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.

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s I Have This Thing for Flowers connect our humanity to flora in surprising and magnificent ways in one of the year’s most powerful essay collections.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“The temporality of flowers is used as a metaphor for the transient manifestations of love in its many forms. Sawchyn scrutinizes her past relationships as both a scientist and an art critic, identifying recurring themes and similarities. Her memoir-in-essays acts as a commentary on how writers and other artists are driven to create a cohesive narrative, wrestling chaos into something that illuminates the human condition . . . . This confessional paean to flowers succeeds as a fascinating, unique model for examining the elusive nature of love.”

In her own words, here is Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection I Have This Thing for Flowers:

In general, my music-listening habits are seasonal and a little obsessive. As the weather starts to change, I’ll start a playlist with one or two songs I’ve been listening to on repeat and add to it slowly—something in a film score, an earworm my partner hums while doing dishes (replacing lyrics with the dog’s name), a deep cut from a band I see in concert, a song piped in at the grocery store—or, if it’s a quiet few months, tracks from another year’s season. This is what I will listen to almost every time I am in the car alone, until it gets consistently warmer or cooler or wetter outside. It’s an eclectic mix that tracks (ha-ha) my life, and sounds random and haphazard to everyone else.

As someone who writes mostly nonfiction, the skeleton of the playlist I construct for each book project are songs from particular times of my life, its muscles and sinew evoke mood. Eventually, the songs become background noise.

I Have This Thing for Flowers is about all kinds of love, and the patterns and relationships between those loves. Each chapter pairs a person from my life with a flower I’ve grown in a garden, but the book’s throughline is the narrative of my cancelled wedding and subsequent marriage to a good friend. Fittingly, I think of these songs as love songs—alternately full of longing, dissonance, rage, and humor—many of which I listened to while writing.

Talking Heads, “Nothing but Flowers”

Of course I have to start here. One of Flowers’ epigraphs is the line, “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower,” and this song’s title is the title of the book’s introduction. The song perfectly articulates the sensation of being in a place that is supposed to be wonderful but is not, presented in that recognizable upbeat Talking Heads tone.

The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back from San Francisco”

If I could mandate that readers to listen to the entire album 69 Love Songs, I absolutely would. In this particular song, Shirley Simm’s vocals are a little bit wobbly and keening and carry the whole thing.

Broken Social Scene, “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”

My ex-fiancé had been a musician, and we often went to shows together. I think we saw Broken Social Scene when we were both twenty-seven—the exact right age to hear this song and to think back to our tumultuous teenage years and feel surprised that we missed parts of them. Also, the memes are excellent.

Fiona Apple, “I Want You to Love Me”

The title pretty much says it all, but there’s something about the warbling vocalizations at the very end that complicates the song—it’s like the suggestion of perspective, that she’s put on an old feeling to show it to us, but it’s no longer what she carries every day.

Iggy Pop, “Gardenia”

It’s a bit on the nose, but I did first hear this song (and then obsessively listen to it) while writing the “Gardenia” essay in Flowers. Maybe I just imprinted on Train Spotting, but he does great junkie music. Iggy Pop’s voice is sleazy and grimy, and it’s the kind that I don’t mind sleeping in.

Animal Collective, “Summertime Clothes”

The lyrics from this song’s chorus do make an appearance in Flowers; I think it’s the perfect soundtrack for warm-weather early-stage love.

Hop Along, “How Simple”

I mentioned earlier that each of the book’s chapters each pair a person with a flower, and this is how they are titled: “Dicentra | The Digger,” “Magnolia | The Mothers,” etc. The one exception is the center of the collection, and this is the song for “Laurel.”

TV on the Radio, “Ambulance”

“Ambulance” sounds to me like a quintessential love song; it is slow and earnest. That it is a cappella also gives it an unembellished quality, like you’re in a movie and a group of crooning backup singers have appeared behind your partner who is singing to you.

Jimi Hendrix, “If 6 Was 9”

The opening to this song is the exact right amount of anticipation. Most of the songs on this playlist feature a “you,” but in this case, the address feels much more general. It’s peak 1960s—a case for making one’s own way and looking good while doing it, and I’ve included it on here as a long for the self.

Pavement, “Gold Soundz”

Apparently, Gen Z likes Pavement, which I find hilarious. Pitchfork voted this song the top track of the 90’s—the whole decade! I enjoy the dissonance of “Gold Soundz.” It is an upbeat breakup song, and in the music video, the band members are dressed in Santa suits and go on a scavenger hunt.

Florence + The Machine, “South London Forever”

Like “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” this is another song about looking back, a love song to a place and also to misspent youth. Few people can wail and belt it out like Florence Welch, as the chorus goes, Over and over and over and over again.

Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”

And speaking of amazing female vocalists.

Townes Van Zandt, “Rex’s Blues”

The last chapter of Flowers is titled “Zinnia | Townes Van Zandt,” so I felt like I should also end this playlist with one of his songs. In the book, I mention “Waiting Around to Die,” but in making a playlist for the book, I think “Rex’s Blues” is a more fitting choice. It’s a complicated song of tribute to a friend—in the version on Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, recorded in the same place that Rex used to “half-own,” you can hear Van Zandt talking about his friend during song’s the lead-in.

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

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. Her essay collection A Fish Growing Lungs was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards, and her second book, I Have This Thing for Flowers, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books. Formerly the editor in chief of The Rumpus, she has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. 

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.

Emily McBride’s novel Queen Mab is a brilliant debut that marries folklore to postpartum depression.

The New Yorker wrote of the book:

“The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry . . . The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.”

In her own words, here is Emily McBride’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Queen Mab:

Spooky lullabies and fairy tale songs from Queen Mab

In Queen Mab, Madeleine is a young mother who thinks her baby is not her baby, but a fairy changeling. The world seems full of menace and threat, especially at night, when she sits alone in the dark, feeding the endlessly hungry fairy child, and trying to sing it to sleep—but the words come out cracked. “I always liked the spooky lullabies best when you were a baby,” her own mother says. “The ones with a bit of menace.”

Some lullabies are written especially to sing to children, and others are just songs, sung low, sung slow. When the lyrics are dark, they hint at a world where a tired adult croons alone in the dead of night, and lets their own fears and anxieties roam over things they wouldn’t admit to in the daylit hours.

Here are the songs of forgotten babies, crab-monsters and unexpected violence that informed Queen Mab.

Highland Fairy Lullaby, Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor

This mournful Scottish tune is quoted outright in the novel. It’s about a mother who puts her baby down in the mountains, and never finds her again. Any parent’s nightmare. In the novel, hearing it feeds all of Madeleine’s latent anxieties that she did something wrong, left a window open, wasn’t paying enough attention. Was the baby really spirited away though, or is she just anxious about everything in the aftermath of birth?

Dodo Ti Pitit Manman, Claudette Thégat

Lullabies from all over the world will often follow a formula of “go to sleep or the crocodile/wolf/eagle/hag/insert-monster-of-choice will come and get you.” But for me, points go to this Haitian Creole take, where the bogeyman is in fact a crab.

V’là l’bon vent, Marie Laforêt

At one point in the writing of Queen Mab, I became obsessed with finding a French-Canadian folk song that would sound like a fairytale, for the novel’s final scene. I didn’t go into the song or its lyrics in detail, but this voyageur song with roots in the 17^th century was in my mind. In it, the narrator laments that a greedy prince with a silver gun has shot and killed her pure white duck. In some versions, gold and jewels fall from the dead duck’s beak. I loved the imagery of this song but also its flexibility—it can be haunting and waiflike, folksy or choral, or played as a fiercely danceable fiddle piece.

Bíum Bíum Bambaló, Sigur Rós

I didn’t know this Icelandic melody until recently, and yet I’ve always known it (by another name). It tells of a mother singing her baby to sleep in a snowstorm, while a face looks in through the window from the storm outside! Is it the face of a troll or an elf of Icelandic legend? Is it the winter itself that needs to be kept beyond the glass? Perhaps what’s most frightening is that it isn’t specified… because we never really know what the future will hold when we sing a baby to sleep.

Beyond the menacing lyrics, the song shows the strange way folk culture reinvents itself. The tune is actually a traditional Irish melody, adapted by Peter Paul and Mary as “Gone the Rainbow” in the 1960s, and only joined with the Icelandic text in 1970. Folk traditions are often more recent than we think, or the versions we know of them are. Fairytales as well as music have gone through this process, and Queen Mab fits this pattern too.

Silver Dagger, Joan Baez

“Silver Dagger” is not a lullaby, it’s more of a murder ballad, though no one dies. The two genres have surprising overlap. It’s easy to imagine crooning this song on a dark night, because of its fairy-tale imagery (the father bears a literal chain of broken hearts). It also presents a strange inversion of the mother-child role. The narrator tells her lover not to come courting because her mother is lying by her side, holding a silver dagger and “she says that I can’t be your bride.” She concludes that she has decided “to sleep alone all of my life.” The mother here has taken her protective duties, and her lying next to the child in the night, to an extreme. Precluding romance, marriage…and therefore any more babies.

Aunque es de noche, Rosalía

Rosalía exploded on the scene around the time I was doing much of my night-singing, and although I couldn’t sing this at 4 am to save my life, the flamenco/pop mashup is, appropriately, all about darkness and light. “Although it is night,” say the lyrics, based on a poem by Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz, although it is night, there is meaning, there is faith, there is finally light. 

Spooky Spooky Spooky, Casper Babypants

These songs are all pretty intense. But then one day, the sleepless nights are passed, the baby is older, and those once-tired parents are with their kid listening to a guy called Casper Babypants. And he has a spooky song too, which is hilarious, gets stuck in everyone’s head for weeks on end—which my own adult sister with no kids added to her Spotify list. The night has departed, and comedy has returned to the world.

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

Emily McBride is a Canadian-born editor, writer, and translator living in Barcelona. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Rumpus, and The Stinging Fly. Queen Mab is her debut novel.

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

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

Emil Wilson’s debut graphic novel The Nightingales is a structurally inventive and emotionally unforgettable book.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“This graphic novel is stunning in every way. Wilson forgoes panels in favor of a format that is part sketchbook, part journal, and part scrapbook—a choice that gives both the visuals and the narrative room to breathe. The artwork has an intimacy and immediacy that complements the text beautifully, and the vibrant color palette communicates the joy that the relationship between Lou and Jim brings them both. . . . Absolutely gorgeous, visually and emotionally.”

In his own words, here is Emil Wilson’s Book Notes music playlist for his graphic novel The Nightingales:

My debut graphic novel, The Nightingales, is based on a true story from my family’s history. In 1985, my father invited a dying stranger and his two dogs to live with us after they had been evicted from their home. The experience brought out both the best and the worst in my family. In the book, a friendship blossoms between this man and a teenage girl inspired by my sister and, in many ways, by me. At its heart, the story is about the transformative nature of kindness, a subject that feels especially relevant right now.

Music plays a part in the story, but for this playlist I wanted to gather songs that trace the coming-of-age of my main character, a small-town misfit who grows into a spirited, self-possessed young woman. They’re songs about innocence, longing, connection, grief, hope, and the messy process of growing up.

Heaven on the Seventh Floor / Paul Nicholas

As a teenager in the 1980s, there was a party game called “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” where two kids were randomly matched and had to lock themselves in a closet to make out. Most of us just sat there awkwardly until the timer went off. As a queer kid, it was torture. This song, glittery, effervescent, and absurdly upbeat, brings me back to those odd, bittersweet days before puberty tightened its grip.

Any Way You Want It / Journey

Growing up in a small Oregon town, Journey occupied the intersection of blue-collar coolness and emotional grandeur. As a high school senior, when I imagined nuzzling my face into a girl’s neck—a phase that would soon end forever—this was the music playing in the background.

Do You Want to Funk? / Sylvester

When I first moved to New York, I dated an older gentleman who had DJed at The Saint, where the early White Parties were held. He played his reel-to-reel tapes for me, and I was struck by the marathon dance tracks, many running ten or twenty minutes without a break. During the early years of AIDS, those extended mixes became a way for gay men to lose themselves in the music for a few precious hours while the world burned outside.

Left of Center / Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega always represented a particular kind of cool to me: intelligent, observant, and utterly herself. If there’s a soundtrack for Lou, the main character of The Nightingales, as she rides her bike through town, it’s probably this song. Listening to it always makes Lou feel utterly real to me.

Stay / Oingo Boingo

My college roommate had far more evolved musical taste than I did (he was from Portland, after all), and he played Oingo Boingo’s album, Dead Man’s Party, constantly. It took me years to appreciate that this wasn’t just a bouncy pop song but something incredibly tender. Beneath Danny Elfman’s usual eccentricity is a quiet plea not to let go. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.

I Melt with You / Modern English

Is there a better song for dancing alone in your bedroom while overwhelmed by teenage angst? The answer is No.

Love Comes Quickly / Pet Shop Boys

So much of the Pet Shop Boys’ early music feels infused with the emotional realities of queer life in the ’80s: longing, secrecy, and fleeting connection. The lyrics never mention AIDS directly, but their fragility and inevitability feel impossible to ignore. Love arrives quickly. But so does loss.

The Ghost in You / The Psychedelic Furs

There’s a scene I cut from the book because I couldn’t make it work visually. A few days before he dies, Jim (the aforementioned dying stranger) wakes in the hospital to find Lou sitting beside his bed, reading. He watches her and realizes he will never see her grow into the woman she’s destined to become. He’s grateful that she’s there, but also knows he’ll soon have to say goodbye. As we linger on his face, we watch several emotions pass across it: anger, gratitude, love, regret, and finally acceptance. Every time I hear this song, I think of that deleted scene.

Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want / The Smiths

Sure, it’s a little on the nose, but this song speaks to what’s happening with every character in the book. Each one—father, mother, children, houseguest—wants something simple but finds themselves disappointed by circumstances beyond their control. The Nightingales is about ordinary people asking for ordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. No one is trying to change the world. They’re trying to love, protect, understand, and survive.

Cloudbusting / Kate Bush

I love this song’s blend of hope and inevitability, and the way it speaks to the people who continue to shape our lives long after they’re gone (“you’re here in my head”). The singer senses that something difficult may be on the horizon, yet she never gives up hope that something good might come of it. She’s even willing to manifest that possibility if she has to (“just saying it could even make it happen…”).

Satellites / Rickie Lee Jones

This song has always made me think about the invisible forces between people: the ways we orbit toward one another, miss one another, and occasionally connect. And sometimes the people who shape us most are the ones we know for only a short time.

Find the River / R.E.M.

This song somehow makes sadness and peace feel like the same emotion. I particularly love the lyric, Watch the road and memorize / This life that pass before my eyes. The Nightingales isn’t a story about death so much as the places that kindness can carry us. Lou leaves Oregon for a new life in New York City, but the current that Jim sets in motion continues to carry her long after he’s gone.

The Downtown Lights / The Blue Nile

“The Downtown Lights” isn’t really about a city. It’s about possibility. And the version of yourself you imagine might exist somewhere else. It captures the excitement and uncertainty that comes with your first big “adult” move. That feels true of Lou as she stands on the threshold of a new life, far from her hometown.

La Petite Fille de la Mer / Vangelis

Visually, The Nightingales is told in the form of an artist’s sketchbook because that’s how memory has always felt to me. A sketchbook is a collection of observations, experiments, abandoned ideas, and moments that seem random and unrelated (but often aren’t). When I first arrived in New York, I’d wander the city with my Sony Walkman, listening to this piece. It always set my thoughts in motion, carrying me from one memory to the next.

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

Emil Wilson is an artist living in San Fransico, California. The Nightingales is his first graphic 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.

Sam Farhi’s novel The Sapsuckers is an impressive debut, a book as inventive as it is moving and intense.

Laura Sims wrote of the book:

“Intense, raw, and haunting, The Sapsuckers takes on a young man’s obsessive search for the truth about his brother’s mysterious death. We travel down dark corridors and into the unexpected depths of a family’s history in this gripping and beautifully written debut novel.”

In his own words, here is Sam Farhi’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Sapsuckers:

Gym Class Heroes – “Za Intro”/ “Papercuts”

My man, Travie. First off, Upstate New York people rock together and you’re going to get that vibe throughout this playlist. We all came from those same woods where no one could see us.

These two songs – this is how hip hop Upstate really sounded. You might’ve known a band and were rapping super lyrical and spoken wordish and you put those two together.

You found each other… which also doesn’t sound right. In a small town, no one’s that hard to find. You were stuck with each other, but you didn’t know that. You jammed for hours, the band would do its improvvy stoner rock and say they hated the Grateful Dead, and you would freestyle. And sometimes, the band is grooving so hard you’re not even saying words and it doesn’t matter. You rhyme the same thing a few times. Then, in that din, your rap becomes personal, and deep, and meant for one person. Voila, literature is born. The only person you want to hear this song is the person you’re rapping about. You wish they were standing right in front of you in that basement or garage.

Travie did something very different in his music; he brought his humor, his personal shortcomings, all of that into the fold (and his flow is so unique). There’s another song on the album where Travie goes, “Thank god for Walkmans” – yeah, that’s the alienated Upstate youth.

Side note: We battled each other on the phone once and he smoked my boots; this guy can rap (I thought I could). We have a texting relationship now as he reads The Sapsuckers where he hits me with “BARS EVERYWHERE.” Stuff like that means so much to me. So yeah, tracks one and two.

El-P – “Stepfather Factory”

The album Fantastic Damage, for me, was frightening when it came out. There really was NOTHING like it. At the time that was still possible. From track one, this was some very scary unknown shit. The song is basically about an evil corporation providing the fatherless folks of the world with robot stepfathers. Pure capitalism, seeing a need in the vulnerable and filling it for profit and control (“Yeah, man!”).

In The Sapsuckers, Peg brings Oscar around the kids. He looks good on paper, he is fulfilling a need and then infects the family. So similar vibes.

Portishead – “Numb”

There’s the music critic version of this song where hey, it is trip hoppy and they made their drums like an SP or MPC and wow look at that… That’s cool.

But I think if you hear this song, and you’re a certain age, this is the make out joint. This is the hip-rocker. It just has that slow sexy vibe. I imagine this would be Rem’s fantasy, he puts this in his headphones and thinks about his crush.

X Ambassadors – “Follow the Sound of My Voice”

Sam Harris is ONE OF my best friends (Danny, did you see the modifier?). We made a little rap group together in high school and I taught him what a bar was (that’s true, don’t deny that).

Years later we wrote a movie together about starting a band in Ithaca and he came up with this beautiful title. When he brought the song in and played it for me, I wept. It’s about guiding his blind brother, Casey, through one of those dark crowded venues they’re always playing, and saying repeatedly, “Follow the sound of my voice.” Brothers. Can’t not put it here.

Maïa Vidal – “Poison”

Maïa Vidal taught me how to be an artist. We were in her basement Upstate, way back in the day, and she busts out her laptop and pulls up GarageBand. And hey, I’m from the world (as I saw myself) of MPCs and Fruity Loops (version 1) and you can’t sample certain things and no way would you use stock sounds.

But she was just having fun. She typed notes on the laptop keyboard, even a little drumbeat, all using instruments in GarageBand and made it sound completely unique. She’d delete parts with abandon, play them again with the same amount of ease. We wrote a song about robots in love and put that funny effect on our voices.

She taught me that being an artist can be (and perhaps should be) playing in a sandbox.

Of course, she also had her accordion, who didn’t? (joke). She made this Rancid cover with permission, I believe, which was already so cool and out of the ordinary. I mean rock stars and anybody even remotely ‘famous’ were so far away from all of us. (Side note: She was in a band called Kieven Rus with Sylvie and Taylor Quan (super shout-out to Taylor who’s so funny on IG and in life)). But I would listen to this song a million times a day. And if you know The Sapsuckers, you know Oscar, you know some people are poison.

Eels – Your Lucky Day in Hell

There’s a part in The Sapsuckers where this plays on the radio. We used to call into WICB, the Ithaca College station, and request stuff like this. I mean this was also on the Scream 2 soundtrack with “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave, which is a good pairing, high rec. I still remember the ICB request line. Watch this: 274 321 (censoring last digit).

Perfect Pussy – “Driver”

I didn’t discover this until recently when I did the Offal Salon with Meredith Graves (the singer here) at Public Records in Brooklyn. I overheard her espousing the charms of Kingston, NY and I just had to add, “They have a great bookstore” (Rough Draft, shout out to you). We figured out we were both from Upstate pretty early. Needless to say, she slayed. She was heartfelt and a natural performer.

This song sounds like a really really really good version of the scene I remember. When I was in high school there were so many of these shows at internet cafes, teen centers, art galleries, rec rooms, basements and any empty space. Sometimes bars and restaurants, but that was really for old people. These were young spaces where we made our own fliers, charged five bucks, screamed and made our lives.

Nina Simone – “Sinnerman”

There’s so much said about this song that there’s not so much to say. I want to put it here for the feeling of being small, for running away, but there’s a comeuppance here that does not happen in The Sapsuckers. So don’t think too hard about this one, just feel it.

London Symphony Orchestra – “The Planets, Op. 32: VII. Neptune, the Mystic”

Writer/poet/rapper Malik Crumpler put me on to this song. We were roommates while I was working on this book and we’d put this song on repeat for hours and hours. It just became background ambience after a while and would cleanse the room for us. Later, when I write with other people on projects, I put this on because it helps the flow. If I just need to calm down, or go to sleep, it works for that as well.

In The Sapsuckers, there’s a chapter called “Downtown” where Pete and Audrey’s journey is marked by the points in the Sagan Planet Walk in Ithaca, New York (they basically built monuments to each planet and then spread them out all over Ithaca in the same ratio of distance from each other as our solar system). So hey, you could read it like that too.

Also, it’s good to end here as a palate cleanser, right?

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

Sam Farhi is a novelist and screenwriter, originally from Ithaca, New York and now based in Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Opiate, PACKET Biweekly, ThoseThatThis, Vogue Italia Online, HBO’s New York Latino Film Festival, Yale’s Paprika! and The Wall. His zines have been sold at OHWOW Bookclub and aNYthing in downtown Manhattan. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University. He is currently working on his next 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.

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

Library Journal wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

“Violet,” Hole

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

“Killing Me Softly With His Song,” Roberta Flack

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

“Karma Police,” Radiohead

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

“Hedonism,” Skunk Anansie

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

“I’m Not in Love,” Tori Amos

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

“Rocky Mountain High,” John Denver

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

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

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

“Doom Beach,” Mark Bradshaw

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

“Giver,” K. Flay

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

“Only the Young,” Journey

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

“Live to Tell,” Madonna

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

Paper Bag, by Fiona Apple

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

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

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

Sapokanikan, by Joanna Newsom

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

Peach Plum Pear, by Joanna Newsom

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

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

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

The Magic, by Joan as Police Woman

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

Oh to Be in Love, by Kate Bush

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

Always Forever, by Cults

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

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

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

Stand Up, by Kim Kwang-seok

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

Мой калашников, by Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

Library Journal wrote of the book:

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

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

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

“Vampires” by S

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

“Soft Atrocity” by rook&nomie

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

“Fast Car” by Xiu Xiu

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

“More for Me” by Tegan and Sara

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

“Nothing Feels Natural” by Priests

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

“Adore” by Savages

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

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

Chloe Lauter is an entertainment publicist in Los Angeles.

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

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

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

Booklist wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

“Seabird” by Alessi Brothers

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

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

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

“Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex

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

“Golden Years” by David Bowie

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

“Something on Your Mind” by Karen Dalton

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

“Road” by Nick Drake

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

“Everybody’s Gotta Live” by Love

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

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

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

“Atlantis” by Donovan

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

“Land”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:

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

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

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

Spinning Away by Brian Eno and John Cale

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

Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

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

Losing You by Solange

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

Cruel Summer by Ace of Base

A particularly cruel, cruel, cruel summer.

Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil

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

Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey

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

Man on the Moon by R.E.M.

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

Wave of Mutilation by The Pixies

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

Broken Road by Kanye West

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

Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill

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

The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen

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

Shape of My Heart by Backstreet Boys

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

Feel Flows by The Beach Boys

Maybe the trippiest song of all time:

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

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

also at Largehearted Boy:

Emmalea Russo’s music playlist for her novel Vivienne

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

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

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

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

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

Paula Becker wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

PART I PLAYLIST

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

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

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

Draft Morning
The Byrds

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

For What It’s Worth
Buffalo Springfield

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

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

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

My Back Pages
The Byrds

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

Turn! Turn! Turn!
The Byrds

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

Where Have all the Flowers Gone
Peter, Paul and Mary

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

PART II PLAYLIST

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

Can’t Find My Way Home
Blind Faith

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

We Gotta Get Out of This Place
The Animals

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

Nowhere to Run
Martha and the Vandellas

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

Fortunate Son
Creedence Clearwater Revival

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

PART III PLAYLIST

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

Teach Your Children
Crosby Stills, Nash & Young

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

Eight Miles High
The Byrds

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

Darkness Darkness
The Youngbloods

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

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

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

War
Edwin Starr

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

PART IV PLAYLIST

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

Another Brick in the Wall, Pt 1
Pink Floyd

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

The Weight
The Band

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

Imagine
John Lennon

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

What’s Going On
Marvin Gaye

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

Theme from “The Mission”
Ennio Morricone

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

Wander My Friends
Bear McCreary, from Battlestar Galactica

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

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

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