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.

May-Lee Chai’s essay collection My Hungry Ghosts is an ever-smart exploration of generational trauma and racism.

Megan Giddings wrote of the book:

“My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning collection that weaves together memoir, history, prayer, and intuition. May-lee Chai has a poet’s control of line and image and the essayist’s ability to take complex people and situations and make it possible for readers to comfortably sit in nuance. A lovely, thoughtful book!”

In her own words, here is May-Lee Chai’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection My Hungry Ghosts:

My musical tastes were quite eclectic as I was writing the essays in My Hungry Ghosts. I listened to some Chinese composers who were directly riffing on themes of ghosts and folk traditions in their music, but I also found inspiration in works by musicians and singers from around the world.

I first experienced the traditional Chinese Buddhist and Daoist “Ghost Month” (鬼月) and “Ghost Festival”（鬼節）when I was a teenager traveling with my father to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1980s. I was fascinated by the way everyone would set up altars on sidewalks and burn “ghost money” and offer incense and plates of food to feed not just one’s ancestors but also the wandering ghosts who might not have descendants or who might have been forgotten. The idea is that this act of good karma will help the ghosts, paying off their karmic debts so that they can be freed of their suffering and be reborn or transformed.

Remembering Ghost Festivals past, I worked on organizing my essay collection. I chose twelve essays that I had written, for each month of the year, representing a different kind of “hungry ghost.” These essays span the globe and the decades, exploring the things that have haunted me: from my father’s migrations and experience of war during his childhood in China to inherited trauma from my mother’s childhood abuse in the U.S. to current events like climate change, rising authoritarianism, racism, and misogyny. I also created a “word altar” for these ghosts, as a way to feed them on the page and thus stop them from haunting me.

In putting together my playlist, I wanted to give a sample of some of my favorite ghostly music. We all have our hauntings, and I appreciated the way this theme was explored by so many different kinds of music whether through vocalization—by a whisper or a stretched note or a wail—or evoked sonically through drum beats, percussive instruments, and even full orchestras.

My Hungry Ghosts Playlist:

1) “Bitter Love: Against Time of Desire” (Track 1), Ying Huang, Steven Osgood, Tan Dun…

Long before his Oscar-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, composer Tan Dun wrote the score for an avant-garde production of the 16^th century Chinese play, Peony Pavillion by Tang Xianzu, about a young scholar who falls in love with a ghost. Tan Dun mixes jazz, rock-and-roll, kunqu opera, Chinese folk music, and Western monks chanting in this ethereal love song between man and ghost.

2) “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” Sinéad O’Connor

This song gives me chills every time I hear it.

3) “Wuthering Heights” Kate Bush

Nothing is quite as haunting (or romantic) as Kate Bush’s high soprano as she portrays the ghost of Cathy calling out to her would-be lover, Heathcliff.

4) “O Death” Ralph Stanley (O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack)

A deeply moving track from the other Odyssey movie.

5) “The Here and After” Jun Miyake, Lisa Papineau

Hypnotic. I can listen to this track in a loop, over and over and over.

6) “Drown” Karen O and Danger Mouse

Not technically about a ghost but it could be, as Karen O’s expressive voice sings of a longing akin to drowning.

7) “Ghost” Beyoncé

“All these people on the planet working nine to five just to stay alive,” Beyoncé sings in a critique of a life lived just to survive but without joy. The song builds to an echoing chorus: “what goes up, ghost around…” The punning lyrics pack a punch.

8) “Hades,” The Odyssey soundtrack, Ludwig Göransson

I didn’t hear this piece until this summer, but it immediately resonated with me. WOW! It’s layered, gorgeous, eerie, haunting, everything you’d want for a scene in which the portal opens and the dead come to convene and tell their tales to the living.

9) “Heart Sutra” Faye Wong

Faye Wong at the peak of her talent singing the heart sutra is perfection. May she chant us all the way to nirvana.

also at Largehearted Boy:

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Tomorrow in Shanghai

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her novel Dragon Chica

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

May-lee Chai is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation including the 2022 short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for The Story Prize; and Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, which won a 2019 American Book Award; and her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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.

Alma Katsu’s novel Incarnate is a chilling modern take on the Faustian bargain for fame.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“A deal with the devil is reworked for the online age, with a healthy dose of body horror joining AI. The combination makes the story uniquely terrifying.”

In her own words, here is Alma Katsu’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Incarnate:

If you read the playlist for my last novel, Fiend, you already know that I rarely listen to music when I’m writing. I’d vowed to change that and… erm, I haven’t. But I will. I promise.

My new novel, Incarnate, is story about a Faustian bargain made by a young woman who wants to be a breakout success on social media. It’s about hiding our bad parts, only showing the good, pretending to be something we’re not—“Dorian Gray for the internet age” is the tag line. I was an early social media researcher and technology futurist and it was this experience that made me want to write Incarnate. I’ve watched the evolution of social platforms and other technologies for nearly twenty years and have come to see it as a net harm to mankind. We didn’t foresee how it would take a dark turn and become a tool for mass propaganda. How many of the emerging technologies of the past ten, fifteen years are tools for deception.

Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles

I’m going very old school for the first cut because, even though it was ostensibly about the then-coming video age of music, this song is just as true for the internet age we find ourselves in. This song, written in 1979, was the first video played on MTV when it launched in 1981. I was a very young music journalist at the time and hung around a big recording studio, listening to musicians fret over the growing interest in music videos, concerned that everything would change. That music would matter less than how the band looked and whether the uglier band members would find themselves out of work.

Nearly fifty years later, all of this is true for the social media age. The image, or pretty wrapper, has taken precedence over the message.

Besides, it’s also a super catchy tune.

The Internet by Jon Bellion

“Life became dangerous the day we all became famous” is the opening to Bellion’s song, and were truer words ever spoken? Did we know what the thirst for fame would bring us, though? A world where we value perception over reality, where perception has become, in most cases, as good as reality. “I don’t need to learn, just need you to think I get it” could be the motto of the millions of students who use ChatGPT as the substitute for their brain and don’t mind disabling their ability to learn.

Filter by BTS

A really pretty song about an ugly truth: technology has made it possible to get bored with the person we profess to love the most. But technology, luckily, also has the answer. It can allow us to overlay endless filters on our beloved to make them new to us every day. In Incarnate, the main character Dorothy feels inadequate—she’s not pretty enough, too fat, not special—thanks for social media, and that frustration and unhappiness propels her to reimagine herself, first virtually and then in the physical world, defying natural law, physics, the fabric of reality itself. Her physical transformation is so extreme, you might be tempted to think she’s looksmaxxing.

Such is the power of self-hatred.

Creep by Radiohead

This song has come to occupy prime real estate in my head since a friend sang it at a karaoke night (daring!) a couple years ago. A perfect portrait of self-loathing, an emotion that more and more of us are seized with as we compare ourselves to what we see on social media. That kind of longing, closely felt over a stretch of time, can warp you. Dorothy has many good attributes—she’s smart, she’s independent—but she lets herself be consumed by envy and self-pity because she can’t turn away from the black screen. She knows there’s something wrong with her, but she keeps it hidden because she knows the high social cost if she doesn’t.

I imagine every one of us has felt like the misfit on the outside looking in at some point in our lives.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears

Another oldie, but this song perfectly conveys the feeling you get when everything’s going your way. I remember when it came out in 1985, dancing to the video in clubs, never feeling so free. It’s the feeling Dorothy has, briefly, when it seems like her dreams are coming true. She’s created Isabella, the perfect virtual persona, and it seems like everyone in the world is falling in love with her. The sky’s the limit, and Dorothy, who has never gotten anything she’s ever really wanted in her entire life, is drunk on the sensation—and quickly becomes addicted to it.

 Dear Society by Madison Beer

You can’t watch this video without feeling badly for every young adult who grew up on social media, now occupying a liminal space between their parents’ experience and the next generation’s… Plus, there’s the chilling opening, where a smug technocrat congratulations the unwilling victim for being part of the training of this new technology destined to usher in a new age for mankind—in his opinion, anyway—that’s exactly how we feel as AI is being shoved down our throats.

True Story by Ariana Grande

In Incarnate, there’s a character named Catrina Villeneuve. She’s a singer having her break out moment when she walks into the visual effects studio where Dorothy works, and Dorothy ends up stealing her motion capture files to use as the basis for her creation Isabella. I visualized Grande when I wrote Villeneuve because she was exactly what I saw for this character: beyond human in her appearance and talent, driven, focused—but with a secret sadness, an apartness from everyone else. And when the worst happens after Dorothy’s stolen this part of her, the internet can’t stop gossiping about what’s happening to her. The public can’t stop looking at her tragedy.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Alma Katsu’s playlist for her novel Fiend

Alma Katsu’s playlist for her novel The Fervor

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

Alma Katsu is the author of Fiend, The Hunger, The Deep, The Fervor, and five other novels. Her work has won or been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Locus, Western Heritage, and International Thriller Writers awards, among others. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a thirty-five-year-long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND. Katsu is a graduate of the master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. She lives in West Virginia with her husband.

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.

Norah Labiner’s novel Morocco is a compelling modern reimagining of Washington Square by Henry James.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“This is subtle but spectacular.”

In her own words, here is Norah Labiner’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Morocco:

The story started, if you can believe it, at a dinner party some long-ago evening, when by gaslight, just before the coffee—an actress told him of a rather plain, but fabulously wealthy young heiress and the fortune hunter who was pursuing the girl, to the great displeasure of her father, Dr.—. You remember him, don’t you, Henry?

What Henry James remembered or did not is lost to history. It remains only that he was taken with the story, and so he took it. He wrote Washington Square, the story of a rich girl who falls for a cad, is betrayed by her father, and yet somehow comes to determine her own fate.

James did not like his little book—or so he later claimed—, but I loved it. I loved it perhaps for the very reason that he hated it. He was a ghost in his own house. He tried to hide himself in the pages, but I found evidence of him everywhere. His dressing gown thrown over a chair, a forgotten teacup, an unfinished crossword puzzle, an ink pen. I heard him at the piano.

I think I saw him cutting roses in the garden.

I was taken with the story, and so I took it.

How a book comes to a writer is somewhere between love and theft.

Morocco is a book about books. It is an ode to stories. And not just good stories, but the bad ones too. Here is the art of the potboiler and the plot twist. Here is a world of overlooked girls and underestimated women, of romance novels and vampires and chocolate bars and soap operas, of postcards unsent, of time machines and typewriters. Here are horror movies and films, noir. Here are songs on the radio. And songs that you never hear on the radio. Here are broken clocks and pearls and a lost umbrella. Here is a golden bowl. Here is a raven and a writing desk. Here are jokes and their relation to the unconscious.

How a book comes to a reader is a kind of gift.

Morocco is a good book to read on a cold night or by a very blue swimming pool.

Here then is a musical interlude for my little book. Here are songs for haunted houses and ruined gardens and endless afternoons. Here are songs for your listening pleasure.

Summertime, Amália Rodrigues (1965)

This song is for every ghost in the graveyard.

Summertime – song and lyrics by Amália Rodrigues | Spotify

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Thelonious Monk (1954)

Here is a story that is a song. Strike that, reverse it.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes – song and lyrics by Thelonious Monk | Spotify

Near the Black Forest, Vanessa Daou (1994)

If you dream or have nightmares or like lemons.

Near the Black Forest – song and lyrics by Vanessa Daou | Spotify

The Box It Came In, Wanda Jackson (1967)

Here is a song that is a story with a happy ending.

The Box It Came In – song and lyrics by Wanda Jackson | Spotify

The Dark End of the Street, James Carr (1966)

Listen to this one again.

The Dark End of the Street – song and lyrics by James Carr | Spotify

Nadia’s Theme (The Young and the Restless), The Ventures (1970)

Here is a story that never ends.

Nadia’s Theme (The Young And The Restless) – song and lyrics by The Ventures | Spotify

Dreams, Faye Wong (1994)

If you like cake or carry a small dog in your handbag.

夢中人 – 電影《重慶森林》歌曲 – song and lyrics by Faye Wong | Spotify

Rivers of Babylon, Bony M. (1978)

This is a good song to sing in a strange land.

Rivers of Babylon – song and lyrics by Boney M. | Spotify

Beauty in the World, Macy Gray (2010)

Here is a song if you have ever opened a door and found yourself miraculously in a library.

Beauty In The World – song and lyrics by Macy Gray | Spotify

also at Largehearted Boy:

Norah Labiner’s playlist for her novel Let the Dark Flower Blossom

Norah Labiner’s playlist for her novel German for Travelers

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

Norah Labiner is the author of the novels Our Sometime Sister, Miniatures, German for Travelers, and Let the Dark Flower Blossom. She has received a Minnesota Book Award for Literary Fiction and currently lives in Minnesota.

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.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said the Dead is wholly atmospheric and inventively told, one of the most impressive postmodern ghost novels I have read.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Ní Ghríofa brings an elegiac sensibility to a haunting portrait of a hidden world . . . Weaving biography, history, fiction, and memoir, Ní Ghríofa vividly imagines the muffled voices of desperate women, honoring their suffering, and her own. A radiant work of empathy and insight.”

In her own words, here is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Said the Dead:

Jonny Greenwood, ‘Never Cursed’, ‘Phantom Thread II’, ‘House of Woodcock’

‘Said the Dead’ was made in silence. There were my silent hours of research in the archive, reading my way through a series of century-old asylum casebooks. Then, there were the silent hours I spent roaming the remains of the asylum. And there were the silent hours of writing that followed, when I parked my car in the ruined shadow of that institution, and tried to pour all I’d learned into the pages of a book. I only invited music into this process if if I was disturbed by a hedge-trimmers or a yapping dog. In such moments, I’d dig out my noise-cancelling headphones and listen to the Phantom Thread soundtrack on loop. Like a river diverted into a culvert, something of that soundtrack might still be felt, burbling under the text of ‘Said the Dead’.

John McCormack, ‘Adeste Fideles’

So much of the process of writing this book occurred in silence, and yet, I always longed to evoke a sense of the soundscape of the asylum. Whereas the old stairwells would once have bustled with voices, I found those steps grown quiet – the sound of my footsteps echoed. Through the asylum casebooks, various doctors were writing to me from that loud past. Among them was Dr Scanlan, whose belief in the curative powers of music had been praised in local newspapers. There he was, rolling a piano to patients’ bedsides, hoping that music might help them towards healing. Other newspaper reports detailed the lengths he went to, one long-ago Christmas day, calling in favours from local musicians, so that he might treat the patients to a full orchestra. Among the hymns the orchestra played in the chapel that day, according to the newspaper, was ‘Adeste Fideles’. I came across a 1915 recording by John McCormack, and those lyrics seemed to beckon me closer. ‘Venite, venite’… come, they insisted, come. And I did. Although that derelict chapel was boarded as I stood outside in the rain on Christmas day, I held my phone to the security barrier and let the sound waves of that old hymn find their way in, slipping through that border to enter the chapel, a song turning back to enter its own past.

Lankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’

The asylum casebooks held vivid descriptions of each woman as she arrived through the asylum doors: her name, age, address and next of kin were all recorded, followed by details of her hair, her eyes, her expression, her skin, her clothing, and sometimes, her speech. Often, these women spoke clearly and powerfully of their inner agonies, listing heartbreaks and losses and griefs, explaining what it was that had driven them to the noose, to the river, to the knife, or the window. The doctors wrote it all down, and a century later, I wrote it all down again. I was writing ‘Said the Dead’ when Lankum released ‘Go Dig My Grave’, and their version of this old song really shook me – how the dread rises and rises, while at its beating heart, Radie Peat’s voice soars with power and ferocity. Something in this song recalled the anguish so often articulated by patients in the asylum casebooks, particularly those who had been thwarted in their decision to end their lives. This song haunts me, still – a song of death, with a glint of defiant life pulsing inside it.

Emahoy Tsege Mariam, ‘Song of Abayi’

In the asylum casebooks, I read of a patient named Anna Martha, and I was struck by all she had held throughout her life. She’d held her brothers’ hands as they died, and then her father’s, too. Through seasons of shock and grief, she held her violin bow and held her paintbrush tight, determined to hold onto her devotion to art and music despite her sorrows, until a sudden change in financial circumstances meant that she could hold no longer. Her path to the asylum was decided the day she held a gun against the city magistrates. She would die in that institution, only a few years later, of tuberculosis – the same disease that had killed both of her brothers. I brought flowers to lay on her grave, but despite my map, I couldn’t find her place in the graveyard. Finally, I understood that she lay right where I stood, in an unmarked grave. Anna Martha’s name may not be written in stone, but it is written in this book. I will always hold the memory of her life dear. I know it’s an impossibility, but whenever I imagine Anna Martha’s youth, I see her sitting to her piano lessons, playing Emahoy Tsege Mariam’s ‘Song of Abayi’.

‘Kyrie’, Linda Buckley

The therapeutic role of music in the asylum extended far beyond Dr Scanlan’s gifts – there were regular concerts in the asylum ballroom, and guest visits from musicians on tour to city theatres. The ballroom has been closed to the public for decades, and the first time I visited, I found rain falling inside, through a hole in the roof. This past summer, however, we reopened those doors and brought music back to the ballroom. Composer and musician Linda Buckley designed an incredible musical performance, including motifs from the operetta ‘Patience’ once performed in the ballroom, alongside some readings from ‘Said the Dead’. It was unforgettable, and deeply moving, to remember those women in the room in which they had all once stood. I wish you could have been there. To give you a sense of it, here is the beautiful ‘Kyrie’ by Linda Buckley.

‘Rhiannon’, Fleetwood Mac

Doctor Lucia Strangman began to write in the casebooks towards the end of the 1890s, and she soon became my brightest guide. To piece together the history of the hospital in which she lived and worked was also to piece together a sense of this remarkable woman’s life. I found her a visionary, a gifted doctor, who was devoted to her patients and to improving their lives. Sometimes, as I wrote, I could feel her presence very close. At others, she sidestepped my efforts, slipping from my grip, like that line in Rhiannon— ‘she is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness’.

‘White Winter Hymnal’, Fleet Foxes

This book drew me on a quest, helplessly chasing traces of long-ago lives through stairwells and corridors and paths and tunnels, through ledgers and newspapers and casebooks, trying to follow the shadows of those who had been present a century before. It has been among the blessings of my life to spend these years of mine in service to their lives, to become the listener to this chorus of voices, and to follow, always to follow, and through these years, the lyrics of ‘White Winter Hymnal’ were a comfort to me, since I, too, ‘was following the I was following the I was following the I…’

‘Scars’, William Stafford

For quite some time, I wanted to call this book ‘Cicatrix’, a word I learned from Dr Lucia. This word refers to an old scar, and was often used in her casebook notes. It moved me, to read these detailed maps to the women’s bodies, to know that one woman had a long cicatrix along her leg, that another bore the mark of an amputated breast. This recording of William Stafford reading his poem ‘Scars’ is incredibly dear to me. The poem itself is a masterpiece. In an oblique way, it felt like every line chimed somehow with the book I was trying to bring into being. As he writes, ‘we see the lesson: / there are years in that book, there are sorrows / a choir can’t reach when they sing.’

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

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her first prose work, A Ghost in the Throat, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the winner of the Irish Book Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year, the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the James Tait Black Prize; and a nominee for the Rathbones Folio Prize. It was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Irish Times, and The Globe and Mail. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Centre fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

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.

Nicholas Russell richly evokes the haunting Nevada desert in his debut novel Observer.

Lincoln Michel wrote of the book:

“In Observer, Nicholas Russell makes the sun-scorched, desiccated West as haunting as any gloomy Gothic manor on the misty moors. The prose is equal parts page-turning and lyrical, and the plot a satisfying combination of science-fiction mysteries, family drama, and unfathomable horrors. A thrilling and chilling debut.”

In his own words, here is Nicholas Russell’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Observer:

I wrote Observer over the course of several years but turned to music most in the last six months, after the book was sold and I was on a firm deadline to hand in the first draft. Almost always, singing voices distract me when I’m reading and writing though they inspire me when I’m not. My novel takes place in a region of the Nevada wilderness that is both real and composite, informed by my own experiences growing up there but also the received myth of the desert so many people have been exposed to. The frontier is an imaginary place and always has been, a fact that allowed what I listened to while writing Observer to be as wide-ranging as the people in the American West.

“Nites Out” and “Desert”, Other Lives

Other Lives make music that belongs in Westerns. Perhaps an oversimplification, but there is a perennially cinematic, open-sky quality to their sound, which one imagines is heavily influenced by their origins in Oklahoma and the unconventional arrangement of instruments at their disposal. These two songs in particular make me think of dark clouds and rain in the desert, a visceral sense memory of the elements that makes the world feel both enchanted and dangerous.

“She Reminds Me of You,” Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

I’m quite hesitant to turn to film scores when writing, especially because their function in any given film is prescribed to a specific scene and thus tempts the listener, or writer in this case, to mirror the beats and emotional arc of that scene. So much writing now is informed by movies and television, not just dialogue, but the montage-like rush through scenes and contexts. I’ve always appreciated how Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross can’t help but make music that stands on its own, no matter what project it’s a part of. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is perhaps the duo’s most haunting score, but it’s also percussive and exhilarating. It exaggerates the feeling of an investigation under way, which was a crucial element for Observer where a young woman searches for her missing mother through artifacts left behind and unreliable testimony given to her by strangers with their own agendas.

“13 Ghosts II”, NIN

The Ghosts series from Nine Inch Nails foreshadowed Reznor and Ross’s eventual foray into film composition and, during the pandemic, emphasized those cinematic sonic qualities that were always present in the NIN catalog. “13 Ghosts II” is a melancholic song that, in my head, is hummed rather than played on piano. It has that slippery thing that great instrumental/orchestral music has, where it lives in a deep-seated part of your mind such that it plays whenever you’re going through a specific emotional experience. There’s a lot of memory in Observer and this song feels like a memory.

“Hoist That Rag”, Tom Waits

Tom Waits belongs anywhere outcasts, weirdos, and vagrants live and there are plenty of those in McNairy, the fictional town at the center of Observer. In the novel, there’s a bar called the Spyglass that serves as a watering hole for a contingent of astrophysicists up at a mountain top observatory and when I imagined them drinking and fooling around, this song was the only one that came to mind. Funny, rhythmic, but so full of feeling, as so much of Waits’s music is. An earlier draft stated outright that Waits was playing through the speakers but in the end, I took it out. It mattered to me when writing those scenes what the music was, but there is such a thing as unproductive specificity and that was one of them. 

“Shadowplay (Royal Albert Hall 2009)”, The Killers

A bit of hometown bias showing through here, but the Killers were channeling something unique and authentically southwestern on their albums Sam’s Town and Day & Age. This live rendition of their cover of the Joy Division song would seem to be a departure from what casual listeners of the Killers might (mistakenly) deem the band’s terminal optimism. But lead singer Brandon Flowers is a desert kid, which means he can’t help but sympathize with and be fascinated by the seedy and uncomfortable pockets of urban life that are never as far away as some people wish. This song felt like a bridge between mother and daughter in Observer, the original and the cover communicating something in both directions.

“The Proposition #1” and “The Rider #2”, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

Not all deserts are the same, but I’ve often found the neo-Westerns made in Australia get at something true about the southwestern landscape that their American counterparts don’t. It’s not only about setting but mood. There’s a forgotten, unstable quality to Cave and Ellis’s score for The Proposition. It reminds me so vividly of driving out into the desert on a brutally hot day, alone, aimless, slightly weary, and still managing to find a relieving breeze. Cave and Reznor are also great whisperers and aren’t afraid to use their voices as instruments rather than lyrical vehicles. The sinister back half of “The Rider #2” does more to evoke the violence and peril of the expansionist colonial project than most bloody dramatizations of it (and The Proposition is plenty bloody).

“Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”, Radiohead

I’m not really interested in the type of characterization that tells readers what music or movies certain characters listen to. Often that feels like a vestige of press tours for movies where actors tell you how a director gave them a dossier of their character’s upbringing and favorite food. I did feel strongly though that the missing mother in Observer, Corinne, was someone who listened to Radiohead’s Amnesiac often, not only because it’s a frequently scary and unpleasant album but because Corinne is the kind of person for whom the scary and unpleasant aren’t necessarily negative. Amnesiac is, among many other things, an evocation of a nightmare, but one that becomes more and more legible as you spend time with it. That felt right for Corinne.

“A Gain”, Devendra Banhart

I see a stone well in a darkened chamber with an intermittent but constant drip of water when I listen to this song. For whatever reason, that was useful to me writing this novel. Sometimes it’s about a sound and a feeling and not necessarily the narrative.

“Summer Sickness”, Big Girl

This song became the anthem of Observer so it’s frustrating to me that I can’t remember how I found it. My girlfriend and I kept saying that this would play over a trailer of the movie, which, now that I think about it, would be wrong because the song deserves its build up. The opening lyrics “call it summer sickness/focusing on forgiveness” are thematically apt but more than anything, it’s the energy and pitch this song arrives at by the end, particularly with its final guitar solo and lead singer Kaitlin Pelkey’s ghostly wail, that feels like it captures the restless, searching spirit of the novel. Finding this song was also how I knew Observer was finally finished, how I knew that what it was had solidified and that, for better or worse, I couldn’t take the novel any further.

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

Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Baffler, No Tokens, Defector, and Hunger Mountain. Observer 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.

Isabelle Correa’s poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It is dark, funny, and moving.

David Gate wrote of the book:

“This is a collection that refuses to behave or be boxed or be anything other than full and open hearted. Isabelle Correa writes desire as collision; body, memory, and longing crashing against the fragile idea of safety. These poems are sharp, darkly funny, and devastatingly honest about how we relentlessly return to intimacy, even when it hurts.”

In her own words, here is Isabelle Correa’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It:

I’m very feeling-centered in my work; you could call me a largehearted girl. My poems are often an exploration, a translation even, of internal worlds. Music is one of the best ways to enter an internal world, to bask in it, sit in it like a mud bath—whether that’s in the stage of writing, editing, or reading.

So, the foundation of this playlist is the songs I listened to while writing Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It. And when the collection was finished, I added and ordered the songs so that the playlist is in sync with the emotional tides of Portrait.

Those tides are turbulent but intentional. In reference to Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” “My Multitudes” are a recurring character in Portrait. This “character” appears in multiple poems, as if all the different versions of the speaker are a bumbling hive-mind vying for attention and a chance to take control. That kind of back-and-forth is reflected in the playlist.

Another aspect that influenced the creation of this playlist is the fact that art is not made in isolation. Artists are always in conversation with other artists. And I love it—maybe it’s because I was an English major; maybe it’s because I’m a Gemini rising; or maybe it’s just because this is a really cool thing. In writing and organizing the manuscript for Portrait, I wanted the influence from contemporary pop culture to come through. There is a poem from the perspective of Fleabag from the TV series of the same name. There is a poem with lines all from an episode of Judge Judy. References to Beetlejuice, Barbie, Janis Joplin, Maury. And then, of course, a lot of the pieces are in conversation with other poets. There are after poems of Margaret Atwood, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby, and Sylvia Plath. So with this playlist, I wanted to make sure that there were some contemporary artists who could be included in this conversation. Some of them are super well-known, like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams, and some are artists that I came across through Instagram or Spotify shuffle that I’ve fallen in love with, like Girlhouse, Ella Vos, Laurel, Ruby Gill, and Sarah Jaffe.

Both the collection and the playlist are pretty long. So here are a few of the songs reflecting a variety of multitudes and why they made the list.

Stream the playlist on Tidal

“Insensitive” — Jann Arden

This is one of the first songs I ever memorized. I was four and it was on the radio all the time. It’s symbolic of how I learned to love, which is the theme and purpose of the first section in Portrait titled “Becoming.” The song belongs near the beginning of the playlist because it belongs at the beginning of the story, when the speaker is learning (from the radio, from movies, from her family) what love is supposed to look like.

“La Vie en Rose” — from French Kiss

When I lived in Saigon, I used to drive around at night when the streets were empty on my scooter and listen to this song. And before that, I used to listen to the French Kiss movie soundtrack in the white Honda I drove in high school, which is a line from the poem “Dear New Year” in Portrait. 

“Send me La Vie En Rose from the movie French Kiss 

on a cd in my old white Honda.”

This song is the epitome of romantic love and pleasure, which is one of the currents running through Portrait. It is, after all, a collection of love poems.

“Pool” — Samia

Because this song is haunting and confessional. Yes, Portrait is a collection of love poems, but they are love poems that like to take a trip down to hell from time to time.

“Wet T-Shirt” — Ruby Waters

Because just because this collection is sad doesn’t mean it’s not also sexy.

“That Funny Feeling” — Bo Burnham

When the comedy special Inside by Bo Burnham came out, I was still in Vietnam. It was 2021 and there was a strict lockdown being enforced. So I would sit alone in my studio apartment with my dogs and watch Inside over and over again. It was one of those mind-blowing experiences of being not only seen by a piece of art, but being almost complicit in it, because I was experiencing it myself in that moment on the deepest level. So this song made the playlist in part because of my obsession with the comedy special that it’s from, and also because this song in particular reflects someone who is worried about the state of the world as well as their place in it. And that’s reflective of the speaker of Portrait because she is lost in her own psyche, but she also is porous; the world keeps getting in.

Phoebe Bridgers — “Georgia” and “As Above”

Phoebe Bridgers is on here twice, for “Georgia” as the second song and “As Above” as the last song. She’s the bookends of this playlist, and there are layers of reasons for this.

First, “Georgia”: According to Pitchfork, “the earliest composition, ‘Georgia,’ dates back to Bridgers’ teenage years, when she crafted her own lyrics out of a misremembered Feist track.” This is why this gorgeous song full of yearning is near the beginning—it’s a young song. It’s a song that was trying to remember another song and instead became itself.

“As Above,” from her recent new album, Lost Weekend: this song is a poem, with some “line breaks” that made me audibly gasp.

“I thought about my mom /
Drivin’ herself to the hospital”

Nobody writes sadness like Phoebe Bridgers does. This song aches; it traces its patterns (as above, so below). It feels like the same breath as “‘What Went Wrong’ is Question and Answer” from Portrait, a poem about looking back as a way of looking forward and inward.

And lastly, Phoebe Bridgers is in conversation with Bo Burnham. What better way to end a weird, wild, nuanced romantic playlist than with love between artists?

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

Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington State now living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is the winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of the book Good Girl and Other Yearnings, and the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. Her work has appeared in Pank, Third Point Press, The Rebis, and more. You can connect with Isabelle at isabellecorrea.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.

Genevieve Plunkett’s The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch is one of my favorite debuts of the year, a brilliant working class novel with an unforgettable protagonist.

Electric Literature wrote of the book:

“Plunkett writes women whose brains are brilliant whirring machines. . . . This is an astonishing novel from a wild talent.”

In her own words, here is Genevieve Plunkett’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch:

The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch was born directly from the time I spent working at a café in my hometown during the early 2000s. My boss, Robin, was the first to coin the phrase, “Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch,” as a way to pay homage to particularly impressive produce specimens. It was a joke that we would have ridden to the end of time, and one that I am apparently still clinging to. Robin was a beloved bad influence, well ahead of her time. She never catered to the norm, refusing to honor fad diets, chasing paying customers out for talking on their cellphones. She performed same-sex civil unions in the middle of the breakfast rush with her batter-smeared apron still on. In me, she saw great potential for mischief-making, and was always trying to convince me to buy a motorcycle or have an affair. She loved books and art and music. If there was a song or an album that she was into, she’d play it incessantly, even if it drove everyone else crazy. She was an icon. She did not give a shit. And so, my friends, this playlist is a direct reflection of what I was forced to listen to during some of the most impressionable years of my life.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road may have been the most played song in café history, and I was probably the only employee who did not eventually want to stick my head in the coffee grinder because of it. It’s upbeat and devastating and perfectly captures that dreamy, melancholic state of a tossed-around childhood. Lucinda’s voice is so matter-of-fact it feels like found art. This line still gets me every time:

“Child in the backseat, ‘bout four or five years/ Lookin’ out the window/ Little bit of dirt mixed with tears/ Car wheels on a gravel road.”

The song itself, played again and again, was its own cult of insatiability, with Robin at its center. I understood her need to dig her nails into life itself, by any means available, even if it was just flying out from the kitchen to press repeat.  

There was, however, a boy who worked with us during the “Car Wheels” era who thought the lyrics were “cartwheels on a gravel road.” He was living in a completely different universe.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot

I think this song has been trolling me my whole life. It’s not just annoying, it also goes on and one with no clear destination. It’s the kind of song you hear playing in a doctor’s office and you’re like, “shit, why do I feel suddenly exhausted? Why am I clammy? Why can’t they find a pulse??”  

Can’t Find My Way Home, Blind Faith

We had a few “café angels” who would leave us mixes anonymously. This song was on one particular mix (I think it was labeled CAFÉ MIX) that got a lot of play time, and it reflects the usual behind-the-counter mood. We, the baristas (with maybe the exception of “cartwheels” boy), were so full of longing, so nostalgic for something we couldn’t name. And we were all heartbroken for some reason or another. There was nothing left for us to do but tattoo ourselves, dream of running away, and tease all the men. Big sigh.

Where is my Love? Lucinda Williams

Big, big sigh.  

Hurricane, Bob Dylan

This song is what it feels like to be trapped in a half-waking workplace anxiety dream. I wish Bob would have left some air for the rest of us.

Amassakoul ‘N’Tenere, Tinariwen

It was 2005, we obviously had a bunch of the Putumayo compilations. This song was from the Mali album and it was a banger.

Corinna, Corinna, Leo Kottke

We baked with a lot of “heartbreak sugar” and “heartbreak flour,” which was what we called the leftover ingredients rescued from kitchens we once shared with our exes. With these ingredients we made many batches of heartbreak muffins and scones, and fed them to the townspeople, as if to distribute the burden. The front window of the café was home to a “heartbreak jade plant” of mine. For years, it thrived there. Also, how dare Leo Kottke do this to us?

Hide and Seek, Imogen Heap

Robin, you were the heart of this little town. Our café is gone, replaced by businesses with zero personality. Everyone is playing it too safe and there’s this thing called AI that you would absolutely hate. Anyway, I hope this book stirs up some beautiful mischief. It’s getting boring on this side of the veil. 

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

Genevieve Plunkett is the author of In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel and Prepare Her. A recipient of an O. Henry Award and the Sewanee Review’s Andrew Lytle Prize, her writing can be found in the Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, Write or Die, Story, and the Southern Review, among others. She lives in Vermont with her partner and their children.

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.

Brittany Perham’s Executrix is a memoir both inventive in form and poignant.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Playing with the official language of audits and lawsuits, Perham is in the rare camp of writers who can dance between pathos and humor without diminishing the seriousness of her subjects. This is a striking memoir of what surfaces when dealing with the vestiges, physical and emotional, of a deceased parent and all the stories we have made them, and us, out to be. ‘I have to tell you not much changes between the beginning and the end. I don’t know and then I don’t know,’ Perham writes. But it may be impossible to read this book without being changed by it.”

In her own words, here is Brittany Perham’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Executrix:

Executrix is a family story. It’s about alcoholism, estrangement, stolen money, death, and the nasty business of sorting out an estate—all the cheeriest things. And also, childhood. Many of the sections take place in hospitals, especially in Mass General Hospital, where my brother was sick as a kid and where my father died, after we’d gone more than a decade without really speaking, due to alcoholic cirrhosis. There are also funeral homes and bars and lawyers’ offices. But the book has lightness, too, because darkness and misery can be funny if you look for it, and because childhood is strange and magical and incomprehensible. In the list below, I’ve tried to think of songs (cheesy and schmaltzy) that bring back good memories of my family from the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. Most of these don’t exist in the book. Writing down my memories and telling them to you will turn them into stories, which I know will influence the memories themselves in ways I can’t yet predict. Executrix explores this process of memory creation, asking questions about why we make narratives out of our experiences and how those narratives go on to inform our lives.

You Are My Sunshine – Jimmie Davis & Charles Mitchell

My mother used to sing me this song when I was a little kid, when she was putting me down for a nap or trying to get me to go to sleep at night. She has a memory she’s told me many times of the song coming on the car radio—she drove a Volkswagon Rabbit that would often overheat on the way to school—and I said, from my car seat, “Mom, they know your song!” This feels like my memory too, although I don’t think it is—it’s my mother’s that, through her story, has been transferred to me. Now it lives in my brain as memory, solid as other “memories” I have of my early childhood, and to it, I’ve added my impression of the car frequently breaking down (which my mother said happened only once or twice, and when I was older) and of the road we drove to school every day. This example of my mother’s memory getting mixed up with mine got me thinking, as an adult, about how we make memory and meaning, and about how our memories actually come from a broad range of sources, many of them exterior to us. That’s one of the big stories of Executrix.

Kokomo – The Beach Boys

My father would play—and (horrifyingly, if my friends were around) sing along to—this late, not-so-great Beach Boys song on summer afternoons while he was working in the yard or grilling hotdogs—in other words, when he was happy and home. And not drinking, or at least not drinking and crying. I have memories of him jumping into the pool with his sunglasses still on. I still like hearing this song because it brings back this particular vision, an uncomplicated joyful memory I have of my father.

Can’t Help Falling in Love – Elvis Presley

My brother went through a phase, age 5 or 6, where he sang this song endlessly, imitating Elvis’s voice and dancing, moussing his hair back with my mom’s aloe vera gel (she wasn’t the kind of mom who had hair products) to get the full look. He’d just had his ear pierced, and he wanted a leather jacket. There were other phases when he was into Will Smith and Bing Crosby, but I’ll always hear my brother singing Elvis, jumping around on the couch with his hair slicked back and his sunglasses on, television remote as microphone, and that will always be a sound of childhood.

Home Again – Carole King

I listened to this song hundreds of times in my childhood bedroom when I was sixteen and seventeen, thinking about how unfair it was that I had to grow up and leave home. During these years, my mom was adamant that I would go to college and I was adamant that I would not, that I would live in my childhood bedroom forever, singing Carole King as loud as humanly possible, and that nothing would change. I understood already, before I’d ever had to leave anyone or anything, that once you leave, you can’t go back. And in fact, I did go to college, and in the next years my parents divorced and my brother got sick and my childhood home got sold. But it turns out I did go back, at least as far as I could, in Executrix.

I Can See Clearly Now – Jimmy Cliff

I remember hearing this song on an airplane on the way back from Florida with my family, one of the last vacations we took together. When I think about it now, I don’t know how this memory could be true: Did I have it on a mix tape in my Walkman? Was it somehow playing in the cabin? Was I only signing it in my mind? All these things seem improbable because in my memory, this is the first time I’ve ever heard this song. The plane is rising over the clouds, fairytale, vision-of-heaven, Care Bear cartoon clouds, the sun is hitting me in the face, and here is the rainbow I’ve been waiting for, my father’s laughing and my family is together.

Perfect Blue Buildings – Counting Crows

When my brother was 14, and my parents were mid-divorce, he got really sick and was admitted to the PICU of Mass General Hospital. At some point, someone handed me his belongings. One of the things he had with him, which he’d taken to school that morning, was a Discman with August and Everything After inside. My mother and I took turns sleeping (or not sleeping) in a tiny room with a cot that they give family members of very sick children. I listened to this album, and this song, many times in that room, on my brother’s headphones, through the first scary week of him almost dying, and then hundreds of times over the next months, when he was in and out of the hospital. I didn’t listen to any other music that year. I drove with my car radio off. If I heard a song come on in a room, I left the room. It was a kind of superstition, a charm to make sure he wouldn’t die. And he didn’t die.

Walking to You – Everything But The Girl

This song was on a mix CD my then-girlfriend burned for me when my brother was just out of the hospital and I was going home from college to babysit him on weekends while my mother was away, having met someone new after separating from my father. This girlfriend also taught me to make scrambled eggs with sour cream, which seemed very grown-up. She cooked them for my brother and me in my childhood kitchen the mornings she was there, and then, on the mornings she wasn’t there, I cooked them for my brother and me, and we were a family of two. That CD, and that song in particular, brought me so much joy—the kind of singing-loud joy you need when nothing much feels like joy—that soon she burned me the entire Amplified Heart album and that got me through the rest of 2002.

The Animal Song – Savage Garden

My partner says if I include this song, even with the memory attached, everyone will know how bad my music taste really is. But here it is: The first present my brother ever bought me with his own money was tickets to a Savage Garden concert at the FleetBoston Pavillion. I have no memory of the concert, but I have a windblown, sweaty-summer vision of my college roommate driving my brother and me through downtown Boston, windows open, blissfully blasting The Animal Song as loud as her stereo would go, all of us screaming along, performing wildly for the eyerolls we got from the drivers next to us at every red light. 

Someday Soon – Judy Collins

A song about doomed young love (because what other kind is there?) that is also about fathers and daughters, specifically a father giving a daughter advice she isn’t going to take. Here are a few lines:

My parents cannot stand him
‘Cause he rides the rodeo
My father says that he will leave me crying…

And when he comes to call
My pa’ ain’t got a good word to say
Guess it’s ’cause he’s just as wild in the younger days

By the end of the song, the speaker (and we) get that this love, with a guy who “loves him damned old rodeo as much as he loves” her, will never work out. But there’s another revelation too: The speaker realizes something about who her father is. She understands why he feels and acts the way he does, something we sense the father doesn’t fully understand about himself. One of the reasons I wrote Executrix was to learn more about my father because we’d been estranged for more than a decade when he died and I didn’t know him very well. Anyone who’s experienced this knows that relationships continue when we’re estranged, and after someone dies, too. Executrix is a conversation I’d like to have had with my father but never could.

You Gotta Be – Des’ree

Listen as your day unfolds
Challenge what the future holds
Try and keep your head up to the sky…

Herald what your mother said
Read the books your father read
Try to solve the puzzles in your own sweet time…

You gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser
You gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger
You gotta be cool, you gotta be calm, you gotta stay together

My get-me-through-the-shit theme song of the ’90s, back when you had to wait for your favorite song to come on the car radio, this one requires no explanation. Sing it if you need it.

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

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. New work in poetry and prose may be found or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Prairie Schooner and Tupelo Quarterly. Her memoir, Executrix, won the AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction and will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2026. For more information, please visit:  https://www.brittanyperham.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.

Matthew Wong Foreman’s novel Sunset at Lion Rock is a debut as visceral as it is profound.

Emma Pei Yin wrote of the book:

“Lyrical, restrained and deeply felt, Sunset at Lion Rock explores identity and memory in the shadow of history. A striking debut of uncommon grace.”

In his own words, here is Matthew Wong Foreman’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Sunset at Lion Rock:

Like many writers, most if not all my work would have been impossible without music. I am grateful to live in an era where I can choose to listen to almost anything I want in a matter of clicks, entirely for free.

Sunset at Lion Rock is a letter from a nephew to his uncle who went missing before he was born, informing him of all that has happened to their family, their city, and their lives since his disappearance. It is also my own letter to the city of my birth, which, in a way, had also died before I was born.

Some years ago, my psychiatrist told me that ADHD brains often listen to the same song on repeat – sometimes dozens of times consecutively – to regulate dopamine levels, providing comfort, emotional regulation, and focus. This behaviour acts as a cognitive anchor, reducing distractions and turning mental “noise” into structured, predictable stimulation. After I heard this, I immediately burst into tears. For almost three decades, I thought this was deviant behaviour. Friends, family, partners, often made fun of me for playing the same song for hours, sometimes to the point where people around me had to physically leave the room.

Music, like writing, has helped me come to terms with the fact that pathology is what I make of it. A condition, psychiatric or otherwise, can be a feature and not a bug, so long as it is managed effectively and put to good use. Here are the 10 songs on endless repeat that made the chapters possible.

“Expedition” – Susumu Hirasawa

Whenever I am asked who my favourite writer is, the first name that invariably comes to mind is Kentaro Miura. While this is neither the time nor place to explain why Miura’s Berserk should be considered alongside Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment as one of humanity’s greatest literary achievements, I will say that the 2022 Golden Age Arc anime adaptation produced a soundtrack that rivals any Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Sunset at Lion Rock opens with the protagonist, Eric, standing on the edge of the roof of his childhood home, contemplating suicide. Not in a morbid, depressing sense (though it can be, if one wishes to interpret it that way), but rather, he meditates on what is: that many, of not all of us, are constantly determining whether life is worth living. And I’d like to think that Eric, in that moment, just like Guts in the “Bonfire of Dreams,” is also staring at the glistening stars in the midnight sky, whispering 艶麗 えんれい enrei (beauty), over and over, before he steps off the ledge to begin his journey.

“Svefn-g-englar” – Sigur Rós

Songs over 4 minutes long are hard to come by nowadays. Our attention economy treats time as inseparable from money. Consumer engagement is a scarce commodity that dominates every board meeting from Meta to your local department store. Artists and writers and editorial directors and corporate sponsors and tech barons and presidential campaign managers all obsess over not just how many eyeballs are on their “products,” but how long those eyeballs linger. The more attention they harvest, the better the spreadsheets look.  

Whether it’s because Sigur Rós predated TikTok or the Nordics have simply figured out the meaning of life, “Svefn-g-englar” remains a 10-minute masterpiece that still regularly gets comments on music video. Go check it out on YouTube – there’s really nothing like it. This pioneering Icelandic cosmic post-rock band are truly inimitable.  

Part I of the novel dives deep into Eric’s family history, laying bare the experiences that shaped his upbringing. Though at first it might seem tragic or heartbreaking (and dare I say it, navel-gazey), I hope the takeaway readers get from these chapters is that tragedy, like the protagonists in “Svefn-g-englar”’s music video, is not a fact but an interpretation. 

“鴿子” – Song Dongye

They say the tragedy of life is what dies inside us while we live. The same can be said of Song Dongye, whose promising career collapsed virtually overnight in 2016, when he was arrested in China on marijuana charges (drugs are a huge no-no). In 2021, his attempted comeback was cancelled when netizens protested online, citing that drug users and criminals do not deserve to have celebrity careers (or any career, judging by some of the comments). In an impassioned post on the social media platform Weibo, Song pleaded with the Chinese public to give him second chance, citing that drug addiction should not be demonized given the severity of the China’s mental health crisis, especially for struggling artists. His cry largely fell on deaf ears. Mainland China’s entertainment industry is heavily controlled, and it will be some time yet, if ever, before we see Song’s creativity again.  

I will not go into my own views on drug addiction, China’s war on drugs, or the carceral state, but I will tell you that Song Dongye’s “鴿子” (pigeon) brought tears to the eyes of an English uncle in Luton who understood not a word of Mandarin. Even if you don’t understand the lyrics (a terrible loss), you will surely understand what is trying to say. An apt song (and message) for chapter 3, which is set in China.  

“Two Fingers” – Jake Bugg

The end of Part I departs from the slow burn of the previous chapters and adopts a higher energy, light-hearted melancholy that mirrors the tale of how Eric’s parents met. Despite what will come to befall them, we get to see how, at one point in time, it wasn’t always so bad. Hopeful, even. A kind of hope only the youth possess, a fierce belief in the possibility of a way out of the endless cycle of Samsara, even if they didn’t know that was what they were after at the time. This hopeful melancholy is captured perfectly in “Two Fingers” by Jake Bugg, or indeed, all of his tracks in his 2012 debut Jake Bugg.

So I hold two fingers up to yesterday
Light a cigarette and smoke it all away
I got out, I got out, I’m alive but I’m here to stay

Hey, hey, it’s fine
Hey, hey, it’s fine
Hey, hey, it’s fine
I left it behind

“In the End” – Linkin Park

I still remember the first time I came across Linkin Park on YouTube. Back in 2008, I was a vehement video game addict, and during the summer holidays – when I wasn’t at Buddhist camp – I would spend upwards of ten hours playing GunZ: The Duel and watching YouTube clips of competitive tournaments. It was on one of these clips that I stumbled onto “In the End,” which would quickly become the first song, and Linkin Park the first band, that received my undying obsession. It got so bad that at one point, a friend of mine opened my iTunes and expressed concern over the 100,000 plays the song received. Linkin Park was my first foray into music, the first band I saw live, my first experience of fandom.  

Part II of the novel leaps ahead into Eric’s adolescence. Here we witness the beginnings of his youthful nihilism, one which represents his rebellion against the various social, cultural, and religious expectations placed upon him. It is only natural that the punk-adjacent, nu-metal “In the End” makes an appearance here. Of course, Eric knows all the lyrics by heart. And so does his “friend,” Eddie.

R.I.P Chester Bennington.

“給自己的情書” – Faye Wong

Faye Wong was my mother’s favourite artist. That’s all that needs to be said about chapter 6, and the song that goes with it.

“Forgotten Love” – AURORA

Whether Sunset at Lion Rock has a romantic storyline will depend on one’s specific predisposition. For some, the latent tension between the two characters is patently obvious. For others, Toni Morrison’s credo in Sula will resonate here – what happens when we forgo traditional romantic tropes and simply examine relations between people in all their complex, messy, unspoken beauty? 

“Forgotten Love,” like the rest of AURORA’s oeuvre, is a bittersweet tale of someone who wakes up one day to the realization that they are no longer sad about their ex. Its dreamy, sentimental yet playful beats inspired the vast majority of the chapters in Part II. While drafting these chapters in 2020, my four-year relationship had started to collapse – its inevitability all the more painful as it was during the height of COVID and we were living together in a remote part of Western Massachusetts. Perhaps this was why I was so reluctant to deploy a stereotypical romance in the novel, to the chagrin of many of my readers.

“WingRiddenAngel” – XXXTentacion

XXXTentacion’s music got me through some rough times. Like Lil Peep and other SoundCloud rappers of the early 2010s, X was one of the pioneers of what advocates dubbed “emo rap” and detractors ridiculed as “mumble rap.” They captured our generation’s iteration of adolescent malaise, the existential hopelessness of those of us who grew up in the digital age of the 2000s and 2010s. “WingRiddenAngel” was one of X’s earlier SoundCloud songs released right before he exploded onto the mainstream. Whatever you think of him as a person – and he was certainly a problematic and controversial individual – it is undeniable that X was a symptom of a disease far deeper than simply poverty and violence. “WingRiddenAngel,” released when X was just 17 years old, reflects on a doomed first love. It is a raw, emotional track exploring drug abuse, suicidal ideation, and the guilt and regret of a young man’s inability to take accountability for his own actions when it matters.

Now a young adult, Part III of Sunset tackles Eric’s role in the Hong Kong protests, his collapsing relationships, and his growing disillusionment with the city he once called home.

“Yuko Ando” – Shogeki

Another one of my all-time favourites is Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan, a manga-turned-anime that ostensibly appears to be a simple shonen centring on a band of teenagers fighting against human-eating titans. However, by the end of the show, readers and viewers are forced to confront themes including the cost of freedom, the cycles of hate, and the morality of violence.

A fitting companion piece to the penultimate chapters.

“Afterlife” – Avenged Sevenfold

I don’t belong here, we gotta move on, dear
Escape from this afterlife
‘Cause this time I’m right to move on and on
Far away from here

A place of hope and no pain
Perfect skies with no rain
Can leave this place but refrain
‘Cause we’ve been waiting for you
Fallen into this place
Just giving you a small taste
Of your afterlife here so stay
You’ll be back here soon anyway

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

Matthew Wong Foreman is a Hong Kong-born writer. He has a B.A. and M.A. from Hong Kong University and Oxford University and a PhD in History from Northwestern University in 2023, where he taught history and writing to college and high school students. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Pacific Historical Review, Asian Ethnicity, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and The Oxford Review of Books, among others. His work has been featured by Radio Television Hong Kong and showcased at the Hong Kong International Literary 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.

Nina Schuyler’s Open the Floodgates is a fabulous fable for our times, a climate fiction novel both compelling and timely.

Kate Folk wrote of the book:

“Open the Floodgates begins with an ingenious premise and unfolds into an intricate tale of interdependence and survival. With lyrical prose and vivid characters—human and non-human alike—Schuyler makes the fight to sustain the natural world feel urgent and intimate.”

In her own words, here is Nina Schuyler’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Open the Floodgates:

With every ounce of my being, I feel compelled to do something about the climate crisis, which is bearing down, tragically reshaping everything. And so, here comes my novel, Open the Floodgates. I can’t read apocalyptic, dystopian climate literature; I can’t live there in my imagination without something vital cracking. You’ll find the playlist touches grief but doesn’t stay there, because I played with the new legal trend of granting personhood to natural entities, giving them rights and responsibilities. This new way of seeing brings hope. So… In an unnamed California town, the River is granted personhood and has the right—and urgent need—to argue in court for its existence. But powerful, well-monied forces line up, determined to keep the River as it is: gunk-filled, toxic, a convenient dumping ground for waste. The story moves like water, entering the minds of the town’s people, pigeons, deer, dogs, cats, the trees, the River’s home, and the River itself. When the River is ultimately jailed, the town faces a reckoning: what do we owe the River? And the River must answer in turn: what, if anything, does it owe humans?

The River (Bruce Springsteen)

Springsteen’s gravelly, road-worn voice cuts straight through me, carrying me down to the river. That’s where, sooner or later, every one of my characters has gone or will go. It’s where the River  (and now I need to capitalize it as a proper name) has seen the full sweep of human life: picnics and swimming, children skipping rocks and laughter, kisses and lovers disappearing in the tall green grass. Women once washed clothes in the River and dipped their babies into its cool, clean water. The babies would startle, then squeal with delight, patting the water, splashing to even greater delight. You can’t do that anymore. Too much crud in the River. But in those days, you could, those beautiful beautiful days that haunt and call to character in the book, one way or another.

Mercy, Mercy Me (Marvin Gaye)

The River is turned into a person and goes to court to argue for its existence, but it doesn’t understand, not really, what is happening and why it has to go to court, only that it’s now a person. Even Florence can’t explain it. The River is playful and alive and bewildered and misses the cottonwood trees that once shaded its banks, misses the fish that flashed along the gray rocks; misses the families who came to swim and laugh and picnic and looked so happy. The deer still come to the River, so do the raccoons and bears, because they have to drink something. If the River understood the word, it would flow right up to the witness stand and say, Have mercy, have mercy on me.

Take Me to the River (Al Green)

When I go to the river, something inside shifts. An unselfing, an opening—I don’t know. George, who is nine and full of boy energy, knows this feeling but doesn’t have the words for it. He can tell you the junk he finds in the River, and how he swims there—he doesn’t care about the pollution, or whatever. Gary, the defense attorney, doesn’t remember the feeling at all. It’s been shoved under trials, briefs, opening and closing arguments—otherwise, I imagine, he couldn’t do his job without losing his mind. I’m sure you know the feeling I’m talking about. You know what it can do, how the River can wash your feet and put them back on the ground.

Beds are Burning  (Patti Smith–Live in Dublin, 6/6/2018)

I love Patty Smith’s voice that rips your heart open. If you watch her sing this song in Dublin on YouTube, it looks like Smith’s hair is on fire. Seventy-five-year-old Hazel, who testifies on the River’s behalf, is not messing around either. She grew up with brothers and knows how to do a headlock. A former schoolteacher who now owns a beauty parlor (called Love Thyself, Woman), Hazel’s slicing voice makes the court tremble and feel things they’d rather not. But did she help or hurt the River’s case, wonders the Judge. Can the jury listen to this?

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Patti Smith; Nobel Prize Award Ceremony 2016)

I can’t explain why, but this song reminds me that the River is snow and rain and ocean, one big gorgeous circle of water. Maybe because the lyrics of this song are all-encompassing, scooping up everyone and everything. It’s a wise song.

It reminds me that the water is wise. It’s been here since the beginning of time. It’s carved mountains, worn canyons smooth, carried civilizations, remembering what we’ve forgotten.

The River, like the song, gathers all the grief—the poisoned water, vanished fish, the failures of our imagination and carries it beyond despair. At some point in this performance, Smith breaks down. She has to start over—and for me, it’s the weight and wisdom and hugeness of the song. She makes it to the end, and it’s like we’ve been through something and made it out. Like the world seemed to tilt, almost imperceptibly, toward possibility. Something large is coming. It has to. Because rivers have always known how to keep moving, and so, finally, must we.

Once in a Lifetime (Talking Heads)

Bewilderment coats the novel like a film, smeared all over the humans and nonhumans, under fingernails, hoofs, webbed feet and fur. When the Law declares the River a person, the known world tilts on its axis. What was once property is now a person. What could be owned now speaks. The questions come immediately: what’s this River doing calling itself a person? How can it be a person, when we’re persons? A person has feet. Feet. A face; a brain capable of inventing bridges and rocket ships.  And nonhumans wonder: why has the River disappeared into that enormous brick building? What happens in there? None of this makes sense. Or maybe, looked at another way, it’s the first thing that ever has.

Money (Pink Floyd)

It arrives with polished shoes and expensive suits, smiling as if it’s the reasonable one. Everyone knows that voice. It fights with claws disguised as precedent and logic. In the strange land of Law, a corporation is a person too, treated with rights and responsibilities like flesh and blood. Money has always been persuasive. It charms. Seduces. It beguiles with shady promises.

Take Me to the River (Talking Heads)

I hear this song, and I start moving my shoulders, then my head, my feet, everything in motion. Listen. Listen to the song. I mean listen to it. That beat moves your watery body with all those little rivers inside. The quintessential thing about the River is that it moves, swaying and swishing and charging right around the big rocks and over the fallen trees. That River, if only we’d move like that, nothing would stand in our way to a better future.   

Freedom (Jon Batiste)

Wafting through the novel is the sweet desire for freedom. Free from prison, from an old narrative, a bad marriage, a one-note flattened way of life, from a sickly existence. This song hits the high notes of joy and delight and aliveness, and that’s in the pages of my novel, too. A handful of characters risk everything for freedom, cracking open the story, filling the pages with light.

Open the Floodgates (The Smile at the Magazine, Jan. 2022)

Because I love Thom Yorke; because the song floods you, your heart, entire being, moving something inside; because I listened to this song—I’d write, take a break and listen to it—and let it flood me, so I could tap into the deep well of something beyond myself; because Yorke’s refrain echoed throughout writing this novel, “someone lead me out of the darkness..” I don’t know what Yorke wanted this song to be about, and I don’t care. Once you put art out into the world, you hand it over. It’s now open to interpretation, open to making it your own.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Nina Schuyler’s playlist for her story collection In This Ravishing World

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

Nina Schuyler is the author of four other fiction books and teaches creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and the independent bookstore, Book Passage. Nina Schuyler’s newest short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. It was also a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics and earned a law degree at UC Law San Francisco. She is also the author of How to Write Stunning Sentences and has an extensive following of her Substack newsletter of the same name.

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