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

Sarai Walker’s novel Furious Violet is a propulsive literary thriller imbued with social commentary.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“With this brilliantly bonkers, fast-paced social critique of, well, everything from feminist literary theory to true crime, with jabs at diet culture and academia sprinkled in, Walker once again proves that she’s among a select few authors who have brought Margaret Atwood’s complex edge into the 21st century….her exploration of what motherhood means today and her bold contributions to the discourse on the societal value of peri- and post-menopausal women make this the perfect next read for those who found the wildness of Miranda July’s All Fours compelling, along with fans of Mona Awad’s ‘Bunny’ horror novels.”

In her own words, here is Sarai Walker’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Furious Violet:

Furious Violet, my third novel, is a literary thriller about a 49-year-old true crime writer named Violet West Shelley, who goes by West. Her mother was a Sylvia Plath-like poet who became a feminist icon after her tragic death. The novel mixes these elements of West’s life, the low-brow world of true crime and the high-brow sphere of her mother’s poetry, which was a lot of fun to write. West narrates the story, and she can be cynical and snarky and also funny, but at the same time, she is being hunted by a stalker who claims she’s their mother (she doesn’t have children), so it’s scary as well. Like me, West was born in the 1970s, but is a child of the 80s, and became an adult in the 90s. Gen X nostalgia, and the angst of middle-age (particularly for a perimenopausal woman), are important parts of the novel.

When I was writing Furious Violet, I made two different playlists—one with instrumental music that I would often listen to as I worked (I usually find vocals to be too distracting while I’m writing), and then another playlist of songs with vocals that helped me channel a certain mood or era, which I would listen to when I was just thinking about the novel. Music is really important to me, but I usually don’t share what I’m listening to, because I’m not a snob when it comes to music (unlike with books) and I just listen to whatever I want, even if other people think it’s garbage. The songs in my playlist to follow—none of them garbage!—are drawn from the two playlists.

“Violet,” Hole

I really didn’t have a choice but to begin my playlist with this song. My main character’s name is Violet, although she goes by her middle name, West. The novel takes its title from a fictional poem called “Furious Violet,” and as in the song, violet is used to describe the sky, but I go on to use it in other, more disturbing ways. Hole’s quintessential 90s song is full of feminine fury and rage, which makes it a perfect fit for my novel, and I also love that it plays with the connection between violet and violent.

“Killing Me Softly With His Song,” Roberta Flack

The mood of this song was really influential to me early on, as I was trying to write my main character into existence. I didn’t pay attention to the lyrics, it was just the whole melancholy vibe that captured something important about West for me. On the surface, she can be jaded and tough, she lives off fast food and Mountain Dew and Advil, and she can be fearless, venturing into prisons and interviewing serial killers, but deep down she carries around pain over her mother’s early death and her father’s abandonment. There’s a tender place inside her that she doesn’t let many people see, and listening to this song helped me channel that.

“Karma Police,” Radiohead

This is another track with a melancholy vibe, a mood I really love in music and films in particular.  I listened to this song a lot early on, along with the previous one, which helped me connect with West. Radiohead is an essential Gen X band, and their 90s songs in particular were influential to me as I wrote this novel about a perimenopausal woman who is reflecting on growing older.  

“Hedonism,” Skunk Anansie

I have loved this song, another delightfully melancholy track, since it was released in 1997, and I think it deserves to be more widely known. West became an adult in the 90s, like me, and so this decade is an important anchor point in her life. Listening to songs like this helped me to channel the 90s instantly while writing, and that was helpful for me as I developed this character.

“I’m Not in Love,” Tori Amos

This remake of the 10cc song is from Strange Little Girls, Amos’s album covering songs by men, which is a brilliant concept, executed to perfection. This track is my favorite. Not only is the music effectively moody, but I respect how Amos puts a female spin on these male lyrics. In my novel, West, as a crime writer, has to navigate the male-dominated field of law enforcement to do her job, and she’s in regular contact with violent men, including serial killers. I’m very much interested in how female voices and perspectives can be subversive in male spaces.

“Rocky Mountain High,” John Denver

I knew I wanted to set this novel in the Mountain West. I grew up (mostly) in Utah, and while some shorter sections of Furious Violet are set there, Utah has too much cultural baggage to make a good setting for the main action of the novel. I chose Colorado as a setting, where my dad and his family are from. John Denver’s music was the soundtrack to my early childhood in many ways. As a kid, we went camping a lot in the summer, and traveled to places like Yellowstone; my parents would play John Denver’s music on 8-track tapes and so whenever I hear it now, I think of those times. When I went on a research trip to Colorado for Furious Violet, I played his music in the car for fun and nostalgia.

“Halloween,” John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies

This is a 2018 remix of the original Halloween theme song, made for the reboot of the franchise. West makes references to horror movies in the novel, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Shining. I love listening to film soundtracks while writing, and when I came across this particular track, I was surprised to find myself liking it. It’s a cool “pop horror” tune that manages to convey a sense of fear and foreboding, while also being a little bit beautiful.

“Doom Beach,” Mark Bradshaw

I often use film scores to channel a mood while writing. Mark Bradshaw’s soundtrack for Top of the Lake: China Girl is eerie as hell, and also gorgeous. This is just one of the tracks from this album that I would listen to when writing some of the scarier scenes in the novel.

“Giver,” K. Flay

My favorite genre of music is alternative. In the novel, West is listening to alt-rock via satellite radio during a particularly pivotal scene. While I don’t specify the song, this is one I listened to a lot while working on the novel. It’s very female and punchy and hypnotic. I love it.

“Only the Young,” Journey

As a crime writer and wanderer at heart, West spends a lot of time on the road, which is her true home. I’m an unabashed fan of 80s rock bands like Journey, Foreigner, Van Halen. I love to blast this song on road trips, and I can imagine West doing so as well while driving on the highway out in the middle of nowhere. It’s pure, heart-pumping 80s nostalgia for people of a certain age. 

“Live to Tell,” Madonna

Speaking of 80s nostalgia, I put this song into my rotation recently, just coincidentally, when early reviews of the novel were starting to come in and I began doing pre-publication interviews. As I listened to it, I realized just how perfect the idea of living to tell is for Furious Violet, on so many levels. I won’t explain further to avoid spoilers, but this track is the ideal way to end the novel’s playlist.

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

Sarai Walker is the author of Furious Violet, The Cherry Robbers and Dietland, which was adapted as a television series for AMC. Her work has been published in more than a dozen countries.

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

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

Lizzie Buehler’s novel The Obsessed is a thought-provoking and immersive debut.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A thought-provoking [meditation] on romantic love, one-sided relationships, and academia. . . Buehler offers intriguing insights into the many ways parasocial relationships take shape—not only with celebrities, but also strangers, fictional characters, and even idealized lovers. Fans of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot will find much of interest.”

In her own words, here is Lizzie Buehler’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Obsessed:

Sadly I’m not the kind of writer who can listen to music while working (I wish I were—I’ve tried!), but that doesn’t mean that music is disconnected from my writing process. I write to explore the texture of different emotions, and listening to music is another way to access those textures.

I wrote The Obsessed in my twenties, and now that it’s about to come out, I’m in my early thirties. When I was writing the book, I felt like it was expressing some sort of truth about the struggle to understand oneself in young adulthood—I was channeling all my uncertainty about myself into Astrid’s character. But now that I’m a bit older and have a better sense of what I want and where I am going, I feel like an older sister looking at Astrid, rather than her peer. When I was writing the book, I knew that Astrid overinterpreted the symbolism of events in her life, but she and I were both clouded enough by the pain and ecstasy of emotion to understand just how transient her feelings are. (What can I say? Astrid is a late bloomer after my own heart.)

Here are some songs that I listened to a lot during the years I was writing The Obsessed. They’re mostly dramatic proclamations of emotion, and I can imagine Astrid walking around Cambridge while listening to them. These songs encapsulate a lot of Astrid’s angst—her feeling that what she’s experiencing is incomparably dramatic and consequential, when really, everything is going to turn out okay. She’s alternating between feeling like the saddest girl in the world, like no one else has ever felt the way she does (except the characters of her favorite books!), and savoring the intensity of her emotions, enjoying how it makes her feel like a character in her own novel.

Paper Bag, by Fiona Apple

If Astrid got another tattoo, I think it would be of this lyric from “Paper Bag”:

He said “it’s all in your head”
And I said “so’s everything” but he didn’t get it

This is the ultimate song about limerence and gets at the spiritual undercurrent of my novel.

Sapokanikan, by Joanna Newsom

The first time I listened to this song, I felt like I was witness to someone unlocking the answers to all the universe’s questions. It feels profound and timeless and makes me happy to be a part of the grandness of humanity.

Peach Plum Pear, by Joanna Newsom

The first time I listened to this song, I cried. I also cried the second and third and fourth time I listened to it. I think that at least half of people who hear “Peach Plum Pear” will be unable to get past Newsom’s unique voice, which I know is controversial, but if you do, then you’ll get to hear a perfect encapsulation of bittersweetness and nostalgia in musical form. This song makes me feel like an old man or woman looking back on the events of my life.

Deadly Valentine, by Charlotte Gainsbourg
Sylvia Says, by Charlotte Gainsbourg

Sexy French electro-pop that makes you feel powerful in your sadness, by Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter! (Speaking of Serge Gainsbourg, “Bonnie and Clyde” is another song I love and an amazing piece of history and literature and music combined.)

The Magic, by Joan as Police Woman

Less electronic, less French, but evocative of the same sense of wounded power as the Charlotte Gainsbourg songs.

Oh to Be in Love, by Kate Bush

I remember going for long walks during the early weeks of lockdown in 2020, listening to the entirety of Kate Bush’s discography. This is one of my favorites (sung in another possibly-controversial voice that I love).

Always Forever, by Cults

Another sad-girl song that says a lot in its simplicity. I taught myself how to play this on the piano at one point and would sing along. I’m sure my rendition sounded a lot worse than the original, but it was fun!

Beautiful Rivers and Mountains, by Shin Joong Hyun and the Men

I feel bad for not including more non-English-language music in this playlist, because the world is so big and sticking to English is so self-limiting! Astrid knows this all too well. Anyway, this is super cool psychedelic rock from the 1970s in protest of the military dictator Park Chung Hee. After the song came out, the police arrested Shin and cut his long hair, because long hair was illegal for men under the dictatorship.  

Stand Up, by Kim Kwang-seok

A beautiful song of gentle resilience by perhaps the most beloved Korean folk singer.

Мой калашников, by Face

This song has nothing to do, tonally or emotionally, with the rest of the playlist (it’s Russian rap about machine guns), but I thought it would be unfair to leave it out because it’s actually mentioned in The Obsessed. Astrid loves languages, she loves listening to sounds that don’t exist in English, and she doesn’t care if the lyrics are incomprehensible to her. Listening to trashy pop music in languages she doesn’t speak allows her to envision an alternate universe where she is from the same place as the song. This kind of music allows her to daydream in the writerly and self-narrativizing manner that she loves most.

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

Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist (winner of the CWA Dagger for crime fiction in translation), Art on Fire, and Table for One by Yun Ko-eun, and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Harvard and Princeton. The Obsessed is her debut novel.

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

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

Chloe Lauter’s novel The Flayed Man is as moving as it is unsettling, an impressive literary horror debut.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“In this debut, Lauter has crafted a genuinely frightening book with emotional depth. Readers of complex fiction with a gritty sensibility such as Andy Davidson’s In the Valley of the Sun or Hailey Piper’s strong, complex women characters will love this book.”

In her own words, here is Chloe Lauter’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Flayed Man:

My novel The Flayed Man is a monster story in a literal sense—the main character will turn into a gruesome, violent creature if she fails to regularly consume blood—but also in the way the trauma-driven, codependent relationship she has with her mother turns their interactions monstrous. I’m always looking for music that embodies the experience I hope the book provides: fast-paced, immersive, emotionally intense.

“Vampires” by S

The book’s epigraph is lyrics from this song so of course I had to include it. In charting a post-break up malaise it expands on the idea of what a vampire might be: someone who takes without care for the person they’re taking from.

“Soft Atrocity” by rook&nomie

God I love this song. I love everything rook&nomie puts out honestly but this song has always been my favorite. It opens with a feral howl followed by “was that okay?” which is the perfect example of the paradox it seems to be playing with: wanting to be soft, but knowing even your self-love has to be violent in order to protect you.

“Fast Car” by Xiu Xiu

I adore the original of course, but there’s something about this cover’s stripped-back instrumentation and the fragile vulnerability of the vocal delivery, like they might be rushing to get the words out before someone stops them.

“More for Me” by Tegan and Sara

Patron saints of lesbian pop! I listened to their 2000 album This Business of Art on repeat while I was working on the book. I love the way this song moves seamlessly between acerbic bite and bald desperation for a bigger life.

“Nothing Feels Natural” by Priests

This is a song that’s best heard live. The vocals take on a rougher, wilder edge that turns it into a manifesto for total transformation. I love the repeated line “No it’s not for anyone / and I can’t wait until it’s done.”

“Adore” by Savages

This song has such emotional depth, from the hypnotic vocals to the instrumental build at the end as Jehnny Beth repeats, “I adore life… do you adore life… I adore life…”. Haunting.

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

Chloe Lauter is an entertainment publicist in Los Angeles.

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

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

Rowan Beaird’s novel Tenderness is both propulsive and moving, a book both literary and thrilling.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“A mystery from the first page to the last…The family’s secrets threaten to spill over as anticipation builds, and the result is a novel that feels like a true event, written with snappy prose and a pace that stretches out the mystery but never feels too slow. This book is great for readers who love complicated entanglements and secrets galore”

In her own words, here is Rowan Beaird’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Tenderness:

I received my first mixtape when I was 14. It was from a boy named Max who had a lip ring and the large, wet eyes of a deer, and I fell in love. Not with Max (sorry, Max!), but with the idea of curating a series of songs, provoking emotion, sending a letter of major and minor keys. Since then, I’ve made them obsessively. I make playlists for friends, family, moods, parties, road trips, and of course, I make them for my books. Nothing gets me into the world of a project faster than music.

My sophomore novel, Tenderness, takes place in 1976 over the course of a wedding weekend on a remote island off the coast of Virginia. It revolves around three main characters: the bride, Shay, who’s recently gotten out of a cult; her brother, William; and her best friend from college, Joel, who’s very much in love with her (and is also not the groom). I never thought I’d write historical fiction, but somehow, both of my books have taken place in decades I’ve never lived through, and a crucial part of my research has been focused on the music of the time. Discovering artists and listening to old favorites, deciding which records my characters would buy and which songs they’d change stations over on the radio. This playlist is Tenderness, all two-hundred ninety odd pages of it, distilled into ten tracks.

“Seabird” by Alessi Brothers

Tenderness is very much a book about siblings—William and Shay, a brother and sister, are at its heart—and so I thought it was fitting to start with a song from two brothers. This is a song you’d listen to on a sailboat, with the sun in your eyes. It’s very ’70s, in really the least cool way possible, with that high-pitched electronic keyboard in the background, and it’s a song that can be easy to dismiss if it’s not played loud enough. But when you dial up the volume, there’s a beautiful sadness to it. That plea to “fly home” breaks my heart.

“Nobody Knows” by Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir

I abide by the High Fidelity rule that song two on any mix has to kick it up a notch, and so here we have one of my favorites: “Nobody Knows.” T.L Barrett is a Pentecostal preacher from the South Side of Chicago who wrote and recorded this album in the early 1970s with his church’s youth choir. I love songs like this, where you can somehow feel and hear the room you’re in. I know nothing technical about how you record music, but I know when a track has that sort of texture. Tenderness is in large part about faith—the characters are all adrift, desperate to find purpose, community, love—and for research, I went to a handful of church services across Chicago. No choir sounded as good as this.

“Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex

This was my sister’s first dance song at her wedding. The wedding in Tenderness, planned mostly by the groom Andrew and his WASP-y, east coast family, is not cool enough to have this playing during the reception, but the mood of this song is the mood of the book. There’s a darkness and a lightness to it, somehow both melancholic and triumphant.

“Golden Years” by David Bowie

For a book about a wedding, I felt like I needed a song on this playlist that would actually get people on the dance floor. I needed to write party scenes, where people were having too many drinks and saying the wrong things. In the book, the song that gets people dancing is “Crocodile Rock,” but I could not bring myself to put a song that I actively dislike on any playlist of mine.

“Something on Your Mind” by Karen Dalton

This is a song for Shay. In the original draft, I only wrote one scene from her perspective; for a book that’s very much about whether or not we can ever know the people we love, I wanted the structure of it to explore whether you as the reader could know her only through the eyes of two men who love her. It turns out, you couldn’t. Every wonderful reader I had asked for more scenes with her, and so I felt like I got to know her better with each draft. This song unlocked a part of her character for me. The lyrics “You can’t stop crying/You haven’t got a thing to say/You feel you want to run away/There’s no use trying anyway” conjured this image of her, alone in her apartment watching Donahue, that ended up appearing as a critical scene in the book.

“Road” by Nick Drake

In Tenderness, the character of William is deeply connected to music—he’s wearing a Stooges shirt when you first meet him, he’s leaving records at his great aunt’s house, he’s playing his sister a Nick Drake song on the telephone. I think a tremendous amount about the music my characters love; it helps me understand who they are, and this song helped me find William’s heart. He’s just trying to find his road.

“Everybody’s Gotta Live” by Love

Love should be so much more famous than they are. This song is from their final album, when it was really just Arthur Lee left standing, and after this, his life was overcome with wave after wave of tragedy. My sister sent me this song during the pandemic, and I remember lying on my bed, listening to it and crying. Sometimes the simplest of lyrics hit you the hardest—something I always try to remember when writing.

“I’ve Been Loving You too Long” by Aretha Franklin

This is a song for Joel. With Tenderness, I really wanted to write a love story—something I’d been terrified to attempt for many years, worried I wouldn’t be up to the task (you, potential reader, can be the judge of whether or not I succeeded). Joel, flaws and all, is my lovesick hero, and I know he’d hear this song at a bar late at night and feel it deep in his soul.

“Atlantis” by Donovan

It’s possible that certain people can’t divorce this song from the scene where Joe Pesci loses his shit in Goodfellas. I am not one of those people. I first discovered this song as a teenager, and I remember when Donovan first starts talking a few seconds in, I thought, “What is this?!” Then there’s the odd, frail way he says “Hail, Atlantis!” at the 1:47 mark, right before the drums kick in and it suddenly becomes incredible. It’s a song that should not work, but it does work, and inspired a metaphor I use in the final chapters of Tenderness.

“Land”

Horses came out the year before Tenderness is set, and I was lucky enough to hear Patti Smith perform during the album’s 50th anniversary tour last year. There’s no one like Patti Smith. She’s a singular artist, a singular human. What she does with this album—it’s poetry, but it’s got hooks. That’s what I aspire to with everything that I write. Just be like Patti Smith. How hard can it be, right?

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

Rowan Beaird’s fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. She is the author of the novels The Divorcées and Tenderness.

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

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

Emmalea Russo’s novel The Moon Papers is one of the year’s most thought-provoking novels.

Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:

“A surprising science fiction novel . . . beguiling.”

In her own words, here is Emmalea Russo’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Moon Papers:

The Moon Papers is a summer novel. It opens in June and closes in late August. As the hot and delirious days pass, we move closer and closer to the launch of a mysterious new luminary into Earth’s atmosphere: Moon2. A kind of momentum builds. Things fall apart. Minds melt. The book moves between the east and west coasts, digital mischief, online forums, conspiracy theories, bat infestations, surveillance mechanisms, varieties of art- and love- making, and neon green trance-inducing driving scenes. Included in this playlist are songs I was listening to while drafting The Moon Papers, as well as some lunar summer tunes the book evokes….

Spinning Away by Brian Eno and John Cale

This song feels space-age-retro, like The Moon Papers. Nauseating and exciting, it’s about drawing the stars—spinning away and getting lost in the image, constellations. At the heart of the novel is Vesta Furio: a painter. She infiltrates a mysterious retro-futurist arts collective in the Mojave Desert, painting what she sees as she spins away.

Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

In the book, you won’t find much of the sort of domestic bliss that this song evokes, but you will find plenty of houses and moments of other sorts of bliss. And a few cats in the yard.

Losing You by Solange

Sad but you can’t help but dance. There’s a particularly complicated marriage at the center of the book—filled with loss, distance, and strangely unshakeable closeness.

Cruel Summer by Ace of Base

A particularly cruel, cruel, cruel summer.

Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil

Sirens are dangerous figures, lady beasts who lure men to their deaths with beautiful voices. There’s a haunting-erotic scene in David Lynch’s incendiary Lost Highway that utilizes this song to great effect. There is a bit of this song in Vesta, I suspect.

Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey

No one makes summertime sadness groovier than Lana. As you will see, The Moon Papers is a book of heatwave sorrows and disappearances and these lyrics could be its tagline: “kiss me hard before you go / summertime sadness.”

Man on the Moon by R.E.M.

I was thinking and reading a lot about the moon landing and the atmosphere of the late 60s while writing the novel, and this song seems to capture it all. If you believe…they put a man on the moon, man on the moon….(spoiler: Lars, from The Moon Papers, does not…)

Wave of Mutilation by The Pixies

I heard The Pixies play while I was working on the book, and this short song is pure magic—oceanic, bizarre, happy, very dark, lunar. In my memory, this song reinvigorated me and provided the burst of editing energy I needed to push the book towards completion.

Broken Road by Kanye West

I remember listening to this song over and over again while revising the book. Finding and losing home, searching for some impossible Source.

Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill

Another one of those songs I listened to on repeat while writing the book. Its vibe must be built into the pages—present, somehow, in Lars’s mystical bus rides into NYC.

The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen

FATE!!!! dreamy, violent, and raucous. This could be the only song on the playlist.

Shape of My Heart by Backstreet Boys

This song came on while I was in an antique store down the shore having a revelation about the antiques that Velour Bellmer, one of the main characters in the book, collects. A catchy and vulnerable little song that I loved as a teen and kinda still do: “Now let me show you the shape of my heart…” Its boyband energy is likely baked into the weird yet innocent relationship between Velour and the youthful and dreamy bat expert, Radko.

Feel Flows by The Beach Boys

Maybe the trippiest song of all time:

“Unbending, never-ending tablets of time
Record all the yearning
Unfearing, all-appearing message divine
Eases the burning”

People record each other in The Moon Papers. I was thinking about surveillance and mystical vision. What is the difference? What kinds of relation do we miss out on when we’re recording ourselves and each other all the time? This song captures another way of registering the moment—tablets of time recording the yearning hours as they dissolve to reveal some divine, untranslatable message.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Emmalea Russo’s music playlist for her novel Vivienne

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

Emmalea Russo is the author of Vivienne, Confetti, Wave Archive, and G. She lives in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

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

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

Laura Kalpakian’s memoir Undesirable is a moving and profound exploration of her brother’s undesirable military discharge during the Vietnam War, her father’s attempts to change that, and the long-lasting effects of war on both combatants and their families.

Paula Becker wrote of the book:

“Undesirable is a poignant examination of duty: the author’s father’s to his son, her brother’s to his country, society’s to those who serve, and her own obligation to her father’s memory. This book reminds a new generation that wars fought far away still exact bitter collateral damage from everyone they touch back home.”

In her own words, here is Laura Kalpakian’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice:

In late August 1970, my twenty-year old brother, Private Doug Johnson, boarded a plane in Vietnam bound for McChord AFB in Washington. He flew under guard because he had accepted an Undesirable Discharge in lieu of a second court-martial for going AWOL and sleeping on duty. The Undesirable denied him any veteran’s benefits. Thus, he had nothing to show for his fourteen months in Nam, nada, unless you count the dead man’s sandal that he clutched when he got off the plane where his father awaited him on the tarmac. His father, on learning the truth of Doug’s actual experience in Vietnam, was convinced the Undesirable was undeserved and, more than that, unjust. He set out to get it changed to an Honorable or a Medical.

Fifty years after these events I found in my basement a cache of documents that had not seen light since 1973. Hundreds of pages chronicled my father’s three-year battle with the Army. I read, re-read, pondered these papers, discovering in the process that the Army had covered up an egregious wrong perpetrated against my brother. Doug Johnson was once a promising musician, charming, attractive to women. He returned from Vietnam shattered physically, mentally, emotionally, still suffering from bouts of malaria, hepatitis, dysentery and jungle rot, and he was a drug addict daily shooting heroin and speed. He spent decades floundering amid addiction, alcoholism, PTSD, and mental illness, wreaking sadness and anger among those who most loved him.

As I fashioned these documents into a book, the music of that era played nonstop in my head, often intruding on the narrative. However, I could not use the lyrics on the page without expensive permissions. Fine. Lyrics alone are insufficient. You need the roll and thunder of the actual instruments, the plaintive melodies, the high-spirited hilarity and the doleful drum riffs, the youthful harmonies, the anthemic insistence. I created playlists. Each of the four sections of Undesirable has a playlist, songs illuminating the emotional, historical and thematic content of the book, primarily music of that era.

PART I PLAYLIST

Reflects the elegiac quality of these first chapters, laying out the essential tragedy of my brother’s life and my father’s efforts to save them both from despair. The songs are of the folk-rock variety, wistfully, poetically asking questions without trying or daring to provide answers.

Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag
Country Joe & the Fish

This is a whoopee-cushion of a song, as in, Whoopee, this war is totally fucked up! Here comes the Cong! Bend over, kiss your ass goodbye! I imagine this playing in the ether as my nineteen-year-old brother walked into the recruiting station in January 1969 after his parents found out he had stupidly dropped a class at the community college and made himself ripe for the draft. Big family fight ensued. Pissed off, Doug enlisted. Next stop is Vietnam!

Draft Morning
The Byrds

The Byrds were a seminal SoCal folk-rock group who broke off (evolved and devolved) into other notable groups. Here their harmonic voices and the gentle guitar work are framed with lyrics about learning to kill, and blended with warlike sound effects. Battle-flare music oozes, inevitably into “Taps,” the dirge played for more than 58,000 men whose names are on the granite wall in DC. The average age of soldiers in Vietnam was nineteen.

For What It’s Worth
Buffalo Springfield

This slow, metronomic song embodied the central question of that era for that generation: What the hell is happening here? Who is that man with the gun over there? And what can/will he do to me? (We, that is, my generation, would learn the answer to this question in May 1970 at Kent State.) Ironically, the song itself arose out of a civic disturbance at the Pandora’s Box nightclub on Sunset Boulevard in 1966. Never mind. The song reeks of both hope and fear.

[Four Dead in] Ohio
Crosby Stills, Nash & Young

Speaking of the man with the gun over there: on May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot and killed four antiwar protesters at Kent State in Ohio. Unthinkable photos of young people, lying dead on the ground, bleeding out, horrified everyone. Within mere weeks, CSN&Y created and recorded this solemn anthem, and it blared from radios. The song is both remembrance and preview. On May 15 city police and state highway patrolmen opened fire, blasted a dorm at Jackson State in Mississippi, killing two, wounding four. To me this CSN&Y live recording is more powerful than the polished studio version that played on the radio. The thumping insistence on the dead is heartbreaking to this day.

My Back Pages
The Byrds

This wistful song about being “so much older then…” speaks to me of loss perceived too late. Implicit in the rhyme scheme, the tenor voices, the harmonies is the sadness of young men in helmets, newly disillusioned. The back pages of my book Undesirable include a timeline of these brutal years, 1969 to 1973.

Turn! Turn! Turn!
The Byrds

The Byrds created this polished version of a song that originated with the legendary folk singer, Pete Seeger (1919 –2014). Pete artfully adapted Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1 –8 evoking the cyclical nature of life, any life. “A time to love, a time to hate, a time of war, a time of peace…” It becomes an antiwar anthem with the addition at the end, “I swear it’s not too late….”

Where Have all the Flowers Gone
Peter, Paul and Mary

Again, a cyclical song originating with Pete Seeger. I prefer this version with a multi-mix of guitar and harmonics, and textured volumes that underscore the thematic sadness. Mary’s sparkling soprano asks where have all the young girls gone, gone for husbands… But there are no weddings in these lyrics. Indeed, her sharp retort, “gone for soldiers, every one” stings like an indictment. The soldiers gone to graveyards, the women widowed, the orphaned children putting flowers on the graves of their lost fathers. The persistent refrain, the question, “When will they ever learn,” turns sadness into protest.

PART II PLAYLIST

Part II of Undesirable is not elegiac. These songs are not wistful, they’re insistent, angry. Part II begins to marshal the evidence, to answer the questions posed in the narrative (and the songs) of Part I. Doug’s letters and testimony reveal the truth of his time in Vietnam and his crumbling psyche. These songs played on the radio stateside, and judging from Vietnam vets’ social postings, they played in the hearts and minds of men in the warzone as well.

Can’t Find My Way Home
Blind Faith

This song rang in my head and heart from the time I brought the documents up, out of the basement. So much so that originally I planned to call the book “Can’t Find My Way Home.” The wail, the plea spoke to me of my brother’s many drugged-up AWOLs, adrift in warzones, wasted, lost, wandering, seeking some ephemeral path home which, in truth, and though he returned to California, he never quite found.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place
The Animals

The “We” of “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” includes the narrator and a girl who needs convincing to escape a dead-end town as if their lives depended on it. For men like my brother, soldiers in Nam, their lives did depend on it. For them, the “We” was a brotherhood of urgency, men who in Doug’s words were “scared shitless.” “If it’s last thing we ever do…” And for many it was the last thing.

Nowhere to Run
Martha and the Vandellas

The song itself describes obsessive love (or obsessive stalking). However, the chorus, the title, the refrain effectively describe incidents from my brother’s testimony at a hearing with the Army’s Inspector General in December 1970. Doug recounts his experience in the jungle, the long grass, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, with Vietcong on the ground nearby, and American helicopters overhead, gunners strafing the grass. (Let it be noted here that Martha’s brother served in Vietnam.)

Fortunate Son
Creedence Clearwater Revival

My brother loved CCR, so much so that he nicknamed his girlfriend after their song, “Suzie Q.” In the late sixties, CCR’s swamp-rock melodies saturated the airwaves. “Fortunate Son” pulses with hard-driving anger, testosterone rage. The refrain, insisting on everything the singer is not (“It ain’t me. It ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaire’s son…”) actually tells us who he is: some poor bastard, on point, humping through the malarial jungles, watching out for punji sticks and booby traps; he’s dirty, sweat-soaked, shooting up cocktails of speed and opium just to get through till sunset and still be alive. In short, Doug Johnson.

PART III PLAYLIST

Part III covers the events of May–August 1970 that led to Doug’s accepting the Undesirable discharge. Doug was a mere twenty days away from DEROS [Date of Estimated Return from Overseas] when Nixon finally admitted to invading Cambodia. Time Magazine ran a five-page spread of military preparations. A stringer for Time Magazine snapped a photograph of Doug and ten other hapless grunts just as they were ordered into a helicopter for the fight. (Photo from the May 25^th 1970 issue is on the cover of my book.) That’s how Doug’s parents knew he’d been sent to Cambodia. That summer his parents lived in a cauldron of grief and fear while they battled the Army for word of their son because Doug went AWOL in Cambodia and vanished into a vacuum of silence.

Teach Your Children
Crosby Stills, Nash & Young

This poignant ballad from the summer of 1970 suggests—doesn’t promise, but certainly hopes—that “their hell will slowly go by,” that love will sustain parents and their children. The generational suffering, historically assured, is softened here, served with gently twanging guitars. For my brother and my parents, no song could be more apt. “Teach Your Children” could serve as a sad canopy to the themes of my book, the love of a father for his errant son.

Eight Miles High
The Byrds

Back to the Byrds, but in “Eight Miles High” their wistful and plaintive qualities are supplanted by harsh, intricate guitarwork and druggy lyrics that promise great highs and a bunch of really scary lows, a panoply of strange faces encountered once you “touch down.” The world served up with equal parts wide-eyed wonder and fucked-up fear.

Darkness Darkness
The Youngbloods

Another drugged-up interlude captured musically. The darkness alluded to, insisted upon here describes not just my brother’s experience in Vietnam but the next thirty years of his life. Darkness truly was his pillow. He crawled through shadows. He inflicted pain.

All Along the Watchtower
Jimi Hendrix, and “Battlestar Galactica” version

With its apocalyptic imagery, its dark prophecies, the wailing instrumentation that recreates the laments of humanity from ages past (and yet to come), “All Along the Watchtower” is an almost biblical anthem. The unforgettable imagery evokes not just the horrors of war, but the horrors that emerge from war. If ever a song belonged on an anti-war playlist, not as prescription, but as warning, this is it. Though Dylan wrote it, Jimi’s is the classic rendition of “Watchtower.” I include the Battlestar Galactica version as well because that’s the one emblazoned in my psyche by virtue of my sons, Bear McCreary on keys and Brendan McCreary, vocalist, particularly in the live version.

War
Edwin Starr

A song that asks—and unequivocally answers—its own question: “War! What is it good for?” “Absolutely nothing.” The call and response elements here compel the audience not just to listen, but reply, to clap hands and shout. Maybe even jump and shout.

PART IV PLAYLIST

Part IV begins September 1970. Doug Johnson (addicted to drugs, shattered physically, strung out emotionally, suffering PTSD) returns to his family, his fiancée and a world he scarcely recognizes and one which does not recognize him. In an effort to correct his past (reverse the Undesirable) and salvage his future (save him from the burden of shame) Doug’s father picks up the pen to do battle with the Army. At the end of a three-year ordeal, there is pale victory, a compromise short of Honorable.

Another Brick in the Wall, Pt 1
Pink Floyd

My father marshaled voluminous materials to reverse the Undesirable and presented them to four different military entities. The Army met his efforts with the unflinching, unchanging stolidity of a brick wall. Deny. Defeat. Fail. Then they melted back into their institution and acronyms. The lyrics here matter less than the delivery, the unceasing thrum, the low, unrelenting menace.

The Weight
The Band

This doleful ballad, with its plain, plucking guitarwork and raggedy piano sound epitomizes my parents’ weary journey in these years while my father wrote and my mother typed. The lyrics are oblique but unmistakable. The grizzled singer is all but beaten, seeking rest, resolution, some sort of safe harbor, but the answer is always defeat, denial, and failure, an echoing No No No.

Imagine
John Lennon

In assembling his materials, my father’s writing often closes with words imploring the faceless, unknown Army brass to think, to feel, to imagine the life that Doug Johnson might yet have if only he can be spared the shame of this undeserved Undesirable. John Lennon, of course, says it better. The simple piano backgrounds swell with strings and a slow drumbeat as the lyrics sweep us all up in their embrace. Lennon too asks questions, but he has answers. He says they’re simple: If a world without hate and cruelty and violence can be imagined, then maybe it can be achieved. Maybe Lennon is dreamer, but we all long to join him.

What’s Going On
Marvin Gaye

This song begins with the families: mothers crying, brothers dying, fathers imploring against escalation. It’s the canopy anthem for the whole of Undesirable. Marvin knew whereof he spoke; his brother Frankie fought in Vietnam. From Frankie’s letters, Marvin made music about the death, the dying, the racism and the confusion, people turning to one another, asking “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He layered his music artfully with random voices not beautifully gathered in choral harmonies, but in ragged confusion, protests, pickets in the streets punished with brutality. The song demands to know what’s going on, but there are no answers in these lyrics—except that war is not solution.

Theme from “The Mission”
Ennio Morricone

This song came on the random playlist in my car as I was driving to my widowed mother’s house on January 5, 2021, to tell her that I had heard word from California that Doug had died that morning. Morricone’s forlorn beauty brought me to tears. Still does. I wept for my brother’s death, but even more so for Doug’s wasted life, that his gifts had been squandered, that he had both lived in pain and inflicted pain.

Wander My Friends
Bear McCreary, from Battlestar Galactica

When “The Mission” ended, “Wander My Friends” came on random and I outright blubbered, sobbing in the driveway of my mother’s house, moved by this simple, sad thrum of farewell written by Bear and the wistful Gaelic lyrics, sung by Brendan. The song throbs with loss. But it also has something of a martial air and it is as close as Doug Johnson would ever get to “Taps.” Doug lived far away from us, and there was, to my knowledge, no farewell service whatever for him. On January 10^th my mother had a heart attack.  

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

Laura Kalpakian is the author of Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook (UNM Press), a memoir, sixteen novels, and five prize-winning collections of short fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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

Chrissy Martin’s poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot explores chronic illness with a unique pop culture lens.

Esmé Weijun Wang wrote of the book:

“This collection captures the realities of chronic illness and disability with language that transcends mere description into art. I nod at a phrase that reflects like a kaleidoscope, a poem that takes my breath-reminded I am not alone.”

In her own words, here is Chrissy Martin’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot:

I wrote much of Whole, Holy, Hot to full albums set to play on repeat. Once I’d worn out one album’s spell, I’d move to another. I wanted to stay inside a single artistic world for a while—to let its atmosphere shape the space I was writing from.

The poems in this book span a decade of my life. Many come from an earlier version of me—another city, another headspace. More were written later, once I began to understand what the manuscript needed: what connective tissue this now-living thing required. Because the poems arrived across so much time, I used the albums represented on this list to remind myself how disparate pieces of a work of art can bump, echo, clash, and cohere into one unified whole without flattening into a single note.

Now, when I look at the book, I hear these albums. I’ve been working on a mixed media acrylic painting alongside Whole, Holy, Hot, penciling the albums and audiobooks that accompanied the painting process onto the back of the canvas. If I penciled songs from the foundational albums of this book, the list would look something like this:

1. “365” by Charli xcx from Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not

I listened to Brat—the original, the deluxe, the remixes—obsessively while revising Whole, Holy, Hot, until it played in the back of my ears in silent rooms. Before the deluxe edition, “360” was my favorite: a song about performance on repeat—a knowing wink, a constant nod to being seen, the self aware of the gaze and yet still controlling the terms of that seeing. When the deluxe edition—Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not—came out, it reframed the album for me, beginning again with “360” and ending with “365.”

“360” is controlled—clean, sharp, built for the camera flash, every movement staged to be seen from every side—a full 360. “365” is a reprise—a return to that opening, but altered—the sound messier, more textured, more reverb, the speaker stuck in the all-consuming, 365-days-a-year cycle of partying, performing, being seen. The control of “360” doesn’t disappear so much as come undone in this return. This is what I want the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot to do: to show a mind and body trying to perform, and to capture the moment when that performance falters, when the mess takes over.

2. “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” by Taylor Swift from The Tortured Poets Department

When The Tortured Poets Department was announced, I was ecstatic. I had just gone to the Eras Tour, I was teaching and writing pop culture poetics—I was a poet in a department! I engraved a “The Tortured Poets Department” sign for my office door and counted down the days for its release during National Poetry Month.

When the album arrived, I was disappointed. I didn’t hear what I expect from poetry—concision, precision, fresh language, a depth that forces me to reread. I listen for sound, too—not just direct rhyme, but slant rhyme, echo, repetition and variation—something that complicates the line rather than landing it too cleanly. So when I started the title track and heard the first two lines, “You left your typewriter at my apartment / Straight from the tortured poets department,” I had to pause the album.

After many listens, I met it on its own terms. I stopped asking it to be a poetry collection and let it be what it was. I watched the public response shift, too—from early complaints about its length and unevenness to people settling into it—returning to certain songs, repeating lines, and holding onto what resonated with them. I take this as a lesson in framing: the way a work is presented shapes genre expectations and determines what an audience looks for. Those expectations, in turn, shape how we encounter the work itself.

“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” understands and plays with the danger of being defined before you speak. “Little old me” begins diminutive, but the song builds until the phrase becomes theatrical, accusatory, dangerous. When Swift sings, “So tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is? / Then say they didn’t do it to hurt me / But what if they did?” her questions turn reassurance inside out. What should soothe the speaker instead sharpens her. The song doesn’t escape its title; it mutates it. This is what I mean when I say framing matters: the title didn’t just name the album; it shaped what I expected the album to do.

That is what I mean when I say framing matters—the title didn’t just name the album, it shaped what I expected the album to do. More specifically, it made me think about titles: how they do not simply describe what follows, but teach an audience how to hear it. Sometimes the work fulfills that promise; sometimes it has to fight the title, stretch it, or make it strange. I thought about this often while titling the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot—especially the poems whose titles name a pop culture moment before complicating what that moment means. A title can act as a frame, a joke, a headline, a dare, or a trapdoor.

3. “Kill Me” by Hayley Williams from Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

Before Hayley Williams released Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party as a full, sequenced album, she released it as a series of singles. She encouraged listeners to choose their own order, and many did, making Spotify playlists with their own arcs, turns, and emotional logic. I was interested in that freedom, but also in the way the official album eventually arrived and said: here is one possible shape.

“Kill Me” kept pulling me back because it names something Whole, Holy, Hot circles again and again: the knowledge that pain is not only personal, but inherited. The song understands the body as a bloodline, a place where other people’s grief—especially women’s grief—can keep living. The song opens with Verse 1:

Eldest daughters never miss their chances
To learn the hardest lessons again and again
Carrying my mother’s mother’s torment
I think I’m where the bloodline ends
I’ll never do the right thing again

In the second verse, the repetition changes the assignment. The daughter is no longer only carrying inherited pain, but is expected to stop it. What begins as bloodline becomes burden. That feels central to Whole, Holy, Hot: the way pain can arrive as inheritance and then become a responsibility the speaker never agreed to carry.

4. “Favorite Daughter” by Lorde from Virgin

In “Kill Me” by Hayley Williams, the daughter is burdened with carrying and ending the bloodline’s pain. In “Favorite Daughter,” the daughter is performing toward someone—singing, winning, working, breaking herself—in the hope that being excellent enough might repair something she did not break. The song captures the exhausting belief that if you just do enough, if you are good enough, if you achieve certain markers of success, then you might finally be praised, respected, and cared for by the very people meant to protect you.

Lorde sings in the second chorus:

Cause I’m an actress, all of the medals I won for ya
Panic attack just to be your favourite daughter
Everywhere I run, I’m always runnin’ to ya
Breaking my back to carry the weight of your heart

The medals are proof of goodness: look what I made, look what I survived, look what I became for you.

5. “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain from Preacher’s Daughter

Across Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain traces an interconnected lineage of women through religious trauma, the patriarchal power bound up in it, and the violence it makes possible. The album’s final single, “American Teenager,” is a haunting dissection of religious inheritance and the American Dream. It distills that inheritance into a national fantasy. Its handclap-driven pop beat makes the promise sound almost radiant: be good, be faithful, be beautiful, be hopeful, support your country, and save yourself. Maybe then the world will love you back. But the brightness falters when Cain sings, “And Jesus, if You’re there / Why do I feel alone in this room with You?” Suddenly, the fantasy reveals its loneliness: God, country, and self-reliance have not saved her.

6. “Everything is romantic featuring caroline polachek” by Charli xcx from Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat

I hear the original version of “Everything is romantic” as a poem of witness, a list poem that lets a place or moment come into focus through detail, association, and accumulation rather than explanation. When Charli sings, “Lemons on thе trees and on the ground / Sandals on the stirrups of the scooters,” I hear a poetics of attention: everything is poetry if we look at it with enough curiosity. This is why I had my Introduction to Creative Writing students write their own “Everything is _____” list poems, asking them to gather beautiful, strange, or intriguing things they had seen without explaining what those details add up to.

The remix of “Everything is romantic” with Caroline Polachek is haunting in its melody and lyricism. The images listed are less pastoral and more political (“ACAB tag on a bus stop sign”) and this song’s premise is two women speaking on the phone, asking, “Everything’s still romantic, right?” Polachek answers:

Late nights in black silk in East London
Church bells in the distance
Free bleeding in the autumn rain
Fall in love again and again

Hearing “Free bleeding in the autumn rain” posited as romantic stopped me in my tracks. Like Whole, Holy, Hot, it treats the unsanitized body as beautiful, refusing the pressure to make embodiment cleaner, quieter, or easier to look at. And the vocal flips that Polachek executes right after these lines sound like the body refusing containment too: the voice breaking open, turning almost acrobatic, making beauty out of strain, excess, and release—while also being, simply, gorgeous.

7. “Florida!!! (feat. Florence + The  Machine) ” by Taylor Swift from The Tortured Poets Department

There is something about a feature with another female musician that allows a song to be especially volatile—the harmony becomes conspiracy, the accompaniment permission.

“Florida!!!” begins with the sound and sense of danger, lightly undercut by the line, “And my friends all smell like weed or little babies.” And what a way to encapsulate the asynchrony of early adulthood! As in Whole, Holy, Hot, in “Florida!!!,” home isn’t a place of solace: 

Little did you know your home’s really only
A town you’re just a guest in

That thought later darkens into:

Little did you know your home’s really only
The town you’ll get arrested

Like “no body, no crime (feat. HAIM)” on evermore, “Florida!!!” turns the female feature into a site of conspiracy, retaliation, and shared escape. The first three lines below directly echo “no body, no crime,” invoking a world where women know, cover for, and avenge one another. But the song quickly shifts from external revenge plot to something more interior and dangerous: the speaker recognizes the risk of what she has said. That recognition becomes both protection and defiance—I know this is wrong to say, but also, I am saying it anyway:

All my girls got their lace and their crimes
And your cheating husband disappeared, well
No one asks any questions here
So I did my best to lay to rest
All of the bodies that have ever been on my body
And in my mind, they sink into the swamp
Is that a bad thing to say in a song?

That question becomes both shield and dare: an acknowledgment that the confession has crossed some invisible line, and a refusal to walk it back. Whole, Holy, Hot is interested in that same charged threshold, where exposure becomes not a failure of control, but a form of power.

8. “Mirtazapine”by Hayley Williams from Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

I love this song because of the celebratory, joyful, companionate way it addresses medication. And it is the addressee in this song—pardon, “she” is the addressee in the song. The chorus repeats:

Mirtazapine
You make me eat, you make me sleep
Mirtazapine
You let me dream, you let me dream

Mirtazapine has agency—making Williams eat but letting her dream, perhaps literally, but also allowing her to dream of a future—to even want a future. Those of us on medications are often spoken to as if the medication is the issue, not the ailment we’re seeking medication for. Antidepressants in particular are often demonized, treated like a crutch—an ironic insult, considering a crutch, like an antidepressant, is an assistive tool, not a failure of will. Williams, instead, calls Mirtazapine her “genie in a screw cap bottle,” someone she “could never be without” and so “had to write a song about her.”

Likewise, the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot treat medication as potential magic, as precious, as companion. My poems do not call the pills “she,” exactly, but they do call diagnosis “she”—shifting what could be clinical and adversarial into a female solidarity.

For these reasons, “Mirtazapine” feels like a musical counterpart to Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a poetry collection I find enormous kinship with. Williams and Erlichman both write against the fantasy that medication dilutes the self. Instead, medication becomes part of the lyric architecture of survival: not the opposite of feeling, but one of the conditions that makes feeling—and dreaming—possible.

Williams does not, however, let relief erase complexity. When she asks, “Who am I without you now?” the line trembles between devotion and existential fear: the love-song logic of I cannot imagine my life without you, braided with the more destabilizing question of who the self is without the medication that has helped make life bearable.

9. “If She Could See Me Now” by Lorde from Virgin

While “Favorite Daughter” performs in hopes of being affirmed by someone else, “If She Could See Me Now” turns that desire inward, imagining what it would mean to be witnessed by the self who once had to survive—after the performance, after survival, and at the threshold of leaving survival mode.

The song grapples with gendered violence, and with the ways we romanticize and mythologize our own pain, trying to make suffering feel significant because otherwise it might simply be, well, suffering:

Baby, whenever you’d break me
I’d watch it happen, like an angel looking down
Ah-ah, ah
It made me a woman, being hurt like that
I can feel, don’t need fantasy
Oh, God, if she could see me now

While the chorus calls the past self “she,” the immediately preceding verse addresses that self directly as “you.” Lorde sings of “exorcising / All my demons” before arriving at the startlingly intimate claim, “Yesterday I lifted your body weight.” The past self isn’t scolded or disavowed, but addressed with the tenderness of someone eager to say: look where we’ve made it to.

10. “Family Tree” [or other song] by Ethel Cain from Preacher’s Daughter

“Family Tree (Intro)” concludes the playlist because it shares Whole, Holy, Hot’s interest in the forces that script a self before that self has language to answer back. The song is not only about inheritance, but also about ritual: family, faith, gender, shame, and fear becoming an atmosphere the speaker has to breathe, resist, and sing from.

For the first thirty-five seconds, a slow, reverberating bass line descends through a spoken sermon, as if an ominous ritual is already underway. A male voice declares, “a woman, a mother, a mother is a very special thing,” collapsing womanhood into motherhood. The sample is from Cain’s paternal great-grandmother’s funeral: what an honor for her to be carried forward in song, and what grief to hear a woman remembered through the narrow language of sanctified motherhood. But by sampling the sermon here, Cain also recovers her great-grandmother from that framing, letting her memory become something stranger, larger, and less obedient than the funeral language by itself allowed. The sermon’s logic of sacred motherhood curdles into the song’s larger claim: not even Jesus is exempt from traumatic inheritance:

Jesus can always reject his father
But he cannot escape his mother’s blood
He’ll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers
But he’ll never escape what he’s made up of

The chorus then repeats:

The fates already fucked me sideways
Swinging by my neck from the family tree
He’ll laugh and say, “You know I raised you bеtter than this”
Then leavе me hanging so they all can laugh at me

The family tree is no longer only lineage; it is gallows, spectacle, and audience. The speaker is made by the family and punished by it, raised by its logic and then left hanging inside it. That is why “Family Tree (Intro)” feels like the right place to end. Like Whole, Holy, Hot, it refuses the fantasy that naming what made you or hurt you means being freed from it. The book’s final poem refuses to smooth survival into redemption. It takes place in the after, just over the threshold of survival mode, where crossing over does not mean becoming untouched. What remains is the frightening possibility of an after: the hope that the worst might be over, and the fear that without pain at the center, the self will have to learn its own shape again.

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

Chrissy Martin is the author of the poetry collection Whole, Holy, Hot (Write Bloody Publishing, 2026). Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Cherry Tree, swamp pink, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere, earning nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Co-founder and Poetry Director of Arcturus, she is also an assistant professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana.

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

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

The anthology Black Summers explores Black joy experienced in Detroit’s urban spaces through a magnificent variety of forms including essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, and comics.

Ibram X. Kendi wrote of the book:

“Magnificently curated by Desiree Cooper, this collection is full. Like summers growing up in the urban outdoors. Like the feelings of Black people navigating Detroit’s public space. In all its insightful recollections and creative variety, Black Summers is full of pleasure, of pain, of splendor, of struggle, of home.”

In her own words, here is Desiree Cooper’s Book Notes music playlist for her anthology Black Summers:

Sunshine and Shadow: The Songs of Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors by Editor/Contributor Desiree Cooper and 28 Writers

In Detroit, summers are short but mighty. For a few months—after brutal winters and malingering springs—the sun rises before 6 a.m. and doesn’t set until nearly ten at night. Like the Whos from Whoville, Detroiters emerge from their winter burrows, and they mean business. Music is everywhere; festivals run back-to-back. Spirits are high and humidity is low. There are rooftop happy hours, block parties, alfresco dining, community bike rides, line dancing, front-porch hanging and waterfront chilling. There is no summer like a Detroit summer.

When I asked 28 Black writers from Detroit to reflect upon their hot fun in the urban outdoors, they pulled from the deep reservoir of summer joy. Their essays in Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors are replete with memories of the city’s beloved island park, Belle Isle (which is larger than New York’s Central Park); fishing in the Detroit River; close-knit neighborhoods; and pick-up games on basketball courts. But on the margins lurks a shadow that sunshine cannot dim: the legacy of racism in a city that’s been America’s poster child for racial strife, white flight, and urban abandonment. Their stories recall the 1967 Rebellion—the worst in U.S. history. The lack of recreational facilities, including swimming pools and parks. Their parents’ struggle to provide safe, outdoor sanctuaries for their children. The interruption of childhood innocence.

The following selections by contributors to Black Summers reflect that tension between sentimental longing and racial strife. Mostly, they land upon Black joy.

“Summer Breeze,” by the Isley Brothers
Selected by Desiree Cooper, editor of Black Summers and author of “We Water”

If I had to pick a theme song for Black Summers, it would be the 1970s ballad “Summer Breeze.” Not the gauzy original version by pop artists Seals & Crofts (a version I adored), but the musical rollercoaster ride by the Isley Brothers. The song opens with Ronald Isley’s haunting, falsetto heart-wish for summers at home—simple and happy. Before you know it, Ernie Isley is setting a controlled burn with his electric guitar, rocketing you from mellow dreaming to head-banging air guitar. It’s that soulful minor key (you have to listen to parts one AND two) that keeps you grounded in summer’s longing, even after the music turns into a straight-up jam.

“Your Precious Love,” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell
Selected by Bridgett M. Davis, author of “Backyard Balm”

One month after the frightening and violent ‘67 Detroit Uprising, this song hit the airwaves. It was a banner year for Motown, with hits by everyone from Gladys Knight & The Pips to the Four Tops to The Supremes to the Miracles. I had four older siblings, and each one had a favorite Motown song. For me it was this one, hands down. I was just seven years old that August, but I needed “Your Precious Love.” I played that 45 over and over, its yellow and brown TAMLA label making revolutions around my little record player. Everything about the ballad captivated me—from the opening guitar licks, to those finger snaps keeping time, to Marvin Gaye’s earnest voice, to the lilting chorus: “Heaven must’ve sent you from above, heaven must’ve sent your precious love.” But it was Tammi Terrell’s sweet, pretty voice that calmed my anxious heart. I adored her! I thought she looked both like my older sister Rita, and an angel. I’d later learn that the famed R&B duo Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson wrote this soulful duet, and that both the Funk Brothers and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed on the song. But I didn’t know all that back then. I only knew “Your Precious Love” made me feel warm and fuzzy inside—and that summer, that was everything.

“Ngiculela – Es Una Historia – I Am Singing,” by Stevie Wonder
Selected by ZZ Claybourne, author of “The Daddy, The Isle, and The Tunnel Drive”

This song speaks to hearing the languages of love around us. It took me a while to recognize the music my father put out during summertime. Movement was how he spoke love—car rides with us where he knew we were safe. Driving was the A-side of his love language. The destination was the B-side. We’d drive to places like Belle Isle or Kent Lake, where he–and we–could enjoy the outdoors unbothered, something he didn’t get anywhere near as often as he wanted. “Ngiculela” might be a joyful song but there’s that pain that hits at about the midpoint when Stevie raises his voice to a defiant declaration/wit’s-end demand. “I AM SINGING!” he shouts, commanding folks to acknowledge the truth of Black days. Singing despite the wider world trying to steal our voices or hem us in.

“You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,”  By Funkadelic
Selected by Keith Owens, author of “Searching for Blackness in Detroit—and Finding It”

This song was a single off the album Maggot Brain by the American funk rock band Funkadelic. Released in the spring of 1971, it was my summer anthem. Being born a Black kid in Denver, my early life was a long search for my Black identity. Who were my folks, and how do I find a way to fit? I was amazed at how a famous Black group was asking those same questions. I loved artists like Funkadelic and Jimi Hendrix—Black artists who broke the molds. They forced folks to acknowledge that Blackness was however we defined it.

Maggot Brain was Funkadelic’s third studio album, released by Westbound Records in July 1971. It was produced by bandleader George Clinton and recorded at United Sound Systems in Detroit, the very city that made room for my own flavor of Blackness.

“Crazy in Love,” by Beyoncé (featuring Jay-Z)
Selected by Brittany Rogers, author of “Black Out, August 2003, Detroit”  

“Crazy in Love” came out in 2003 on my birthday, May 14. Just like me, this song is a Taurus to the core—fixated on facts, loyal beyond reason, and unembarrassed by blatant longing. When this upbeat, catchy song dropped, I was a sophomore in high school, which is shorthand for being a know-it-all teen who was often loud and wrong. So, it should come as no surprise that the boy I was so crazy in love with that spring became a boy I barely knew by the time Detroit’s sky went pitch black that August when 50 million people lost power in an outage that covered the Northeast United States, and part of Canada. I just kept blasting “Crazy in Love” at every opportunity that summer, yearning for a love of that magnitude.

 “I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It,” by Stevie Wonder
Selected by Esperanza Cintron, author of “Feral Fields”

When I think of summer music I think of Stevie Wonder’s album Hotter than July, which debuted in 1980. I remember listening to the single, “I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It,” while riding with my ex down the back roads of Kinshasa, Zaire. Back then, Mobutu Sese Seko was in power, a corrupt, ruthless strongman propped up by Western governments including France, Belgium, and the United States. As Stevie sang it, “I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It” was an obvious reference to a man who wasn’t about to stand by and let someone else take his woman. There’s  the rising anger at “somebody picking my cherries . . .and digging in my cake.” But I will forever connect the lyrics with the endless cycle of repression by Western powers in Africa and American cities, especially those with large Black populations and/or Black/Brown political representation: rebellion, freedom, devastation, reoccupation. We know the reason for Detroit’s neglect and decay is racism. It fueled divestment that destroyed our cherries and buried our cake, but I ain’t gonna stand for it!

“Knock Three Times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn
Selected by Lillien Waller, author of “Listen, Children, All Is Not Lost”

In the 1970s, I LOVED Tony Orlando and Dawn. They were at their height during the summers our family spent camping at Mitchell’s Bay in Canada. “Knock Three Times” was the ideal road trip song. It played on both AM and FM radio and we as kids were allowed to sing along because my parents were certain that the two youngest of us (me and Juanita), had no idea what it was about. We just liked making the three knocking sounds.

“Wurk” by Linqua Franqa
Selected by shannon garth-rhodes, author of “The Summer Protest”

When this song came out in 2022, it felt like the song I had been waiting for. Bridging the gap between the old and new labor movements, it opens with a shout out to organized labor like big-upping a set in 90’s hip hop. Then it hums into the hook “Which side are you on my people / Which side are you on?” “Wurk” then merges a Spanish language chant, “El Pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” (“the people/united/will never be defeated”) often used at rallies and protests, with a popular labor ballad from 1931. The pulsating beat and the visualization of the historically underpaid and underrepresented workers call for organization. “Here’s my ask for all my hominids: collective bargainin’ / Amazon and Target and FedEx and Walmart and Instacart and Whole Foods til we all get what we oughta get / Workers run the company, there isn’t any argument / So are you with them are you in?” The moral question about working class solidarity that shows up as a refrain in the song is also repeated throughout my essay, “The Summer Protest.”  Are you with us or them?

“Blue in Green,” by Miles Davis
Selected by Isaiah Chambers, author of “The Poet in Their Natural Habitat”

My poem in Black Summers is about poets finding an outdoor place to be who they are. When they find that space, the poets become part of the environment, and the environment lives inside the poets, like blue in green. When I find that place among nature where I belong, I often lose my words. I become a revel of emotion. Miles Davis replicates that feeling; his wordless music overflows with meaning. The tenor and trumpet, the flirting, the anger, the joy, all exist within the song, without a word. In the same way, the flora and fauna inspire wordlessly, creating living, continuous poetry.

“Din Daa Daa” by George Kranz
Selected by Angela Atabex Lugo-Thomas, author of “Detroit Boricua”

After I left Puerto Rico and moved to Detroit as a child, I longed for my island life and my culture. I found remnants of both in the Motor City. Long before we were married, my future husband and I were students at Detroit’s Bates Academy in the 1980s. It was there that our dance teacher, Miss White (co-founder of Detroit Windsor Dance Academy), challenged us to choreograph sections of the dance club hit, “Din Daa Daa.” We loved that song so much; it gave me a chance to incorporate some of my favorite dance moves, and my hubby was one of the breakdancers. To this day, I continue dancing with the RicanStruction bomba drum and dance group through my cultural organization, La Casita Cimarrón y Yuketi de Detroit. I not only found a connection to my culture in Detroit, but I also found my “island”: Belle Isle, Detroit’s island park that we sometimes called “the Rock.” We used to spend summer evenings cruising on the Rock, listening to the beats of “Din Daa Daa.”

“My Eyes Don’t Cry” by Stevie Wonder
Selected by Rochelle Wilson-Ellis, author of “A Boatswain’s Boblo Memories”

When I was a kid in Detroit, the highlight of every summer was sailing down the Detroit River on the Boblo Boat to an amusement park in Canada. It was at least one day a year I got to spend with my mom, who was otherwise always working. That boat was magical—we had snacks, sat near the railing to gaze at the water, and bought touristy trinkets. Once, a bride came down the huge staircase to dance with everyone on the giant dance floor. I thought it was stunning—like the Titanic. That dance floor was like the heartbeat of the boat. On summer rides in the ‘70s, all the DJ had to do was play the hustle song “My Eyes Don’t Cry,” and everyone got up—young, old, Black, white—and we line danced together as a single spirit, just enjoying life, enjoying summer, enjoying being a Detroiter.  

Miscellaneous TV Theme Songs, Hard Rock and Laid-Back Soul
Selected by Chace Morris, author of “Factory of Light”

Music has always been in my life, shaping my view of the world. When I walk through the portal back to that time as a kid the first music that comes to mind is theme songs. The unmistakable harmonica of the theme to Sanford and Son (“The Streetbeater” by Quincy Jones), the rock banger that opened Baywatch (“I’m Always Here” by Jimi Jamison), or the screaming guitars of “Electrifiying” by Jim Johnston playing as WWE’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made his entrance (“If you smell…what The Rock is cooking!”).

Then there was the “me and Ma in the hot ass kitchen with Mix92.3 on high” essentials: everything Anita Baker and Sade.

…And the miscellaneous jams that shaped my journey into hip-hop, writing, and overall Black nerdom: the hip-pop “On Our Own “(Ghostbusters soundtrack),” by Bobby Brown, the hip-hop “Children’s Story,” by Slick Rick, and the jingle for Nintendo’s Street Fighter II.

Can’t pick one. All of them were the sounds and songs of an eastside Detroit child on summer break at home early mornings with little to do but hang—before he even knew how much he loved the music.

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

DESIREE COOPER is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, former attorney, and editor of the groundbreaking 2026 anthology, Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash Fiction America 2023, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, Best African American Fiction 2010, and noted in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper’s children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and included on the NY Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.” She is a founding board member of Cave Canem, a residency for Black poets; a former board member of the Furious Flower Poetry Center; a current member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective; and a fellow of Kimbilio, a residency for Black fiction writers. www.desireecooper.com

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

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

Meg Richardson’s coming-of-age novel Paradise Pawn is one of the funniest debuts of the year, a book as compassionate as it is hopeful.

Debutiful wrote of the book:

“A fun-as-hell coming-of-age romp. Theft, pawn shops, Florida. What more can you want from a novel that packs so much heart into every laugh? Fans of Kristen Arnett will devour this one.”

In her own words, here is Meg Richardson’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Paradise Pawn:

Paradise Pawn is my debut novel. It’s about two best friends who work at a pawn shop in Florida, based on my own experiences working at a pawn shop. Music played a huge role in my writing process for this book. 

Jackie and Kayla, the book’s two protagonists, are on the brink of starting high school, on the brink of their friendship changing, and on the brink of realizing that a plan they have been pouring their hearts into may not work out the way they hoped. 

On some days, Jackie and Kayla are aware that everything is changing, and it’s painful for them. They’re overwhelmed by nostalgia and worry. On other days, they love the power they are gaining as they grow up, and they want change to happen faster.  

I think that teenagers (and people of all ages) go through life balancing these two feelings—feeling nostalgic and sad about change on some days and feeling excited for change on other days.

Music was my diving board into pools of these two feelings as I wrote Paradise Pawn. Like Jackie and Kayla, I often get overwhelmed by nostalgia. I even feel preemptively nostalgic for nice moments long before they end. But other times, I am filled with a teenage-style belief that everything is going to work out—all my dreams, and the dreams of the people I love, are going to come true, if we are brave enough to let ourselves change. 

While I was writing Paradise Pawn, I made a playlist of songs that make me feel emotional about change for various reasons. I would blast this playlist as I walked to whatever coffee shop or library of friend’s apartment I was writing in. The songs fall into two categories—songs that make me feel like change is sad, which I’m calling “Nostalgia Songs” and songs that make me feel like change is exciting, which I’m calling “Pump-Up Songs.” I usually hit “shuffle” on my playlist, to give myself an injection of both of these feelings about change, but here I have separated them out for you. I hope you enjoy these songs as much as I enjoyed writing about them for you!

Nostalgia Songs

Love in this Club by Usher

This song came out when I was fourteen, just like the girls in Paradise Pawn. I remember it playing at the homecoming dance when I was a freshman in high school in Iowa. I thought it was incredibly romantic. I had only the vaguest idea of what a club was, or what making love was. I don’t think I even knew that “making love” meant sex. I just thought it was a poetic phrase that Usher had coined meaning “to create love” or “to get to know each other”. I remember standing in the dark cafeteria in a clump of my friends. We were a month into high school and terrified, watching other people grind, and wondering if anyone would ever want to do that with us. I was deeply moved by “Love in this Club” when it played. I loved the idea of feeling so drawn to someone else that you had to get to know them, even in a busy, crowded place. When I listen to this song now, I feel so much tenderness for me and my friends at fourteen. I wish I could reach back in time and help them through all the grinding and clubs and love that they would one day experience. I hope that people reading Paradise Pawn will get to feel a similar tenderness for their teenage selves.

Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell

This is my dad’s favorite song. It has always reminded me of him and how much I love him. When I started writing the character of Devon, Jackie’s dad, I didn’t intend to make him similar to my real dad. However, now that people are reading the book and talking about how much they love Devon, it’s clear to me that a lot of his character came from my real dad. Both Devon and my dad are incredibly hardworking, almost to a fault, but not quite. They are both remarkably good at helping their daughters through heartbreak and other confusion, in spite of the stoic, hard-nosed front they often put up for the rest of the world. “Wichita Lineman” is about a lineman at work missing a person he loves and wishing for a break, but knowing there is work to be done. There’s a soaring violin part, which sounds like love, and a plodding guitar part, which sounds like work. Devon, the dad in Paradise Pawn has often had to set aside his emotions because there is work to be done. The work he does supports the people he loves, so every time he polishes a chain or mops a floor at the pawn shop, it’s an act of love. To me, “Wichita Lineman” is an ode to hardworking people, and the ways people show love through work. I want Paradise Pawn to be an ode to hardworking people too, especially an ode to my parents. 

Big Deal by Lucy Dacus

I’ve gone to over 20 weddings of my dear friends during the course of writing Paradise Pawn. If I was ever writing and felt the need for an injection of emotion about the passage of time and its impact on friendships, all I had to do was wait for the next wedding, and I would be flooded with feelings. In “Big Deal,” Lucy Dacus captures this feeling so brilliantly with the lines, “You’ve got your girl, you’re gonna marry her/And I’ll be watching in a pinstriped suit/ Not even wishing it was me and you/so what changes, if anything?”. When I feel sad about the passage of time and my friendships changing, I sometimes ask myself, “You wouldn’t want everything to stay the same forever, would you?” and “You wouldn’t want to marry every one of your friends, would you?” and “What do you actually want?” Jackie, the narrator in Paradise Pawn is asking herself these same questions. Maybe both Jackie and I just want our friends to know—“You’re a big deal.”

Umbria by Family Consumer Science

This is a song from Will Barker’s first album, London Songs. Will Barker happens to be my younger brother, and one of my best friends and favorite artists in the world. When I was writing about the sibling-like love between Jackie and Kayla, I always thought about Will. I also thought about Will when writing about the pain of being separated from siblings, or people who feel like siblings. Will wrote this song about a trip to Spain with his high school Spanish class, and a conversation he had with his host mom there. When he went on the trip, I was in college. I remember thinking t it was inconceivable that he was having experiences in another country in places I would probably never see with people I would probably never meet. He was on his own and so was I. There were a few years when we didn’t know how to deal with this gulf. How do you go from sharing a bathroom with someone for fifteen years to needing to explain your life to them on the phone? When Jackie starts to have experiences that are different from Kayla’s, it feels inconceivable to her too. Will and I have found ways to become even closer than we were as kids. One of those ways is by sharing art we make about our lives. Though I wasn’t with Will on the trip to Spain, I can listen to the song and understand some of what he was feeling. I love the close harmonies in the song, that remind me of “A Ceremony of Carols,” which he and I sang with the children’s choir we were in every Christmas. I love that the voice singing and the fingers playing guitar belong to my brother. I would like to think that in Jackie and Kayla’s universe they will find ways to stay connected as they grow up too. 

Glitter by Eliza McLamb

I dream that Paradise Pawn will give readers the feeling that this song, and its beautiful music video, have given me. If there is ever a movie of Paradise Pawn, I would love for this song to be in it. This song captures the exact feeling of being a teenager and not wanting your friend to abandon you or abandon herself for boyfriends and the grownup world. The chorus of the song goes, “I wanna kill your boyfriend/ He could never know you/he wants to crush you in his hands/ and every time/ That you say he loves me/ I say that’s not what love means.” The narrator of the song has a combination of naivete and certainty. Jackie has a similar naivete and certainty as she narrates Paradise Pawn. I appreciate that the song takes this certainty very seriously, the way I have taken Jackie’s certainty seriously in Paradise Pawn. I think many of teenagers’ convictions about the world are right, and they deserve to be taken seriously in real life and in media. 

Pump-Up Songs

Hello by Kes 

This song will always remind me of my job at the pawn shop. I had a coworker at the shop from Barbados who loved this song, and because of her, I loved it too. We would play it in the mornings before the store opened as we were taking jewelry out of the safe and setting it up in the cases. The chorus, “Hello, hello, hello, hello” made us laugh, because we said that was what we sounded like saying “hello” to customers over and over. 

Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran 

This song also reminds me of working at the pawn shop. It would play on the radio constantly, often accompanying the sound of chainsaws and the jewelry cleaner. But it was special for another reason. One of my coworkers at the shop was from the Philippines. Whenever a guitar would come into the shop, he would fix it up and tune it. When the store was empty, he would play this song for us and we would sing along. His son and his wife lived in the Philippines and he hadn’t seen them in years. Once he played “Thinking Out Loud” for them over FaceTime. I got a little teary watching him sing this ubiquitous, but none the less beautiful love song to his loved ones who were so far away. But when the song was over, he wasn’t sad and neither were his wife and son. They missed each other, but this was their life every day, and they were making it work. I thought about this moment often when writing about characters in Paradise Pawn. I did my best to think hard about how my characters would feel about what was happening to them. I tried not to overlay my own emotions onto their lives. 

Little Red Corvette by Prince

My mom loves this song, and she used to sing the beginning of it when I was a kid as we merged onto the highway in her Toyota Camry. (When I told her I was writing about her and this song she said, “But it’s so racy! You could pick ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’”). But, I will always associate this song with her, so Mommy, thank you for giving me the okay not to use “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Somewhat like with “Love in This Club,” I didn’t know that “Little Red Corvette” was about sex when I was a kid. I loved the lines, “Baby you’re much too fast,” and “Honey you’ve got to slow down.” I felt like it was a song about being told to be less intense, but going fast and being intense anyway. My mom is incredibly hard-charging and hard-working. She has so much belief in herself and in me. She and I both talk fast and make things happen fast. When I would stay up late as a kid, making labor-intensive valentines, or making puppets for a history project that didn’t require puppets, she would say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” to me, and I was so proud. What she meant by this was that that I was similar to her, and she understood why I had to be so intense. The girls in Paradise Pawn are told implicitly and explicitly not to want to much, not to be too intense, and to slow down. They don’t have someone like my mom to encourage them to keep their feet on the gas pedal, but I am certainly glad that I did. If I hadn’t had my mom, I know Paradise Pawn would not exist. 

Diet Pepsi by Addison Rae

To me, this song embodies the joy of summer, the joy of feeling desired and beautiful, and the joy of being connected to someone. This song came out shortly before I sold Paradise Pawn, when I had been working on it for eight years. A lot of the joy and excitement I had felt about the world of Paradise Pawn had faded at this point. After years of rejections, I was starting to think that publishing a book wasn’t in the cards for me. But, part of me still had hope, and still wanted to work on the book. To help fuel that hope, I would blast this song in my car and try to imagine what it would be like to publish the book. And now I’m finding out! 

These Are Days by 10,000 Maniacs 

I have loved this song since the moment I heard it in the opening montage of Cheaper by the Dozen when I was a kid. In the montage, Steve Martin is jogging through farm fields alone, and then he comes home to his twelve chaotic children.To me, this is a song about recognizing that the moment you are living in is a good one, and the connections you have to the people you love are precious. It’s about knowing that your world is changing, but also knowing that you’re not going to forget how special your world felt before it changed. If the words, “Never before and never since/I promise/ Will the whole world be warm as this” where in a different kind of song, they would make me cry. But in this anthemic, joyful song, it doesn’t feel like a bad thing to feel that the world is the warmest it will ever be. It feels like something to celebrate. I’ve been listening to this song a lot as I work on planning my book tour and getting the word out about preordering my book. This book was partially written out of anxiety about losing friends as our lives changed, but, ironically, publicizing the book has helped me reconnect with so many old friends. I am already preemptively nostalgic about this special time in my life, but this song is helping me remember “to be part of the miracles you see in every hour,” and to keep appreciating the people I love and the music I love while I can. 

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

Meg Richardson is the author of the debut novel Paradise Pawn (Tin House/Zando).

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

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

Nephi Craig’s memoir Our Knives Will Save Us brilliantly melds his own history and the culinary heritage of First Nations people.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Our Knives Will Save Us shines with Craig’s admiration for Native people as he carves out a place for himself in the world of haute cuisine without sacrificing his connection with his heritage and community.”

In his own words, here is Nephi Craig’s Book Notes music playlist for his memoir Our Knives Will Save Us:

Songs of Survivance

Song: Can It Be All So Simple|
Artist: Wu-Tang Clan
Album: Enter the Wu-Tang 36 Chambers

This song paints a vivid picture and back in 1994, I could relate to wanting more from life and dreaming about how to get it. This song reminds me of riding my skateboard in search of freedom, identity, power and purpose as a lost young kid.

Song: Liquid Swords|
Artist: The GZA
Album: Liquid Swords

The opening of the song reminded me of my late father Vincent Craig, him being a famous singer/songwriter and how my dad fought oppression through his music, humor and how I watched him growing up. I identified then, and now, with the lyric, “I’m on a mission that ppl say is impossible, but when I swing my swords, they all choppable!” The entire song is a classic and it empowered me during all my best and worst moments in my journey to sobriety.

Song: Under The Bridge
Artist: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Album: Blood Sugar Sex Magic

This song is the anthem of my youth. It came out the hear we moved from Apache land to Navajo land. I remember all of us young Apache kids would sing the chorus when it came on the radio or someone blasted it on a boombox. My home, my Rez, my family is “take me to the place I love, take me all the way, I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day.” Still a favorite song and matches many moments of returning home to find safety in sobriety.

Song: Heaven and Hell
Artist: Raekwon the Chef
Album: Only Built for a Cuban Linx

This song has been inspirational at every moment of my life. I often say that for indigenous peoples, the world ended once. We live on the other side of the apocalypse. This song articulates the hope and despair of this post-apocalyptic indigenous reality.  From a recovery standpoint it also reminds me to “create heaven” in the here and now, because there is no guarantee that there is anything after this. This song brings me hope.

Song: Burn Out
Artist: Get Dead
Album: Bad News

To me the lyrics, “We’re all tangled up in the barbed wire, out of bullets, out of time. The rain was horrendous, the locusts and the fire”, describe what the last days of active addiction felt like for me just before entering recovery. I found Get Dead in 2024 and Codefendants in 2025, and I mention singer Sam King in my acknowledgements.

Song: Venice Queen
Artist: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Album: Stadium Arcadium

This is one of my favorite driving songs for both me and my oldest son. In almost all my travels in the book, this song was playing in a car, stereo, on a phone and in my earphones. From the long drives across Arizona and the American southwest, it brings vivid memories of Washington State and the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Here’s a huge shout out to PNW, Seattle & PDX!

Song: Angel’s Wings
Artist: Social Distortion
Album: Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll

Social Distortion has long been a part of my life and I appreciate it because singer Mike Ness is also a person in recovery, so I can hear the themes and messages woven into the songs. These lyrics capture what it feel like to be sober for many years, “I triumphed in the face of adversity, and I became the man I never thought Id be, and now my biggest challenge?…a thing called love. I guess I’m not as tough as I thought I was.”

Song: The Death of John Smith
Artist: NOFX
Album: The Longest Line

This song was blasting when I got into a car accident that changed my life. I often don’t like to hear this song because of the vivid memory, and other times this song brings back many fond memories of being young and hungry to start my own life. It helped me to believe in myself a little bit more.

Song: Time Tonight
Artist: John Frusciante (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Solo Album: Curtains  

This song by John Frusciante encapsulates the emotion, hope, optimism, pain, clarity and love that I felt after becoming a father to my two younger children when I was about 6 years sober. My oldest son Ari and I had grown in recovery together and this song represented a new way of life, while reflecting on the life left behind. I feel deep gratitude for sobriety with this song. I would play this song as I drove my baby daughter to her daycare, and later her little brother too. John Frusciante is also in recovery, and I hear the recovery messages loud and clear.

Song: Point of No Return
Artist: Immortal Technique
Album: Revolutionary Vol. 2

I heard this song when I was struggling with constant relapse toward the end of my addiction. The angst, rage, resistance, and flow of the truth in the lyrics affirmed my right to feel legitimate indigenous rage. Later when I got sober, hearing this song also affirmed that I had passed a point of no return because I had changed, only because of the power of surrender and truth. When I gave up the need to control everything in life, I gained control over me.  

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Nephi Craig is the executive chef of Café Gozhóó in Whiteriver, Arizona, on the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and an advanced certified relapse prevention specialist (ACRPS) and behavioral health technician (BHT) currently serving as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the Rainbow Treatment Center. Craig is the founder of the Native American Culinary Association (NACA), an organization that is dedicated to the research, refinement, and development of Native American cuisine. His work has been recognized in national and international publications such as Newsweek, Forbes, Food & Wine, and The Guardian.

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