Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Eric Beck Rubin’s novel Ten Clear Days is a profound exploration of end of life choices and their weight on family members.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“[Beck Rubin’s] writing, self-assured throughout, is lyrical, even haunting at times. . . . [A]n absorbing, often moving read.”

In his own words, here is Eric Beck Rubin’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Ten Clear Days:

My soon to published novel, Ten Clear Days, is about a woman seeking medically assisted death, a decision that splits her family in two and sets off ten tense days of waiting – will the doctors acceded to her request? Will the patient follow through? At the same time, it is a story of what brought this person to her decision, which takes the reader back in time to the protagonist’s childhood and upbringing.

In my previous novel, the story was saturated in music. One character was constantly playing records for the benefit of the other, who went on to become a musician. The soundtrack, split in two parts, came easily. Ten Clear Days only refers to two pieces by name. At the same time, the protagonist is a music lover, a concert goer, and music of a certain kind, in a certain register, can be imagined as floating around the edges of the story.

The soundtrack I’ve suggested includes the two pieces mentioned and a few others that create a sense of the atmosphere in the pages and, as much as possible, echo crucial moments in the plot.

1. Mozart, Clarinet Concerto, Second Movement, Deutscher Kammerphilharmonie with Martin Fröst soloist

This is one of the pieces that is named in the novel: the protagonist’s grandson plays a recording for her, remembering the time they listened to it together at a recent performance by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It is a special piece to the grandson because he knows about the main character’s reverence for Mozart, whose work she describes as effortless, as if breathing and creating music were the same thing. It is a contrast to the broken storylines of the protagonist’s own life, the effort she has had to make to survive, and a model of how she might have wanted her life to be.

2. Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7 ‘Leningrad’, Third Movement, London Philharmonic conducted by Kart Masur

This is the second piece named in the novel, and it is played by the main character herself; she blasts it from her CD player while sitting in her garden. This piece opens on a knife’s edge, which slices through the remainder of the movement; it’s tense and dramatic, like the historical moment it was trying to depict. Shostakovich composed his seventh symphony as the German siege of Leningrad was underway, and nobody knew how it would end.

3. Ligeti, ‘Lontano’, Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Benjamin Nott

Like the protagonist of the novel, György Ligeti is Hungarian. ‘Lontano’, the name of the piece, translates to ‘far away’ but it suggests something more like far, far away – somewhere beyond and outside. What it describes is on the other side of some impossibly high wall. Some place inconceivable for most of the people in the main character’s life, but not for her. She has been to the other side of that wall, and what she experienced there is never far from her.

4. Wagner, Tannhäuser Overture, Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Georg Solti

Solti, the conductor of this piece, is another Hungarian. And his lento direction of Wagner’s overture exudes its epic qualities. For those susceptible to Big Opera, there is no resisting it, which is the point. It was aesthetic appeals of this kind, overriding reason, that drew so many Europeans to the Nazi cause. I know you came here for a songlist but if you’re this far in, then you must have had a sense this was coming. The fullness and lushness of this Wagner is what led directly to the hollowed out world of that Ligeti.

5. Bach, Organ Sonata No. 4, Second Movement, transcribed and performed by Vikingur Olafsson

We are close to, if not over, an hour of music here, so please forgive me for making this Bach the last stop. This piece brings multiple voices into harmony, it rises and falls, it points to a world beyond the current one, it is fragile yet determined, it strays and returns – like the path taken by the main character in her incredible life.

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

Eric Beck Rubin is a novelist and academic. His début, School of Velocity, was named one of the Guardian’s Books of the Year. He created and produced the Burning Books literary review and interview podcast, which ran for seven years. His academic work looks at how history is transformed through literature, monuments, and memorials. He teaches architectural and cultural history at the University of Toronto and collaborates with art galleries and architecture firms on exhibitions and design competitions. He lives in Toronto.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

TJ Fuller’s story collection Some Stupid Glow showcases a brilliant absurdity of language and humor.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Fuller’s prose is punchy, original, and lively, and his tales constantly shift the ground beneath the reader’s feet. Each story is short, dense, and intriguing throughout this consistently excellent, varied, and fascinating collection.”

In his own words, here is TJ Fuller’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Some Stupid Glow:

At the keyboard in the morning, I feel the pressure to perform. To sing. I love a musical sentence. I love a sentence that rejects worn out phrases and obvious metaphors, but those sentences are hard to construct. These sentences are hard to construct. How do I explain how stressful writing can be? Many of you know. You want your images to be gemstone sharp and gemstone rare, and each morning you have to prove to yourself you can create those images.

I can’t participate in word count exercises, like 1000 words a day or National Novel Writing Month, because I write slowly. Instead I use a timer. For an hour, sometimes thirty minutes, I try and forget about work and the state of the world and chisel out some sentences. And then the timer rings and I put on some music to decompress. One of my favorite moments of the day is those first few notes of a song after a tense writing session. This is a playlist of the songs I often listened to after working on my debut short story collection, Some Stupid Glow. If you find writing difficult, they might help you decompress too.

Steal Smoked Fish by The Mountain Goats

The first song I got in the habit of playing at the end of every writing session. I wanted my stories to feel like this song, small and personal and tense. The past hangs around the present, and the narrator of the song is caught between them. This song is also set in Portland, like most of the stories in my collection, and Portland too is caught between the past and the present, leaving behind too many people pressed by its strange future.

The Race is On, The King is Dead by Guided by Voices

“Every single highway is the wrong way home”—that should have been the epigraph for Some Stupid Glow. Nothing satisfies these characters the way they hope it will. Nothing takes the anxious itch from their bodies. I love the sound of Robert Pollard’s voice going up an octave. I love the way he pronounces odometer. I want to live in the last chorus of this song.

Little Fury by The Breeders

“My big drum on your big face”—that’s how all writing should feel.

I’ll Stay by Roy Hargrove featuring D’Angelo

I swear I read once about this recording session, how hard it was to get D’Angelo to commit to a song, and that at one point, Bernard Wright and D’Angelo started playing Sly Stone’s version of Que Sera Sera and all of the men in the studio sang along. I think of that lost session often, the choir of men singing “Whatever will be, will be.” My obsession with D’Angelo as a teenager led me to obsess with whomever he was obsessed with, Prince and James Brown and Miles Davis, the Yodas, he called them, and to find writing Yodas, writers whose every sentence I wanted to glue myself to like D’Angelo glued himself to the rare VHS performances of his favorites. When he died last year, I was in disbelief. Rest in power to one of the artists who taught me to obsess, to embrace creation being difficult.

Unwind by Sonic Youth

The guitars chase each other like children, languid, loose, and even as the distortion enters the chase, the song never gets as far from the melody as other Sonic Youth deconstructions. That’s why I find the screeching so relaxing.

The Freedom by Swan Lake

I love the mix of Dan Bejar’s voice on this song. He sounds a bit more raw, more flip, than a typical Destroyer track, tossing out that strange opening line, “I put a hex on the telephone wire.” One of my favorite reads about Bejar’s work is on the substack tiny mammal kingdom. She writes about irony and his lyrics and the idea that he’s less interested in the “idea of words meaning something as opposed to doing something. As opposed to the effect they create.” “He’s not interested in his words actually meaning anything…He’s interested in what they do — how they sound, but also their effect on the listener.” I am chasing something similar in my writing, metaphors and similes that you feel before you understand. Dan Bejar’s lyrics are inspiration to push beyond the obvious.

Pizza King by Wussy

Lisa Walker’s laugh. Before the thick drums or stomping bass, Lisa Walker’s laugh breaks the tense writing morning. It’s a song about missing your chance. “You’re up in the air. She’s already there.” But I listen to it alone and feel like I still have a few moments left to commit before she completely disappears.

BASQUIAT by Jamila Woods featuring Saba

LEGACY! LEGACY! is one of the more underrated albums of the last ten years. I think we should talk about it like we do Channel Orange or Black Messiah. Each song surprises. Each song is as vulnerable as it is political. On BASQUIAT, even more than the way she says, “I don’t know fucking know,” which is delightfully biting, I love the breakbeat cracking open the song with two minutes left. Without sacrificing any anger, the song downshifts and cruises.

Shadow Man by Noname featuring Phoelix, Smino, & Saba

It’s going to be awkward at my funeral when my wife has to explain why they’re pausing the eulogy to listen to Metro Boomin, but this Smino verse is too good, tiptoeing across the beat while talking about tiptoeing, rhyming booming with Boomin. Noname is another model of an artist in the world, not wasting her time on the empty endorsements other celebrities do, and instead creating her incredible Noname Book Club, focused on uplifting writers of color and radical books.

Chinese Apple by Loose Fur

There are many Jim O’Rourke tracks I could have chosen. I love how he deconstructs through repetition, the most famous being his cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. But this is the one I listen to most often. The fingerpicking circles the same few notes as an otherworldly sound mounts behind the guitars, but then the tension dissipates, like it does for me after writing, and we’re back in Jeff Tweedy’s folk song. But you can only be so comfortable after you’ve heard whatever is pressing in from the other side, and that’s the kind of experience I hope for my debut short story collection, Some Stupid Glow, that these small, personal stories are pressed on by an otherworldly feeling mounting behind them.

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

TJ Fuller’s stories have been featured in The Columbia Journal, Juked, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other journals. His work has also been included in two anthologies, What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, based on the work of Mitch Hedberg, and And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative.He earned an M.F.A. in fiction from Eastern Washington University, and has been accepted to both Tin House and Sewanee summer workshops. Some Stupid Glow is his first book.

TJ Fuller lives in Portland, OR.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Patrick Cottrell’s novel Afternoon Hours of a Hermit s tender and funny and pitch-perfect, another literary gem from one of our most talented authors.

BookPage wrote of the book:

“Afternoon Hours of a Hermit has the same dizzying creative energy that propelled Michael Chabon’s classic sophomore novel, Wonder Boys… remarkably gripping, full of humor and unexpected twists. This striking novel cements Cottrell as a true rising star of the literary moment.”

In his own words, here is Patrick Cottrell’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Afternoon Hours of a Hermit:

When I was in high school in the late nineties, I chipped my front tooth on a piece of ice. My front tooth turned gray. My mother didn’t like how it looked so she took me to the dentist where I had to have an extensive root canal. A year ago, my current dentist looked at my x-rays and she said the root canal was one of the best she had seen.

Much of my book Afternoon Hours of a Hermit concerns memory and the techniques of fiction which I have tried to pass onto my students. But truth be told, I often feel like a dentist when I’m writing. Like my suburban Milwaukee dentist, I listen to soft pop/adult contemporary music while I work. Like the dentist, I am constantly looking for what’s rotting. In honor of that root canal so many decades ago, I have tried to recreate from memory the soothing soft pop/adult contemporary radio station playlist on that day in 1997.

Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last”

The critic Greil Marcus has written about the technical sheen and perfection of this song and Williams’ halting, delicate delivery. I once thought this song was about unrequited love, but now I can see the song is about an extremely beautiful woman who is deeply confused by the stupidity of her love interest. She knows she’s the best, she knows she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, she doesn’t understand why her love interest isn’t reciprocating: “I wondered what was wrong with you?”

That question, “I wondered what was wrong with you?” is one of the animating questions of Afternoon Hours of a Hermit.

Heart “These Dreams”

I listened to this song over 500 times while I wrote my book. Some days it was the only song I listened to. I put it on infinite repeat. It sounds like something that was written for Stevie Nicks during her solo years. The lyrics make no sense; it’s a ridiculous song. But the band buys into its affective charge…I don’t know if it’s from the music itself or something that happened in the studio, but that unshakeable belief in the material is something I thought about while writing. Although what’s happening on the page might be ridiculous, if there’s some kind of emotional charge present, you can do more, you can go farther.

Bruce Hornsby and the Range “The Way It Is”

The opening keyboard riff is so iconic. This song makes me think about how the singer is trying to convey a serious social message within the trappings of a pop song.

Belinda Carlisle “I Get Weak”

Soft pop choruses were so big and sweeping in the ’90s. There’s so much propulsion in this song. I listened to it a lot while I was drafting my book to keep myself in a positive mood. In some ways not much happens in Afternoon Hours, but I wanted there to be a sense of momentum. A ball rolling down a hill.

‘Til Tuesday “Voices Carry”

I am a huge fan of Aimee Mann. It’s cool to see the ways her style has changed, but you can still recognize that this song is hers, even with the faux New Wave vocal tics. You can hear her present-day style in the multi-tracked backing vocals in the last third of this song. Her long solo career is one of the all-time greats; she doesn’t have any weak spots.

Amy Grant “Baby Baby”

I had no idea until recently that this song is about a baby, Amy Grant’s baby.

Sheryl Crow “Leaving Las Vegas”

The novel Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien made an impression on me in high school. It’s a classic fantasy about romantic self-destruction disguised as a novel and it’s mentioned throughout my book. I haven’t read LLV in over twenty years, so I don’t know what it’s like, only my memory of it. Deep loneliness. This song isn’t one of Sheryl Crow’s best, but it foreshadows the darkness of her follow-up album which is so much better than her debut.

Donna Lewis “I Love You Always Forever”

This song can put you in a trance. It’s kind of like Enya + the Sundays + weightless obsession. It’s not dated at all. I wish I could write something this good.

Wilson Phillips “Hold On”

My favorite part of this song is when Chynna (I think) sings, “You’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness/you got yourself into your own mess.” I think this applies to my narrator’s situation and, I’m guessing, to the majority of people’s problems.

Mariah Carey “Can’t Let Go”

Mariah Carey’s best songs are about obsession and longing: “Do you know the way it feels when all you have just dies?” So much of writing my book was about being haunted by the past, not being able to let go: “Every night I see you in my dreams/You’re all I know.”

also at Largehearted Boy:

Patrick Cottrell’s playlist for his novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

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

Patrick Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. He is the winner of a Whiting Award in fiction in 2018 and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award in 2017. Cottrell is currently an assistant professor at the University of Denver.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Geoffrey D. Morrison’s novel The Coffin of Honey is imaginatively speculative and marvelously thought-provoking.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“This dense and poetic novel of first contact from Morrison (Falling Hour) submerges readers in a future that is both collective and fractured… [Readers] will be rewarded with much food for thought.'”

In his own words, here is Geoffrey D. Morrison’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Coffin of Honey:

If we were in a very fast elevator – perhaps plummeting fatally to earth on account of improper maintenance – and I had almost no time to describe The Coffin of Honey to you, I would call it “a Marxist Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” If our descent was happily arrested before impact, I would also be sure to tell you it had debts to Roberto Bolaño, Ursula K. Le Guin, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and a 1968 pamphlet about flying saucers by the Argentinean Trotskyist J. Posadas.

The book takes place at the end of our century, in a world where a half-successful global proletarian revolution managed to hold back the worst effects of climate change but could not completely unseat the capitalist powers from their increasingly paranoid and death-driven perches. It is into this fraught geopolitical arrangement that the UFOs arrive – because of course they do – and begin to offer select individuals the chance to travel to other worlds, have life-changing encounters with the sublime, and then go home again. Central characters include Varughese, a minor Marxist politician from Kerala; Forough, a poet and biodiesel engine mechanic from the Greater South Caspian Collective; and a man with a redacted name who spies for ATNA, a nasty garrison state patched together from all the most reactionary tendencies of the Anglosphere.

Music and song play key narrative roles in this book. Multiple characters are moved to sing or play instruments by their transit to new worlds, and they do so in ways that either draw from their own traditions or create strange new syntheses. Of special thematic importance to me were West and South Asian Sufi devotional forms like the ghazal and qawwali which emphasize the intoxicating love of the divine.

I sometimes listened to music as I wrote, but I listened even more while riding the bus, doing chores, going for walks, getting wistful late at night – moments when I tried to conjure up the emotional states and aesthetic sensibilities that would be so essential to the writing I did later. The songs on this playlist all helped me to do that in one way or another. Some of them are also explicitly mentioned in the book.

The Coffin of Honey has an internationalist point of view, and this playlist inevitably reflects that. But despite the eclecticism, there’s an emotional tenor many of these songs have in common: rapture, catharsis, yearning, the desire for transcendence or union. Some of them also speak to my book’s interest in cross-cultural contact and polyglotism. A higher-than-average number of them have the power to move me to tears.

Écoute-moi camarade
Mazouni

This song comes first simply because of how fully it evokes another time and place, with such irrepressible attitude, a swagger undercut by self-mocking melancholy. I don’t know if it’s possible for any book – let alone mine – to truly feel how this song sounds, but in my moments of wildest ambition I hoped it might.

Mazouni was an Algerian singer who spent a decade in France making music for fellow immigrant workers. The title of this compilation album, Un Dandy En Exil – Algérie / France – 1969​/​1982, is almost a poem in itself.

Come Down to Us
Burial

My friend Matt says this might be the best song of the 2010s. Adam Curtis used it to spellbinding effect in the opening of his 2015 Afghanistan documentary Bitter Lake. Curtis has spoken about the song as representing the new Romanticism of the lost post-2008 generation, aching for transcendence and a reenchanted world. I listened to it often during the years I was working on this book. The Lana Wachowski sample – “this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds previously unimaginable” – must have subconsciously informed my decision to have my characters keep cryptically telling each other, “It’s in the other room.”

Many of the other samples have a science fiction or ufology flair, coming from sources like the Whitley Strieber movie Communion, the classic RTS StarCraft 2, an interview with NASA Earth scientist Melissa Dawson, and a 1982 film called Liquid Sky, in which a UFO comes to Earth to feed off of human endorphins released by partying New Wavers during sexual climax. I’d never heard of the film until I began doing research for this playlist, but I’m struck by its similarity to my own, perhaps gentler premise about alien beings symbiotically drawn to the human experience of the sublime.

Milonga de Manuel Flores
Written by Jorge Luis Borges
Performed by Eduardo Darnauchans

The rioplatense milonga, strongly rooted in traditional African rhythms, was a precursor to the tango. Like the Mexican corrido or the estadounidense cowboy song, it sometimes told of young men coming to quick deaths in knife fights on the plains. This one has the distinction of being written by none other than Jorge Luis Borges. You can tell: “Miro en el alba mis manos, /

miro en las manos las venas; / con extrañeza las miro, / como si fueran ajenas.” (“I look at my hands in the dawn, / I look at the veins in my hands; / I view them with astonishment, / as if they were another’s.”)

Darnauchans’ version interests me because it doesn’t sound like a milonga at all. I first heard it on the Uruguayan literary podcast Oír con los ojos, and was shocked by how much the opening bars almost reminded me of an Irish or Scottish air.

With Tomorrow
By Gene Clark
Performed by This Mortal Coil

We’re still firmly in Adam Curtis territory here. He used this one (which I had no idea was a Gene Clark cover until now!) for his 2021 documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head, most memorably to accompany footage of a Chinese revolutionary ballet. I started work on The Coffin of Honey not long after watching the documentary, and while I sometimes find Curtis’s politics a bit wishy-washy I think it is hard to deny what an artistic and curatorial achievement his films are. I always come away from them feeling imaginatively replenished.

Mohammed’s Radio
Warren Zevon

I listened to this a lot on the bus home from one of my several jobs, teaching English to immigrants at a night school. I would look around me at tired-looking people from all over the world, hauling their all-too-costly groceries in their worn reusable bags, and feel like the lyrics hadn’t aged a day: “Everybody’s desperate trying to make ends meet / Work all day, still can’t pay the price of gasoline and meat.”

We don’t know who Mohammed is or why he has a radio (or a lamp for that matter), and that is part of the magic. The song is populated by generals, aides-de-camp, and village idiots whose faces are glowing with wonder, and that is magical too. Warren Zevon songs are outward-looking in a way that’s unusual for Americans – even when he’s stuck in Echo Park, his heart is in Ensenada. Partly why I like him so much.

Biological Speculation
Funkadelic

We don’t know what we’re vibrating about. I love how this song is both grounded and metaphysical at the same time – one of the great hallmarks of George Clinton’s writing. It provided the perfect soundtrack to my attempts to grapple with concepts like bubble universes and braneworlds in my research for the book. I of course also loved and listened to Clinton’s even more emphatically UFO-oriented project, Parliament’s Mothership Connection, but I decided it would be too on the nose for this list.

Lorelei
Cocteau Twins

Maybe Scotland’s greatest-ever alternative act, which is saying something. Listening to Cocteau Twins makes me feel like I am floating in a warm, peach-coloured ether. The famous incomprehensibility of the lyrics is actually a part of this. Meaning is always receding just around the corner, which means that the song is inexhaustible and will last forever. 

She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap
Craig Leon

The earliest stages of the reading, writing, and thinking that would eventually become The Coffin of Honey were often accompanied by Craig Leon’s remarkable electronic music albums Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. They are ideal for embarking on a science fiction-adjacent project like mine was, and the song titles are marvelously evocative: “She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap,” “Standing Crosswise In The Square,” “Four Eyes To See The Afterlife,” etc. And this is the man who produced or co-produced the self-titled debuts of The Ramones, Blondie, and Suicide!

I had half a mind to put this song first, but I loved the transition to this from “Lorelei” too much.

Every Grain of Palestinian Sand
Muslimgauze

Muslimgauze was really the UK-based producer Bryn Jones, who until his untimely death in 1998 made albums of experimental electronic music expressing strong sympathies with the Palestinian people. “Muslimgauze” is of course a pun on “muslin gauze.” It always makes me think about how the etymology of “gauze” has long been thought to come from “Gaza,” and that in the Middle Ages Gaza was an important and prosperous city of trade and textile production.

While many of the songs on this list were the kind that would inspire me to write later, rather than the kind I would listen to while writing, I think Muslimgauze’s work is genuinely good music to write to. The insistent, seeking intensity of the rhythm locks you in.

Ser Magu
Shahrem Nazeri, Keykhosrow Pournazeri

On this recording, the tanbur player Kaykhosro Pournazeri accompanies the singer Shahrem Nazeri, who has long been interested in expressing Sufi themes and poetry in his music.

The tanbur is a lute-like instrument which exists in various forms across Central Asia, Iran, and beyond. I sometimes listened to tanbur playlists while writing to try to evoke the feeling of the rainy hills of Northwestern Iran, which in the book is the location of the Hyrcania Kolkhoz where Forough lives. Part of the reason I was interested in this specific part of the world is that, like my home city of Vancouver, its biome is temperate rainforest. I once visited a local botanical garden with my mother and noted how well the trees from northern Iran were doing in this likewise rainy and overcast region. The nearby Caspian seaport of Anzali genuinely was briefly the epicentre of a Soviet-aligned Persian Socialist Soviet Republic from 1920 to 1921.

Ay Carmela
Coro Popular Jabalón

If you are the kind of teenager who quotes Spanish anarcho-syndicalist Buenaventura Durruti in your high school yearbook (and, yes, I really did) then it is inevitable that you will become acquainted with the many rousing left-wing anthems of the Spanish Civil War. In imagining the culture of the Communards in The Coffin of Honey, I figured they would be a little bit like that too, paying homage to the working-class revolutionary movements that came before them. They keep time with the French Republic calendar, use Russian terms like “soyuz” and “kolkhoz,” and sing songs like “The East is Red” and “Ay, Carmela.” However, as an international movement, they do so in ways that also reflect their local traditions, and so I had the Communards of the Hyrcania Kolkhoz listen to a tanbur player who slips “Ay Carmela” in among more traditional material.

Listening to this Spanish song now in between “Ser Magu” and “Tinariwen,” I’m struck by what it has in common with them: the dark, communal ambience of low voices chanting along to a melody played by a stringed instrument in something like a Phrygian mode. I don’t think it’s an accident. Spain was al-Andalus, once, and its former place in the Islamic world is reflected in everything from architecture to music to basic vocabulary. Even the beloved Mexican football chant (“A la bio, a la bao, a la bim bom ba”) may ultimately have an Arabic origin.

Tinariwen
Group Anmataff

An infectious bop. I listened to it often on my way to work in the summer of 2024.

Group Anmataff’s “Tinariwen” is not to be confused with the famous Tuareg rock group of the same name. In the Tuareg language of Tamasheq, the word “tinariwen” literally means “deserts.” The song was included on the influential 2011 compilation album Music from Saharan Cellphones, notable for being most non-Saharan audiences’ first chance to listen to the phenomenal Nigerien guitarist Mdou Moctar.

Paduka Saigal Padoo
Umbayee

Umbayee, who hails from Kerala, is a pioneering figure of the Malayalam ghazal. The ghazal form is a short, richly ambiguous love-lyric based around couplets, often set to music. What makes the form so compelling to me is that, just like George Clinton’s lyrics in a totally different context, ghazals are grounded and metaphysical at the same time. When ghazals tell of intoxication or love, they can be understood either physically or spiritually. Ghazals originated in Arabic but moved eastward to Persian-speaking and Urdu-speaking lands, and then onwards to South Asia more broadly. Umbayee played a key role in popularizing the form in the south of India, having fallen in love with it while working as an apprentice electrician and part-time smuggler in Mumbai.

I felt that Varughese would be a fan of Umbayee and see him as a kindred spirit. A working-class man with left-wing sympathies who grew up in the multicultural environment of Kochi, Umbayee wrote sensitively in his autobiography of his battles with alcoholism, poverty, and crime. His voice has a tenderness which I felt Varughese’s would have too.

Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Pt. 1
Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi

This song comes at a pivotal moment in the 1973 Bollywood smash hit Yaadon ki Baraat (“Procession of Memories”), as it brings together three brothers who were separated in childhood. I first learned about the film and its soundtrack in a somewhat roundabout way, while reading about the deep love many people in Romania feel for Bollywood movies. When Yaadon ki Baraat was shown on Romanian TV in 2003, more people watched it than Big Brother. Romania and India had good relations during the Cold War, and at a certain point in my book I have a character reflect on this in a highly associative way (call it a procession of memories!).

I also made this song the “interval signal” for one of the numbers stations used by the spy from ATNA. There’s more on numbers stations in the entry for the “Tyrolean Music Station” below.

Donald and Lydia
John Prine

Two lonely working-class people have sex via astral projection. Like all the best Prines it’s sweet, funny, tender, and sort of makes me want to cry: “But dreaming just comes natural / Like the first breath from a baby” (!!!)

Albeit in a non-sexual way, two characters in my book, Forough and Varughese, are also cosmically linked via dreams, premonitions, and uncanny coincidences. 

Spud Infinity
Big Thief

This album was a favourite on bus rides home during some of my critical writing phases. Many of the songs that urge me onwards creatively do so with a few lines that seem to express my own project even better than I could. In this case it was the lines, “When I say celestial / I mean extra-terrestrial / I mean accepting the alien you’ve rejected in your own heart.”

Tyrolean Music Station
Broadcast by the French intelligence agency SDECE
Archived by the Conet Project

This requires a little explanation. Also, I’m sorry.

I’ve been fascinated by shortwave radio numbers stations since I was like 18 years old. They are used by many of the world’s intelligence agencies as a very secure way to send coded messages to field agents. The numbers they broadcast are meant to be decoded via a one-time pad, a cryptographic method that is technically unbreakable if you do it properly. They also tend to have an “interval signal” indicating the beginning and end of the transmission, usually a piece of music or a sound effect.

Numbers stations give me a spooky, lonesome, Cold War-hauntological, end of the world kind of feeling. Imagine being a random home shortwave enthusiast staying up late at night and finding one of these stations by accident. More to the point, imagine being a spy, holed up in some bug-ridden safehouse with curtains drawn, listening with pencil and paper at the ready for a message that might literally be a matter of life and death. I did! And then I put something like that in the book. Technically all of the redacted journal entries by the man from ATNA are being sent to his handlers this way.

I find the Tyrolean Music Station alternately hilarious, maddening, and eerie as hell. A perfect work of postmodern pastiche. The French Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage chose German-language music, numbers, and names to throw off the scent. They added a music box playing the opening bars of “The Internationale” to make it seem like the transmission was coming from a Warsaw Pact country like East Germany. And they probably chose yodelling thinking it would be too awful for anyone to want to listen all the way to the end. I especially love how the percussion in the first part sounds like explosions.

Yeh Jo Halka Halka
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Yes, this version is over twenty-three minutes long. Yes, periodically there are guys clearing their throats loudly on mic. No, it could be no other way. This recording – at the Digbeth Civic Centre in Birmingham in 1983 – is the version for me, maybe because it’s the first thing of NFAK’s I ever heard. I watched the video of this performance (it’s easily found on Youtube) and was profoundly moved.

If you’re getting bored, just promise me you’ll stick it out until the percussion comes in.

An audience member shrieks in delight nearing the 14 minute mark, and then again at 15. My editor, Pasha Malla, told me his dad was at an NFAK concert in Toronto where someone fell from a balcony out of sheer ecstasy.

Jeff Buckley, a Nusrat superfan, once said, “He’s my Elvis. I know everything about him.” He described his idol’s voice as being like “velvet fire.”

L’Internationale
Words by Eugène Pottier
Music by Pierre Degreyter
Performed by The Eyo’nlé Brass Band ft. Francesca Solleville

I knew I had to include this song because it stirs me and because it plays a crucial role in my book (Varughese sings it to the UFO that comes down to him on Kerala’s Golden Beach, among other things I’d prefer you find out for yourself), but I had a hell of a time choosing which version.

Some of the big orchestral arrangements get too self-serious and lugubrious, but the versions recorded by solo vocalists tend to lose the uplifting might of the chorus. The original French lyrics don’t always translate or even scan well in other languages (poor Portuguese! poor English!), but most France-French arrangements are a little too uptight for my taste. I nearly went with a jaunty Catalan rendering, because you are meeting me at a very Catalan time in my life, but I decided it was too jaunty for this playlist.

Enter Benin’s Eyo’nlé Brass Band.

The perfect recording of this song does not exist, because at heart it is not meant to be recorded. It is meant to be sung out in the street with many other people. But this recording, for an album made to mark the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, comes very close. You can easily imagine parading down the avenues and singing with a band like this. Francesca Solleville, who recites verses near the end, also sang on the album commemorating the Commune’s 100th anniversary. If we eat our vegetables and stay out of plummeting elevators then perhaps we will live to celebrate the 200th anniversary, with any luck in a world that has come a little further along towards realizing the promise in the words of this song.

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

Geoffrey D. Morrison is a language teacher and trade unionist who lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory. His debut novel, Falling Hour (Coach House Books, 2023), was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The Coffin of Honey is his second 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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Dimitry Elias Léger’s Death of the Soccer God is an atmospheric, moving, and hilarious novel with soccer at its heart.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Like its predecessor [God Loves Haiti], the novel moves with lyrical, imaginative force, especially in its vivid evocations of soccer play, while also showcasing the author’s penchant for orchestrating funny and poignant romantic interludes. A historical novel that merrily dances and jukes its way across the pitch of time.””

In his own words, here is Dimitry Elias Léger’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Death of the Soccer God:

The playlist features songs from seductive Haiti, sexy and spiritual 1950s New York City and festive and soulful Brazil, among other countries, most of them are featured in the novel. They helped me try to capture romantic ebb and furious flow of Caribbean, North and South American life and soccer.

“Trahison”, Super Jazz Des Jeunes

Since my father and his generation treasured the exploits of the real life Haitian-American soccer star of the 1950 football World Cup, a song by one of his favorite bands first came to mind. It’s a dirge, but incredibly sexy, meant to be danced slowly and closely, and the title means “betrayal,” my favorite literary theme.

“So What”, Miles Davis

The greatest song of the greatest jazz album of all the time, soft yet cocky, anyone who read and loved Miles Davis’s autobiography, like I do, has to love the contrast between his gently swining trumpet-playing voice and the man’s snarling real voice.

“All Blues”, Miles Davis

Probably my most played song from the era, more sad than romantic for sure, could be the soundtrack for a black immigrant in New York City in any era.

“Pursuance”, John Coltrane

Coltrane and I almost share a birthday, but we definitely share an obsession with trying to marry the overtly spiritual and the profane in our respective arts. The title of his landmark album featuring this song, A Love Supreme, was one of the working titles for my novel.

“Samba de Orfeu”, various artists

Orfeu Negro aka Black Orpheus, the classic Brazilian movie from 1959, was another one of this novel’s working titles. This award-winning French-Brazilian movie, with its beautiful black cast mostly dancing through carnival, love, and death, remains one of the most beloved reflections of Caribbean life, not just black Brazilian, on film. On top of that, its lilting soundtrack introduced the world to samba, a banned black Brazilian music style that became its signature export along with Pelé and beautiful and winning soccer teams.

“O Nosso Amor”, Chiquinho do Acordeon

I can’t even write the name of this song without standing up and dancing. It’s also the title of a chapter about losing one’s mind in Brazilian intoxications.

“A Forca”, Seu Jorge

Because this song is so beautiful and plaintive it makes me cry every single time I listen to it. Because after I translated the lyrics, I cry even more. Because Seu Jorge is the Brazilian musical titan of my generation with an otherwise very funky catalog.

“That’s Life”, Frank Sinatra

Because my novel is narrated by a once famous man facing a firing squad in prison while asking God how the hell he got there, Sinatra’s song answers that question for all of us, doesn’t he?

“Limyé”, Manno Charlemagne

Manno’s voice is so deep it’s like the voice of God and my father’s voice. Back in 2003, I used to go watch him gig every week at Tap-Tap, a beloved Haitian restaurant on South Beach.

“Jail House Blues”, Ella Fitzgerald

With a third act in my novel taking place largely among lifers in prison, the witty first song of my favorite Ella Fitzerald album These Are The Blues practically wrote the words for me.

“Supplication”, Roger Colas

The quintessential Haitian song of my childhood. “Sweetheart, I kneel at your feet, I don’t believe you will reject me,” he sings, begging like no man has ever begged. “I’m at your feet begging for forgiveness. Mommy, have pity on me.” I don’t ever won’t to feel that desperate. But boy, I love writing about it.

“Tranquilo”, Thalma de Freita

I write novels about trying to survive hell on earth a lot. But I like to believe that when we get to heaven, this light Brazilian ballad will be on repeat.

“Canto das Tres Racas”, Clara Nunes

Nunes is Brazilian samba’s equivalent to Aretha Franklin (Astrud Gilberto, the other ‘60s samba star, is akin to Diana Ross), this anthemic song’s title translates to “the song of the three races,” white, black, mixed. Let’s go!

“Bois Brillé”, Eugene Mona

After eight years living in Geneva, New York City, and Stockholm stuck on the first 40 pages of this novel, I moved to Martinique in late 2022 to finally figure out how to finish writing it. My first Thursday in Fort de France, Sarita, one of my only acquaintances, took me to an open mic night at a hotel by the beach, where I heard a singer give his all to this popular classic song. It’s an angry blues song that evokes the enslaved singing around a camp fire after an impossibly long and painful days’ work. The song made my jaw drop and filled my heart with courage. The novel wrote itself after that in a brisk two years.

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

Dimitry Elias Léger is the author of God Loves Haiti, a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Fortune, Granta, The Miami Herald, Literary Hub, The Millions, and The Source. Beyond his writing, Léger studied geopolitics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and served as an advisor to the United Nations for a decade. He lives between Brooklyn, Geneva, and Martinique.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Sam Beckbessinger’s debut novel Femme Feral is a striking feminist satire.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A darkly entertaining feminist satire…This tale of women’s rage against societal marginalization builds to a satisfying and bloody end, with Beckbessinger using the tropes of werewolf horror to provide her tough-as-nails heroines with a sense of power, retribution, and gratification. This has bite.”

In her own words, here is Sam Beckbessinger’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Femme Feral:

Femme Feral is a book about a woman who thinks she’s going through perimenopause, but is actually turning into a werewolf. Underneath that extremely serious premise, it’s a novel about the ugly emotions we repress—rage, grief—and what they curdle into when we ignore them. 

A big part of what I was writing through was my own inability to feel a whole range of emotions, especially anger. Call it a combo of being a parentified child, a lifelong “good girl”, and the product of a whole culture that finds women’s fury unacceptable, but I spent most of my life honestly believing that I never felt angry. 

The great power of the midlife shift, for many women, is that it’s the moment where a lot of our lifelong coping strategies fail, and we’re forced to confront everything that’s been burbling and rotting deep inside ourselves. For me, it’s been a grotesque and ultimately very healing time.

I’ve always used music as a crowbar to access emotions that I usually hide from myself. As a teenager, I remember lying in the bathtub and listening to Radiohead while dribbling water down my cheeks pretending I was crying. When I was writing Femme Feral, I listened to a lot of furious music, mostly ’90s Riot Grrrl, while walking for hours around London. Here are some of the songs that bled into the pages.

Seether – Veruca Salt

The working title of the book that became Femme Feral was “Snarltooth”, because of this song, which perfectly captures the horror of realising there’s something furious inside you that can’t be releashed once it’s been unreleased. “I tried to calm her down … I tried to cram her back in my mouth…” I was quite inspired by the song’s ambiguity about whether the seething creature is something inhabiting you, or if it’s just you. 

Everything In Its Right Place – Radiohead

Ellie, my protagonist, is a woman who tries to keep her life together through complex productivity systems. She has a never-ending to-do list that she recites in her head like a mantra. I love how this song juxtaposes the repeated stuttering “everything in its right place” with a sound that feels frantic, increasingly unravelling. Control as a coping mechanism that’s starting to fail. 

Under the Table – Fiona Apple

Is there a better lyrical chronicler of fury than Fiona Apple? Her brilliant song Werewolf would have been an easy pick, but Under the Table’s the one that belongs in this book, with the quiet defiance of “kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up”.

I started working on this book at a really weird time. I’d just uprooted my whole life and moved from South Africa to the other side of the world to the UK, where I was excited to get to travel and enjoy the thrills of living in the big city! Except, haha, it was January 2020. I hadn’t made a single friend before we got locked down, I couldn’t go home, and I felt like I’d been stranded on a desert island. 

The aptly-named album Fetch the Bolt Cutters came out in April that year, and I spent endless hours listening to it, walking and walking and walking around the city by myself, the first scenes of this book starting to form in my mind.

Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon

How could I not? London is a city with a long lycanthropic lineage in literature and film, which I had a lot of fun playing with. Observant readers will spot references to An American Werewolf in London, specifically.

Of course, the practical plotting problem I faced with a werewolf running around London in the early 2020s, which my forebears didn’t have to worry about, was … what the heck do I do about all the CCTV footage? Solving that problem led me to one of the book’s most playful setpieces, which is something I literally stumbled on during one of my long rambles around the city. I can say no more!

Also, “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand” is one of the most hilarious opening lines of any song. 

Venom – Little Simz

And a nod to contemporary London, with rage growing from problems that are structural and political as well as personal. I could happily listen to Little Simz’ virtuosic wordplay forever “I’m a mess honestly … when I dig deep, I can never find nothing left, it’s a mystery, rage, nothing but rage, can’t figure out if I’m going insane…”.

Second Skin – The Gits

A song about the ability to repress emotions failing, and the too-slow realisation that “holding it inside only helped to do me in”. This song holds extra meaning because the woman who wrote and sings this song, the incomparable Mia Zapata, was raped and murdered walking home from a friend’s apartment in 1993. 

About ten years ago, I was walking to a friend’s birthday party when I realised some creep was following me. I did all the normal things women do: I clutched my car keys in my hand. I sped up but didn’t run lest I trigger him to chase. But I also felt something new: I had a clear flash of rage. I found myself wishing that I had a weapon in my handbag so I could turn around and confront him, turn the tables, make him afraid. That moment was the seed that became this book.

Feels Blind – Bikini Kill

Honestly, the whole playlist could have been 90s Riot Grrrls. I debated “Shitlist” by L7, “Dig Me Out” by Sleater-Kinney, “Bruise Violet” by Babes in Toyland, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” by X-Ray Spex, “I Feel Insane” by Daisy Chainsaw. 

In the end, it had to be “Feels Blind” by Bikini Kill for the line, “I’m the woman I was always taught to be, hungry…” Femme Feral is very interested in hunger – appetites, starvation, eating disorders, how women are taught to starve ourselves and keep ourselves small. One of my favourite scenes in the novel is where Ellie eats everything in her kitchen, from the leftover condiments to whole peppercorns she crunches in her teeth. 

Someone’s Gonna Die Tonight – Gin Wigmore

Of course, sometimes what you’re craving is a little more bloody.

I just love how jaunty this song is, singing about how she’s off to go and bite someone’s head off, because sometimes you just need to just go out and commit an act of unspeakable violence with the girlies, you know?

Army of Me – Björk

Björk is an artist who’s always recognised the animal inside the human. I once flew to Barcelona and stood in the rain for three hours waiting to see her perform and I regret nothing.

This is the quintessential song about being sick of other people’s whinging, about how fascinatingit is when the world’s self-appointed caretakers finally snap. “You’re on your own now, we won’t save you, your rescue squad is too exhausted.” 

In a culture obsessed with youth, it’s life-saving to cultivate a roster of older role models, and Björk is absolutely one of mine. On her remarkable podcast Sonic Symbolism she says, “Most of us go through phases in our lives that take roughly three years, and it’s not a coincidence that this is often how long it takes to make an album, a book or a film.” It was true for this one.

9 to 5 – Lady Parts

Speaking of older women inspirations, I adore this punky cover of Dolly Parton’s eternal working-women’s anthem. But please watch the original movie with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, the perfect film about how sometimes you and your girlfriends murdering someone terrible really is the best solution.

This cover comes from the absolute banger We Are Lady Parts, one of my all-time favourite TV shows set in London. 

I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch – Courtney Barnett

A lot of the novel is set in the tech industry, which is where I worked for most of my twenties. The most infuriating and outrageous things that happen to Ellie were all just lifted from my real life, and will be annoyingly familiar to any woman who’s ever been talked over or asked to take minutes in a meeting (everyone?). This song reminds me of a particular moment from my career where I’d made a polite request to an engineer who was my subordinate, and he rolled his eyes at me and said, “Yes Mom”. I stole that moment almost word-for-word for the novel. 

I would very much like to go and play him this rant of Courney Barnett’s deliciously deadpan fury. 

Get Off the Internet – Le Tigre

The tech industry is obsessed with quick, easy fixes to complex problems; problems that the tech industry itself is at least partly guilty of causing in the first place. Even things that appear to be domestic, health, emotional, personal problems, are often at least partially systemic.

Ellie can’t begin to heal until she finds a pack. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the solutions aren’t about self-help, or more productivity or cleaner eating or self discipline or apps or (only) medications or therapy, but require us to get out into the streets with other people and fight for large-scale political change. 

Or, you know, just disembowel all your enemies.

Dog Days are Over – Florence and the Machine

Lastly, a reminder that on the other side of a breakdown, very often, inevitably, there’s joy. When you finally stop clutching what’s not working, you have the chance to try something new. 

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

Sam Beckbessinger teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, writes kids’ TV and picture books, and once wrote for Marvel. She grew up on a farm near Durban, South Africa, but now lives in London.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Jeff Miller’s novel Temporary Palaces is an enthralling debut with a punk heart.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A memorable debut … Miller’s bittersweet novel burns with the warmth of lasting friendship.”

In his own words, here is Jeff Miller’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Temporary Palaces:

Music is at the heart of my novel, Temporary Palaces. The book is full of songs playing in cafés and late-night bus stations, on tape decks in kitchens and living-room turntables, broadcast on pirate radio or performed by punk bands in sweaty, crowded rooms.

The novel takes place in the do-it-yourself (DIY) punk and hardcore scene that I grew up in the nineties and beyond. As we follow punk singer Ben and visual artist Alex through two timelines of friendship, loss, and hope, music is more than a soundtrack. It reveals the characters’ secret lives and pushes the plot forward.

The underground was more than music, of course. Zines (like my Ghost Pine), visual art, letters, and anti-authoritarian political ideals circulated through this space alongside records. But music was what originally grabbed me. Experiencing weird music opened my mind to different ways of living and offered a glimpse into another world.

1) Los Crudos “En Mi Opinión”

The novel opens in a tent dense with summer heat where two young men, Ben and Rob, lie entwined. Ben wakes up and, doing his best to sneak out, grabs his Chuck Taylors and Los Crudos t-shirt. As he unzips the door, we realize the tent isn’t in some bucolic nature spot, but on the roof of a building in the centre of the city where the two are hiding out.

Ben’s Los Crudos shirt is a bit of a shibboleth. While I want the novel to be accessible to all readers, I wrote it for the punks who grew up in the scene. Los Crudos were a ferocious hardcore band from Chicago. Frontman Martin Sorrondeguy, who sang in Spanish, also led the gay straight-edge band Limp Wrist.

Angry, political, and DIY, for me Los Crudos are a metonym for the 1990s HC scene at its best. Listening to them now evokes the smells of sweat and nutritional yeast, and the heat of bodies pressed in tight, moving to volatile music.

2) Cat Power “Cross Bones Style”

Next we meet Alex, listening to a mix tape that Ben gave her as she develops photographs in a darkroom. In a classic mixtape move, Ben tried to show off his sophisticated taste. Instead of punk songs, he selected brooders by Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, country despair from Songs Ohia, and pop chanson courtesy of Rufus Wainwright.

Tired of all the male melodrama, Alex fast-forwards to the only song by a woman, this haunted riddle by Cat Power. Her tangled guitars ride a relentless Jim White beat, intertwining into something almost pop and wistful, but also troubled and troubling. Sad music to shake your hips to.

3) What Cheer? Brigade “Malagueña”

Alex and Ben attend a massive anti-globalization demo, marching to the soundtrack of dancehall rumbling from a flatbed truck mingling with the drums and horns of an anarchist marching band.

Anarchist marching bands like Providence’s What Cheer? Brigade perfectly embody the political theory they advance: their ephemeral, ever-changing personnel come together either for a single march or wider campaign, making beautiful cacophony in protest.

4) Huggy Bear “Her Jazz”

Riot Grrrl spread all over the world in a tidal wave of records and zines in the 1990s. Within a few years of the first Bikini Kill EP, there was an all-girl band in every city in the world. For me the initial lightning bolt of this rebellion is audible on “Her Jazz” by Brighton’s Huggy Bear when they sing “This is happening without your permission,” followed by a scream of pure joy.

Enlisted to sell merch at the record release show for Ben and Rob’s band, Alex watches the openers Period 52 and reflects on how her own musical ambitions were dashed. In the rose-colour of nineties nostalgia, just how aggressively women were discouraged from playing music at the time is often forgotten. It took so much courage to play out in the face of indifference or flat-out aggression from the dude-dominated scene.

5) The Deadly Snakes “Oh My Bride”

At nineteen I started going to bar shows at the Dominion Tavern in Ottawa where they booked raw rock ‘n’ roll and sold cheap pitchers of beer. Ben and Rob’s band The Blank Tapes are a scrappy garage rock trio that would have fit on that stage.

In dreaming up The Blank Tapes I thought a lot about the purity of The Gories’ minimalist songs. I also recalled Jay Reatard’s synthy group Lost Sounds. They simmered with dark charisma when I saw them play the Dominion to an audience of maybe a dozen people.

But to sum up The Blank Tapes in a single song, I’ll choose this cut from The Deadly Snakes’ classic LP Ode to Joy. Like Ben and Rob who end their triumphant set with a scuffle on-stage, Snakes singers Max McCabe-Lokos and André Ethier possessed a seething animosity on and off stage. It was a high-tension wire that electrified every performance of their trashy teen cantatas.

6) The Breeders “Safari”

Alex has been working for weeks to produce a series of portraits for her upcoming photo exhibition at the local café. As she selects which prints to show she listens to another mixtape, an older one she made herself. “Safari” is the last song to play before the power goes out in a city-wide blackout. There’s such coiled menace in this song that it felt like a perfect harbinger for what comes next.

7) Dirty Three “The Restless Waves”

Ocean Songs always feels like a September record to me. The perfect set of songs for when the nervous system needs a reset after the summertime highs. It’s as constant as the tides. Put it on and ponder time, where it goes. Squint and try to see what’s on the horizon.

This is the first song that Ben plays on his stereo when we meet him again following a ten-year gap. His life is different, but music is still at the centre of who he is and how he sees himself.

8) METZ “A Boat to Drown In”

Ben now owns a stake in his friend’s restaurant and plays in a band called Grass Stains. In my mind as I wrote the book, Grass Stains were an impossible mix between the metal-core of Converge and the Upper Canadian heartland rock of The Constantines. Then I realized I was describing METZ.

In METZ’s twelve years of releasing albums, no one could match them at merging pop hooks with massive rock heft. The perfect balance of sweet and salty, their live show melted faces. Their longest song, “A Boat to Drown In” has a cinematic scope, balancing frantic vocals, motorik rumble, and a glittering tapestry of harmonic noise at the end.

9) Peaches “Boys Wanna Be Her”

After a decade apart, Ben and Alex reconnect at their friends’ wedding. At the reception, they dance to the queer party anthems of their youth. The Gossip, Kelis’s “Milkshake,” and the incomparable Peaches.

This is a tiny tribute to Vazaleen, the party thrown by my friend Will Munro, to whom Temporary Palaces is dedicated. Vazaleen was a deliriously queer mix of rock, camp, drag, trash culture, and art performance. Everyone played Vazaleen, from Peaches to ESG, Limp Wrist to Carol Pope, and more. I remember taking the bus from Ottawa and rolling up to the El Mocambo one afternoon before a party, Will gripping my hand and gleefully leading me backstage to a colourful world of punk camp nonsense. Later we pogo’ed together in the DJ booth. I miss him.

10) Unwound “Hexenzsene”

I spent my twenties living in punk apartments, large rambling places with lots of rooms, many inhabitants, cheap rent, and grime. One of the best parts of collective living was how all roommates piled their records, tapes, and CDs in the living room. The number of hours we spent sitting on couches listening to the stereo and talking about our days is incalculable. Music was the small fire our little household communities gathered around.

This is depicted in Temporary Palaces in a scene where Ben returns to his former punk house to hang out with his old friend Gabe and meets the new roommate Ruth. Unwound were a perennial favourite on the turntable at most apartments I lived in. All their records are imperishable classics.

11) The Jesus and Mary Chain “Darklands”

This song plays as Ben and Alex slow dance in Ben’s apartment. Slow dancing is one of the most romantic things ever, and there is no cooler record than Darklands to sway to in someone’s arms.

12) Elvis Costello & The Attractions “No Action”

Writing about punk shows is incredibly fun so there is a second gig in the book, very different from the first. The headliners, Telephone Junkies are another combo of impossible influences, a kind of raw DIY punk smashed together with intricate guitar solos by Ruth, riding the wave of Saharan rock from the Sahel Sounds label.

Their name comes from “No Action” by Elvis Costello & The Attractions on This Years Model. What a sick band. I wish this song was in their set recorded live at El Mocambo in 1978. Hyped on speed, the Attractions smash through songs from the first two Costello records at incredible speed. I bought that LP on my sixteenth birthday and it blew my little mind.

13) Godspeed You! Black Emperor “Mladic”

Near the end of Temporary Palaces, we hear the clanking sounds of les casseroles banged by protestors during the student strikes of the Printemps érable. You can hear a field recording of this at the end of “Mladic” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The joyous banging and clanging on pots and pans of people in the streets marching for what they believe in. It’s a beautiful sound.

One of the things I miss about living in Montreal is how Godspeed would play residencies with cheap ticket prices every year or two. You could see them play a few times in a week. As a result, I’ve seen them play a couple dozen times over the course of nearly thirty years. I vividly recall catching a cab home after seeing them at the Corona in 2011. News radio was on in the car, and the story was that Osama Bin Laden had just been killed by the Americans in Pakistan. With the gig still ringing in my ears, it felt utterly surreal.

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

JEFF MILLER is the author of the award-winning creative nonfiction collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, and he frequently publishes criticism. Jeff holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in Nova Scotia.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Madeline Vosch’s memoir Undead is a profound and honest recounting of suicidal ideation and the aftermath of a suicide attempt, as well as a clear exploration of self and how the world shapes us.

Clancy Martin wrote of the book:

“A brave, honest, and really quite magnificent book that will save lives. It’s very hard and absolutely necessary to describe how the suicidal mind works. If you struggle with suicidal ideation, love someone who does, or have lost someone to suicide, you will be helped by reading this book. Thank you, Madeline Vosch. We need you.”

In her own words, here is Madeline Vosch’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Undead:

In 2017, when I was struggling daily with the growing desire to die, I made a playlist. The playlist was thirty-one songs, all by the Mountain Goats, titled simply: stay alive. 

My book, Undead: A Memoir of My Suicide, tells the story of surviving a suicide attempt in 2018. It opens in the immediate aftermath of the attempt, then jumps back in time to tell the story of all the days and hours and years that led up to the attempt. The last part of my book moves to recent years, in which I’ve tried to answer the question of what it means to go on living in a world that is so hostile to so many of us. What do I need to change about myself, what do we need to change about the world, to make this place more livable?

When I was making the playlist to accompany the book, I was tempted to only use Mountain Goats songs. I love the Mountain Goats for many reasons, not least of them being how many songs boil down to some version of, “You don’t have to kill yourself today.” But, I tried to expand out of that and tried to limit the number of Mountain Goats songs on the playlist.

I’ve tried to arrange the songs in this playlist so they follow the general arc of the book: starting with the daze and fog that followed the attempt, tumbling downwards into the darkness that led me there, then, finally, stumbling up toward something like hope, something like a way forward.

A Preface

This Year by the Mountain Goats

In the years and months and days leading up to my suicide attempt, I sang this song like it was a prayer. 

After I tried to kill myself, they took me to a hospital where they watched me night and day. In this locked ward, there was a guitar. You needed a special note from your doctor to be able to play the guitar. The strings could be used to hurt yourself, I learned. We couldn’t be trusted with it. I didn’t have a note, but I have always been good at lying when I need to be. The afternoon shift at the hospital would never let me touch it, but there was a boy on morning shift who handed me the guitar one morning. 

We realized at the same moment there wasn’t a pick. He took a piece of notebook paper, lined and thick, folded it over and over itself until it made a triangle. He covered it in tape, handed it to me like a talisman. 

I could only play the guitar in a soundproof room. This room was where they took other patients when they were having what the staff called breakdowns, when their screaming or shouting was uncontainable by their own body. 

I had just started learning guitar and didn’t know what I was doing, really. On that couch, staring out into a colorless Boston day, I played the only song I knew by heart. I played it again and again, out of tune and rhythmless, all alone in that soundproof room in the locked ward. In the first days after I tried to die, I sat in that room and sang that I was going to make it through this year, as if I could trick myself into believing it. 

Wild Sage by the Mountain Goats

This is a simple story. Someone walks out of a house in the morning, walks along the side of a highway, trips, gets up. Soft, restrained, it is the story of a person on the periphery, a person unnoticed. This, a story of things thrown away, tossed aside, things that still, somehow, in ditches and rubble, grow.

In Corolla by the Mountain Goats

In this song, someone decides, without fanfare or agony, that they are going to kill themselves. It is mostly just the singer and a guitar, tranquil and peaceful. The night I decided I was going to kill myself, I felt a comfort I had never known. This song captures that feeling, walking toward a final peace, looking at the beauty of the world and saying goodbye. Not urgent, not panicked, a soft acceptance.

No one was gonna come and get me, there wasn’t anybody gonna know. Even though I leave a trail of burned things in my wake every single place I go.

This stanza is sung decrescendo, fading softer with each word. The final word, “go,” no more than an exhale, disappearing into the air. 

To Meet You There by Anjimile

The first time I heard this song, I was in an attic in Cambridge. It was mid-April, less than a month before I tried to kill myself. A friend had turned the top floor of her apartment into a makeshift, DIY venue. She hosted bands, readings, karaoke nights. She draped fairy lights over the windows. In the crowd, I watched Anjimilie perform this song, this acknowledgement of the person you’ve been and the person you are, and finding a way forward to be the person you want to be.

Stay Alive by José Gonzáles

After I was released from the psych ward, I spent two weeks in an outpatient program in the heart of Boston. I don’t know how I found this song, but I listened to it on repeat on the bus ride across the city, watching the sun rise over the Charles River. 

Left and Leaving by The Weakerthans

Intertwining longing and resignation, the song takes us across a city, across time, trying to move on. Trying to be the person who is doing the leaving, all the while knowing they are the person who was left. 

Loneliness by MAITA

There is something haunting. Not really a song of loneliness, but a song of profound aloneness. Maita’s lyrics are always striking, and here, paired with the soft, high notes of the chorus, there is person moving through the world all alone, left with a ghost of something that might never have been there at all.

sucks to see you doing better by Valley

Who among us hasn’t been there: still heartbroken over someone and suddenly seeing them in the distance with someone new? The way I used to gasp, the way I used to want to run to the person who broke my heart, tell them everything I thought, everything I felt. This is one of those songs that lets you lean into that feeling, that lets you dance in that feeling. This song is catharsis for the moments when you know you can never actually tell that person the story of your heartbreak.

If you see light by the Mountain Goats

Here, a slant retelling of Frankenstein, the creature hiding, waiting for the villagers to come kill him. In the days after I tried to kill myself, I waited for everyone to see all the things that were wrong with me. I moved across the country, rented a little room in a house, hid from my housemates as much as I could. I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened, or who I had been. I wanted to hide from the world, and waited in terror for the day someone would find out who I really was.

No one knows how to keep secrets round here, they tell everyone, everything, soon as they know, and then where is there left for poor sinners to go?

I’ll believe in anything by Wolf Parade

This, this is something like happy desperation, hopeful desperation. Like the kind of joy and freedom that comes when you’ve finally given up. I wouldn’t ever call this song nihilistic though. Instead, I think this song is saying that there is still something to believe in, even if we don’t know what it is. I can take you where nobody knows you, and maybe that will be where we find something good, but even finding something good there isn’t what matters. It’s the idea that there is a place that actually exists, somewhere, where no one knows you, where you can start over, where people don’t care about the person you used to be. I think in this song, it is the dream of that place that matters more than anything that place might offer.

A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley

I go to a little karaoke night here in Austin that stubbornly only lets people perform indie/punk music. This song is often on the list of the most sung of the year. We call it the fight song. The song for when you want to give up, when you’re breaking, and you need someone to shout alongside you that sometimes shit just sucks. Sometimes you are the worst version of yourself and the only thing to do is to get up tomorrow and try again. This song is an anthem for those moments, to remind you that you can still try even if you failed today. That you can try again tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days that come after that. 

I’m Not Your Hero by Tegan and Sara

A triumph, a triumph for those of us who will never be heroes. A reminder that things that can feel so simple: standing where we are now, standing up at all, these things can be victories, and no one gets to take that from us. No one else might know how much it took for you to be standing wherever you are, or how much it took for you to get up out of bed today. But you know, and you can be proud of how far you’ve come, even if no one else knows where you started.

American Hearts by Piebald

Whether or not you want to be, you’re part of it. You’re part of all of this, this life, this country, this world. This world that can be so beautiful, this world that can be so unlivable.

From all I’ve heard, and all I’ve seen, this place has broken my American heart.

Absolute Lithops Effect by the Mountain Goats

A lithops is a plant that looks like it isn’t alive, like it’s never been a living thing, even as it grows. Lithops are sometimes called living stones. Because of their coloring, their size, their strange split tops, it’s sometimes hard to tell that it’s a plant at all. But there is something so small, growing so slowly it is unnoticeable, growing and changing there in the dirt.

My insides are pink and raw, and it hurts me when I move my jaw, but I am taking tiny steps forward.

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

Madeline Vosch is a writer, a translator, and a professor. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, the Washington Post, and The Rumpus, among others. She was awarded the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award for Nonfiction and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow.

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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Sara Lippmann’s novel Hidden River is a powerful novel of trauma and friendship.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Crisp and unsettling…Readers will admire this gritty slice of life.”

In her own words, here is Sara Lippmann’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Hidden River:

Music plays throughout my novel, Hidden River. While the forward story unfolds over the summer of 2008, its emotional heart is lodged squarely in the mid ‘80s to early ‘90s, when any Gen Xer could tell you: music was life. Our spark plug, our deliverance. We lived at the mercy of the radio, lugged around our battery-operated portable tape decks smug with the technology of dubbing. We waited (and waited) for the DJs to play our songs. A Gen Xer can tell you their first purchased cassette (Foreigner’s 4), their first CD (Pearl Jam’s Ten), their coveted vinyl (The Who’s Tommy), their first heartfelt mixtape (from Robbie C. in 6th grade). Music not only lent shape to feeling, it was a driver, a reason to stand outside the record store in the rain for Kinks tickets, to plaster those Duran Duran pinups on our walls, to stare wide-eyed, slack-jawed into the glare of MTV.

For my narrator, Cass, who is being groomed by her friend Sally’s father, music is a sign and guide from the universe. “Waiting for a Girl Like You” – could it get any clearer? Popular hits are speaking directly to her, messaging her on sex and desire, affirming all that longing and possibility. What she understands, what she misunderstands, all of it, makes her feel less alone.

What we watched, what we heard, what we wore (courtesy of Lex Wexner) flooded the waters of complicity. I don’t merely mean the countless ways we were sexualized and objectified (as we belted out numbers like “Legs,” like “Girls”), but also made to feel adult male attention was normal, if not desirable. Stoned on Led Zeppelin we did not think about Jimmy Page’s 14-year-old girlfriend. Or if we did, if we thought about the swarms of teenage girls dripping on guitar arms, we chalked it all up to rock-n-roll.

And so, nothing fringe, nothing off the back wall here. This list is as mainstream, as omnipresent as it gets. Which is the whole kick. I dedicate it to Cass. To all the Cassandras.

Cassidy by the Grateful Dead

Although my narrator, Cassandra Trout, is named as much for Sweet Mama Cass as the Trojan princess who was disbelieved, Len Sellers, Sally’s father, nicknames her Cassidy after the song written by Bob Weir.

Unlike most of the other songs in this playlist, Weir’s lyrics are not sexual (the song was written about the birth of a friend’s daughter, Cassidy Law, with nods to the death of Neal Cassady of Kerouac and Merry Pranksters fame), and yet, Len anoints Cass with them – Ah, child of countless trees – infusing them with suggestion.

He will take her to the back room of Wonderland, the longstanding Philadelphia headshop (now closed) to scroll through the racks of concert bootlegs and Dead posters; he will take her to South Street to tattoo the lyric on her arm: what you are, what you’re meant to be, and he will take her to a show after graduation, in the parking lot of which he will take from her the one thing he hasn’t yet taken.

It is a song about two certainties: life and death. A song that pulses through Hidden River‘s pages as Len will die and Cass will become stuck in time, unable to free herself from her past trauma, to embrace her own future.

Private Eyes, Hall & Oates

To be at the whims of Philadelphia disc jockeys in these years meant being subjected to a lot of local favorites – the Hooters, Patti LaBelle, Daryl Hall & John Oates. The cheesy claps in this Billboard Top Hit make it feel cheerful, even innocent, but as Len slowly works his hooks into her, so much transpires in watching, waiting for a flicker of recognition, the silent exchange in a glance. The glimmers, the withholding. They’re watching you watching you watching you watching you. Desire, in abeyance. This is how obsession builds.

Panama by Van Halen

We’re talking the glory days of MTV. Eddie Van Halen’s winsome mug, the wild hair and zealous gyrations of David Lee Roth. “Panama,” written purportedly as an exercise in range, to show David Lee Roth could do more than strut among beach bodies singing about “California Girls,” is not really about a car at all. Reach down between my legs, ease the seat back. It is just the kind of blatant doubling inherent to grooming, and Len was adept at serving lines like this, that could pass in public, and vibrate with implication beneath.

Second Hand News by Fleetwood Mac

Speaking of cars, Len’s big hands on the wheel, percuss the dash – Lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff – as he drives Cass home one evening from a playdate with Sally.

Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

Len takes Cass and his daughter, Sally, to the Momentary Lapse of Reason concert tour at Vet Stadium in 1988. He gives them money for beers, for merch. Afterward, he watches in the rearview as the girls try on their new T-shirts. Again, the loadedness of a look. Again, the encouragement to all that adolescent pining. Two long souls swimming in a fish bowl – who hasn’t scrawled that on the brown paper bag covers of their biology textbooks?

Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen

Another artist beloved by Philly’s DJs, Bruce and Len share a passing resemblance: dark, curly, veined in the forearms. “I’m on Fire” might be the obvious choice, but who can forget Courteney Cox being brought up on stage in the video? Before we knew who Cox was, one could believe that she was a nobody plucked from the crowd, discovered in thousands of fans. Cass believes this. Cass believes she was picked by Len, selected, chosen. It makes her feel almost special.

Summer, Highland Falls by Billy Joel

At one point, Cass lays down a mixtape, ostensibly for Sally, but the rule of mixtapes is they’re as much (if not more) about the maker than the receiver. This is one of her curated tracks. It’s either sadness or euphoria.

Gonna Fly Now by Bill Conti

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Rocky soundtrack lands on every Philly athlete’s playlist. Cass wouldn’t call herself an athlete. She is a runner but not a competitor. She becomes a runner because Len is a runner. She remains a runner long after Len is no longer in the picture because running is the one thing she can do. This song lends flight to the flightless. It also happens to be just the right tempo for a few paced miles along the Schuylkill River.

Lithium by Nirvana

The day Senator Heinz’s small plane collides with a helicopter over Merion Elementary, killing everyone on board and two small children in the schoolyard, Cass and her friends hang out in a friend’s basement after last period, as if it’s a day like any other. Only thing, is they’re waiting for word from their friend’s missing little sister. It is April 4, 1991. The basement smells like worn socks. I’m not gonna crack.

Vive la Vida by Coldplay

In June 2008, Cass, at 35, is going nowhere fast. As the novel advances, as she slowly begins to process her trauma, the tethers to her past begin to loosen, to break down, enough for her to start moving forward. The hit of that summer, “Vive la Vida,” is a rallying cry for Cass to start living, which leads to her booking plane tickets to Sally’s extravagant wedding in late August.

Forever by Chris Brown

Abuse allegations against Brown would arise in 2009. In the summer of 2008 this song played rent free in our heads. Undoubtedly, it would’ve been cued up at Sally’s London wedding. It would have brought the whole party to their drunken feet. Once his abuse becomes known, does it stop anyone from listening? We know the answer to that.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Sara Lippmann’s playlist for her novel Lech

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

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the novels Hidden River and Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, The Chicago Review of Books, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible (SUNY Press). She received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School, and has been teaching creative writing for over 20 years to people of all ages. She is a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. You can visit her online at saralippmann.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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Alexa Yasemin Brahme’s novel Good News is a striking debut that thoughtfully explores the confluence of youth, art, and ambition.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Brahme’s appealing voice-driven debut finds Turkish art student Maggie Arif navigating a love triangle in New York City while struggling to complete an ambitious painting . . . Brahme’s character work is top notch.”

In her own words, here is Alexa Yasemin Brahme’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Good News:

While Good News mainly focuses on visual art, every facet of the art world has influenced the novel, and music is no exception. Though the main character is a painter, she gets her name from a fictional musician. Music plays in a few scenes to signify belonging and estrangement, tenderness and seduction. Specific songs even came to mind while crafting certain scenes and characters. What follows is an eclectic playlist that could make you cry or dance or say “what the fuck?” As with all good things, it ends with Cher.

Sensiz Yaşayamam by Ayla Dikmen

I absolutely had to include a dramatic Turkish ballad about lost love. Sensiz Yaşayamam translates to, “I cannot live without you,” and that is the exact kind of song that reduces Maggie’s mother to tears. In the novel, the main character Maggie, whose real name is Müjde, is named after one of these classic, beautiful Turkish singers who specialize in High Drama: I cannot live without you, your presence is warmer than the sun, my heart is empty, come back before my heart stops beating for you, etc. I love Turks. Long live their yearning.

Cherry, Cherry by Neil Diamond

There’s a scene early in the novel in which Maggie is in the car with her boyfriend Rob, and a very American song comes on the radio. Maggie can recognize that the song is famous but could never be counted on to know its name or the artist. Americans (Rob included), seem to know the words to this artist’s every song. Meanwhile, Maggie thinks Neil Diamond and Willie Nelson are the same person.

Big Time Sensuality by Björk

I say this with love and respect: I adore a freak. And I adore Björk! She is only listening to herself and her inner voice. This is something Maggie strives to do throughout the novel, and something the Artist (also a freak, a character who has denounced her name and simply goes by “the Artist”) does effortlessly. People may not understand the Artist or her antics, but they certainly respond to her. And the lyrics of this song feel apt for any artist who is trying to make it in their field: “It takes courage to enjoy it.”

Not to give anything away, but it’s moving to think of Maggie and the Artist when I hear the line, “Something huge is coming up/and we’re both included.”

Mujeriego by Ryan Castro

If Maggie’s ex-boyfriend Rakib had a theme song, it would be this. The lyrics loosely translate to, “I’m a womanizer, I can’t deny it, I steal a woman and say ciao, then go steal another.” But the song is so hot and fun that you just have to dance? Criminal, Ryan Castro. Rakib is a sexy, cruel mess who appears in the novel to ruin Maggie’s life. A runner-up theme song for him was Pimping All Over the World by Ludacris, which he would think was cool but is obviously insane.

Something About Us by Daft Punk

Speaking of Rakib… There’s something about him! There’s something about him with Maggie! “It may not be the right time, I might not be the right one. But there’s something about us I want to say, ’cause there’s something between us anyway.” Terrible that this is the case, considering Maggie is seriously dating Rob when Rakib pops back up. But when there’s “something about us,” it’s terrible to ignore.

Blue by Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, the queen of sadness. This whole album could kill a person. I thought of it often while writing Maggie in the depths of her despair. There’s a scene when Maggie and Rob are going to sleep together, and Maggie says to Rob, “You’re blue,” cherishing the look of his face in the dark. She means literally, in the unlit room his skin is blue-ish. But she’s thinking of Joni. You’re blue, this is ruined, I’m sad, you’re sad, and it’s the blue kind of sad. Sadness forever. Brutal.

Águas de Março (Live) by Stan Getz & João Gilberto

Rob plays this song in an ultimate act of emotional warfare against Maggie toward the end of the novel. The two are growing apart, though neither can correctly pinpoint the reason why. In an attempt at tenderness, Rob plays this song in their apartment because it evokes their first years of dating, when things were simple and beautiful and easy. At least, that’s what it evokes for Rob. For Maggie, the song makes her think of the first time she’d ever heard it. She was nineteen, in her early days in New York—single, exploring herself and the city and men. She was standing at the precipice of her life, everything about to begin.

Memory Lane by Minnie Riperton & O Günler by Ferdi Özbeğen

Both of these songs are absolute perfection and are about those days. Those days in the past that are ossified in amber, inaccessible and beautiful and painfully distant. Minnie writes the American version and Ferdi writes the Turkish version and their vibes are…different. Memory Lane is such a beautiful song. She’s looking at a photograph and appreciating the beauty and love of a former flame. It’s not that sad and it’s a groove. Ferdi? That man may as well be weeping on the record.  He sings, “My whole lifetime got taken away from me just for the one day of happiness I had.” That’s the High Drama I mentioned earlier. I thought of both these songs when Maggie looks at a photograph of her and Rob and takes a bit of her own trip down memory lane.

Believe by Cher

Do you believe in life after love?

I do. Maggie does. Listen to this after finishing the book for the feeling that all worked out the way it was supposed to. Reject despair! There is life after love!

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

Alexa Yasemin Brahme is a writer from southern California. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert J. Dau PEN Award, and Best of the Net. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is a bookseller at Books Are Magic. Good News is her first novel.

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