that characterizes my protagonist, Corbin. Corbin hates his body; he thinks he’s too fat, ugly, etc.; he thinks that if he were beautiful, it would solve all his problems. He keeps all these torrential feelings at an ironic distance, and that’s why he can’t see himself clearly. But he can’t avoid himself. Nor can he avoid the murder of angry crows, which keeps returning at random points to attack him. Why? I like a book that keeps you guessing, and a song that does the same. It makes the moments of clarity so beautiful. Like in the chorus, when the chaotic patchwork clicks into a startling sudden order, and the song just soars. And that guitar solo! If someday someone decided to produce a TV show out of my novel I’d beg the reptilian TV execs to get Water From Your Eyes to write the theme song.

Ugly by Sugar High

Corbin could have written the lyrics for this song. There couldn’t be a more direct way of defining his problem, or what he thinks his problem is: I’m so ugly. I think this is universal: everyone must have felt it at some point. No matter how many inspirational Instagram posts you read, when you feel you’re not in the club, it’s difficult to convince yourself that the “true beauty” is “within.” But in the examination of these ugly feelings, this song shows in them the pattern of something far more profound. As Corbin says, “I had wanted to be a writer because I’d thought that if I could put the right words in the right order, everyone would realize that I was beautiful inside. But I wasn’t beautiful inside.” The beauty of this song proves its singer wrong, and I hope my novel does the same.

Drunk II by Mannequin Pussy

The first draft of Go Help Yourself was written in a period of converging crises: on the one hand, I was going through a breakup; on the other, the whole world was going through a pandemic. While the novel lampoons the self-help genre—Corbin’s mother is a famous self-help guru, and he hates her—of course I couldn’t have survived these crises without some kind of healthy self-helping of my own. So I started running. And whenever this song, “Drunk II,” came up on my running playlist, it made me fly. It’s got that blurry, drunken, “fuck everything,” “let’s point this rocket ship into the fucking sun” mentality, that loving embrace of your own brokenness that feels, for some reason, so, so good. Which might be a very bad and immature thing, but it’s a feeling that Go Help Yourself’s protagonist, Corbin, knows all too well. And these lyrics! And do you remember the nights I called you up? / I was so fucked up, I forgot we were broken up / I still love you, you stupid fuck. I wish I’d written that.

Between Two Mysteries by Mt. Eerie

My novel is set in Seattle, so I had to get something by Phil Elverum in here, a Pacific Northwest legend. And what better for a PNW novel than a song that directly references Twin Peaks, both sonically (with that keyboard part) and lyrically? The town rests in the valley beneath Twin Peaks / Buried in space / What goes up there in the night / In that dark, blurry place? An ongoing theme of Go Help Yourself is the way that Seattle is changing in ways that are beyond the control of Seattleites, dictated from above by the corporate overlords; and yet, just as the body fights back against the mind, just as crows continue to flourish in the cracks of human society, so too will that essence of the PNW live on: And the songs fade, and the singers die / But my heart will not stop thumping / The shapes in the dark still look convincing / So here I am.

I Don’t Love by Have a Nice Life

I like a playlist that has a narrative shape. So here we are approaching the dark night of the soul: I don’t want to live like this anymore / I don’t want to live at all. Corbin’s masochistic/hedonistic embrace of his own misery—the drugs and the binge eating, on one hand, and the manic exercise/self-help regimen on the other—can only go in one direction, and that is toward oblivion. The haunting muddle of this song reflects a muddled mind seeking refuge in nothingness: the layered and indistinct synthesizers, the crunch and fuzz of the drums and bass, the muffled voices drifting like silhouettes in fog. Until suddenly, everything lines up into clear, soaring octaves and harmonies, and the floating voice sings I don’t love / I don’t feel anything / I don’t feel anything where this love should be. I don’t know about Dan Barrett (who sings these lyrics), but in Corbin’s case, the problem is not that he doesn’t love, but that he thinks he doesn’t deserve it.

Second Son of R. by Oathbreaker

Writing a novel is hard, and it should be. How do you expect to connect to your character’s struggle without struggling through the material? So consider this the crisis point for both Corbin and me: The crashing drums, the roaring guitar, the screaming, and then—in a moment of stillness, when everything dies out except the guitar—a slow moment of grief: Your empty house won’t comfort me. In the novel, Corbin’s anger at his mother is easier to feel than sadness, but the anger keeps the house empty, it keeps the plastic on the furniture; in the writing, my desire to produce a good novel, which is (at least in part) a desire to be known, runs up against my fear of being known and of knowing myself. In another breakdown toward the end of the song, the time signature shifts from 4/4 to 6/4, which means that the guitar has sped up while the song has slowed down. There’s an immense tension in this contradiction, the inner crisis only sharpened and focused by the glassy stillness holding it suspended, until finally comes the immense catharsis of total breakdown. I won’t spoil the novel, but in my case, this is the catharsis that came from finally tapping into the part of myself I was avoiding and putting it on the page and realizing that this was where the story was all along. God, what a relief!

Fishing Bird (Empty Gutted in the Evening Breeze) by Grouper

This song is wreathed in tape hiss, an analog warmth, an acknowledgement of music as a material process that includes both the musician and the listener. This intimacy frames the scene: the fishing bird, the fish in the water, the singer speaking directly to them—How long can you hold your breath? / Flash of silver moving away. There’s an intimation of the interconnectedness of things, but our part in it is ambiguous. So it is with Corbin: what’s going on with these crows? It seems they’re fishing for something. Maybe his eyeballs. But is he projecting? Is it his denial of the reality of the body that prevents him from seeing them clearly? He and the crows are involved in some total process; we are all part of the same web, and we ignore this at our peril.

Camargue by Malibu

Malibu is a favorite artist to write to. Her songs have little structure, only patterns left briefly in the sand before the tide comes in again. The best word to describe it, besides “oceanic,” is “sublime,” with all its beautiful and terrifying valences. The sublime allows us to understand something impossible by aesthetically experiencing the impossibility of understanding it. I believe that every novel aims at a moment like this: an understanding that cannot be represented in language but can be presented as the failure of language. So this is the revelation after the crisis, but it’s a revelation that you can’t approach directly. You have to let it envelop you.

Watchlar by Cocteau Twins

A good ending manages to be both an organic continuation of what came before and the beginning of a new cycle. Here, the dreamy singing, synths, and guitar demonstrate continuity, but the clinical electronic beat is a new vibe.

The best endings are like the ending of a concert where the musicians invite the audience onstage to dance: we’ve been enjoying this thing from a distance, but suddenly, there we are, included within its frame.

You could see my novel as a conflict between the body and the mind. Here, having passed through all the contradictions of the mind, we return to the body, as we always must. Hopefully this time with a bit more love for it and what it does for us.

I hope this song returns you to your body; I hope you feel the love. And I hope you enjoyed my playlist.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Daniel Pope is a writer and musician from Seattle. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in the UK, where he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.