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

Susan Donovan Bernhard’s novel Westerly is a multi-generational epic that spans fifty years, three countries, and three generations of unforgettable women.

Heather Aimee O’Neill wrote of the book:

“In a story packed with as much secrecy as love, Westerly follows two generations of women as they move from war-torn Germany to an Irish village to mid-coast Maine across five decades. But the larger journey is one of learning to share our lives―our past and present truths―with those who are supposed to know us best, and trusting that they will still love us. An absolutely beautiful story of choosing honesty and forgiveness over secrets and shame.”

In her own words, here is Susan Donovan Bernhard’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Westerly:

Two German sisters are sent to foster care in Ireland, where they are separated by tragedy. WESTERLY follows one girl to the United States where she lives with a name and identity that are not her own. It’s a story of knowing yourself, expectation and longing, the shame that comes from harboring secrets, and ultimately the hard journey toward real forgiveness and authentic living. I don’t listen to music while I write. I build the playlist to set mood, to create a headspace where my characters can swim and dance and fight and do all the things complex characters do. Plus, as a person susceptible to ear worms, it’s a way for me to keep thinking about the novel even when I’m not actively working on it.

Love You For a Long Time by Maggie Rogers

Came in like a vision from the old west wind

All the songs I longlisted for WESTERLY were assigned to a character. I imagined Faye or Maeve or Molly listening to the song on the radio, singing along, hearing their own stories. But the moment I heard this song, I assigned it to me. Maybe it was at that point I started truly believing that this novel would be a book.

You know that I could never make this up
I found the reason I’m not givin’ it up

The journey to publication is scary and fraught, depressing and exhilarating, deflating and affirming. If writing is art, the art is the work and not the product. Still. To have it all bound into a physical book is like framing a painting. Characters from my first novel have stayed with me and these ones will as well. After all, I’ve loved them for a long time.

Babe, don’t you wanna see how far this thing can go?

The Benediction (A Good Woman) by Rose Cousins

Call me by my name and I will answer.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard this song. March 5, 2020. My mom’s 99^th birthday. I was walking on the beach in Chatham, MA on the first day of a writing retreat wondering what in the world this virus was and whether we would be able to get food in a week. I was struggling to understand the novel I was working on, what I wanted to write. Then I heard these lyrics about silence and interiority. I listened on repeat.

Listen and you’ll hear what I am saying
Feelings I have difficulty relaying
My silence isn’t absence, I’m just praying
I wanna be a good woman.

I made my way back to the house as the sun was going down. A pack of coyotes moved together across the grass and down to the shore. I burst into the house and played the song for my writing partners.

A strong and reliable daughter
A kind and understanding sister
A dear and attentive friend and lover
A girl with her heart on fire.

Love In Wartime by Birds of Chicago

I love quiet domesticity in the lyrics, the routine and wonder. There is something so human and flawed about the characters in this song. William and Faye both suffered through war and carry guilt and pain and a desire to forget and a desire to be loved and to love despite it all.

We are not made from metals hammered
We are lightning, clay and grammar
We’re the whispers in the dark when the night comes ’round
Yesterday and tomorrow
Keep our joy and our sorrow

Painted Blue by Sundy Best

Man, I love a broken character. And Conor O’Kane is broken and bitter and damaged. He’s a guy who knows how to hold a grudge. (The two of us might be related.)

Too bad you traded your love for your pride.

There’s a story in my family about my dad Tom and his brother Bill. The story goes that Uncle Bill came to my hometown to barhop and get drunk with my dad. The two of them got into some sort of brawl and spent the night in a jail cell sobering up. The next morning, the sheriff drove Uncle Bill to the town line and told him never to come back. And Uncle Bill, prideful and stubborn, swore he never would. Then my dad got mad because his brother wouldn’t come to visit him and he swore that, by God, he wouldn’t visit my Uncle Bill either. For maybe fifteen or twenty years they didn’t see each other. They lived 80 miles apart. I was 17 when my dad died and I met my Uncle Bill for the first time the next day. They looked so much alike I thought he was my father’s ghost.

I’ve been broke down and I’ve been fooled
By time and age and some by you
So I just lay here with a bottle on the floor

Why wouldn’t Conor just…? Why didn’t he tell William that…? Why didn’t my Uncle Bill just…? Why wouldn’t my dad pick up the phone and…? Because these Irishmen—real and fictional—held grudges like possessions. To give up the grudge would make them poor and weak. It was a game of chicken and my dad and his brother crashed into each other. For Conor O’Kane, giving up the grudge would have meant letting go of Fiadh. For my dad and Uncle Bill? I don’t know. But, to this day, I don’t forgive either of them for keeping me from knowing the two of them together. I am my father’s daughter after all.

So when the pain starts to creep in
And I just pour another shot again
So I don’t have to miss you anymore

Eyes to the Wind by The War On Drugs

So I’ll set my eyes to the wind
But it won’t be easy to leave it all again
Just a bit rundown here on the sea
There’s just a stranger livin’ in me

When I first started building the character of Maeve, I imagined a path for her that would lead to (spoiler alert) happiness. I had a friend in high school named Marla. Everyone loved Marla, wanted to be close to her, wanted to be her, even. This was the early 1980s and Marla was a star basketball player, a “tomboy,” and utterly cool. We kids were shockingly obtuse and cruel back then, ridiculing and mocking girls who were drawn into Marla’s orbit. Surely some of those girls were attracted to Marla more than they were to any boy. Surely some experienced the confusion of desire at a time when you just couldn’t be gay. Marla’s twin sister Joni, equally charismatic, was a literal beauty queen. Both sisters were insanely popular and beloved. Both girls had better and closer friends than me, people who knew their secrets and their pain. No one escapes high school unscathed, after all. Marla, though, carried the kind of pain that ultimately led to her taking her own life.

When I met you and I fell away again
Like a train in reverse down a dark road
Carrying the whole load just rattling the whole way home

At a class reunion in 1992, I talked to Marla about my life. I was living in San Francisco at the time, dating a guy who would eventually be my husband. Marla had come out by then and brought the woman she was dating to the reunion. We talked about San Francisco, what a great city it was, how open and adventurous and artistic and wild. I think that was the last time I saw her. Though we weren’t close, I was heartbroken by the news of her death. There was just something about her. When it came time to write the character of Maeve, I imagined Marla, confronting the demons that haunted her and coming out on the other side of the fight very much alive.

Nightflyer by Allison Russell

Molly is constantly in battle with herself, two things, fourteen things at once, all versions of herself vying for attention. She is The Morrigan, the triple goddess, a shapeshifter. Even her grandfather sees the warrior in her.

I’m the melody and the space between

The fire and the branch that’s burning

I’m each of his steps on the stairway
I’m his shadow in the door frame

Molly’s battle to get overcome the trauma of her childhood by owning it, literally wearing it, is so perfectly encapsulated in this song. I feel like it was written for her.

His soul is trapped in that room
But I crawled back in my mother’s womb
Came back out with my gold and my greens
Now I see everything
Now I feel everything…

Macushla by The Adler Brothers

She sings the song her dad would sing
Now he listens from above
It’s all gonna be okay
My macushla, my love.

Faye and Thomas have such a lovely and melancholy relationship, bound as they are by secrecy and loss. I found this searching for versions of the traditional Irish song. I love that it came to me so organically. And boy do I know that feeling of missing your dad.

Come Back by Pearl Jam

Please say, that if you hadn’t of gone now
I wouldn’t have lost you another way
From wherever you are
Oh-oh, oh-oh, come back

There’s a running theme for all the characters in WESTERLY of running away and returning home, of blame and sacrifice that is often misplaced and misapplied. Early on, I had an epigraph from Euripides. “Come back, even as a shadow, even as a dream.” I’ll take any piece of you, any version of you—you who I have lost, you who I long for, you, gone too soon or simply gone. Not long after my dad died, I dreamed that he came into the house like he’d never left. He hugged me, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close to him. In my dream, I imagined climbing into his shirt pocket. I woke up so sad but also so grateful that he came to me, even in a dream. I keep that now as a memory, as if it were real. Because aren’t dreams real?

And the days, they linger on
And every night, what I’m waiting for
Is the real possibility that I may meet you in my dreams
Sometimes you’re there and you’re talking back to me
Come the morning I could swear you’re next to me
And it’s okay

Carry Me by The Secret Sisters

What if this song had three narrators instead of one?

Molly: I’m a long way from home
I feel the weight in my bones
I’m tired like a sinner
I’m cold and my money’s all gone

Maeve: I’m ashamed of the things that I’ve done
Feeling love is like facing a gun
The closer you get
The farther that I’m gonna run

Faye: If I keep on hiding, how will I be known?
I keep telling myself that I’m better alone

On a roadtrip through Ireland in 2019, we got turned around in the Wicklow Mountains and ended up at a place called The Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. The organization is housed in an old barracks that has had many functions during Ireland’s turbulent history including as an ignominious reform school operated by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Post-World War II, the Irish Red Cross housed German orphans here before fostering them with families throughout Ireland. I’d never heard anything about the program, dubbed Operation Shamrock, but these little German sisters appeared to me like an apparition. I pictured them stepping off a bus in a foreign land, the sound of bombs still bursting in their ears. How strange that must have been. WESTERLY was born from that wrong turn in the Wicklow Mountains. That the place is now one for peace and reconciliation seems especially apt.

I’m worn and I’m weathered
But your love is the shelter I need.

Fly by Nick Drake

Please, give me a second grace.
Please tell me your second name.

I’ve been a fan of Nick Drake for so long. I don’t remember when I first started thinking about this song, about Faye and Sela, about second chances, about how you don’t want to wait too long to ask for forgiveness or to grant it. But it’s always been there.

Now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done
Come, come sit down on the fence in the sun

You and Me On The Rock by Brandi Carlisle

I already spoiled that Maeve’s ending would be happy so here she is, with Wendy. (And it makes me so happy to imagine that in some alternate universe, Marla got there, too.)

I build my house up on this rock, baby
Every day with you
There’s nothin’ in that town I need
After everything we’ve been through.

Front Porch by Joy Williams

Say my name through the screen door
Come on back to the front porch

I hear this song and I think of all the women in WESTERLY, the headwinds and tailwinds that buffeted them and nudged them along, how they fell and rose. I wish I could bring all my characters together (and all the people who inspired them) so we could sit on the front porch at the farmhouse in Maine and have a cold beer as the sun goes down.

Whatever you’ve done, it doesn’t matter
‘Cause darlin’ we’re all a little splintered and battered.

Donoughmore by Rose Cousins

In the green of Ireland, oceans in between
I think of you again and what all of this means.

Rose Cousins bookends, perfect for Faye and Molly and Maeve, for Fiadh and Gisela and Elisabeth, all of them making room for love.

Heart be with me now,
As I make room for love.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Susan Bernhard’s playlist for her novel Winter Loon

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

Susan Donovan Bernhard is the author of Winter Loon, an Amazon bestseller and winner of the Boston Authors Club’s Julia Ward Howe Prize for fiction. She is a Mass Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a GrubStreet Novel Incubator program graduate, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Susan was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana and graduated from the University of Maryland. She now lives and writes in Massachusetts.

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

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

Catriona Silvey’s novel Vervain Hollow is a masterfully unnerving and engaging work of literary horror.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“An otherworldly portrayal of fanaticism and evangelism with an expansive moral lesson about the dangers that lie in sacrificing one’s identity to fit in…Silvey’s exploration of what drives people into cults is sensitive yet poignant and speaks to the modern moment. This thoughtful and haunting novel is an excellent addition to the growing number of regional gothics.”

In her own words, here is Catriona Silvey’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Vervain Hollow:

Before Vervain Hollow was a book, it was a playlist.

Laura, the protagonist of the novel, used to be in a cult. Drawn in by charismatic leader Vervain and his promises of impossible power, she vied for his favor until a fire destroyed the cult, the sprawling house they lived in, and apparently, Vervain himself. Two years later, hearing Vervain might still be alive, Laura returns to the ruin in search of him.

From the moment I imagined the novel’s opening scene – Laura venturing back to the burnt-out shell of the cult’s former residence – songs started collecting around it. By the time I had a playlist I was happy with, I knew the broad beats of the plot. I knew Laura was still devoted to Vervain, more than two years after his apparent death. I knew that Vervain was no fraud: the power he had promised Laura was real, but his motives and his nature were very different from what she had imagined. I knew that Laura’s arc would function as an allegory of the ways in which real-world systems shape our behaviors, define what we see as real, and make us complicit in the harm done to those we love.

Apart from a couple of songs I substituted in during revisions, the playlist below is the same one that propelled me through the first draft. It’s a mix of songs I’ve loved for so long that they formed part of the subconscious material for the novel, and songs I discovered serendipitously along the way. If the playlist has a mood, it’s emotional, obsessive, and unsettling, much like the book itself.

‘Hey Jupiter (Dakota Version)’ by Tori Amos

Laura starts the novel in a place of heartbreak. The cult that gave her life meaning, the leader she adored, the power he promised her, are all ashes in her past. Until the moment she hears that Vervain might still be alive, she is hopelessly adrift in her grief.

As the title suggests, ‘Hey Jupiter’ is a breakup song turned cosmic, chronicling the end not only of a relationship but of a framework for understanding the world. The programmed drums and vibrating bass of the single version add a menacing edge, hinting that this longing isn’t leading anywhere good. The music video, featuring Amos sitting impassive while the room burns around her, also evokes the fire that destroyed the cult’s residence, and the part of Laura that never escaped the flames.

‘Before the Fire’ by Santigold

Santigold is a fixture on my book playlists: her songs are so specific, so unexpected, and so evocative that they always open up possibilities for me as a writer. They are also uniformly bangers, and ‘Before the Fire’ is no exception. Over a driving beat and haunted, repeating backing vocals, the lyrics tell a story of trauma, numbness, and help that comes too late. The refrain, “I was burned before the fire”, applies to Laura and to many of her fellow cultists, wounded in ways that make them ripe for Vervain’s manipulation.

‘Lion’s Share’ by Wild Beasts

I love and mourn Wild Beasts. Before disbanding in 2018, they perfected the expression of a uniquely slinky, sideways masculinity, like if Kate Bush happened to be four men from the northwest of England. Pairing throbbing bass with tinkling piano, ‘Lion’s Share’ is both seductive and subtly horrifying: “I love you all the more for every fault/They’re how I’d gotten in, they’re how I cracked the vault”. Predatory in the best way, it perfectly evokes both the attractive face Vervain presents to Laura and the menace lurking underneath.

‘De Selby (Part 2)’ by Hozier

While I was revising the book, I got obsessed with Hozier’s album Unreal Unearth, and with this song in particular. The title is a reference to Flann O’Brien’s surreal, horrifying novel The Third Policeman, and the lyrics are appropriately disturbing: “What you live in/Darling, it finds a way to live in you”. It makes me think of the relationship between Vervain, the house that embodies him, and Laura; more broadly, it echoes the novel’s wider themes of how the structures we’re raised with become a part of us.

‘Take Over’ by Tom Rosenthal

Honestly, I feel bad about including this one. In its original context on the album Fenn, ‘Take Over’ is a tender ode to seeing the world through the eyes of your child. In the context of Vervain Hollow, the invitation to “take me over” has a much darker connotation: Vervain’s ultimate goal is to possess and control Laura’s body. Still, I couldn’t resist keeping this sweet, gorgeous piano ballad on the playlist: the gap between the delicate beauty of the music and the horror of the lyrics (when read in a literal way) evokes the dissonance between Laura’s blissed-out fugue state and the reality of what she’s inviting.

‘Rorschach Baby’ by Ryn Weaver

I first heard of Ryn Weaver when a reader included her song ‘New Constellations’ on a playlist for my book Meet Me in Another Life. It felt like serendipity, then, when her new single ‘Rorschach Baby’ came up on my recommendations as I was revising Vervain Hollow and I discovered it was spookily perfect for the book. Carried along by electronic urgency and an anxious, schizophrenic rhythm, the lyrics read like a synopsis of Laura’s journey. In short: try and tell me this song is about anything other than psychological warfare with a trickster faux-god and I will refuse to believe you.

‘Cannibal’s Hymn’ by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

There’s a chapter late in Vervain Hollow where Laura sees past events from Vervain’s perspective and finally comes to understand his predatory, consuming nature. That chapter was a lot of fun to write, much as I imagine this song was. The crunchy drums, insistent up-and-down bass riff, and Cave’s purring baritone combine to create a song that’s sexy and disturbing in equal measure. When Cave croons, “If you’re gonna dine with them cannibals/Sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten”, it’s hard to resist the urge to sing along. (As long as the neighbors aren’t listening.)

‘Deeper Devastation’ by Jesca Hoop

Once Laura understands Vervain’s true nature, she recognizes her complicity in his crimes. ‘Deeper Devastation’ is a song about a reckoning with the self, and with the flaw at the heart of us all: “You cannot trust a human being/To do the right thing”.

Like Santigold, Jesca Hoop writes songs that wrestle with hard-to-define but resonant emotions. Musically, she doesn’t sound like anyone else: here, her rich voice floats in a mournful soundscape of Twin Peaks-esque guitar and backing vocals like ritual chants. In the novel, this song corresponds to the lowest point of Laura’s arc, when she can’t see a way past her own frailty.

‘Dear Wormwood’ by The Oh Hellos

In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Wormwood is a demon tasked with tempting a human to sin. This song is a defiant reply from human to demon, acknowledging its dark influence and refusing to succumb.

Most of Vervain Hollow is written in first person direct address, with Laura referring to Vervain as “you”. It’s a marker of devotion, of longing for his recognition, that signals how bound up in him she’s become. This song corresponds to the moment when she stops. Recognizing Vervain for what he is, she sends him back to the third person: “I know who you are now/And I name you my enemy”.

‘Trellick Tower’ by Emmy The Great

Emmy The Great excels at telling a profound and complete story in under five minutes: something I can only envy, as I’m incapable of even attempting that in fewer than eighty thousand words. Here, it’s a breakup story about an ex-lover who left because he found God. The song weaves together the titular London tower block and the story of Rapunzel, placing the lost love impossibly out of reach: “Can I spend my life trying to climb you?”

For me, this song stands for Laura’s reluctance to turn her back on Vervain, even after all she’s learned. Letting him go means letting go of the power he granted her, conditional and toxic as it was, and of the idea of herself as chosen. ‘Trellick Tower’ contains one of the foundational lines for Laura’s character, and one of the most beautiful lyrics I’ve ever heard: “And I think relics ache for when the saint had breath/They miss the thing that changed them”.

‘Vesuvius’ by Sufjan Stevens

At the climax of Laura’s internal battle, she must burn away any part of Vervain that remains and reclaim what’s left of herself. ‘Vesuvius’ describes such a spiritual showdown, a scouring of fire that must be undergone, no matter the pain: “I’d rather be burned than be living in debt”.

Starting with a simple muted piano, the song builds gradually, adding discordant electronics, glitchy beats, and layered vocals that reflect the opposition between “ghost” and “host” that runs through the lyrics. When I listen to it, I think of Laura wandering her own tangled mental landscape, collecting the fragments of herself back into a whole.

‘Horizon’ by Aldous Harding

The horizon is a recurring motif in Vervain Hollow. At the beginning of the novel, it stands for the infinite possibilities that paralyze Laura, pushing her toward the strictures and control of the cult. By the end, the horizon has changed in her perception, becoming a symbol of freedom.

Another off-kilter breakup song, ‘Horizon’ features cryptic lyrics that suggest rather than explain. The chorus, “Here is your princess/And here is the horizon”, gives me shivers: there’s so much in there about refusing others’ definitions, choosing instead something that is open and scary and yet to be known. It expresses the end of Laura’s journey, in a way that carried through to the pages of the book. This song was always the last song on the playlist, and the last word of the novel is “horizon”.

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

Catriona Silvey is the author of the international bestseller Meet Me in Another Life and Love and Other Paradoxes. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in Scotland and England. After collecting an unreasonable number of degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and Edinburgh, she settled in Edinburgh where she lives with her husband and children.

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

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

Alex DiFrancesco’s post-dystopian novel-in-stories The Grief Shop is inventive and enveloping.

Never Angeline Nørth wrote of the book:

“Sharp, inventive, and deeply human, The Grief Shop is a look at how emotions make us who we are and the way those same feelings link us together. Simultaneously zooming in to the personal and out to the global, DiFrancesco is an astute observer of how we all tick”

In their own words, here is Alex DiFrancesco’s Book Notes music playlist for their novel-in-stories The Grief Shop:

The Grief Shop and Other Stories from a Broken World takes place after “the tragedy” kills ⅓ of the earth’s population, and renders the rest clinically emotionally numb. The novel-in-stories follows Gemma, who works a lot of odd job hustles as the world recalibrates – most of them speculative. She works in a grief-infused coffee shop, a boxing gym for pain therapy, a funeral home, and more. Gemma went numb long before the tragedy due to trauma in her young life, and much of the book revolves around her trying to feel again as the rest of the world settles into its numbness.

The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man) – Car Seat Headrest

Since an unnamed catastrophe hangs over the book, it only makes sense that this song would open the book’s playlist. I learned about Car Seat Headrest from a 20-something coworker at a bakery I worked in last year, and fell in love with their bombastic indie sound.

Another World – Anohni

I first heard Anohni’s voice on the cover album of Leonard Cohen’s songs, I’m Your Man, singing a perfect version of “If It Be Your Will.” Anohni’s mournful list of things she will miss from the old world, but her longing for a new world seemed to encapsulate Gemma’s longing for things lost and her faint hope for things to come.

Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

I spent a fair amount of time in my youth listening to classic rock, so when I thought of a world that was completely devoid of feeling, it seemed fitting to put this song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall on the playlist. There’s been some debate through time about whether this was a song about doctors getting a sick lead singer ready for the stage, or heroin, but in either case, it speaks to the numbness of the world in The Grief Shop.

Search and Destroy – The Stooges

The main character of The Grief Shop, Gemma, while adjusting to the new world with ⅓ of the population killed in the tragedy, takes up crafts. One of the crafts she does is cross-stitch hoops with inspirational images and Iggy Pop lyrics on them. “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,” and such.

Fuck All the Perfect People – Chip Taylor and the New Ukranians

Gemma is pretty jaded, and so is this Chip Taylor song about all the people sleepwalking through life, and how they can all go to hell.

I Wanna Be Sedated – The Ramones

Gemma spends a fair amount of time in the book drinking with her best friend, Xander. The numbing desire behind that is very reminiscent of this punk song.

zombie girl – Adrianne Lenker

From the moment I heard the lyric “vacant as a closed down fair” in this song, I knew that it was something that Gemma could relate to.

Road To Joy – Bright Eyes

At a certain point in the book, Gemma moves towards feeling again. This 2000s Bright Eyes song, based on the “Ode to Joy” isn’t about an uncomplicated road to feeling, so it seemed fitting. “I read the body count out of the paper/ and now it’s written all over my face.”

White Elephant – Nick Cave and Warren Ellis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when I first started writing The Grief Shop, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis were writing Carnage, which (coincidentally!) was also about a post-disaster world. This song from it is, hands down, my favorite Nick Cave track in about a decade. One reviewer of it wrote something along the lines of how long it had been since Nick threatened to shoot us in the face, and how nice it was to return to that.

How Sad, How Lovely – Connie Converse

Connie Converse and her legend play a huge part in The Grief Shop. She’s idolized by one of the characters, which leads to thoughts about what hero-worship of legendary artists really means. This song, ostensibly about watching a sunset, seems like the perfect close for this playlist, and not just because it’s about endings.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their memoir Breaking the Curse

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their story collection Transmutation

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their novel All City

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their essay collection Psychopomps

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

Alex DiFrancesco is the author of the dystopian novel All City, the story collection reflecting trans realities Transmutation, and the memoir Breaking the Curse (2024). About their debut story collection, Patrick Cottrell wrote in the New York Times: “At the affective core of Transmutation is the question of how we can offer shelter for one another’s pain, real and imagined.” They are the winner of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2022, and their novel All City was the first awards finalist by a transgender author for the Ohioana Book Awards in its eighty-year history. They served as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications in Tennessee, and edited LGBTQIA+ non-fiction for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Their work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Pacific Standard, Eater, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. DiFrancesco lives in Philadelphia.

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

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

Meg Charlton’s novel Voyagers is a debut both compelling and moving as it explores the possibilities of great friendship and extraterrestrial life.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“In her debut, Charlton writes with the elegant prose, cohesive plotlines, and believable characters of a seasoned author….The feeling of uncertainty and doubt around their experience gives depth to the alien-abduction trope, making this read as a blend of sci-fi and literary fiction… Interrogating the importance of friendship, what friends owe each other, and what makes a narrative true, this novel will appeal to fans of Gabrielle Zevin who enjoy the nuance of conspiracy.”

In her own words, here is Meg Charlton’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Voyagers:

In Voyagers, two six-year-olds, Alex and Ana, mysteriously vanish for two days in the late 1990s. The incident is interpreted as an alien abduction and makes the two kids a) famous and b) inseparable, until their divergent beliefs about the truth of their experience tear them apart as teenagers. Now adults, they reunite when the world seems to be on the verge of actual, global first contact with aliens. Voyagers is about many things — aliens, of course, but also fame and faith. Class and conspiracy. Truth and memory and the nature of reality itself. But above all, it is about friendship, that most durable yet delicate of bonds, and what it takes to maintain that intimacy across vast distances of time and space. 

For every project, I make a playlist. I rarely listen to it while I write, but I use it as a towline back into the mood, characters and world of the story. I worked on this project over about five or six years, so the playlist contracted and expanded many times! Some of the songs are literally about UFOs or the fallibility of memory or the fraying of a previously unbreakable bond. (I can be pretty on the nose with my song selections!) But others were selected for more oblique reasons. Hopefully, they capture the mood of both the book itself and the mindset I was in while writing it.

Door of the Cosmos – Sun Ra

I said I never listen to the songs on my playlist while writing, but this is the exception that proves the rule. I listened to a lot of free jazz while writing this book, but Sun Ra was my favorite, for obvious reasons. Sun Ra’s visionary music and Afrofuturist philosophy was born out of an alien encounter, which transported him to Saturn. After the encounter, he dropped out of college and ended up pursuing music, to all our benefit. Sun Ra’s music, for me, is always bursting with freaky joy and wondrous possibility. For Voyagers, I wanted to approach space as a place (to paraphrase the title of Sun Ra’s own film) and alien contact as an event from a mindset of fear but of thrilling, radical transformation.

California – EMA

That opening line — Fuck California / You made me boring — could be a mantra for either one of my main characters, Alex or Ana, who both believe, in their own ways, that their lives were irrevocably altered (for better and for worse) by their childhood experience in the California desert. This song has such an angsty, angry adolescent sound to it that I really love, earnest and plaintive and haunting. It sounds just like how I wanted the teenage sections of Alex and Ana’s lives to read.

Take Me Home – Phil Collins

This song has such a wonderful, shimmery menace to it. Apparently, Phil Collins was inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and it’s interesting to listen to the song through that lens. But I always heard it as a song of incredible yearning for answers, of all kinds, and for the imagined liberation they might bring. For me, it always made me think of Alex and his own desperate belief that “the truth is out there” if only he could find it. That final plea — “take, take me home / ‘cause I don’t remember” — might be a little on the nose for Alex’s situation. But when I wanted to drop into the real ache of his search for answers, I’d listen to this song. 

The Passenger – Iggy Pop

Sorry, but I think the multiverse is the most damaging science fiction device since sentient AI! Based as it might be in real theories of quantum mechanics, it often (not always) ends up perpetuating this view of our lives as a form of consumer choice: If I’d just made this one discreet change, then everything would be different. I was interested in exploring the dark side of that multiverse mindset in Voyagers. Alex is obsessed with the idea that his life has been thrown “off course” somehow. But what if we accepted that the life we live is the only course that was ever set for us? What if we surrendered the idea of ever being in the driver’s seat? Alex spends a good chunk of the novel as a literal passenger, but in a bigger sense, he spends his whole life as one. I think we all do. “The Passenger” is a perfect song about letting the world wash over you and the exhilaration that comes with letting go of our need for control. 

Hey Moon – John Maus

I listened to a lot of John Maus when I was working on this book. His music makes me feel like I’m driving at night through LA. I don’t have the sonic vocabulary to explain why it gives me that sensation, but it does! (While the majority of the book takes place in New York City or in the Coachella Valley, Los Angeles still felt like the novel’s home city.) But “Hey Moon” also feels, on a more literal level, like such a lovely song about loneliness and looking for companionship among the celestial bodies. So much of this book is about asking whether or not we are alone, in the universe or in our lives. I think this song offers a beautiful, ambiguous answer — maybe there’s no one out there but the moon but that doesn’t mean we need to feel lonely. 

Series of Dreams – Bob Dylan

I first heard this song in the trailer for Bombay Beach, a beautiful film about a community living on the Salton Sea in the Sonoran Desert. Because of how I first encountered it, I always associated “Series of Dreams” with the desert and the Southern California desert in particular, where some of the most pivotal sections of Voyagers take place. The extremity of that landscape makes any bit of human civilization feel so alien and dreamlike, which is maybe why this song evokes the desert so well, its sweeping instrumentation under non-sequitor lyrics that feel like snippets of real dreams. 

When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky – Lucius

Another Dylan, but a cover! I tried to restrain myself from doing too many on the nose musical cues — which is to say: “songs with space-related keywords in the title” — but I couldn’t resist this one. My husband sent me this version when I was feeling very stuck with the novel and then the writing completely unlocked for me after listening to this song. Something about the way it builds from that mischievous opening guitar to this plaintive, huge final chorus echoed the structure of the story, as did the lyrics: “it won’t matter who loves who / you’ll love me or I’ll love you” felt like a perfect summation of Alex and Ana’s complicated but unbreakable bond. And I liked to imagine that opening line — “look out across the fields / see me returning” — playing over a dark screen at the end of a film version of Voyagers. 

After the Gold Rush – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris

I love this version of a Neil Young classic. Saddest song ever written about interplanetary colonization! But really, it’s about the destruction of our own little spaceship Earth, “the only home we’ve ever known” as Carl Sagan put it. Any conversation about aliens is inextricably linked with reconsidering our relationship to our own planet. In films, the invading extraterrestrials usually serve to unite humanity, petty differences cast aside in the name of species-wide unity against a common outside threat. It’s a goofy trope, but there’s something quite profound about it. 

I Think UR a Contra – Vampire Weekend

Alex grows up in a very preppy Manhattan milieu, with all of its attendant seductions and snobbery and small cruelties, and who better to evoke that than Vampire Weekend? But I also picked this particular track because it speaks to that awful rug-pull of betrayal when someone you believed you were close with reveals themselves as a stranger. Alex and Ana’s central conflict — over the nature of the truth and of their own moral superiority — could be summed up with the song’s chorus: “ “I think ur a contra / I think that you’ve lied / don’t call me a contra / ‘til you’ve tried.” 

It’s All Coming Back to Me Now – Céline Dion

This is the only track in this playlist that is actually featured in the book—Someone plays it on the piano at a pivotal party Alex and Ana attend in the hills of Silverlake as teenagers — in a moment meant to show the nimbleness of Ana’s charisma and Alex’s awe at its power. I love the insane scope of this song — personally, I have a soft spot for both Céline and power ballads — and its instant shot of late 90s nostalgia. Hopefully Voyagers plunges readers back in that era, too. 

I Know the End – Phoebe Bridgers

When I was writing this book, I told a friend that I wanted it to feel like listening to Punisher. If I accomplished even a drop of that for someone, I will have done my job. This song in particular mirrors the arc of the book, both lyrically and structurally. But that’s all I’ll say — No spoilers! 

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

Meg Charlton lives in New York City. Voyagers is her first novel.

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

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

Part personal travelogue, part guidebook, and part advocacy guide, Lindsey Danis’s (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel is an empowering book for queer travelers

The Rumpus wrote of the book:

“Danis offers an abundance of resources, concrete information, and helpful suggestions for queer travelers, but doesn’t propose a one-size-fits all approach. They make space for readers of differing races, ethnicities, abilities, identities, personalities, and values; never getting prescriptive about the ‘right’ way to travel. (Obviously a queer book makes room for possibility.) In fact, each chapter ends with a list of prompts and questions so readers can reflect on what matters most to them as individual travelers.”

In their own words, here is Lindsey Danis’s Book Notes music playlist for their book (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel:

(Out) On the Road is part travel memoir, part guide, packed with all the things I didn’t even know to Google when I set off on my earliest adventures. The songs on this playlist kept me company while I researched and wrote.

Pulled from my own travels, these songs have defined pivotal moments at various life stages, from childhood to teen years and my emerging queerness, to the first trips I took independently and the journeys that have shaped me the most. The best stories are shared in my book, so I won’t spoil them here. This playlist transports me to the dining room of my childhood house, or the interior of my beloved Volvo station wagon, which was covered in bumper stickers, or expat bars in dusty alleyways and the shared connection those spaces provide.

“Graceland,” Paul Simon

Like the boy in the song, I am a child of divorce. This song soothed the pain of being different for reasons beyond my control. When I drove cross-country, years later, I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit Graceland, in search of the song’s promised redemption.

“La Louisiane,” Poisson Rouge

In Lafayette, Louisiana (state #47), there wasn’t much to do at night but drink and Hideaway on Lee was the obvious place. That’s where I heard this haunting anthem to Louisiana’s disappearing Francophone culture for the first time. The song is about a marginalized community resisting erasure, and the parallels to queerness were obvious.

“Heart of Gold,” Neil Young

This song followed me across Thailand and Laos from the nomad hub of Chiang Mai to Si Phan Don–4,000 Islands–a remote river archipelago near the Cambodian border. Its introspective yearning feels so obviously a backpacker’s anthem, but what can I say? I love it.

“A Horse With No Name,” America

In heavy rotation on my first cross-country road trip, this song transports me to the desert Southwest. After watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon and hiking down into it a bit, so we could say we did, I drove through Petrified Wood National Forest to Albuquerque. As we drove east, we periodically stopped and gathered dirt, collecting portions of America in plastic bags as if this act of archiving could make America belong to us. For years, I kept that dirt in glass soda bottles with the location marked on the bottom. It’s long gone now, but I recall the colors: deep rich red, bruised-purple, golden sand, and the simple love I had then for a land that hasn’t always loved me back.

“Run-Around,” Blues Traveler

One of two tracks that played on repeat on the trip I took to Egypt and Israel. I was fourteen and spent half my time being moody and introspective and the other half enchanted by traces of ancient civilizations.

“America,” Simon & Garfunkel

YEARNING, pt. 1.

“American Music,” Violent Femmes

McDonald’s fries and coke with no ice in Cairo, drag queens lip syncing to Lady Gaga in Phnom Penh, Neil Young on repeat—America’s biggest export is our culture, including American music. Being American, I didn’t realize the cultural hegemony in this until a good friend, who was an international student, pointed it out to me. To be an American traveler is to find traces of home everywhere; to be understood because the world has learned your native tongue, and to see all of this as normal.

This song reminds me of the soft power expressed within the world’s love of American music—the tender hope for the unfulfilled promises this country was founded on—and the cultural myopia of most Americans. Too many of us don’t know our own history, never mind anybody else’s.

“Uncle John’s Band,” Indigo Girls

The second song that played on repeat the summer I spent in Israel and Egypt. I’d never heard it before then, didn’t realize it was a cover, and had never listened to the Grateful Dead, but over the monthlong adventure this song wormed its way into my heart and head.

Tracking it down back home took the sort of sleuthing I would later apply to figuring out if my crushes were into women. I faintly remember requesting the CD through an interlibrary loan then promptly burning myself a copy on cassette.

“Land of Canaan,” Indigo Girls

YEARNING, pt. 2 (sapphic era): It’s just the London skyline telling me you’re not mine.

The live version of this song is introduced with sly humor as “a rock and roll song” and the audience scream-sings along in a way that evokes lesbian nostalgia. (Out) On the Road is about travel, obviously, and finding the places where we fit, both within ourselves and within the wider world. Part of that is letting go, as this song reminds me.

“Born on a Train,” The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields’ alt-country album The Charm of the Highway Strip is an old favorite, this song most of all. It spoke to my wandering heart the same way that On the Road did, when I read it in high school, assuaged by Kerouac’s misfit crew and the glimpses of queer lives sprinkled in its pages.

“Reno Dakota,” The Magnetic Fields

Brokenhearted, at a crossroads in my life, and lost in the swamps of Florida, I fantasized about starting a Magnetic Fields cover band. I’d learn ukulele and sing all of Claudia Gonson’s songs, including this one, and perhaps one day, this would make the ex I couldn’t get out of my head fall back in love with me.

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

An avid chronicler of her many travels, Lindsey Danis has visited all fifty states, plus Puerto Rico, and twenty-eight countries. Her travel writings have appeared in publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Fodor’s, Business Insider, USA Today, The Albany Times-Union, Longreads and Eater. Lindsey’s essays have received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. In 2021, Lindsey founded Queer Adventurers, a travel blog for LGBTQ+ people. Lindsey received a BA in English from Vassar College and an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and lives in Upstate New York.

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

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

Stephen O’Connor’s novel We Want So Much to Be Ourselves powerfully explores the personal price of fascism.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“O’Connor offers a lucid and chilling view into the rise of fascism. . . . It’s a knockout.”

In his own words, here is Stephen O’Connor’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel We Want So Much to Be Ourselves:

When I was in middle school, my mother, distressed that I read almost nothing but science fiction and comic books, handed me the Modern Library edition of Selected Stories of Franz Kafka, published in 1952, the year of my birth. She recommended I start with “The Metamorphosis,” presumably because she thought a story about a young man who has turned into an insect would be close enough to science fiction to hook me. While I was definitely intrigued, I lacked sufficient confidence in my mother’s opinion to commit to the novella-length “The Metamorphosis,” and so I started with the much shorter “A Country Doctor.” That story hit me like a hurricane, its every image so fantastically unexpected, evocative, and resistant to interpretation that I hardly knew what to make of anything that happened, yet felt I was constantly discovering crucial truths. It is possible that, even before I reached the story’s deeply resonant and eternally mysterious final image, I had conceived the desire to write stories myself that would astound and perplex readers as a means of enabling them to engage more deeply with their own lives.

I am not sure why this back-alley route to enlightenment instantly became so central to my literary aesthetics—although it is true that I find any story that leaves me knowing exactly what happened and how to interpret it dull and forgettable. I vastly prefer fiction that doesn’t surrender its mysteries, and so serves as a springboard to ever multiplying revelations. There is, I am sure, a chicken-or-the-egg relationship between my love for “A Country Doctor” and these aesthetic predilections, but, in the final analysis, they don’t explain why I felt so deeply at home in an imaginative space where nothing is definite or fully explicable, and everything is ominous. Only recently, as I have been considering another tendency in my writing, have I come to a possible explanation for why I find this weird space so much like real life.

The protagonists in both my fiction and nonfiction narratives—including my memoir—are almost always people who try to do the right thing and fail. Many of these characters are well-meaning idiots, or the perpetrators of only minor failures, but some, like Thomas Jefferson, the co-protagonist of my last novel, are capable of unforgivable wrongdoing, even as they also have compelling virtues. I have long known I am drawn to such characters because of my father, whom I loved and respected, even though he was an alcoholic and perversely committed to his own destruction—which is to say that he was someone I could never make sense of, someone who seemed exactly as deserving of my contempt as of my love, and thus that I had been born into a world in which the abiding “truth” was an ominous indefiniteness, to which perplexity was the most honest and realistic response.

Günter Zeitz, the protagonist of my new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, is a psychoanalyst, as was my father, but the ambiguity of his moral nature is more a matter of context than character. He is compassionate and tolerant; he wants to help his patients; he tries hard to understand their points of view and remain unjudgmental. In ordinary circumstances, such traits would make Günter a good man, but because he lives in Nazi Germany, these virtues are the road to hell. The only way he or any Aryan German could survive the Third Reich with their decency intact was to oppose fascism with such ferocity as to make their death all but certain—a degree of moral fortitude that Günter, only an ordinarily brave man, finds all but impossible to summon up.

1. “Wiegala,” written by Ilse Weber, sung by Anne Sofie von Otter

Ilse Weber, a Czech musician and children’s book writer, was sent to Theresienstadt with her husband Willi and their son Tommy in 1942, and reportedly composed this lullaby to sing to Tommy and the children in the camp’s hospital, where she worked. After Willi was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Weber became so unhappy that she asked if she and her son might also be sent to the camp. Her request was granted and, minutes after they descended from the train at Auschwitz, she and Tommy were herded into the gas chamber, without ever even glimpsing Willi. I have decided to start my playlist with this song partly because I feel it conveys the moral foundation of my novel: that tender and hopeful optimism so essential to trust, love, and kindness. But I have also chosen it because Weber’s adherence to that very optimism made her unable to comprehend, despite her having endured eleven years of brutal antisemitism and two years in a concentration camp, that the industrial-scale atrocity we now call the Holocaust was even possible. Although a grotesque proportion of the German populace were more than happy to abide by the Final Solution, a great many people shared Weber’s incapacity to grasp what was happening before their eyes, an incapacity partly due to pure innocence, but mostly, I believe, to self-deception, a phenomenon explored at length in my novel.

2. “Daydreaming,” written and performed by Radiohead

There is an absurd aspect to the aspiration expressed in my book’s title, for how can it possibly make sense to want to be the person you already are? But the “self” referred to in the title is not so much the person one is, as the entity referred to in the phrase “my true self,” or in the declaration, “that’s not who I really am.” These are idealized selves—versions of who we are minus a few of our weaknesses. Despite Günter’s only ordinary courage, a moment comes when he thoughtlessly takes an action that causes many people to think him heroic, and for the remainder of the novel, he is torn between the desire to become that heroic self and his conviction that it would be wrong to take credit for virtues he does not possess. Günter, like all of my morally compromised protagonists, does not arise solely out of my inability to  arrive at an unequivocal moral judgment of my father (or myself), but also out of my uncertainty about idealism, a mode of thought that can be both an inspiration to do the right thing and a means of concealing one’s moral failures, even from oneself. The minimalist lyrics of Radiohead’s “Daydreaming” present idealism as inherently sorrowful and dangerous. “Dreamers…never learn,” we are told. They go “Beyond the point/Of no return,” until “it’s too late/The damage is done.”

3. “Lili Marleen,” written by Hans Leip and Norbert Schultze, performed by Marlene Dietrich

Although the struggle against authoritarianism looms large in We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, much of the novel concerns the passionate but tortured and ultimately doomed love of Günter and his wife Josine. While he is a gentile and she Jewish, they are both atheists, entirely detached from the religions they were born into. So, in 1924, when they meet in Sigmund Freud’s waiting room (Günter being Freud’s student, Josine his patient), it is possible for them both to think that they are, in Josine’s words “the same.” History, of course, will dramatically invalidate that assessment, though the problems that arise within their marriage have more to do with Josine’s troubled past than the poisonous antisemitism that engulfs them. Late in the novel, Hannah, Günter and Josine’s daughter, is sitting on a mountainside in the Bavarian Alps and hears the melody of “Lili Marleen” played on an accordion, drifting up from a valley. To my mind, Marlene Dietrich’s classic rendition of this soldier’s lament for a lost love evokes the most beautiful elements of Günter and Josine’s tragic relationship.

4. “Song of the Insufficiency of Human Endeavor,” &

5. “Pirate Jenny,” both by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, and sung, respectively, by C.K. Alexander and Ellen Greene

At a party following the January 1928 debut in Berlin of the theatrical adaptation of The Good Soldier Švejk, Günter falls into an awkward conversation with a solitary and depressed-looking man, about his own age, who turns out to be Bertolt Brecht. Perhaps only days later, Brecht and Kurt Weill begin writing The Threepenny Opera from which these two songs are taken. Both songs, the first comical, the second fiercely grim, render the nihilistic bitterness and despair that characterized so much of Weimar culture, and that, alas, not only inspired revolutionary art and music, but also the reactionary nationalism, bigotry, and violence of the Nazi Party. These songs are from the Public Theater’s 1977 production of the play that I saw at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which, as it happens, is not more than a three-minute walk from the Rambles, where, in the novel’s final pages, Günter and his dear friend and colleague, Edith Jacobson, come to an understanding of the deep trauma they share.

6. “Streets of Minneapolis,” written and performed by Bruce Springsteen

I started this novel the summer before Donald Trump was elected to his first term and finished it the summer before he was elected to his second. Maybe I too suffered a blend of innocence and self-deception, but during both summers, I found it impossible to believe that someone so manifestly cruel, ignorant, and out of control as Trump could be elected president. And so, twice over, this novel, like its protagonist, has been transformed by a shift of historical context. The transformation is not radical, however. I always intended that this book make clear the ways in which authoritarians exploit credulity, racism, and fear to seize control of a nation and enslave the very people they claim to be liberating. But originally, I saw that dynamic as part of a larger argument about the many ways human beings fail to recognize the true nature of their own lives, ideas, actions and loves. I hope that it will not be long before this is the primary way my readers and I again see my novel. But right now, I am deeply worried that this country is slipping into Nazi-style fascism, and so I am letting Bruce Springsteen give voice to my own fear and anger. But the presence of this song on my playlist also represents hope, as it wouldn’t have been possible in Nazi Germany for such a song to have been performed so frequently and heard by so many people.

7. “Peace Piece,” written and performed by Bill Evans

I learned so much as I wrote this book, especially as I went ever deeper into the hearts and minds of Günter, Josine, Hannah, and the novel’s two other important characters, Elke Havekost and Max Pfeiffer, and as I wrestled with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and tried to figure out how they contributed to and diverged from this book’s most essential themes. It was also endlessly fascinating to think about and render so many modes of feeling: curiosity, love, sexual desire, and parental joy, but also loneliness, fear, guilt, fury, and disgust. And maybe more than anything else, I loved the pops, sparkles, and hums that occurred between the words in every new sentence throughout the eight years of the novel’s surprising raveling, unraveling, and re-raveling. But there were also many times, often amid the book’s most crucial scenes and meditations, when writing became a torture, when I had to get up every fifteen minutes and walk around my apartment until my head and heart were clear enough of revulsion and despair that I might sit back down and continue. And so, I am ending this playlist with one of my favorite pieces of music: Bill Evans’s consummately sensitive and expansive improvisation. Listen to it in the dark, ideally lying down. Let Evans lead you into the vast and gentle interstices of his sensibility, his mind, his music, and this incomprehensible universe, which, despite its absolute indifference to every human wish, remains, essentially and always, astoundingly beautiful.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Stephen O’Connor’s playlist for his novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

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

Stephen O’Connor is the author of seven books including two novels, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings and We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, and the short story collection Here Comes Another Lesson. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and his nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Nation, Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

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

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

Chantel Acevedo’s novel Cages is a moving and thoughtful book about forbidden love in a totalitarian society.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“This illuminating novel from Acevedo (The Distant Marvels) documents the tormented life of a gentle zookeeper in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Homosexuality is considered counterrevolutionary by Castro’s regime, and punishable by imprisonment or confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Felix, a zookeeper in Havana carrying on a secret love affair with his male coworker, Réne, grows anxious from these threats as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis… the author shows how the cages of the title are both literal and metaphorical, representing homophobia, heteronormative marriage, and authoritarianism. It’s a mournful and impactful story of displacement.”

In her own words, here is Chantel Acevedo’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Cages:

Cages tells the story of Felix, a gay zookeeper in Cuba, London and Miami spanning the 1960s through the early ’90s. The novel is told by a series of witnesses and key players in his life—his lovers, his wife, his brother-in-law and youngest daughter—all in answer to questions from his eldest daughter, the one he was estranged from and who has come looking for answers about her father. Among many things, Felix is a lover of music. In 1960s Cuba and beyond, music considered counterrevolutionary was banned, and so Felix is careful about who he plays his American records with. It’s an element that runs through the novel and mirrors all the other things that Felix must hide from society and his family to survive. The artists listed in this playlist all appear in the novel as well, save for the last one.

Track 1: I’m Alright/Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley’s Beach Party featuring this song was the artist’s first live recording. The show was taped in 1963 in segregated Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Raucous and fun, the lyric, “I’m alright” repeats continuously and feels like Diddley trying to convince himself of the fact. The track appears in the second chapter of Cages, in a section told by Felix’s first lover, René. René, too, is desperate for things to be “alright,” not just in his relationship with Felix in a country where being gay could get you arrested, but against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, when the novel opens.  

Track 2: You Beat Me to the Punch/Mary Wells

Wells was a Motown teen sensation, yet despite her youth, this song is full of mature longing. It’s a flirty tune and comes up in a moment when René is trying to understand Felix. But Felix is closed off and often unknowable. René is speaking from a present time when Felix is no longer in his life. Wells sings, “One day…you would go away and leave me blue,” presaging René’s troubled relationship with Felix.

Track 3: The Christmas Song/Nat King Cole

I am one of those annoying people who love Christmas songs year-round. In Cages, though, I kept the carol close to the season, and if we’re talking Christmas in the 60s, you can’t miss with Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song.” When it appears in the novel, Felix, his wife Anabél and their infant daughter, as well as René and his wife Elenita are enjoying what would be their last Christmas together. The scene represents the end of many things—not only the dissolution of these attachments, but the end of Christmas in Cuba as it had been known. It would be banned as a holiday in 1969 because it was said to interfere with sugar production. That ban wouldn’t be lifted until 1998, and only then in respect for Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island.

Track 4: You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away/The Beatles

The second voice we hear from in Cages is that of Claudia, a young actress in London who befriends Felix and Anabél and soon finds herself falling for the enigmatic Felix. She has this line in the book where she talks about the Beatles getting their MBEs from the Queen that year, which would have been unavoidable news. Help! was the first of their two 1965 albums (productive lads!), and given Claudia’s impulses, I couldn’t resist sharing this song here, though I wouldn’t dare be so on the nose in the book! It’s a great tune from an album that also features “Yesterday” and “Ticket to Ride.”

Track 5: How Deep is Your Love/The Bee Gees

In the novel, we hear from Virgilio next. He’s Felix’s ex-brother-in-law and essentially raising Felix’s daughter in his stead. On a rare visit, Felix sits with his tween daughter, Eva (the listener of the stories) and reacts poorly when she mentions she loves The Bee Gees. This one may also be lyrically a bit too pointed, but the question of this song is at the heart of Eva’s search for her father. Did he love me? How much? If so, why doesn’t he come around more? Try harder? Felix’s life is a complicated one, something Eva learns through the witnesses who speak with her, but as a 13-year-old, it would have boiled down to a far more simple question.

Track 6: Beautiful Dreamer/Louis Armstrong

When Anabél, Felix’s wife, finally speaks, it’s a voice that has been fueled by silence, and she’s angered to have to break it open. But she does, and her confession includes the tragedy-infused fairy tale that was her early relationship with Felix. At one point, she discusses her dreams with him, her desire to see other countries, skyscrapers, snow. She tells Felix that Cuba in 1957 is a dangerous place on the brink, and he counters by telling her danger is everywhere. He points to a story about the Little Rock Nine in the paper, and a quote by Louis Armstrong condemning segregation: “The government can go to hell.” It’s the kind of statement that just a few years later in Cuba could lead to imprisonment, or in the early days of the revolution, the paredón, or wall of execution. I’ve chosen Armstrong’s rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer” here, composed by Stephen Foster and wonderfully performed by Armstrong in 1957 on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Track 7: El Manisero/Rita Montaner

Rita Montaner’s “El Manisero” is one of her most well-known songs, featuring her lovely soprano in a lively pregón, or song sung to advertise goods, in this case, peanuts. You can still hear these “songs” on the streets of Miami. “¡Maniiiiii!” the peanut vendor sings, holding paper cones, or cucuruchos, full of warm peanuts. For me, this is a core childhood memory, and Rita Montaner elevates the everyday here to artistic heights. Why is this song on the track list? The final voice in the novel is that of Rita, Felix’s youngest daughter, named after the singer and inspired by her grandmother’s role as an actress of Cuban zarzuela’s. Rita, born in London, is very disconnected from her Cuban roots, and so she answers the call of the sister she’s never known in the hopes of learning more.

Track 8: Your Song/Elton John

Though Rita’s section is the shortest, we’ll stay with her for a few more tracks. In relating her life with her father to her sister, who had no such relationship with him, Rita paints the picture of an on-again, off-again dad, who took real interest in his daughter, which must have been difficult for Eva to hear. She mentions Felix waiting in line overnight to buy tickets to an Elton John show. Here, as in other places in the book, I’ve drawn from life. My stepfather, who has been my dad since my teens in the absence of my father, who like Felix was closeted and complicated and unknown to me, once camped out for New Kids on the Block tickets for me, which he did without fanfare, critique, or anything but genuine love for his boy-crazy kid. I think “Your Song,” written in 1970, is one of those tunes that feels as if I’ve known the lyrics my whole life. The gist of it is, here is a song I’ve written for you. Tell everybody this is your song. And when I think of my dad sitting there in the dark, waiting to buy me those tickets, I am filled with warmth and love. That was his song to me, one of many.

Track 9: Sliver/Nirvana

By the time we reach Rita’s sections, it’s the early 90s, and her references include Nirvana, REM, Princess Diana, and reflect my own early adulthood when my father passed away. Our generation’s music was so…intense. There was Kurt Cobain’s wail in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and REM’s “Losing My Religion” video, with its depiction of Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows, evoking that combination of Gen X malaise and rage pointed everywhere and nowhere. We felt abandoned by everyone as a generation, so it made sense that sometimes, our parents abandoned us, too. Nirvana’s “Sliver” is kind of a silly song, lyrically, but behind the repeated “Grandma take me home” line is a real longing for stability, parental and otherwise.

Track 10: Turn the Lights Back On/Billy Joel

Let’s call this my cheat track. I am not overstating things when I say that Billy Joel’s songs were foundational to me becoming a writer. I think I learned dialogue, setting, and character first and most viscerally through his music. Joel’s most recent song, “Turn the Lights Back On,” comes after a 17-year pop music hiatus. In it, he’s singing to a lover: “Have I waited too long to turn the lights back on?” but also to his fans, hoping they’ll be there for him as they once were. In the context of Cages, however, one can argue Felix and Eva are saying similar things to one another after the last page has turned. “I’m late, but I’m here right now. Is there still time for forgiveness?” I’d like to think the answer was yes.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Chantel Acevedo’s playlist for her novel The Living Infinite

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

Chantel Acevedo  was born in Miami to Cuban parents. She is the author of The Living Infinite (Europa, 2017); The Distant Marvels (Europa, 2015), a Carnegie Medal Finalist; A Falling Star (Carolina Wren Press, 2014); and Love and Ghost Letters (St. Martins, 2006), winner of the Latino International Book Award. Acevedo is a professor of English at the University of Miami, where she teaches in the MFA program.

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.

Cinelle Barnes’s memoir A Way Home shares the mesmerizing story of her recovery from a ruptured brain aneurysm.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil wrote of the book:

“In this stunning memoir, Barnes emphasizes kapwa―the Tagalog word for shared humanity―writing with a clarity that refuses spectacle and showing how home is grown slowly, through attention and care, rather than claimed all at once. A Way Home is a needed reminder that even after displacement and injury, the world still offers places―often in each other―where we can rest and belong.”

In her own words, here is Cinelle Barnes’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir A Way Home:

In 2023, I was writing the last chapters for A WAY HOME, a travelogue about journeying home to the Philippines after a twenty-year separation and finally securing American citizenship. After being undocumented for most of my life in the United States, I finally could tell joyful stories about travel. (And these joyful stories feel extra precious right now.) 

But just weeks before I was to turn in the manuscript, I suffered a brain aneurysm rupture and required emergency brain surgery. I woke up from the surgery a different person: my memories and connection to my husband and daughter, our home in South Carolina, my sense of self, and my past were all erased in a blink of an eye. I had to relearn how to walk, talk, and write with ease. I had to regain stamina, cognitive function, and mental capacity, and adopt a new way of doing most things, including reading and writing. 

To complete A WAY HOME, I had to remember who I was, and I did, thanks to the music my two main caregivers played through the harrowing nights and the too-quiet mornings. This playlist is a collection of songs that brought me back to my spirit, my roots, and my resilience, which is so deeply rooted in the strength of the global majority. This medley allowed me to regain not only my dynamic sense of self but the many abilities necessary to finish the book. Without these songs, I would not have been able to create what I think is a new nonfiction subgenre: the travel-medical memoir, a form braiding moments of leisure and recovery. An intertwining of two kinds of exploration. The playlist certainly mirrors this intertwining: a curation of songs that made me cry or made me laugh until I cried. I think this playlist also reflects what many of us are currently experiencing in these fascist times: the need to find whimsy in the midst of warfare and woes.

I dedicate this playlist to my personal DJ and primary caregiver, my husband Stephen, and to our daughter Anouk, who teaches me all the new viral K-pop, P-pop, and KATSEYE choreos. My two brought me home to myself and my craft through their eclectic musical tastes and agile way of loving; they just go with the flow and get to the beat.

“New Dance” by XG 

Discovering this song on YouTube was a happy accident. It was early in my brain injury journey and I was still incapable of so many basic tasks: bathing independently, filling the kettle and boiling water for tea, remembering to take my meds. My then twelve-year-old understood something in our life had drastically changed, and she tried, in her own way, to cling to something familiar. We’d always introduced each other to new or new-to-us songs, my 90s and Y2K RnB to her Gen Alpha princessy picks. Just weeks into my recovery, she asked for a new song rec, and because my memory was out of sorts, I couldn’t remember the name of the song and girl group I wanted to introduce her to. On YouTube, we tried a few entries: “New Day,” “New Gen,” “New Song by Xpa.” It was rather comedic, and boy were there some truly unexpected search results. I’m so glad my poor cognition resulted in discovering XG, a Japanese girl group producing nostalgic RnB and hiphop inflected with fresh cotton-candy pop. Their debut “New Dance” was just the little bounce our family needed during a crushingly confusing time. The way I searched for the song feels analogous to the way I had to search my brain. More than two years later, I still don’t remember my original thought but it doesn’t matter. In a new life of deficits and disabilities, “New Dance” fit, and it gave just the right lift… nudging me toward A WAY HOME’s completion.

“Alaska” by Maggie Rogers

Not only does this song start off with lines about exploration, discovery, and arriving at the self — themes I ponder in the travelogue thread of the book — “Alaska” was also on repeat for me as I finished A WAY HOME because it captured the strange experience of depersonalization, a symptom I intermittently had for a year following brain surgery. Depersonalization is when someone with a neurological condition experiences life out of body or apart from their reality or receded from the plane of time. Whack, I know. In “Alaska,” Maggie Rogers’ narrator is both “you” and “me,” singing lines like “I walked off you / and I walked off an old me / oh me oh my I thought it was a dream” and “You and I / there’s air in between.” This is exactly how I felt in my depersonalized fugues.

“Bakunawa” by Ruby Ibarra

A song about Filipino folklore and motherhood, Ruby Ibarra’s NPR Tiny Desk Contest-winning song is written in Tagalog, Bisaya, and English, languages I write in and about in A WAY HOME. As effortlessly as Ibarra switches from one tongue to the next, I aimed for prose fluidly linking my relationships with all three languages. “Bakunawa” was a necessary song to hear and watch on NPR Tiny Desk, performed, aptly, by an intergenerational, multi-genre assembly of Filipinx-American artists, including RnB singer Ouida, rock legend June Millington, and flautist Camille Ramirez. Why did this matter to the book? A WAY HOME is a book about resilience, and that resilience is rooted in my diverse community.

“US” by Ruby Ibarra

Is A WAY HOME a travel book? It sure is. Is it a conventional one? I sure hope not. “US” (also by Ruby Ibarra) is a protest song, one that’s as empowering as it is boppy. I wrote A WAY HOME with a lyricism that you can easily slide into and sit in the pocket of, and it’s my way of luring people into learning about Philippine history and its frustrating, forced marriage to the United States, and how these have resulted in booming, albeit harmful, Philippine tourism. At the book’s conception, I chose an attractive form (travelogue) and set out to fill it with really thinky, really feely stuff. As an early reviewer described the book, A WAY HOME is written in “exquisite, revealing, and lyrical prose” and is layered so that it will “grasp your heart, swim laps in your soul, and somersault in your mind long after you read the last page.” Thank you, Ruby Ibarra, for giving me a song that encouraged me to practice artful multitasking. 

“Pantropiko” by BINI

Writing a memoir and surviving a brain injury are two of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and to do them simultaneously? It was imperative to find some fun. Better yet, it had to find me. BINI’s bubblegummy, summer-inspired global hit traveled all the way (through TikTok) from my birthplace of Manila and found me shriveled in post-surgery agony. It’s easy to understand how “Pantropiko” helped BINI become Spotify’s highest-streamed OPM (“Original Philippine Music”) artist. Three minutes and forty-five seconds long, “Pantropiko” is written and arranged for today’s distracted listener, or, in my case, someone with neurological deficits affecting focus and memory. Incorporating calypso steel drums, this song was the jaunty little trick I needed to intermittently step out of my funk and write about my tropical travels. It was a hard time, but it definitely wasn’t always sad.

“Touch” by KATSEYE

My favorite refrain from the book has to be “We have a good team,” a piece of dialogue I borrowed verbatim from my daughter. It’s not the most lyrical, artful, inventive line ever written, but it was something that held a special place and played a special purpose in the travelogue my “old self” wrote. As if the pithy phrase wasn’t already load-bearing, when I began to interlace vignettes from my brain injury life, the “medical” part of “travel-medical memoir,” the phrase lent itself as a narrative engine for the second thread. We have a good team. We have a good team. The refrain’s power became evident not only in moments of crisis but in times of play, too. 

“Touch” debuted soon after we binge-watched Popstar Academy, a docuseries detailing KATSEYE’s formation through an intense K-pop-style training program. You bet my daughter taught me the choreo and pulled me into the KATSEYE girl-power vortex. Sophia, the Filipina member, was our, to borrow K-pop slang, “bias.” Just over a year later, when I was more neurologically stable and more comfortable with adaptive sensory tools, my girl and I saw KATSEYE live at Madison Square Garden. That night felt like a graduation: celebratory and also a little scary. If concerts and memoirs can’t mark our passage in time, I don’t know what can.

“NUEVAYoL” by Bad Bunny

No doubt, Bad Bunny is a prime example of the art of cultural multiplicity. Using both music and imagery to convey his “in-betweenness,” he gives us glorious tools to sculpt our own composite forms. Benito, who I joke to my husband and daughter is “my boyfriend who helps me live through these trying times,” understands that confluence is power, and that there’s a difference between “readership” and “reach.” The former is the specific, significant few for whom an artist creates and with whom an artist dialogues. The latter is the broader community, there to witness the magic of Specificity begets universality. Not only did “NUEVAYoL” harken back for me images of “Un verano en Nueva York,” motifs persistent in A WAY HOME, it also reminded me of a strength of my work: its syncretism. This new book is a mother-daughter story, an immigrant story, a story of romance amid recovery, a history lesson (the Philippines and Puerto Rico have twin histories), and a celebration and critique of travel. I can hear my two (other) loves, New York and Bad Bunny, say, “Why be one when you can flourish as many?”

“Gemini and Leo” by Helado Negro

What do you do when you feel like an alien in someone’s body, home, family, story? You dance. My experiences in depersonalization taught me that to feel present, you have to move and feel the body to you which you’ve been assigned. After brain surgery, I couldn’t always be sure that my feet were mine. I would go from feeling so connected to Stephen, the kind and gentle man who helped me into clean pants, to feeling like I was furniture in the house he owned. In the book, I described this feeling as “Two seconds too soon or two seconds too late,” like I was never in rhythm with reality. But there’s a poignant moment when “Gemini and Leo” (which I reference in the travelogue) played on our bluetooth speaker and Stephen scooped me up from the recliner so we could dance. Small, small sways. My head resting on a shoulder that in the moment indeed felt familiar. And I remembered then who we were: I’m a quick-witted, late-May baby prone to health kicks and multiple passions (personalities!). He’s a late-July peach, sweet, loving, tender, bruised in some parts. The disco-ish song goes: Gemini and Leo dancing on the floor all night.

“The Boy is Mine” by Brandy and Monica

Give me ’90s and early 2000s RnB any day, but especially on days when I can’t remember who I am. How did Stephen know how to do this? I can only suppose it’s because music from our growing up years has the same effect on him. Later in my recovery journey, when I was deep in neuroscientific research, I learned that music from our adolescence has a profound, lasting impact on the brain. People with dementia will forget what year it is or what their grandchild’s name is, but they’ll remember the exact words to the song their teen selves played on cassette or vinyl. Songs from our adolescence are hardwired in our identity formation and brain’s reward pathways, and proof of this is how I came back to Earth, so to speak, every time Brandy and Monica’s instantly recognizable arpeggio intro twinkled and blooped from a speaker.

“Hymne a l’amour” by Celine Dion, Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony

“Music is organized sound,” said a neurologic music therapist I was learning from. No wonder it has helped me with everything from speech and memory to, believe it or not, correcting my gait speed and walking cadence. Music activates so many of the brain’s networks at once, making it one of the most efficient ways to reorder the brain’s structure and wake up what’s gone dormant. Anecdotally speaking (I’m no medical expert but I’m an expert of my lived experiences), I believe listening to music allowed me to regain the lyricism and eclecticism of my writing. 

Further, when Celion Dion, who lives with a progressive neurologic disorder that impacts, sometimes paralyzes, her singing, performed “Hymne a l’amour” from the Eiffel Tower at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, I felt my whole brain swell with awe. My scalp tingled and my knees gave, and I sobbed, knowing what it was like to fight for your ability to do that one thing you’d done all your life… that thing that allowed you to connect with other humans and with yourself. I still feel this way and I am still brought to tears when I rewatch Dion’s performance on YouTube: singing an Edith Piaf song, in her first language, in a diamond-laden Dior dress, in the night rain, at the top of the glittering Eiffel Tower. The world hushed. We were all Celine.

I was already so grateful to have survived a brain aneurysm rupture, something that kills more than half of the people that experience it. Hearing “Hymne a l’amour” performed at the Olympics by someone with a similar medical condition galvanized me to complete A WAY HOME. It also instilled a simple but profound truth: In dire times, all we have is love. I wish I had something cooler to say, Largehearted Boy reader. I wish I had a more intelligent take on music but all I have is this: In my dire moments, what I had were my Stephen and my Anouk. As the song’s starting lyrics say: Le ciel bleu sur nous peut s’effondrer / Et la Terre peut bien s’écrouler. The blue sky above us did collapse, and the earth surely crumbled, and it was their love that I needed to keep on not just with life but with living.

I end the playlist with this song so that when you, reader, are doing the dishes, walking the dog, or waiting in the carpool line in these atrocious times, wondering if you must pursue whatever it is that guards or bestows that which gives you a sense of self, a sense of here-ness, you can belt out the high notes and whole passion of this love song, letting your voice and spirit and perhaps body soar to the heights of its grand coda, allowing it to unite you, all of you, as it takes its famously dramatic musical leaps.

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

Cinelle Barnes is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom. She is also the editor of A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. Cinelle is a brain aneurysm survivor and sits on the South Carolina Brain Injury Leadership Council. She lives in Charleston with her husband, daughter, and cat. For information, visit www.cinellebarnes.com.

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

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

Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7 is a novel profound, funny, and life-affirming. Unferth’s estimable storytelling skills shine in this necessary work of climate fiction.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Unferth’s prodigious worldbuilding unfolds magically. . . . Profound, funny, alarming, and imbued with love and sorrow for our lost world. . . . [A] masterpiece of climate fiction.”

In her own words, here is Deb Olin Unferth’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Earth 7:

I listened to a lot of goofy anthems as I wrote this book. I was going for retro in the way going to outer space feels a bit retro to me, even as it makes a comeback in the public imagination, for better or worse. In my father’s time, outer space felt like the next frontier for a species that thought of itself as invincible and capable of forever expanding. Now, the renewed interest in outer space feels to me less like we want to soar off on a quest in our new shiny vehicle, and more like we broke the vehicle we have and need to find a new one, which as a bit of a desperate vibe to me. So as I imagined writing this book, I went for comfort listens, feel-good familiar songs, that, when listened to closely, revealed an underlayer of death, destruction, loss. Apocalypse songs.

Free to Be… Me and You (music by Stephen J. Lawrence, lyrics by Bruce Hart)

I grew up with this album. I was three years old when it was released. My parents must have bought it since I don’t remember it ever not being with me. It had one of those bright primary-colored album covers that suggested it was for children, but adults liked it too. It’s strange to read on Wikipedia now that the concept of the album was to encourage “gender neutrality.” I remember as a child thinking that despite how playful and joyful the song was, the lyrics cast a heavy shadow.

There’s a land that I see where the children are free
And I say it ain’t far to this land from where we are.

As a child, I understood the words to mean that I was not free and I likely never would be, but I could still imagine freedom, and that might be some consolation. When I was writing Earth 7, about an apocalyptic future, this song came to me.

Lay My Love (Brian Eno)

I’ve loved Brian Eno for decades, but this song is maybe my favorite of his. Another end-of-the-world vision: a plaintive, almost toneless chant calling out over a simple beat and the smallest line of melody: “I scramble in the dust of a failing nation.” But it ends with a promise that even in the darkness, there will be something beautiful: “I will lay my love around you.”

I Will Always Love You (Dolly Parton)

As crazy as it sounds, I imagined humans singing this song to planet Earth as they left, went pinging off in spaceships and on microchips. I imagined the Earth as a piece of burnt coal, after all humans had done to it, and humans excusing themselves with, “If I stay, I would only be in your way.” I prefer the Dolly Parton version of this song for this book—her version has a note of insouciance and lightness as she tells this man she is leaving for good.

All Kinds of Time (Fountains of Wayne)

Another countdown song: “The clock’s running down, the team’s losing ground…” The story of the song takes place in a few seconds of a football game. As the ball leaves a set of hands, soars over the heads of players, and toward the quarterback, who stands ready to catch it. He daydreams as he waits for it to arrive. The crowds around him are cheering and going wild. It feels like time has paused while the quarterback waits patiently and takes stock of his past and future, the quiet melody contrasting with the energy of the moment, the screaming fans, the other players running toward him. I think I was looking for songs that helped me slow time or speed it up in dramatic narrative ways. But what I also wanted were funny songs: deadly serious, but also a little ridiculous, songs about how every experience is both small and giant.

Waters of March (Art Garfunkel)

Final retro song. I heard this at the end of a Joachim Trier movie and I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it, it was so perfect. If Fountains of Wayne slowed time down, Garfunkel was speeding it up, carrying me through the process of death becoming life, rebirth. The song is a list piece, a string of nouns, each rooting me to Earth, reminding me of why I call it home.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Deb Olin Unferth’s playlist for her story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance

Deb Olin Unferth’s playlist for her memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

Deb Olin Unferth’s playlist for her novel Vacation

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

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including  Earth 7, Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review.

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

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

The 50 short critical essays in Ed Simon’s book American Elegy each offer a glimpse at United States history through cultural icons, history, and more. These pieces coalesce to offer an unadulterated history of the country and a road map to righting its wrongs.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Editor and public humanities lecturer Ed Simon takes a critic’s approach in American Elegy…In 50 short essays, he weaves history, pop culture, literature, music, science, and more, interrogating what he calls the dis-United States. Simon’s cultural studies background leads him to draw from unorthodox sources, emphasizing thought and content over hierarchy of form.”

In his own words, here is Ed Simon’s Book Notes music playlist for his book American Elegy:

If America, at its best, is to be thought of as anything, it should be as a song. Let other nations have their epics, forget even the so-called claimants to the Great American Novel, for if the nation should be something, let it be musical. A novel is the work of a single person, but a song is endlessly variable, always reinvented, and in some intangible way independent of those responsible for its composition (that is if we even know who is responsible for a given song’s composition). Much as the eternal promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” must be ever reinterpreted, so too is music an ever-living thing, experienced in time and passed on in performance. The melody of thought, the soul of rhythm, the solidarity of harmony – all of it must be intrinsic to the functioning of democracy, which far from being an ossified political ideology has to be the living, beating heart of individual experience if there is to be any hope for our future.

It’s not a mistake that America’s most enduring cultural contributions have been musical. Long after this nation will have collapsed, and our literature turned to acidic pulp, our art buried beneath the rubble, they’ll still be humming our tunes. Blues, gospel, country, bluegrass, rock and roll, hip-hop, soul, disco, JAZZ – all of it an American innovation, fused from disparate sources into something new. Also, not a mistake that every single one of those genres has its origins in the Black experience, so that the most marginalized group in the nation’s violent history played the central role in its cultural genius. That’s because, as I explore in American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-united States, there’s a kind of psychic country within our country which marks how all of us as Americans must think of themselves. There is the actual nation of the United States, which has done both good and bad things (frequently the latter), but is a country like any other, and then there is a higher, grander, more utopian, entirely impossible, and completely beautiful place called America. Our culture at its most prophetic produces missives from America to hold the United States to those greater ideals, and frequently the greatest medium for doing that has been music.

When writing American Elegy, which is structured through a series of short essays on seminal texts in a form that could be called “flash criticism” that are then organized asynchronously as a “cultural mixtape,” I understand that music should feature prominently. There are of course works of literature considered (Moby-Dick, Beloved), art (The Peaceable Kingdom, Nighthawks at the Diner), and politics (“The Gettysburg Address,” the 14^th Amendment), but music pulses through every section. America is the nation of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, Sun Ra and Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, and this was part of the glorious inheritance which I precisely wanted to remember as the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches. During its composition, I continually listened to music as a means of charting my ship towards America, as a reminder of what could be rather than what is. This summer, as the anniversary is overseen by some of the most vain and sociopathic, cruel and wicked people imaginable, my ballast has been Guthrie’s reminder that this land is your land, and that this land is my land, more than it ever is their land.

“America” – Walt Whitman

What could better the announce such a project as the supposed voice of the good, grey poet himself, Walt Whitman, reading from his poem “America?” Discovered by researchers at the University of Iowa three decades ago, the recording was rendered on an Edison wax cylinder, the only aural connection to our greatest poet and his craggy, rich, Mid-Atlantic tenor. America, “centre of equal daughters, equal sons.”

“Wondrous Love” – Traditional, performed by Anonymous 4

 “Wondrous Love” is an example of nineteenth-century “Sacred Harp Singing,” a type of choral arrangement for four-part a capella hymns based in the shape-note system of sight reading. To my ear, it’s strange and uncannily beautiful sound evokes a kind of Protestant Gregorian Chant. 

“Appalachian Spring: Simple Gifts” – Aaron Copeland, performed by the Nashville Chamber Orchestra

American symphonic music is split between our two poles of Copeland and Gershwin, the country and the city, the West and the East (both men were, of course, New Yorkers). When Copeland took the theme from the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” and adapted it for Appalachian Spring, a piece intended to accompany the choreography of Martha Graham, he contributed an indelible piece that somehow sounds both grand and democratic, epic and personal.

“Rhapsody in Blue” – George Gershwin, performed by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra

Once while driving with a friend who knows virtually nothing about music (he’s a good but strange friend) I tried an experiment by putting “Rhapsody in Blue” on my car stereo and asking him what this iconic composition, which he’d amazingly never listened to before, was about. After a few minutes of contemplation, parsing the iron-and-steel sweep of the music, the chrome-buffeted soaring, its sonic playfulness and exuberance, he said “New York.” Can you imagine that?

“Peace Behind the Bridge” – Traditional, performed by the Carolina Chocolate Drops

Instruments have personalities, but something about the fiddle both laughs and cries in a manner that is unique. “Peace Behind the Bridge,” a traditional song from the almost-forgotten genre of the Black string band tradition, was preserved by the blues and folk musician Etta Baker and later interpreted by the brilliant and cheekily named Carolina Chocolate Drops. The fiddle and the banjo working together sound unmistakably “country,” and of course it is – but in American history, “country” also meant Black. 

“Star Trek Theme” – Alexander “Sandy” Courage, Loulie Jean Norman

If the British have history, then Americans have space; which is why the former gave us Doctor Who, but the later the grand epic of Star Trek. Conceived of by Gene Rodenberry during a fraught, if in someways optimistic time, Star Trek imagined a future that was better than the present, not just in terms of science and technology, but in the far more important relationship between human beings.

“The Weary Whaling Grounds” – Traditional, performed by Stuart M. Frank

Before America was a continental civilization, it was an oceanic one; before it looked west, it looked east, and the first frontier was the shore itself. The great industry of the first half of the nineteenth-century was, as any reader of Herman Melville knows, whaling. It was sea shanties like this one which sustained a motley crew of men from all nations, as any reader of Melville also knows.

“Tapestry from an Asteroid” – Sun Ra

Jazz, arguably our single greatest cultural contribution, is not bereft of visionaries, but few were as eccentric as the great Sun Ra. An Afrofuturist visionary prior to that term even existing, Sun Ra – with his baroque conspiracy theories and cosmologies, his claims of interstellar patrimony – was slurred as a madman, but he also happened to be a genius. There is hopefulness in his music, which though it’s surreal, is also beautiful; though it’s experimental, is also glorious; though it’s strange, also swings.  

“dlp 1.1” – William Basinski

America is sometimes considered a brash country that’s home to a loud people, but in classical minimalism, there is an underappreciated genius for quiet, for unassuming simplicity that’s far more complicated than at first listen. Experimental composer William Basinski’s haunting Disintegration Loops, rendered from the literal sound of aging magnetic tape flaking away into nothingness as it was digitally transferred, has long been associated with the 9/11 attacks that occurred on the day it was created. From that horrible event, Basinski offered the most poetic of inadvertent elegies.

“Rally Round the Flag” – George Frederick Root, performed by the Weavers

Also known as “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” abolitionist composer George Frederick Root’s clarion call to confrontation against the Confederacy during the apocalyptic Civil War is the rare patriotic song to rise above pablum and into something prophetic. That this particular version is performed by the folk group the Weavers (which included Pete Seeger), accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of disloyalty, is all the more perfect.

“Halloween Parade” – Lou Reed

The frontman of the Velvet Underground, which Brian Eno joked was a band that only a few dozen people bought the debut of (though they also all formed seminal bands), is often dismissed as cynical, if not nihilistic. Yet Lou Reed’s “Halloween Parade,” which mournfully recounts the ever-thinning participants in an annual gay costume parade as members of the community die from AIDS (many of those mentioned being the composer’s friends), is heartbreaking and anything but nihilistic.

“Can I Kick It?” – A Tribe Called Quest

The seminal hip-hop group famously sampled Reed’s instantly recognizable bass-line in their classic “Can I Kick It?” A postmodern symphonic bricolage of samples (including from Ian Drury and Prokofiev), “Can I Kick It?” demonstrates the avant-garde brilliance of hip-hop as a musical form, where disparate parts are synthesized together in an aesthetic unmistakably American.

“Hard Travelin’” – Woody Guthrie

The hillbilly troubadour who set Methodist hymn melodies to communist lyrics, the hard-working Okie with the heart of an anarchist, Woody Guthrie is the great songwriter of the American proletariat. To choose a single representative track is a fool’s errand, but the relentless litany of places mentioned by the singer, with the narrator being an indigent, traveling worker just trying to stay alive, is as classic Guthrie as I can imagine.

“La Guacamaya” – Traditional, performed by Los Lobos

A traditional Mexican son jarocho number, “La Guacamaya” is a reminder that the border crossed millions of people before they ever crossed the border. As historian Greg Grandin makes clear in America, América: A New History of the New World, the United States has always had more in common with our neighbors to the south than our pretend ancestors to the east. A nation that is, first and foremost, not European, but American, which means that we’re as much Latin as we are Anglo.

“As Time Goes By” – Herman Hupfield, performed by Dooley Wilson

Casablanca gets more of the national character than almost any other film, a people that will do everything but the right thing until the last minute. In “As Time Goes By,” first written for another movie and soulfully performed by Dooley Wilson, the deep and intrinsic sadness of America – a place so often historically misinterpreted as fundamentally plucky and optimistic – is made manifest.

“The Internationale” – Pierre De Geyter, performed by Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips

What could seem less American than the international communist anthem, associated with Red Square May Day parades and marching Maoist soldiers? Yet “The Internationale,” with a melody by the French composer Pierre De Geyter from 1888 and lyrics by his countrymen the poet Pierre De Geyter written seventeen years before, is a consummately American song in that like May Day itself it was in part inspired by the brave rebellions of American workers. In this homespun, twangy, instrumental version by Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips, that American flavor is discernable. 

“So What” – Miles Davis

Miles Davis on the album Kind of Blue, joined by Bill Evans, “Cannonball” Adderly, and John Coltrane, is so preposterously cool that it’s difficult to be in his aura. “So What,” both in what it performs and what it doesn’t, is the single coolest track ever written, an embodiment of a distinctly American aesthetic and ethos.

“Thunder Road” – Bruce Springsteen

“All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood/With a chance to make it good somehow/Hey, what else can we do now?//Except roll down the window/And let the wind blow back your hair.” What else can be said? When I was still a drinking man, I used to kill with this at karaoke.

“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” – Blind Willie Johnson

Like virtually every luminary to caress a guitar a century ago in the Mississippi Delta, the bluesman Blind Willie Johnson’s life was one of suffering, marginalization, and pain. Dying from malarial fever after Texas hospitals refused to admit him because he was Black, the blind singer was buried in an unmarked grave that remains undiscovered. In this track, there aren’t even lyrics, just a kind of melodic keening. And yet after the United States is no more, after the sun itself has undergone a supernova, this track will endure on the Voyager space probe’s famed Golden Record, somewhere deep into interstellar space.  

“We Are Family” – Sister Sledge

Like many disco tracks, “We Are Family” became a gay anthem, in this case because of the lyrical paeon to the idea of a found family, of creating one’s own network of love, care, and relationships that are based in human flourishing. It’s also, maybe incongruously, the song associated with the 1970s Pittsburgh Pirates, my beloved team that hasn’t been to a World Series since when this track was in the Top 40.

“The Rainbow Connection” – Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher, performed by Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson)

The Muppets evidence a special type of American genius, superficially saccharine but actually subversive, with the mild-mannered green frog a neurotic, if ultimate well-meaning, avatar of his associates. In the heartbreaking “The Rainbow Connection,” from the 1979 The Muppet Movie, there is a clarion, almost religious, call to the possibility of a better and more beautiful way of being.

“John Brown’s Body” – Traditional, performed by Paul Robeson

Who exactly was the composer of “John Brown’s Body,” that arresting, haunting, and dark humored Union march, is of some debate. The melody itself is traditional, from hymns that proliferated during the Second Great Awakening, but the lyrics have been associated with this or that regiment, even while the more dignified lyrics of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” are unequivocally by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe. As performed by Paul Robeson in his sonorous bass there is a regal and martial dignity to its message about justice’s inevitability.

“Blue Moon” – Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, performed by Elvis Presley

Maybe only Lennon and McCartney can top Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart as a twentieth-century musical partnership. Tin-pan alley prodigies, composer Rodgers and lyricist Hart were indispensable contributors to that collection of oral law known as the “Great American Songbook,” works meant to be reinterpreted and made anew over and over again. Elvis’ haunting, eerie, and almost avant-garde rendition, with his thin quivering falsetto sounding out over the clip-clop syncopation that accompanies him in this strip-downed version, proves that a bit of enchantment absolutely dwelled about the King.

“A More Perfect Union” – Titus Andronicus

The New Jersey post-punk indie band’s 2010 The Monitor, an unlikely concept album based on the Civil War and featuring spoken word excerpts of quotations derived from Ken Burns’ documentary, along with lyrical allusions to everyone from Billy Bragg to Springsteen, presaged the exact cultural fissures we face nearly two decades later. “A More Perfect Union” is both mournful and angry, dejected and ready to fight, conveying the exact energy and emotion needed if the song’s title is ever to be true. 

“Over the Rainbow” – Harold Arlen and Yip Harburb, performed by Judy Garland

The most painfully sad song from the single most American movie based in the most American novel. The Wizard of Oz conveys – spiritually and psychically – everything that is intrinsic about America. It concerns our imagination, our striving, our reinventions, and our bullshit. Sung by a young girl, abused and destroyed by the Hollywood machine, “Over the Rainbow” nonetheless tries to envision some better place beyond the gauzy filament of that colorful illusion, where even if we don’t actually believe that we can get there, we understand that we must continue trying to.

“American Tune” – Paul Simon

“And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease/I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered/Or driven to its knees,” sings Paul Simon. “But it’s alright, it’s alright.” So we sing again.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Ed Simon’s playlist for his book Devil’s Contract

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

Ed Simon is the author of over a dozen books, including An Alternative History of Pittsburgh; Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology; and The Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, The New Republic and The New York Times, among others. Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Belt Magazine, and Creative Nonfiction Editor at Carnegie Mellon University Press.

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