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.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s novel The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford is one of the year’s most striking debuts, a book both wholly transportive and masterfully told.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Droll characterization, wry humor, and storytelling chops [are] displayed by the talented Thompson-Spires in this debut novel, …Reminiscent of T.C. Boyle, another master of the darkly whimsical short story, Thompson-Spires packs a sharp, caustic wit that yields plenty of compassion for even someone as mean and misbegotten as her title character. Is this a whodunit, or a ‘how-they-did-it’? However you define Thompson-Spires’ novel, it’s shrewd, audacious, and funny.”

In her own words, here is Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford:

My debut novel, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford chronicles the final hours of Rich Milford, the most hated man in Newville, Oklahoma. Told from alternating perspectives by the townsfolk of Newville and the five women who attempt to murder Rich, it explores who gets to claim what stories, whether there’s such a thing as truth, and the lengths people will go to in order to alter or preserve their legacies.

Although I made a vibes playlist for the book early in my drafting process, I’m one of those people who can’t write to most songs because I’ll end up choreographing a music video before a single word lands on the page. I can, however, write to Billie Eilish. There’s something fully immersive and atmospheric about her work that always inspires me, and though I do often end up singing along, I can still maintain my focus on the project at hand. Her music only makes a brief cameo on this playlist, but I want to acknowledge that it has provided much of the background noise, along with Brooklyn’s unique diegetic sounds, for my years of writing and revision of this novel. Below, find my ideal soundtrack for The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford.

“Cha-Cha Slide,” DJ Casper; “The Wobble,” V.I.C; “The Hustle,” Van Mcoy; “Do the Urkel,” Family Matters

Line dances tell us so much about community. They mark insiders and outsiders to cultural knowledge, and Rich Milford is as far outside of Newville’s conventions as one can imagine. Four Wives is structured as one big line-dance tour through the towns, Rich’s life, and over his grave. Thus, the above songs—and more like them—figure into the novel’s pacing and the townsfolks’ joy over Rich’s death.

“Can You Stop the Rain,” Peabo Bryson

Bryson’s song is about the grief of romantic love lost, but the titular Rich, the novel’s antagonist, also grieves many things, most prominently his younger sister, and arguably his parents and the uncle who raised him. Rich is heavily influenced by barometric pressure, and it’s no spoiler to say that his lightning strike at a young age becomes a formative event.

“Blame It on the Rain,” Milli Vanilli

Yes, a theme is forming here. As the song says, “Whatever you do, don’t put the blame on you/ Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah.” And Rich, who becomes a worse cad than usual under the strain of inclement weather, takes this chorus literally.

Alternates: “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” Ann Peebles; “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” Missy Elliott

“For the Love of Money,” The O’Jays

“Money,” the O’Jays observe, “can drive some people out of their minds.” Rich Milford loves no one more than his sister, Mae, and his fat bankroll. And his lack of honesty about how much money he has directly influences one of his wives’ decision to murder him.

“Torn,” Natalie Imbruglia

“I’m all out of faith…. I’m cold and I am shamed/ lying naked on the floor,” Imbruglia writes in this pop song. Shame figures largely in each of the women who attempts to murder Rich, his first wife Lally no exception. Lally prides herself on respectability, so Rich’s continual degradations of her—including infidelity and sexual and financial humiliation—leave her with what she feels is no choice: To quote Ja Rule, “It’s murda.”

“Criminal,” Fiona Apple

If any of the women in Rich’s life feels especially guilty over her murderous actions, it’s his second “wife,” Sophronia, who worries about what to tell her children when their father ends up dead, presumably by her own hand.

“Petite Mort,” Meshell Ndegeocello

This song’s passionate emphasis on a queer romance suits Georgette, the only wife Rich lets handle his money. Though she is generally levelheaded and somewhat austere, her ultimate vulnerability is most visible when it comes to the secret affair she’s been having with another character in the book.

“I Love You,” Billie Eilish

There are multiple Eilish songs I could have chosen (“My Strange Addiction,” “Hostage,” or “Hailey’s Comet,” for example) to describe Vivianne’s near obsession with Rich. As the last woman to enter the family, she pines over him with a burning but mostly unrequited love that drives her to do wild things. “I can’t escape the way I love you,” Vivianne, like Eilish, might sing, “and I don’t want to.”

“Tears Dry on Their Own,” Amy Winehouse

Vivianne receives so little in the Milford household—barely thrown a bone—that I’m giving her a bonus song. “I don’t understand,” Winehouse sings, “Why do I stress the man/ when there’s so many bigger things at hand…. Even if I stop wanting you/ and perspective pushes through/ I’ll be some next man’s other woman soon.” Vivianne, too, is prone to this pattern.

“I Love the Lord,” Whitney Houston

Alberta, Rich’s lifelong cook, has seen it all, and she wishes she hasn’t. Ever trying to clean the “Milford stink” off of herself, she delights herself in the Lord in both true devotion and defense against the wiles of wicked Rich and his unconventional family.

“The Payback,” James Brown

My favorite James Brown song calls for “the big payback,” “revenge,” and, boy, does Rich Milford meet vengeance.

“Goodbye, Earl,” The Chicks

Very few people mourn Rich’s death. He’s a notorious brawler, a domestic abuser like Earl in this song by The Chicks, and he’s an unsteady, volatile presence in the book and to the people who know him. The townsfolk of Newville, as I mentioned, literally dance on his grave.

“Sweep Around Your Own Front Door,” The Williams Brothers

The townspeople of Newville are not without their own faults. In addition to being incredibly judgmental and sexist, they spend their time spying on Rich Milford and his family. This song encourages nosy people to tidy their own houses before they call out the sins of others, and Newville might take note of it and their own complicity in Rich’s demise.

“Motownphilly,” Boys II Men

This jam reflects Newville, which, in addition to serving as a Greek chorus of sorts, features competing bards. I’d like to imagine that its electric four-part harmonies and acapella riffs would complement the voices of the town’s lamppost singers, the Darker Brothers and the Dixon Boys, who write songs about the Milfords and perform them to passersby.

“Oklahoma,” Rodgers and Hammerstein

My novel is, in part, at its heart an ode to the all-Black towns of Oklahoma, of which there used to be over 50 and now only 13 remain. I wanted to both historicize this important part of the United States and pay homage, as in the book’s dedication, to the archivists who have kept these towns’ stories alive. One of Newville’s major beefs with Rich is that he takes up too much space in their town’s lore. At the end of the day, the townsfolk want to be remembered for their great contributions to a place they deem beautiful and important. As the song says, “Every night my honey lamb and I/ Sit alone and talk/ And watch a hawk/ Makin’ lazy circles in the sky/ We know we belong to the land/ And the land we belong to is grand.”

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

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the award-winning, National Book Award longlisted short story collection, Heads of the Colored People.

In addition to a debut novel with Scribner, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Rich Milford, her young adult debut is forthcoming with Make Me a World (Penguin Random House). She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Grant and a 2019 Whiting Award.

She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications.

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by David Naimon is an enlightening and informative collection of interviews with one of our greatest writers by one of our most talented (if not most talented) literary interviewers.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“An enlightening conversation about the writing process. Both authors adopt the tone of artisans discussing their craft, and each’s delight at debating with a like-minded professional is evident throughout. . . [Le Guin’s] expansive knowledge of the SF genre provides, most strikingly, a sharp perspective on how its female practitioners have too often been forgotten in favor of their male contemporaries. Her rapport with Naimon results in an exchange that is both informative and charming.”

In his own words, here is David Naimon’s playlist for his book Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by David Naimon:

The book that Ursula K. Le Guin and I created together began as conversations between us, one in each genre—fiction, poetry and nonfiction. And as we dived into questions of craft it became quickly clear that the music of words, the non-connotative elements of language, was of great importance to Ursula. As she herself put it:

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

Ursula would often borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf, “the wave in the mind,” to describe this very thing.

Today, however I have the pleasure of putting together an actual musical playlist to accompany the journey Ursula and I made through fiction, poetry and nonfiction. In thinking of how best to do so, I’m reminded of something Ursula wrote in the introduction to the book (an introduction she quite amazingly titled “Fear and Loathing in the Interview”!) where she said: “The good interview is like a good badminton rally: you know right away that the two of you can keep that birdie in the air, and all you have to do is watch it fly.”

Given the dialogic nature of our book it seems only right to have this playlist move back and forth between us, to volley between the music of Ursula’s world and the music of mine, as we make a third music together, one that invites you now to join in with us.

ON FICTION

“Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” by Willie Nelson

The question Ursula was asked most often was “where do you get your ideas from” and she often let Willie Nelson answer for her. In Ursula’s words: “One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought of his tunes, and he said, ‘The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.’ Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery. And a true one.”  Similarly, elsewhere she has said, “A story or poem may reveal truths to me as I write it. I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work.”  So, in the honor of Willie’s wisdom here is the song he himself considers one of his favorites.

“Misty Mountains Cold” The Hobbit: The Complete Original Soundtrack (1977)

The two writers that come up most often for Ursula when we talk about the musical rhythm of prose are Virginia Woolf and J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the unique strengths of her engagement with writing craft is her refusal to keep so-called “literary” writers and “genre” writers siloed, to instead present them together like this. Likewise she wouldn’t hesitate to cite an indigenous oral story as an example, alongside Dickens or Tolstoy. In honor of Tolkien’s rhythms I chose a song from my childhood, from the 1977 animated film The Hobbit. This song is an adaptation of a sung poem in the book itself. For the Spotify playist I was limited by what was available (the soundtrack of the recent Peter Jackson directed film) but I’m really thinking of the version of this song from the 1977 animated film, a film that was so formative for me growing up. I hope you’ll listen to the much more charming version as well. You can also hear a recording of Tolkien reading the original poem-song from the book here.

“Scene 2: Recantation” from Philip Glass’ Opera Galileo Galilei

Ursula loved opera and found Philip Glass’ Galileo “completely beautiful.” In speaking about craft she liked to distinguish between writing rules that are genuinely useful and writing rules that were really simply there to uphold the status quo, whether around class or gender or level of education. She also cautioned against getting swept up in the latest trend in style, to take a longer historical view on what is available to you as a writer. Both of these impulses speak to the importance for Ursula of puzzling out how to stay true, which sometimes means violating norms, either of tradition or contemporary (often capitalistic) pressures on what writing is supposed to look like. This scene in the opera is a dramatization of when Galileo is forced to recant his astronomical findings which he nevertheless knows are true.

ON POETRY

“Promise is a Pendulum” by Big Thief

In the introduction to our book Ursula reveals she was nervous for our poetry conversation, even as poetry is the writing practice that is the true throughline of her writing life. In the 1950s, the work she first submitted for publication was poetry, and she continued to meet with her poetry writing peer group and write poems long after she stopped writing novels. It wasn’t until the Poetry Foundation commissioned me to write a piece reflecting on what her poetry tells us about her more well-known work that I learned that it was only with her final collection of poetry—in a long wonderful career as a poet—that any true editorial attention was given to her poems. We talk about how, for her, poetry is more contemplative than imaginative (perhaps one of the reasons we don’t have science fictional poems by her) and I got the sense that to be a poet in this way required always putting yourself back in beginner’s mind. Quieting the mind, becoming acutely aware of the limits of human knowledge and welcoming in influences from the more than human world (as much of her poetry engages with the natural world and our role within it). It makes me think of one of my favorite songs from Big Thief with lines like:

I could never build a rainbow
Or any kind of flower
I could never make a sparrow
Or a meteor shower
I could never build an earthworm
Could never make the earth turn…

I’ve been listening to the laughing
Of the fox down the trail
I’ve been clasping to the listening of the moss to the snail
The shimmer of the beech leaves
As the wind does a big sneeze

“Beautiful Reward” by Bruce Springsteen

One of the things that Ursula notes about poetry is that dictators are afraid of poets. And in one of her most powerful moments, receiving the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she delivers a fiery speech warning against the commodification of books by the likes of Amazon who were both a sponsor of the event and sitting just below her as she spoke. In that speech she uses the phrase “beautiful reward” four times, but because few caught the reference, she later clarified she was referring to the song by Bruce Springsteen, one of her favorite songwriters. So in honor of the poet facing down the powers that be on behalf of art, we have to include this song on the playlist.

ON NONFICTION

“On the Banks of the Wabash” by The Mills Brothers

One of the things that concerned Ursula out in the real world, and which she wrote about in her nonfiction, was the erasure of women. Sometimes she would write about direct theft and erasure, like that of the case of Wallace Stegner and Mary Hallock Foote but other times she would worry about women who in a given contemporary moment are being celebrated and centered and then as time passes, unlike similar male contemporaries, they seem to not only drift out of the conversation but never fully enter the canon. When we spoke about this, she said she worried about Grace Paley in this way.

It made me wonder if Grace Paley ever wrote about songs she loved and I came across her short story Mother which begins with the lines: “One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway.” I believe she is referring to the song “On the Banks of the Wabash” with its lines: “But one thing there is missing in the picture;/ Without her face it seems so incomplete./I long to see my mother in the doorway,/As she stood there years ago her boy to greet.”  I imagine this incomplete picture without Grace Paley, and with Ursula imagining her in the doorway, and now us doing the same with Ursula.  (another resonance is that the Wabash was also the site of a 19^th century utopian socialist settlement called Harmony and later New Harmony).

“Heron Dance” from Music & Poetry of the Kesh by Ursula K. Le Guin and Todd Barton

Even if Ursula was most nervous for our poetry conversation, as a genre she seemed most uneasy with nonfiction, even as she has written not only some of the most unforgettable ground-shifting essays, but also some of the most insightful critical appraisals (i.e. book reviews) of her writing peers’ works. These book reviews often serve as deep instructional insights into craft themselves. I suspect her uneasiness with the genre, something we explore in some detail in the book, partly has to do with her ideas about the imagined and fantastic. In many ways she saw them as fundamental to reality, more real than realism. It reminds me of her oft-quoted declaration: “I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.” Or the line:  “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

Thus, for this penultimate song, I choose a work of Ursula’s herself, a “real” work of an “imagined” people, the Kesh, from her 1985 novel Always Coming Home. The original 1980s edition of this book came with a cassette with this very music on it. The track I chose of this future imagined culture, became the real theme music for the 2022 limited series I did on my podcast, Crafting with Ursula.

“Try” by Dolly Parton

If you were lucky enough to see the exhibition in Portland, Oregon in 2025, called A Larger Reality, on the life, thought and work of Ursula (an exhibition that will hopefully one day travel), you would’ve encountered a large mural of a giant tree whose branches were populated by many of Ursula’s influences and loves, whether Charles Dickens or Joy Harjo or Dolly Parton. After seeing Dolly in that tree, I looked to see if I could uncover any instance of Le Guin mentioning Parton and even better, particular songs of hers she loved, but I couldn’t find anything. But somehow I stumbled upon the perfect Parton song, performed in a perfectly strange circumstance, to serve as a final song for this journey.

The third time we talked about writing, it was no longer at the radio station but in the upstairs reading room of her house. We had established a warm rapport by then, and because of it we were both notably more relaxed. Her cat Pard even came into the room in the middle of it, checked us out, unimpressed, and returned to the bed in the other room. In this warm, loose moment, at the very end of the conversation I ask her to read a piece of hers, that I don’t believe she has ever read out loud before. Ironically, this incredibly funny, over-the-top and snarky piece is called “On Serious Literature” and it made her laugh so much to consider reading it that she snorted. My proudest moment.  In the spirit of that moment of uncontainable unseriousness, while reading about serious literature, I present Dolly Parton’s song “Try.” Again, not because of its version on the Spotify playlist but mainly because of the video of her performance of it during her cameo on the sci-fi comedy drama The Orville. Where she sits on a very human couch to sing it to a very appreciative alien audience of one. You may or may not snort when you see it, but thinking of the meeting of a very real human celebrity with a very imagined reptilian alien, I return to the realness of the imagined for Ursula. To wit, at the very end of our third conversation I say something like, “I can’t imagine who else I could’ve done this with, to look back across a writing life together, not only in one genre, but in all three.” And she said, let’s make it into a book.

And here it is.

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

David Naimon is a writer and host of the radio show and podcast Between The Covers in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Tin House, AGNI, Fourth Genre, Boulevard, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His writing has been reprinted in The Best Small Fictions 2016 and cited in the 2016 Pushcart Prize volume, The Best American Essays 2015, and The Best American Travel Writing 2015. His podcast and writing can be found at: www.davidnaimon.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.

Grace Byron’s novel Herculine is a brilliantly riveting and visceral debut.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A brilliant addition to the growing genre of trans horror…a piercing portrait of trans community and solidarity. The author brings enough humor to the proceedings to prevent the horror from becoming too all-consuming while keeping the pages flying with a thrilling plot and a moving examination of loneliness, desire, and hope in the wake of trauma. Byron proves an exciting new voice in horror fiction.”

In her own words, here is Grace Byron’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Herculine:

Hardwired, Metallica

My protagonist is a huge metal head, a sort of ex-punk. Her ripped Metallica tee shirt is an important motif, so I had to include one of my later favs. 

God, Tori Amos

Long one of my favorite songs about religion. “Do you need a woman to take care of you?” is one of the most withering lines of theology. I think of it often. 

Gibson Girl, Ethel Cain

I can’t but pay tribute to one of our best Gothic singer-songwriters. Her work was inevitably a big mood while writing Herculine. Sexy, sad, stormy. 

Devil Town, Bright Eyes

Always have admired Oberst’s lyrics, even though this is a cover. His twisty tales of Gnosticism imbued with Shakespearean language and political intrigue are breathtaking. No musician has influenced my prose more than Bright Eyes and its extended universe. 

Demons, Kim Petras

Someone joked this would be the credit song if Herculine was ever made into a movie. Maybe not emotionally the same, but sure, why not? 

Song for Sharon, Joni Mitchell 

Huge reflection point for the novel, a few riffs on Joni in the book. She’s a legend. My favorite musician of all time. Her thoughts on love and marriage are gospel. 

Mouths Cradle, Bjork 

I wanted the chapter of the same name to feel this creepy-crawly, once the demons are out of the bag. 

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams 

A girl’s roadtrip anthem. I do think in some ways, like Nevada, this is a road trip book. I was happy to write a brief chapter set in Pittsburgh which is halfway between NYC and Indiana. 

I Dreamt We Spoke Again, Death Cab for Cutie 

I almost had a chapter written as a letter years later at the end of the book—there’s a way that the protagonist is yearning to talk again to her ex-love—but perhaps it’s better left on a more ambiguous note. 

Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash 

I had to set a chapter in hell, of course, and there’s an echo of country music in my mind at least to a few of the chapters in the book. 

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

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York magazine, The Nation, and Vogue, among other outlets. Find her @EmoTrophyWife. Herculine is her debut novel.

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.

Sébastien Dulude’s first novel Asbestos is as moving as it is inventively written.

L’Humanité wrote of the book:

“In the land of asbestos mines, two boys build a paradise bound to be lost. A sensitive, powerful debut novel … that captures the dark side of the Canadian dream.”

In his own words, here is Sébastien Dulude’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Asbestos:

…Asbestos for all!

Creating playlist is among my top favorite activities. It’s basically my love language. What a fun and stimulating thing to build one around my novel Asbestos, where music plays such an enveloping role.

Asbestos, as you may know or hopefully are about to, is a story about friendship, and about going from childhood to teenage under rough conditions: an asbestos mining town, a violent father, and grief. I believe these songs support the novel’s narrative while also taking the listener into a more personal dimension, where music evokes everyone’s individual memories and emotions. I’ve tried to select songs that reflects both the luminous and darker moments of the novel.

So here are 25 songs, because that’s the way my character Steve would’ve wanted it (he has a thing with number 5).

One important rule to remember: never put a playlist on random mode; that goes against the very idea of a playlist. It’s a list for crying out loud! Respect it and enjoy!

1. Les mystérieuses Cités d’or, Jacques Cardona

The Mysterious Cities of Gold was my favorite animated series as a kid. I fondly identified with the main character, Esteban, while my sister used to pretend she was Zia and my little brother wasn’t so pleased about getting to be the goofy Tao. I really liked that the three kids were parentless, and that they got to fly in a giant golden condor.

2. Boys Don’t Cry, The Cure

This one’s a no-brainer here: Asbestos is all about boys needing to cry safely. Plus I think it has a great kicking groove to start the playlist. I wish Robert Smith was my father.

3. Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Tears For Fears

Especially kids.

4. In My Room, The Beach Boys

If you’d asked me when I was 9, Steve’s age, what music I was into, I would’ve answered Mozart and The Beach Boys. Ugh, what a nerd. Well, turns out I discovered at an early age what a perfect melody is – an art that both Amadeus and Brian Wilson mastered. I used to skip the slow-paced In My Room, which is now one of my favorite tracks from the surfer boys. This one is for Steve, quiet in his room, in his fort, in the security of his best friend’s gaze.

5. Les aventures de Tintin, Pierre Pain

Here’s a confession: a lot from Asbestos is autobiographical, but one thing that is pure fiction is Charlélie Poulin’s character, Steve’s BFF. I never had such a close friend besides me. Here’s another confession: my best friend was Tintin. I used to hop off the bus back from school and run home to read another Tintin album. I read them all, in order, one per day. How I wished he was my courageous, tender and bright friend in real life.

6. Où Est Le Soleil?, Paul McCartney

Where is the Sun, where is the Father, where is the light, where is the fire. Everywhere. It seemed like all the bad deeds we did as kids were witnessed by the Sun. I used to have a funny theory about the lyrics of the song (Où est le soleil / Dans la tête / Travaillez; Where is the Sun / In your head / Work): it was about a man feeling the urge to sneeze, looking straight into the sun, finally sneezing, and getting back to work. Yes, what a nerd!

7. Orinoco Flow, Enya

This one is for Claire Robin, Steve’s mother, whom I describe to have dark brown hair: “black Irish, like Enya”, she says herself. Enya is a major guilty pleasure of mine, I can’t help to love Orinoco Flow’s dreamy vibe. No one but Enya can strike the orchestra hit chords this seriously. I used to hear and sing “C’est Noël, c’est Noël, c’est Noël” (“It’s Christmas”) instead of “Sail away, sail away, sail away”.

8. Venus, Bananarama

Venus is the song that plays in the school bus when Cindy Drouin is introduced. I always thought it was a wonderful dancing song (it’s a cover, did you know?) and it fitted just right for the playful and mocking 10-years old Cindy, to draw a contrast with her later teenage gothic years.

9. Hold Me Now, Thompson Twins

Another core 80’s killer hit. I kept hoping for it to play on my dad’s reel tape compilation he made from recording songs on the radio. I wasn’t allowed to mess with the machine, but on Sunday afternoons my father would play it. I wish he held me back then.

10. Bad Boys Running Wild, Scorpions

This is when I started listening to music standing up in my bed, feeling 10-feet tall, air guitaring the riffs, air drumming the beat, air shutting my mouth the lyrics. Fists clenched, shy little Steve was channeling his inner bad boy running wild. You better get out of the way.

11. Damn Good, David Lee Roth

Even for an unhappy, mistreated, unloved child, some days are beautiful. The days of childhood, those shrouded in perfect innocence, are damn good times indeed. We spend our whole lives trying to forget it. This is another song I used to skip in my yellow Walkman, that I now consider one of the finest on the much-underrated Skyscraper album.

12. S.O.S. d’un terrien en détresse, Daniel Balavoine

One of the very first intuitions I had while reflecting on the idea of writing a novel was to create a sexually ambiguous teenager character that would hide his love for the Starmania space opera soundtrack. S.O.S. d’un terrien en détresse is a stellar song from the late Daniel Balavoine, whose high-pitched and tremulous voice was a gift from Above to all bleeding hearts. How Steve wished he was a bird to see the world upside down. (You may wanna check out Dimash Qudaibergen’s version for extra out of worldly chills. It’s the most glam shit you’ll ever hear. You’re warned.)

13. The Great Gig in the Sky, Pink Floyd

“I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying, there’s no reason for it.” And then that voice, Clare Torry’s. For Steve, peace is to be found up there, higher, as far from the ground as possible, far from the giant hole behind the house. This is where the portion of Steve’s childhood on the playlist ends.

14. Good Times Bad Times, Led Zeppelin

This is Steve’s older brother Daniel’s music blasting in his Nissan 300ZX. “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man.” Indeed we were. They made an obsession out of it. And yet they all secretly fantasized about singing or playing guitar shirtless in front of a sweaty male audience. Oh, the irony.

15. Possessed To Skate, Suicidal Tendencies

Suicidal Tendencies were among the bands I hid the cassettes from my parents. But the very name of the band had put words on something that kept nagging at me. Unlike my parents dreaded, I didn’t become obsessed with death because of heavy metal, I was drawn to it because I felt different, unfit, unwanted. I learned to live with my darkness thanks to metal and punk music. I felt like a belonged to a community of misfits, which I still had to discover.

16. 18 and Life, Skid Row

Hair metal was the best. Period. Badass, erotically filled, poignant: everything I wanted to be as a teenager. Skid Row’s singer was named Sebastian Bach. Sebastian fuckin’ Bach. I mean, of course I fell madly in love with him. One day, one night actually, I’ll sing 18 and Life in a karaoke, I’ll hit all the high notes and everyone in the place will cry their lives out. I’ll be Sebastian fuckin’ Bach.

17. Somebody Save Me, Cinderella

Cinderella posters were probably the ones that made my father (I mean Steve’s father, sorry) tilt out.

18. Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Poison

Or maybe was it Poison’s posters? Laugh all you want, “Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song, every rose has its thorn” is plain poetry. Get dressed, Robert Plant.

19. Blaze of Glory, Jon Bon Jovi

A deep cut. I could’ve put Wanted Dead or Alive (“on a steel horse I ride”) but I like the fire analogy of this one. And boy, that snare hit at 1:04. Pow, dead.

20. Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana

Is there even anything to add here? There was a before and an after Smells Like Teen Spirit. When I watched that music video for the first time, it was exactly like I wrote it in the novel. Just swap Cindy for my brother! I was 14, and nothing would ever be the same.

21. Tornado of Souls, Megadeth

Megadeth was arguably thrash metal’s angriest band. For legal reasons, we couldn’t print out the lyrics of the song in the book, so there it goes: “You’ll grow to loathe my name / You’ll hate me just the same / You won’t need your breath / And soon you’ll meet your death”. Pretty cool huh? Also, insane guitar solo.

22. Deep Down Trauma Hounds, Skinny Puppy

Here comes the real Cindy, the toughest character of the novel. What a pleasure it was to create her. All I had to do was to imagine everything I’m not: cool, bold, strong, pessimistic as hell.

23. Blood Red Skies, Judas Priest

If you read all the way down to here, congrats, you’re a die-hard music lover. This isn’t an obvious one, but if I imagine a song playing during the last few pages of the novel, it’s Blood Red Skies. I get goosebumps when Rob Halford sings: “As the end is drawing near / Standing proud, I won’t give into fear / As I die a legend will be born / I will stand, I will fight / You’ll never take me alive”. Another karaoke fantasy.

24. I Want to Know What Love Is, Foreigner

In the end, that’s all Steve ever wanted. I’m crying just to write it down. I love you, Steve.

25. Smells Like Teen Spirit, Maude Audet

A lullaby to soothe the angst. Merci la musique, merci la vie.

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 Montréal in 1976, Sébastien Dulude grew up in the Mitchell neighbourhood of Thetford Mines from the age of six to sixteen. A writer and publisher, he is the author of three poetry collections and an essay about typography and poetry. Asbestos is his first novel.

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.

Clifford Thompson’s novel Let Us Go Then, You and I is a remarkable fiction debut.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“A midlife-crisis novel that searches for the meaning of life with sympathy and compassion.”

In his own words, here is Clifford Thompson’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Let Us Go Then, You and I:

The novel begins in 2002 with Theo Brown, who has lived in his grandfather’s house in Washington, DC, for all of his 37 years, lamenting the recent death of Charles Maddox, his best friend since fourth grade and a successful journalist in New York City. Charles died of a drug overdose, but there are questions about why. The song here is “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” performed by G.C. Cameron for the 1975 film Cooley High; Theo and Charles would likely have seen this film, which was a hit in black communities like theirs. In the film, the song plays during one character’s burial, watched from afar by the character’s grieving and guilt-ridden best friend. “It’s So Hard” captures Theo’s heartbreak.

And yet heartbreak is not all Theo feels. At Charles’s funeral, listening to the reminiscences by friends of Charles’s whom he has never met or even heard of, Theo begins to wonder if he knew his best friend as well as he thought—or if Theo really had much of a place in Charles’s life. A version of Solitude, recorded by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at their historic 1961 summit, evokes much of Theo’s emotion: Armstrong’s gravelly, mournful vocals and heart-piercing, introspective trumpet lines suggest Theo’s mood, full of feeling yet alone.

Soon the novel looks back at when Theo and Charles met as boys. Washington, DC, was the scene of a musical subgenre of funk called Go-Go. A leading light in Go-Go was the DC-based group Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, whose song I Feel Like Bustin Loose was all over the city airwaves during Theo and Charles’s growing-up years in the 1970s—and also captured Charles’s feeling of wanting to spread his wings and do all in life that he is capable of.

While the more retiring Theo stays in DC, Charles moves to New York after college. Peter Gabriel’s Big Time is the perfect soundtrack for this time in Charles’s life, as he confidently—though not always as confidently as he seems—takes on the big city.

Theo, meanwhile, continues to live with the grandfather who raised him beginning when Theo was abandoned by his mother as an infant—a rejection that left a hidden but permanent hole in his confidence. Remaining with Granddad as a young adult, partly out of inertia, partly from lack of confidence, Theo eventually feels unable to leave home—even when he is finally ready to—because of the old man’s growing dependence on him. Cat Stevens’s song Father and Son reflects the mix of love and frustration in the relationship between Theo and his grandfather.

When Theo’s grandfather dies, not long after Charles’s death, Theo is at a crossroads. Suddenly untethered, wondering about the reasons behind his best friend’s death, wanting to help Charles’s grieving sister, Melanie, find some answers, and grieving himself, Theo makes a—for him—radical choice: he moves for a time to New York, to meet those in Charles’s circle and try to figure out what happened. In other words, Theo becomes a detective, just like Johnson Jones, the hero of the crime novels he loves. The Ventures’ recording of Hawaii Five-O—the theme of the detective TV show of the same name, which aired during Theo’s boyhood—captures the excitement and drama of Theo’s adventure.

Theo first met Charles’s sister when he and Charles were young boys. A beautiful girl who ran with the “in” crowd, two years older than Charles, Melanie seemed to Theo to be his romantic ideal—and to be so far beyond his reach that he never considered actually pursuing her. But when Theo and Melanie are grown and reestablish contact after Charles’s death, Theo begins to sense that he has a chance with her. He wants her, and he thinks that she wants him. But, realizing that he has not lived much of a life until now, he feels reluctant to enter a committed relationship before he has lived a bit on his own. Will the potential love between them wait until after Theo’s adventure in New York? Lionel Richie’s Hello expresses both the desire Theo feels for Melanie and the distance between them. (Is it me you’re looking for?)

In New York Theo begins to put the pieces together and meets the beautiful Holly—the woman at the center of Charles’s life and the person who seems to hold the key to understanding his death. The more Theo comes to know Holly, the more he begins to understand what happened to his friend. Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible gives a feel for Holly’s power over Charles and other men—including Theo?

As Theo learns more about Charles’s love life, and looks back on his own, we hear OutKast’s Hey Ya!—a seemingly upbeat song that embodies both the excitement of romantic relationships and the melancholy when they don’t work out.

Indeed, because the novel is part detective story and part doomed romance, George Benson’s This Masquerade—whose bluesy melancholy is the perfect accompaniment to a noir tale—is the right soundtrack for Theo’s investigation. Meanwhile . . .

. . . threaded through Theo’s story is the story of his mother, Robin. Her abandonment of Theo is part of the pattern of her life. Robin lives by her own lights. She will not be held still when she wants to move, and she always wants to move, never quite sure of what she’s looking for, knowing only when she hasn’t found it. Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon nails Robin’s free spirit and perpetual dissatisfaction.

At the end of the story, Theo has discovered some truths, which do not come without a cost. He has arrived at a sense of a new beginning, one that helps him accept, but does not let him forget, old wounds. The saxman Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s achingly beautiful 1957 instrumental version of Spring Is Here, by Richard Rodgers and Lorez Hart, is the ideal coda for this story of friendship, love, and the joy and pain of both.

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

Clifford Thompson’s previous books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’ s Blues and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. His work has appeared in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. Thompson lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Nick Francis’s graphic novel The Tumor in the Clay is a stunning debut.

Shinichi Sakamoto wrote of the book:

“The Tumor in the Clay is an astonishingly immersive experience. My heartbeat quickened, my palms grew damp, and I could not stop turning the pages. I forgot every distraction of the real world and found myself completely drawn into the story.”

In his own words, here is Nick Francis’s Book Notes music playlist for his graphic novel The Tumor in the Clay:

A selection of songs from the writing and drawing process behind this comic. 

Contributions by Nick Francis and Yoh Philips.

The Tumor in The Clay was drawn over several years of Covid Isolation, spent sketching panel after panel of surgical utensils, flowers blowing in the wind, buzzing cicada wings, with the pages of the book illuminating the late nights with a cool blue light, all while line after line was soundtracked to endless endless music. This playlist, made in collaboration with Yoh Phillips, captures many of the pockets I found myself in for long periods of time, and hopefully speaks to the mental and emotional state I was in while writing The Tumor in The Clay. I hope you enjoy it.

Mémoire De Forme – Pierre Rousseau

After several months of lockdown, my friend Yoh and I itched for something new to experience – something to share and discuss, from locked in our own doorways three thousand miles away. We gave ourselves challenges to listen to music in very specific parameters for set periods of time. Only Non English Music for 90 Days, Only Music Recorded before 1960 for 60 Days, No Relistening to Music for 30 Days, that sort of thing. The Non English Music challenge was the most fun, we both had grown up with a bit of music influence from across the world, but fairly limited in scope and often without focus. I found myself listening to a lot of French music in particular, electronic and pop records. Synths. Pierre Rousseau felt like a great opener to set the tone of this playlist, capturing the strange etherealness I hope my pen achieved with The Tumor in The Clay.

Walk Thru Water Ft St. Panther – Overmono

Overmono is a quintessential Yoh pick, and very indicative of the sonic landscape that covered the ground when the very first inklings of The Tumor in The Clay began.  And what a dog. 

Break – Fugazi

Everything Built. Everything Gone. So much of The Tumor in The Clay is built on the grief of loss – and what the fuck do you do when you have lost the tools to repair, when you have lost the ability to imagine(!) how to repair, a new life. There are endless Fugazi records to throw on my playlists to speak to my emotional state when writing or drawing, Break cuts to the point pretty damn fast. Their combination of drums and fast chords clicks something beautiful in the back of my skull, the place hollowed out by years of chronic pain that is now just for good migraine music. 

Touch – Daft Punk and Paul Williams

“I need something more, in my mind…” …”I remember touch”… There is a scene of Paul Williams sitting at a counter in a vintage diner, eating I believe soup, or clam chowder, with oyster crackers. Eating very slowly, occasionally glancing around the diner, waiting for someone. I had that scene looped in my QuickTime media player with this song replacing the original audio. I would just leave it on and draw on very dark nights, the rest of the screen illuminating my studio in a deep blue color. I love this song. 

Out of Time – The Weeknd

This song is so shameless. It shouldn’t work at all. And yet it is one of the most infectious, perfect, pop records of the last decade. The whole dawn.fm album is very special to me. What a glorious music video. There were a few months where this album and the FKA Twigz, Caprisongs, felt like twins to me and were all I would listen to. Lots and lots of time drawing in the dark, with the sensation that the morning was just around the corner. 

Prepare Yourself – Yoshimasa Terui

Terui’s score here is just brilliant, light and charming with a light touch to the changing of currents – mental, physical. Something is coming, just lingering around the corner, just out of sight. Paneling The Tumor in The Clay was a practice in tension, building, cutting, tiny cut-cut-cut, relief, large gashing slices of skin and muscle, flowers. I adore how Terui handled the tension in the Hidden Inventory arc. It felt like a bomb dropped on the comic & animation world watching his, Gege & Mappa’s work come to life. What an astounding moment in time those few months were. I felt more inspired to be making comics than I had in a very long time. 

Urantia – Deftones

There have been days I’ve looped Urantia, this whole album on repeat. Go for a run. Draw. Weight Lift. Lay out a blanket and crawl into a cold bathtub for the day. All the same.  – On a complete tangent, as much as I like the Ohms album cover, in particular on vinyl, I wish this song had been on Gore – just so I can hear this song and look at those beautiful flamingos, that would be perfect. Gore has my favorite cover of all their work. 

Piggy – Nine Inch Nails

Every page of The Tumor in The Clay’s surgical sections is pure The Downward Spiral. Song after song, panel after panel. Just perfect. 

Gimme Danger – Iggy & The Stooges

Migraine Lyrics – though the beauty of these songs, these old blues songs remade in every genre and form imaginable, is how mutable they are. My migraine, my Crohn’s, your alcoholism, your loneliness, your cancer, your old emotional wound, your whatever it is that makes you the last man or woman with a guitar, a bottle and a gun on the road. Music of the self myth maker, the navel gazer, the oh woe is me, and hopefully – hopefully, the same one who is all those things and still gets up at the end of the day and makes something of it. Or else the song doesn’t exist, then we’re all fucked.

Shhh / Peaceful – Miles Davis

I don’t entirely know how “Shhh / Peaceful” became the singular song to describe The Tumor in The Clay We have memes about the song and the book together for god’s sake! When working on the book the jazz records I listened to the most were Coltrane tunes, My Favorite Things in particular, so I assumed that would become the singular record for The Tumor in The Clay, but no! Shhh / Peaceful reached out with its long slender fingers of green and blue and black and held tight. An incredibly dark and whimsical song. When I was animating the cicadas flying through the tall blue grass, the flower petals blowing in the wind through old columns, it just fit perfectly. 

I didn’t spend much time during the writing/drawing process listening to jazz on my runs, but this last weekend I took a nice long run along the Bronx River Pathway playing Shhh / Peaceful and other Miles tunes and it was a gorgeous time. 

The Tinker – Maruja

I think Yoh introduced me to Maruja during one of our Pandemic Music challenges. I have an affinity for songs, scores that rest in a natural space. As if you could walk off your mountaintop bivouac across the notes playing in the sky, walk through the trees, the flora, the snow, the creeks and swamps and rivers. Maruj, FM Forest, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bear McCreary, Imee Ooi. Whimsical and glorious. These scores all touch the same place I reached for in the later arc of The Tumor in The Clay. An unknown mysterious, dangerous, beautiful place. Somewhere we may desire to make home, but shouldn’t linger in too long, a place to be visited, learned from, and left. Two people, one person, reaching across the poles from place to place.

Michi wo Sagase – Hako Yamazaki

  Oh Hako Yamazaki. I reconnected with her glorious, haunting voice with the release of the 1975 classic Tobimasu in 2022. I must have spent weeks with just Tobimasu on repeat, and slowly began working my way back until stumbling upon Aruite, and Michi Wo Sagase. To Find a New Path. Ugh. A perfect folk song. To sit and draw, to write, to pull every chord, string, vein from your body onto the page, leave it out for a day’s work, paused to start again tomorrow. Sit down with a song, a drink…. To know for just a second before the doubt returns, that your efforts, your labors have been pure. 

Don’t Be So Nice – Chuck Senrick

A touchstone for our Surgeon, our protagonist in The Tumor in The Clay. He is so lost, so desperate, so without cause or reason. But he remembers how beautiful life can be, he remembers the touch of a loved one, of achieving something miraculous with the people around you, your friends, your colleagues, your team. He remembers achieving something greater than your former self. And he mourns it, so earnestly. Now at his wits end, our story of The Tumor in The Clay, he sees one last chance to set a path back – and if he fails, so be it, the current life isn’t worth a damn. He has to try…

Not Okay – Sophie

In the back of The Tumor in The Clay there is an interview with my editor where I discuss how much The Tumor in The Clay was driven by grief, the loss of friends, family, and by others in the creative fields around me. SOPHIE was one of those people. I think every artist in my demographic group with even the slightest interest in music was keenly connected to what SOPHIE was creating in the 2010’s. She created an entire underwater current that shifted so much of what we heard, danced to, and imagined that we are still feeling the repercussions of her work – and her loss today.

 I don’t intend to spend a lifetime documenting every gravestone we put down, an illustrated essay for each funeral that only gets fifteen minutes because too many people are dying and the world moves too quickly, but we might need to make it an honorable profession. 

Hot Pressed – Mahawam

I had the privilege of illustrating the cover of Mahawam’s album: Hot Pressed, and animating the music video for this song. When you animate a music video, you inevitably have to spend months and months listening to the song, thousands of times.  I have had my share where I get sick of the song. I fell in love with Hot Pressed more with each listen, and still do now. My favorite kind of lyrics. 

(You Can Watch The Video Here: https://youtu.be/bHsdoDqxpUU?si=5GVUu7Hp6o1eGjbs)

Portrait of My Heart – Spellling

I’m crazy about Spellling. Simple as that, my friend Michael Sneed made the introduction and I have been a huge fan since. I like this new record a lot and am very excited to see what direction they continue to push. I was listening to their album, The Turning Wheel, during the drawing process. Very ethereal, strange, catchy tunes. 

Unfinished Sympathy – Massive Attack

God what a voice Shara Nelson has. I would put this record and all its mixes on while I drew blade after blade of grass in The Tumor in The Clay. When inking drawings you often find yourself needing to breathe a certain way, in or out, to achieve the correct one from. The weight, curve, feeling can all come out wrong so easily, a song like Unfinished Sympathy is incredibly helpful for moments where you don’t just have one line or one part of a drawing that is difficult to get right – but pages and pages. Unfinished Sympathy becomes meditative, perfect for placing each grain of colored sand in its proper place in the mandala. 

Timid, Intimidating – BADBADNOTGOOD

I like a lot of the BADBADNOTGOOD records, they often exist on that border of easy listening, but not just background music. “Study, Working” music might sound dismissive, it might be dismissive. If it is – I am sorry, but I also have to imagine it must feel pretty nice to know that your music helps thousands and thousands of young scholars, artisans, on their path. I like to imagine a lawyer going through their briefs playing these records late at night, in some higher office. Pretty sexy in its own way.

Movement 3 – Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders

Pharoah Sanders has been a regular repeat on my jazz playlists for fifteen plus years at this point. Not enough time. I just love the simple strangeness of what he made in his final years with Floating Points and the London Symphony. Just remarkable. Lovely music. 

Hold on, Hold on – Neko Case

Hold on, Hold on feels like a full circle of The Tumor in The Clay to me, embracing her (his) vices, faults, with an aged wisdom that keeps the faith to continue to try. The humor in the dark that has been lived, knowing one will continue to make mistakes – but hopefully better ones. The song is tonally dark, the chords upbeat, a contemporary blues record. I think most good art is still revisiting the same blues chords over and over, because they are so pure, so honest, so true. We each can add our own flavor of Valium.

Riot! – Earl Sweatshirt

Some Rap Songs is a faultline running below the current Himalayas of contemporary rappers. To me, it all comes back to what Thebe was able to create with this incredible moment in time. It is so heartfelt. Yoh and Myself were privileged to work on marketing copy for the release of the album, and while I can still remember working on it up in the studio house at Sea Ranch it stays beyond my comprehension just how impactful this brilliant little album has been. What a great song, what great production. What an incredible world. 

Fuck This World – Rina Sawayama

Writing is a horribly depressing process, drawing is a horribly depressing process. If you don’t draw, write, fast enough then before you know it the pages you’re working on are at such a higher quality than the first that you are obligated to go back and begin again. If you cannot let go, the book will never end. This song, and Rina, always made those days where you have to let go a bit easier. Panels and panels of drawings that you desperately want to change, parts of your life you would give anything to rewrite, but have to move on. 

(I must have over a few hundred miles on my feet running to this song on loop just during the production of The Tumor in The Clay)

Delia – Blind Willie McTell

For all the talk of Classic Blues Records, how all our best work is still just retelling them over and over it felt important to include one of my personal favorite piedmont blues classics – Delia. The world keeps spinning on the same chords, same progressions, same yearnings, same love, same pain. How beautiful it is that we continue to find new ways to express it. 

My Favorite Things – John Coltrane

I have listened to this song more than any other song, throughout my entire life. It plays in the opening pages of The Tumor in The Clay, and in the last. I hope the same is true for myself. 

Dreams – Faye Wong

Recorded the year I was born. The principle message of The Tumor in The Clay is to continue to TRY, regardless of the circumstances, an effort must be made, belief must be had, a dream must be acted upon. In the final pages of the book, we see the Surgeon act on this in his own way, changed, and I can’t help but imagine such a purely earnest song playing out his actions. I need to return to Hong Kong with an extra suitcase just for all her CD’s. 

Thank you for listening, thank you for reading!

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

Nick Francis was born in San Francisco in 1994 and now lives in Oakland, California, with his partner & their three cats: Kiki, Noodle & Blue. Working as a disabled illustrator and storyteller for: Fantastic Negrito’s Grammy Award Winning Album “The Last Days of Oakland”, and PBS & ITVS’ animated documentary “BROTHER”, and for The NYU College of Nursing & The Monterey Jazz Festival.

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.

Chital Mehta’s debut novel Have You Seen Romit? is a searing portrait of family and identity.

R. O. Kwon wrote of the book:

“A gripping, intensely moving portrayal of a woman whose ferocious love for her children ends up clashing with how others expect her to behave. I loved spending time with the rule-breaking Usha and with the complicated world Chital Mehta has conjured. Vivid, fresh, and resonant.”

In her own words, here is Chital Mehta’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Have You Seen Romit?:

My novel, Have You Seen Romit? takes place in Southern India, where a middle-aged mother, Usha, goes looking for her missing son in the forests. Usha has never broken the rules, but for once, she must step outside the realms of what she thought was comfortable and safe. It is a story of defiance and relentlessness, delving deep into the true nature of connection and kinship under the most daunting of circumstances.

I put together this playlist, songs that helped me take a deep dive into the head of my protagonist, Usha, and allowed me to step inside her world. Most tracks, especially the ones from Kishore Kumar, are part of my childhood, songs that my father played in our house, urging us to connect with the songs of his era. Back then, I was averse to this music. As I drafted Have You Seen Romit? I pictured Usha in her house with the faded walls; I picked these songs to put me directly into her settings, a slow domestic life that is disturbed by an upending problem. 

This soundtrack is like my brain – soft, loud, quiet, and cheerful. Pour yourself a cup of chai as you take a listen.

Kisi baat par main kisise khafa hoon from the movie Bemisal – Kishore Kumar

A timeless musical by singer Kishore Kumar. This song is filled with lyrics that speak about pain and love. I listened to it as it helped me flesh out the relationship between Usha and her husband, the quietness in their marriage, and the unsaid things. They enjoy listening to Hindi classics while they navigate life.  

Kala Chasma from the movie Baar Baar Dekho – Badshah and Prem Hardeep

An upbeat, energetic number. It’s hard not to shake a leg when this one comes on. The wedding party in Have You Seen Romit? features this song. I found it tacky with its catchy lyrics. It’s beautiful how this song can bring any dance party to life.  

Dekha Ek Khwab from the movie Silsila – Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar

This song doesn’t appear in the book. But I do mention the name of the movie, in which the characters Om and Usha enjoy watching it. This comes from having seen my father talk about this classic song while I was growing up. It’s an evergreen song. I played this song as I wrote the first chapter of Have You Seen Romit?

Mehendi Hai Rachnewali from the movie Zubeidaa – Alka Yagnik

Rich, colorful, vibrant. The henna ceremony of any Indian wedding is not just an event, but also about the unspoken future that comes after the wedding. In Have You Seen Romit?, Pari misses her brother but can’t help longing for a future that belongs to her. This song from Alka Yagnik is soft and soulful.

Musafir Hoon Yaaron from the movie Parichay – Kishore Kumar

Although I don’t travel so much, I walk a lot. This song talks about travelling, about how no one place is home, and about adapting to the changing landscapes of life. When I uprooted my character, Usha, from her home and put her in a place that was foreign to her, this song came to my rescue.

Phoolon Ka Taron Ka from the movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna – Kishore Kumar

Raksha Bandhan. The sibling ceremony. In my novel, I highlight the relationship between the siblings. It’s rocky, yet they come together every year to celebrate their bond. There are rakhis, the gift exchange, the tikka, the rice, and the sweets. The brothers are always there for their sister regardless of the rift between them.

Ekla Cholo re from the movie Kahaani – Amitabh Bachchan

A patriotic song originally written by Rabindranath Tagore was adapted in the mystery movie, Kahaani. In this song, Vidya Balan embarks on a journey to find the answers to the death of her husband. She is mostly alone. The lyrics are Bengali, but the emotions are raw. I pictured Usha walking alone to find her missing son in the thick forests with this song in the background. 

Kal Ho Na Ho from the movie Kal Ho Na Ho- by Sonu Nigam

This song defined my teenage years. Yet, the lyrics still help me navigate through life as an adult. As I wrote the draft, I was often tired, wanting to give up. Kal Ho Na Ho, which means you don’t know if there will be a tomorrow. This is the moment. Hearing this soothing number always brings peace to my chaotic head.

Happier by Marshmello and Bastille

As I wrote the pages when Usha decided to start looking for her son, Happier played in the back of my head. It’s hard to let go, but sometimes, so important. It evoked the mood as I slipped into Usha’s skin and made the decision to leave her home behind.

English Vinglish from the movie English Vinglish – Shilpa Rao

Sridevi outshines in this number. Her flaws, her fears, her imperfections – everything becomes crystal clear. I bring out similar characteristics in Usha as she embarks on unlearning and learning new things when she picks a deviation from her daily life.

See You Again – Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth

Pain can be a good fuel for writing. This song helped me pause on days when I struggled with the writing. Or, even on days when life seemed to move faster and I couldn’t keep up. The lyrics talk about meeting a friend on the other side of death, but it’s also a good reminder to slow down and connect with the ones who mean the most.

Muskaanein Jhooti Hai from the movie Talaash– Suman Sridhar

Uncertainity. Betrayal. Secrets. From the thriller, Talaash, this song accompanied me during times of not-knowing which was most days. Singer Suman’s voice played in the back of my head on nights when the words refused to come. This haunting, jazz infused track is a must listen to crush those evil voices inside your head.

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

Chital Mehta was born and raised in India. Her short stories have appeared in the Pinch, Oyez Review, SLAB magazine, and elsewhere. Her story “Damaged Gifts” won the SLAB fiction contest in 2022. She lives in Delaware with her husband and children. Visit her website at chitalmehtajey.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.

Erika Meitner’s poetry collection Assembled Audience lyrically distills our current troubled world to reveal its wonders and joy.

Camille T. Dungy wrote of the book:

“Assembled Audience is a tour d’force to treasure. With sharp attention and bright wit, Erika Meitner’s poems gather the good, the bad, and the ugly of our present day and refine what’s assembled into pure and splendid glory. I love this book.”

In her own words, here is Erika Meitner’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Assembled Audience:

1. Come Together – Daphne Willis

Assembled Audience is a book I wrote over four years from 2019 to 2024, about the ways people gather together: in celebration and in mourning, in public and private, in airports and on beaches, for leisure or to protest.

This Daphne Willis cover of the Beatles song “Come Together” from her 2016 five-song Beatles cover album has her great raspy alto vocals over catchy updated percussion, but Willis is a really interesting genre-hopping singer-songwriter—she’s done pop, hip-hop, R&B, soul, rock, folk, and even EDM. As a poet, I aspire to what I think of as the ‘delta factor’—being a little stylistically unpredictable from poem to poem—and Assembled Audience has all different kinds of work: documentary, narrative, enigmatic, lyric, prose, colloquial, braided, formal.

Fun fact: the original “Come Together” was written by John Lennon in 1969 as a campaign song for Timothy Leary’s run for California governor. It’s original title was Leary’s campaign slogan: “Come together, join the party.” Leary was the father of the psychedelic movement and introduced LSD to many as a way to promote social interaction and raise consciousness, which is basically what I always want poetry to do. Lennon eventually added nonsense lyrics to bulk out the campaign song, and Paul McCartney added swampy bass, and it became the opening track for Abbey Road.

2. Tumbalalaika – The Barry Sisters

My book opens with a poem that’s all existential questions, then moves to the beach. I wrote a lot of Assembled Audience at a few different residencies at the Hermitage in Manasota Key, which is this magical place you can’t apply to; they just send you a tiny vial of sand and seashells in the mail one day and invite you down. Manasota Key is a nesting beach for endangered sea turtles, and I grew up going down to Florida to see my grandmothers, who both lived in Hallandale. The Barry Sisters’ “Tumbalalaika” has the upbeat slightly comedic rhythm of shlepping to the beach with all your stuff: the towels, the umbrella, the chairs, the cooler. The Barry Sisters—Minnie Bagelman and Clara Bagelman (who were originally known as the Bagelman Sisters before they anglicized their performing name) sing it entirely in Yiddish—and it reminds me of my Yiddish-speaking Holocaust-surviving grandmother, who appears later on in the book in “A Strikingly Unsettled Portent” and “To Survive I Need You to Survive.”

3. Despacito – Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee

Since 2017’s Hurricane Irma, I’ve been going down to Miami with photographer Anna Maria Barry-Jester to work on a long-running documentary poetry / photo project on sea-level rise and the built environment. We listen to a lot of Zeta 92 in the car driving around the city, and the first year we were there “Despacito” was on the radio like every other hour—it’s a Spanish-language reggaeton pop song—and we could change the station and it would just be on the next station too. It was like we had an actual theme song that came on every time we started our car. Many of the poems in the book take place in Miami, and are part of that ongoing project.

4. Self Control – Laura Branigan

As part of the Miami project, and while I was often down in Florida at the Hermitage, I took it upon myself to watch (or in many cases, rewatch, since I was a big fan as a kid) every single episode of all five seasons of Miami Vice—114 episodes. Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” features in what is potentially one of the worst episodes ever of the show: “The Great McCarthy,” in season 1, where Crockett and Tubbs use information from Izzy, their informant, to catch a drug smuggler who’s also a powerboat racer. In the actual episode the song is covered by a local Miami band called (no joke) “The Gloryhole Drillers” and they’re wearing these amazing sequined outfits. There is a poem in the book made entirely of lines from Miami Vice episodes called “Watching Miami Vice Reruns at the Vagabond Motel.”

5. Mercy Street – Peter Gabriel

The album Mercy Street came out in 1986 when I was eleven years old, and it has some of my favorite songs of all time on it—“Don’t Give Up” (his duet with Kate Bush) and “In Your Eyes” are two songs I spent a lot of time singing to myself as I wore out the cassette tape in my Walkman. Things take a more serious turn in Assembled Audience when I start writing about immigration and displacement, via Our Lady of Charity shrine and Cuban refugees in Miami, and my own grandparents—who fled the Nazis and eventually landed in Queens. The song “Mercy Street” also appears in the third episode of the third season of Miami Vice: “Killshot,” which also features a Jai Alai subplot. The song was actually inspired by Anne Sexton’s poem “45 Mercy Street,” and has some of her poetry in the lyrics, which is wild to me. It’s also super-haunted and melancholy and evokes the loss of a home country to me. Fun fact: Peter Gabriel and Sinéad O’Connor had an on-and-off affair in the early 1990s. You can hear her on his 1992 album Us on “Come Talk to Me” and “Blood of Eden.”

6. Holocene – Bon Iver

Bon Iver is fronted by Justin Vernon, who’s from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I live in Madison now, so I felt like I needed some Wisconsin representation in here. This song spoke to me deeply when I was writing some of the more simultaneously hopeful and depressing poems in Assembled Audience about climate change and pandemic existential despair, like “Gnostic Spring, or That New York Times Article on Languishing,” and “the world that has been entrusted to us.” Its rising and falling chord changes give the song a sense of motion, but it’s also deeply melancholy, with a little bit of upbeat hope at the end with “But I could see for miles, miles, miles.” I think a lot about poet-as-seer, or poet-as-oracle, and in this book the speaker is definitely a Cassandra of sorts. But that feeling is often tempered with this feeling from “Holocene”—“and at once, I knew I was not magnificent.” Fun fact: the B-side of the single is a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Come Talk to Me.” Everything is connected!

7. Wagon Wheel – Old Crow Medicine Show

Old Crow Medicine Show is an Americana string band out of Virginia, and since I’ve spent most of my adult life living in Charlottesville (6 years) and Blacksburg (15 years), I’ve been listening to the band since the early aughts. Ketch Secor, the band’s co-founder, used to play with The Hackensaw Boys, a popular Charlottesville band that started in 1999—the year I moved to Charlottesville, and they used to play around town all the time. Many of the poems in Assembled Audience chronicle the landscape and culture of rural Southwest Virginia—the area of Southern Appalachia where I lived from 2007 through 2022 as faculty at Virginia Tech. There are poems about the gun culture in the area (“Liquid Nitrogen” and “It’s Gunna Be All Right”), the political conservatism (“Light-Sensitive Puzzle Piece” and “What I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire”), the protests against the Mountain Valley Pipeline (“Another Possible Future / Hedge Yer Bets”), and the mountain landscape generally. The poem has a moment in the lyrics where it mentions Roanoke, which was the closest big city to Blacksburg, and whenever I hear it it’s some kind of weird stand-in for my entire time in the region. Also my husband’s old bar band in Blacksburg, The Mud Daubers, used to cover the song, and we’ve heard it everywhere—even in the public market in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where we lived for six months in 2015. It’s like the ultimate Americana song, and the poems in this book are distinctly American, with all this country’s flaws.

8. It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Billy Joel

This song came out in 1980, and reminds me so much the childhood summers I spent in the late ’70s and early ’80s in the Catskills at a Bungalow Colony—a series of rustic summer cabins arranged around a communal court where people from working-class (often Jewish) neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx and Staten Island (the outer boroughs) would spend their summers with their kids. Husbands would come up on weekends unless they were public school teachers. There’s a poem in Assembled Audience called “To Survive I Need You to Survive” that takes place at the bungalow colony and it’s an elegy to a childhood friend’s mother. There was a ‘casino’ at the one I spent summers at, which was just a big gathering space with a stage and a jukebox, and a soda fountain counter. When my dad came up on Friday nights or Saturdays we’d go to the casino for ice cream cones, and he’d put “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” on the jukebox. The kids roamed these places in packs, and when it was mealtime, whatever mom was around would usually feed us hot dogs or Kraft mac and cheese on picnic tables and paper plates. Also the first concert I saw once we all had Covid vaccines was Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden during his residency, and it was so joyful to gather again like that, even if we were masked. The whole crowd was on their feet the entire time singing every song, including this one.

9. It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Sinéad O’Connor

Sinead O’Connor died while I was writing this book, and the day it happened, I was at an artists’ residency—Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. We were all so distraught that we decided to gather that afternoon at the pool, and one of the composers brought a portable speaker down, and started playing all of her songs, including “Just Like U Said It Would B” while we drank beers and sang along in her honor. Later that night I went back to my studio and wrote “The Shape of Progress,” which is an elegy to Sinéad, but also a poem about invasive species, climate change, and the particular rural landscape of Amherst, Virginia, where the residency was located. There are a lot of songs that appear in poems in this book: “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye, which my kids were obsessed with for a while; “Okay I’ll Admit That I Really Don’t Understand” by The Flaming Lips, which appears in an elegy to David Berman set in Charlottesville (“I tell my students to listen for memory triggers”); “King of Oklahoma” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, which was on the radio all the time when my family and I were road tripping across the country through National Parks; “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard—but it kind of felt too obvious to put these in the playlist for the book.

10. Di Shvue – Isabel Frey

Assembled Audience ends with “Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform,” which is a poem that’s about the act of resistance—and nature’s survival and the way it’s inextricably tied to human actions. The poem cites an old Yiddish resistance song called “Mir veln zey iberlebn,” but the only version of that song performed that I was able to find while I was writing the book was by the Klezmer band Tsibele on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk_1pw70Qjc). For this playlist I swapped out that song for a rendition of “Di Shvue” by Isabel Frey, which literally means “The Oath” in Yiddish, was the anthem of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund in the early 1900s, and Bundists still sing it when they meet. One of the difficult things about publishing this book is that since I wrote many of these poems, our cultural moment has changed, and the current administration is using the memory of the Holocaust and what they define as antisemitism as a pretext to dissemble and defund higher education, curtail constitutionally protected free speech and the right to assemble, and disappear lawful US residents affiliated with universities who advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, as a professor at a major research university, and as an artist, I firmly believe that the only safety we have is through solidarity with others, and not via persecution, repression, and threat.

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

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.

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.

Scott Gould’s novel Beneath a Fallen Sky is a mesmerizing account of four northeast Alabamians facing predicted peril when Halley’s Comet appeared in 1910.

Ethan Rutherford wrote of the book:

“Scott Gould is a fantastic, natural born storyteller, and in Beneath A Fallen Sky he brings the Sand Mountain region and its inhabitants to full, singing life as they anxiously await the arrival of Halley’s Comet in the spring of 1910. The history here is deeply felt and fully inhabited, a true pleasure on the page—as are the cosmic questions this novel raises and turns over, which lift from the book to lodge in your chest.”

In his own words, here is Scott Gould’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Beneath a Fallen Sky:

Here’s Beneath a Fallen Sky in a nutshell: It’s May, 1910. Halley’s comet is hurtling toward Earth. A strange sort of panic grips the mountains of northeast Alabama as some scientists and astronomers predict the end of all life. The novel follows four characters in the valley town of Fort Payne and up on Sand Mountain as they navigate what could be their final days. The book is definitely setting-dependent, so it made sense to create a playlist that draws on the rich musical traditions of Alabama and the Appalachian mountains. In addition, I borrowed a great deal of family lore and traditions to write the story, so some of the songs have a direct connection to my family tree that’s rooted in northeast Alabama.

The Louvin Brothers – “In the Pines” and “My Baby’s Gone”

Ira and Charlie Louvin were from Henegar, Alabama, on Sand Mountain, a place where they developed their high-lonesome, close harmonies, a sound that influenced a number of acts to come (like The Everly Brothers and Gram Parsons). When I was writing the novel, “In the Pines” popped into my head and has become the de facto official anthem for Beneath a Fallen Sky. The Louvin Brothers have one of the great album covers of all time. The art on Satan is Real features a giant plywood devil and piles of burning, smoldering tires. Google it. (Also, I’m distantly related to the Louvins, but I can’t sing a lick.)

United Sacred Harp Musical Association – “Canaan’s Land”

If you’ve never heard Sacred Harp (or shaped note) singing, the sound of it will more than likely pin your ears back. Each summer, when my family gathers for its family reunion on Sand Mountain, the entire day is spent singing Sacred Harp hymns. This vocal tradition stretches back to the late 1700s and is alive today in small churches, like the ones scattered across Sand Mountain. When you listen to the acapella harmonies of Sacred Harp, you can hear where the Louvin Brothers found their inspiration.

Alabama – “Mountain Music”

Much of the story in Beneath a Fallen Sky takes place in the town of Fort Payne, Alabama, which happens to be the home of the band, Alabama, one of the best-selling country music groups of all time. I mean, they had 21 straight #1 singles on the country chart and sold more than 73 million albums. (For ten bucks, you can visit the Alabama Fan Club and Museum on Glenn Boulevard in Fort Payne.) In 2005, Alabama was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The Delmore Brothers – “Sweet Sweet Thing”

Alton and Rabon Delmore, from Elkmont, Alabama, were Grand Ole Opry stars in the 1930s, and along with musicians like the Louvin Brothers, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and Arthur Smith, are considered early pioneers of country music.

Hank Williams – “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”

About an hour and a half south of Fort Payne, just north of Birmingham, sits Mount Olive, the birthplace of Hank Williams. Williams’ legend is so large and looming, it’s hard to fathom that he died at the age of 29. In the midst of writing Beneath a Fallen Sky, I stumbled back into Hank Williams’ 40 Greatest Hits album. A line from this song struck me as pretty apt for the novel: “I’ve never seen a night so long/When time goes crawling by…”

Mister Ragman – “Halley’s Comet Rag”

In 1910, as Halley’s Comet bore down on the planet, rag time music was still a popular genre throughout the country. The excitement and anxiety about the comet’s arrival inspired Tin Pan Alley songwriters, and Harry J. Lincoln’s piano instrumental was one of the most popular tunes. (In the novel, one of my characters orders the sheet music for “Comet Rag” and plays the tune at a crucial moment in her narrative.)

Emmylou Harris – “When Halley Came to Jackson”

You’ll have to work at connecting the dots here. In 1910, Halley’s Comet flashed by Earth. Mark Twain was born in 1835, when Halley’s Comet appeared; he died in 1910, when it appeared again. In 2011, a double-CD called Mark Twain: Words and Music, was produced as a benefit for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. On this CD, Emmylou Harris performs a Mary Chapin Carpenter song entitled, “When Halley Came to Jackson” (in 1910.) Emmylou is from Birmingham, Alabama. Beneath a Fallen Sky takes place in Alabama. In 1910. When the comet is coming. There, see? It all sort of clicks together.

Shannon McNally – “Pale Moon”

This song, from McNally’s killer 2005 album Geronimo, has absolutely nothing to do with comets or Alabama or Mark Twain. But for some reason, I listened to it over and over while I was writing the novel, especially the sections that take place atop Sand Mountain. And I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s something in the rhythms or the delivery or the instrumentation. All I can say is that “Pale Moon” found its way into the story and took hold.

The Red Clay Strays – “Demons in Your Choir”

If you write about the South and the Appalachians, you’re going to find yourself writing about religion at some point. It’s as unavoidable as breathing. And in 1910, with a comet on the way, religion becomes a balm and an escape route. In Beneath a Fallen Sky, religion materializes as an unofficial female minister who concocts fake Bible verses and baptizes folks for a quarter a head to save them from the impending apocalypse. And as a snake-handling preacher testifying in a sweaty tent revival on Sand Mountain. While not a traditional gospel tune, this song by The Red Clay Strays (from Mobile) feels like it sprang from the religious fervor I imagined filling the air in the spring of 1910 in northeast Alabama.  

Lamont Landers – “The World Is Burning”

It’s 1910, and a comet is supposed to collide with the planet. Lamont Landers, from Decatur, Alabama, sings “the world is gonna burn up in flames tonight.” Then again…it might not.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Scott Gould’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Peace Like a River

Scott Gould’s playlist for his story collection Idiot Men

Scott Gould’s playlist for his story collection Strangers to Temptation

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

Scott Gould is the author of six books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His latest book is the novel, Peace Like a River (August, 2025). Gould’s other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Pangyrus, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, and New Stories from the South, among others. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina.

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.

Tomas Moniz is the rare writer whose books are charming in the best of ways. The King of Aloe Vera, his third novel, brings together a septuagenarian widower and 21-year-old queer woman in a love letter to San Francisco both present and past.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“One of the best parts of this truly sweet and never cloying novel is the tension between Rey’s willingness to venture out of his comfort zone (as when he discovers a velour Gucci tracksuit suits him well) and his determination to enjoy his quiet pleasures (bananas drizzled with honey, a barbacoa burrito). Beneath the sweetness lies deep sadness, and a choice Rey considers that will remind readers that grief takes many forms and can last a long, long time. The characters are so authentically rendered . . . readers will root for them.”

In his own words, here is Tomas Moniz’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The King of Aloe Vera:

I experienced a momentary wave of panic when I thought about writing this essay for Largehearted Boy. The reason for my concern: I barely mentioned any music in my new novel: The King of Aloe Vera, though now that I think about it Christmas carols do feature prominently in a key scene, which immediately gave me pause considering the possible marketing strategies around the holidays…could this help sell books?

And, of course, this train of thought left me aghast, chiding myself: Marketing? Sales? What have I become, to quote Saint Reznor.
You see, I love reading the essays other writers craft for the site: the playlists that provide inspiration, the way I feel so seen reading stories of how music provides focus and energy and release. Then it hit me: I may not mention songs or cite catchy pop lyrics in the story, but the book references so many places specific to musical life in the Bay Area: venues, events, bars. Everywhere in the Bay music thrives.
So here is my article’s premise: you all should consider visiting these places when you travel to the Bay.

So let’s start with them Christmas carols and the Davis Symphony Hall (201 Van Ness Ave, SF). For a period of maybe 5 years I was Carpool Karaoke Dad driving my tween daughter and 3 of her fellow SF Girls Chorus members to rehearsal, speeding over the Bay Bridge from Berkeley to avoid the late afternoon commuter traffic. Once there, I’d wait in a room adjacent to the practice hall, and there would be this moment when all the chatter would stop and their voices, my god, would rise and join into this harmonious, beautiful wave of sound. So if you visit the City in December, check out their Annual Winter Concert, but all year long, the SF Symphony hosts wide-ranging events. Plus they just hired a super young hip female conductor that people are celebrating: Elim Chan.

The next venue is easy: go to El Rio (3158 Mission St, SF) because it’s so much more than a bar. It’s a union organizing hot spot, particularly for teachers and it gets crazy every last day of school! El Rio hosts many community centered events: I’ve shucked oysters for charity, read poems and celebrated Pride, wound up there post various protests. I’ve witnessed dozens of bands, the highlight: The Coup with Boots Riley and Pam the Funktress (RIP). It’s a genuine SF musical and cultural landmark, a truly radical space.

Which, of course, leads me and hopefully you to the East Bay and its legendary 924 Gilman (yes, located at 924 Gilman, Berkeley). This is a bucket list trip, like paying homage to the former CBGB building in NYC (another RIP) or The Troupador in LA. Gilman (as the kids call it) truly puts its politics into practice. Well, it’s not perfect and there are a number of books and documentaries to learn about its history of volunteering and political organizing and fighting dumb ass Nazis and sometimes fighting their own community, but trust me go see a show: buy your yearly membership card (it’s 5 bucks and fits in your wallet and no you can’t by it online, only at the door), sit on the sticky couches, read a zine from the library, purchase earplugs, brave the bathrooms. And you have to take a selfie in front of the famous sign at the entrance:

● NO RACISM
● NO SEXISM
● NO HOMOPHOBIA
● NO TRANSPHOBIA
● NO ALCOHOL
● NO DRUGS
● NO FIGHTING
● NO STAGEDIVING
● NO MAJOR LABEL BANDS.

You probably won’t see the next Green Day, but hey, you just might. Also, you never know: you might see me!

also at Largehearted Boy:

Tomas Moniz’s playlist for his novel All Friends Are Necessary

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

Tomas Moniz is a Latinx writer living in East Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and a Lambda Literary Award. His second novel, All Friends Are Necessary, won the 2024 California Golden Poppy Award. He teaches at Berkeley City College, the Antioch MFA program and St. Mary’s College. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.

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