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

The stories in Mallory Smart’s collection Book of David masterfully unearth the darknesses found in the American Midwest.

Eric Larocca wrote of the book:

“Every reader who peers into the pitch-black maw of Book of David unwittingly surrenders and bears witness to a gospel of cruelty engraved in viciousness, darkness, and unrelenting rot. Bewildering and utterly breathtaking…”

In her own words, here is Mallory Smart’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Book of David:

I’ve been calling Book of David Midwest rot instead of Midwest horror. There are basements, highways, dead friends, old technology, local legends, bad weather, and people who stick around longer than they probably should. There’s also Dave. He keeps showing up.

This isn’t exactly a soundtrack to the book. Some of these songs were around while I was writing it. Some feel like the Midwest I know. Some remind me of people I haven’t seen in years. Some just sound like something bad is about to happen.

Defiance, Ohio — “You Are Loved”

Defiance, Ohio sounds like basements to me. Not creepy basements. The basements where you ended up when you were young because nobody had enough money to go anywhere and there was usually an old couch down there.

There are people you spend so much time with growing up that you don’t realize you’re developing rituals. You sit in the same places. Tell the same stories. Nobody schedules any of this. It just happens.

Then you get older and keeping those people in your life becomes actual work. Somebody moves. Somebody gets married. Somebody has a kid. Suddenly you’re picking a Saturday three weeks from now for something that used to happen because it was Saturday and everyone was around.

“You Are Loved” gets at the sadness of that without making it completely depressing.

Broken Social Scene — “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl”

There are people I knew as teenagers who are still teenagers when I think about them. I know they’re somewhere being adults now, but that isn’t the person who lives in my head.

“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” has always felt a little unsettling to me for that reason. Nostalgia gets strange when you stay inside it too long. Eventually you’re remembering your memory of someone.

Steve Miller Band — “The Joker”

“The Joker” matters inside Book of David. I don’t really want to say why.

I’m fascinated by the way a song can stop belonging to the person who made it and start belonging to somebody you knew. Music is particularly good at haunting people because you don’t get much say in when you hear it. You can throw away an object. You can stop going somewhere. You have very little control over what starts playing while you’re standing in a Walgreens.

Smashing Pumpkins — “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, so Smashing Pumpkins was inevitable.

I thought about picking “1979,” but that feels almost too easy. “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” feels closer to the Midwest I actually know.

My Midwest isn’t endless cornfields. It’s strip malls and subdivisions and parking lots and highways. It’s being close enough to Chicago that Chicago is always there, but far enough away that you’re still going home at the end of the night.

When I was younger, there was always this idea that something more interesting was happening somewhere else. Sometimes that somewhere else was only twenty miles away. You could drive there. You could move there. You could become whatever version of yourself you imagined existed there.

The suburbs are strange because they’re designed around movement. Roads everywhere. Highways everywhere. Cars everywhere. Everyone can theoretically leave.

Then you grow up and realize how many people stayed.

That contradiction feels like the Midwest to me. Restlessness mixed with an incredible ability to remain exactly where you are.

Sufjan Stevens — “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”

I grew up around Chicago, where John Wayne Gacy is part of the cultural memory whether you want him to be or not.

What has always disturbed me most is how ordinary everything around him looked. A suburban house. A neighborhood. People next door.

Sufjan Stevens makes the song quiet when the subject seems like it should demand noise. I think that makes it worse.

I’ve never needed horror to happen somewhere gothic. Give me a normal house with something wrong inside it.

Frank Turner — “Polaroid Picture”

A photograph is a strange attempt at preservation. Here is proof everyone stood together once. Here is what you looked like before you knew what happened next.

I have a strange attachment to dead technology and physical things that outlive whatever they were supposed to preserve.

Sometimes the object survives the relationship.

Sometimes it survives the person.

Echo & the Bunnymen — “The Killing Moon”

Some songs already sound haunted.

“The Killing Moon” has this sense that whatever is going to happen has already been decided and everyone else is just catching up. I like horror that works that way too. Nothing has happened yet, but you already know the night isn’t going to end the way everyone expected.

Morrissey — “Ouija Board, Ouija Board”

One of my favorite things about ghost stories is how quickly the supernatural becomes inconvenient.

Everyone desperately wants proof of life after death until a dead person actually starts bothering them.

“Ouija Board, Ouija Board” is spooky, melodramatic and a little absurd. I assume the dead would still be annoying too.

Donovan — “Season of the Witch”

I like horror most before I know exactly what’s wrong.

The room looks the same. Everyone is acting normally. Something has shifted, but nobody can tell you what.

“Season of the Witch” lives in that moment. It doesn’t explain itself, and I don’t want it to.

Violent Femmes — “Country Death Song”

If someone asked me for one song that sounds like Midwest rot, I might give them “Country Death Song.”

The Violent Femmes are from Milwaukee, but it’s more than geography. The song feels like something somebody heard from somebody who heard it from somebody else. By the time it reaches you, everything terrible has already happened.

That’s how local legends worked when I was growing up. A road had a story. A bridge had a story. A house had a story. Somebody knew somebody who knew what happened there.

The details changed depending on who told it.

That was part of the fun.

I’m interested in the life a story develops after the actual event is over. Maybe there was a real person at the center once. For a while people remember the person. Then they remember what happened to them. Eventually people who never knew them are telling the story too.

The Midwest is particularly good at this. There are places where you can drive past an ordinary patch of road and somebody in the car will tell you not to stop there. Ask why and suddenly you’re hearing about something that supposedly happened thirty years ago.

Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t happen exactly that way.

The story survived either way.

Lana Del Rey — “Tulsa Jesus Freak”

I’ve always been interested in the point where devotion to an idea turns into devotion to a person. America is particularly good at blurring those lines. Religion becomes celebrity. Celebrity becomes mythology. A person becomes a symbol people can use for whatever they need.

“Tulsa Jesus Freak” has that strange combination of devotion, desire and American geography.

Even the title sounds like somebody you’ve heard stories about but never actually met.

Vera Sola — “The Cage”

This is the song I keep playing now.

I started listening to it constantly around the time Book of David stopped feeling like something I’d been working on and started feeling like something that was actually going to exist outside my computer. I don’t know why this became the song. It just did.

Most of the songs on this playlist remind me of something that already happened. “The Cage” is different. Whatever memory I’m eventually going to associate with it is happening right now.

Ten years from now, I’ll probably hear it and remember this period of my life.

I have no idea what part.

Ramshackle Glory — “Bitter Old Man”

Everybody knows some version of the guy in “Bitter Old Man.”

He’s somebody’s friend. Somebody’s ex. Somebody you used to see constantly and now only hear about when something happens.

I like characters who’ve had enough time to disappoint themselves. Book of David has a few.

Johnny Cash — “The Man Comes Around”

This had to be last.

“The Man Comes Around” sounds like an ending before it even starts. Cash pulls from Revelation and doesn’t have to do much to make it frightening. Horsemen. Judgment. Death. The end of everything.

I love the distance between apocalyptic imagery and the way people actually experience catastrophe. The world might be ending, but somebody still needs gas. Somebody’s phone is dying. Somebody is pissed off about something that stopped mattering an hour ago. People don’t suddenly understand the significance of the moment just because it’s significant.

Book of David starts with small things too. Friends. Roads. Basements. Old objects. Stories people tell each other.

Then things get worse.

Johnny Cash can take it from there.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Mallory Smart’s playlist for her novel I Keep My Visions to Myself

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

Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer, editor-in-chief of Maudlin House, and podcast host.

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.

Adam Wilson’s Fail Sons is one of the year’s funniest and heartfelt novels, the brotherly road trip story (accompanied by their cryonically-preserved (and thawing) father you didn’t know you have to read.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Wilson hits all the right notes in this dynamic dark comedy about grief and hope. Readers will enjoy the ride.”

In his own words, here is Adam Wilson’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Fail Sons:

Scott Platt, the narrator of Fail Sons, is an unemployed forty-year-old Brooklynite who spent fifteen years editing the culture section at a glossy magazine before the decline of print journalism ended his career. In other words, he’s a man with opinions about music. You will find those opinions scattered throughout the novel—Scott opines on Pavement, Taylor Swift, and all points in between. He wonders why Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” would play in a casino since it encourages prudence, and he makes a case for Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” being the greatest pop song of the twenty-first century. He worries that recommendation algorithms have made guys like him obsolete (his wife reassures him he was already obsolete.) 

As Scott’s takes on these songs appear in the book, I thought I’d use this space to discuss some that don’t, but that do feel relevant to it, both personally and thematically. Fail Sons is a book about aging and mortality; fathers, sons, and brothers; failure and grief. These songs have guided my understanding of these subjects as I’ve dealt with them in both my writing and my life.

Drive-By Truckers – “Outfit”

I didn’t cry for roughly a decade. Then I switched from Prozac to Wellbutrin, and proceeded to weep at every father/son scene in every movie ever made. A particular one that gets me is Alec Baldwin teaching his son, Dildo, to tie a tie in the Farrelly Brothers classic, Outside Providence.

Listening to music can be a very emotional for me, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t make me tear up like films do. There are exactly two exceptions, and “Outfit” is one of them. Actually, there are three exceptions if you count Bruce Springsteen’s spoken intro to “The River” on Live 1975-85, an anecdote about Bruce, his dad, and the Vietnam War that I sometimes listen to while walking the Prospect Park loop; if you see a middle-aged bald man crying into his hands as he stumbles down the track, wave hello! (that live version of “The River” is pretty great too.)

Jason Isbell wrote “Outfit” at twenty-two after being invited to join Drive-by Truckers. In it, he sings from the perspective of his own dad—a house painter—giving advice to his son before he heads out on tour. The empathy with which Isbell inhabits his father’s perspective elevates what might feel like a gimmick into something profoundly moving, the rust belt response to Springsteen’s “Independence Day” we didn’t we know we needed. The narrator counsels young Jason to use common sense (“steer clear of the needle”) and remember his roots (“don’t sing with a fake British accent.”) He describes his own abandoned dreams of economic mobility, underlined by his hopes for a bigger life for his son. The kicker cues the waterworks: “Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus…don’t give it away.”

Bruce Springsteen – “Highway Patrolman”

I still haven’t watched that Springsteen biopic with the guy from The Bear, and Nebraska is not even in my top five Bruce records, but I did read Warren Zanes’ fantastic book that inspired the movie, and I do love some songs from that album. My favorite is “Highway Patrolman,” a devastating ballad about siblings and mercy. A guy kills someone in a bar fight, and his brother—a cop—chases him to the Canadian border, only to let him go. The song ends with the narrator watching his brother’s taillights recede into darkness. It reminds me of Andre Dubus’s short story, “A Father’s Story,” in which a devout Catholic helps his daughter dispose of a body, an act the narrator justifies to God by explaining that since God never had a daughter, only a son, He has no right to judge.

Michael Ian Cummings – “Oldest Troubles”

I’ve been listening to Michael’s music since we were teenagers in suburban Massachusetts, and this title track from his first solo EP is my favorite thing he’s ever done. What the singer’s “oldest troubles” are is never specified—all we know is that he must face them—and the lack of specificity makes the song feel universal. Like Fail Sons, its theme is early onset middle-age (In Fail Sons, Scott prefers to call it “the slow denouement of youth”) and how alienating it can be when the rest of your cohort seems to have advanced in their lives and careers in ways that you haven’t. “Work is hard if you hate it,” may be one of the great opening lines of all-time. 

Joni Mitchell – “Little Green”

There’s a moment in every music fan’s life when they must face the fact that everyone loves Blue—it is not yours alone—and that, in fact, everyone else’s favorite song on itis “A Case of You” too.  But you know what else is a perfect song? Well, all of them, but especially “Little Green.” The line “child with a child pretending” used to repeat in my head when I’d push my older son’s stroller around Brooklyn. I was thirty-six when he was born, and like Scott in Fail Sons, I was emerging from a rather protracted adolescence. In the old days, a man might have been to war and back by that age! In some sense, Fail Sons is a book about Millennials having to accept that we’re no longer children pretending to be adults—we’re just adults now, full stop.  

Pinegrove – “Old Friends”

Apparently the theme of this playlist is songs that destroy me. “Old Friends” does it in a single line: “I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago/I saw some old friends at her funeral.” What an incredible distillation of the swiftness and brutality of time!

The years I spent writing Fail Sons involved a not insignificant measure of grief, including the sudden and unexpected passing of my dear friend, Bret. I always associate this band with him because of a photo in which he and I are jamming out a different Pinegrove song, “Angelina,” at a dingy practice space in Gowanus. I’m on guitar, Bret is on drums, and I can tell what we’re playing because there’s a capo on the sixth fret and my fingers are formed in a C add 9 chord. That photo hung framed above my desk while I was writing the book.

Prince – “Little Red Corvette”

When children are very young they have to listen to the music you choose. Later, they develop their own tastes, and car rides become occasions for the Encanto and K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtracks. I was in a big Prince phase when my older son was a toddler, and he loved this song. We spent some long mornings listening to it on repeat, and I’ll forever associate it with the specific joy of watching someone who has only just learned to walk try to dance. Fail Sons is a death-haunted book—it’s literally about two guys driving around with their dad’s corpse—but it is also, I hope, a book that comes down on the side of life. Nothing brings both the fragility and beauty of human existence into stark relief like having children does, and few things feel more emblematic of that dichotomy than watching a toddler dance to an 80s pop song about the fleeting thrill of a one-night stand while trying not to fall on his diaper-cushioned butt. 

Pen Pal – “All the Lights” & “Here With You”

Before he passed, Bret and I, along with my wife, Sarah, made an album together. This was during the pandemic, and the way we recorded it is that Sarah and I would send tracks back and forth with Bret from our respective lockdowns. The project became a lifeline during those bleak months. As a musician, I’m a hobbyist at best, and I was lucky to make music with this much more talented and accomplished duo. These are the last two songs on the record, and my favorites. “All the Lights” is a composition of Bret’s to which I added lyrics—it’s about returning to New York after being gone. “Here With You”  is a love song I wrote for Sarah, and that she sings beautifully, a song about reaching a point in life when staying home to eat pad thai and watch Top Chef with the person you love is more enjoyable than partying. If Scott learns anything in Fail Sons, he learns this.   

Silver Jews – “The Wild Kindness”

A few years ago, I got the lyrics “shine out in the wild kindness” tattooed on my thigh in memory of Bret, who was a huge Silver Jews fan. I gave Scott, in Fail Sons, the same tattoo. David Berman’s lyrics can be elliptical, and I’m not totally sure what he means by the line. But I like the idea of a wild kindness; I imagine that, like wild blueberries, it is more fibrous and intense than the cultivated kind.

Paul Simon – “St. Judy’s Comet” & “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War”

When my second son couldn’t sleep at night, I’d sing two songs to him in his crib: The Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” and Paul Simon’s “St. Judy’s Comet,” which, itself, is a song about singing to a child at bedtime: “If I can’t sing my boy to sleep, well it makes your famous daddy look so dumb.” Fail Sons is, in part, about becoming a father, and the challenge of adjusting to that new life role. I learned this song from my old roommate, Jordan, who used to play and sing a gorgeous cover of it when we lived together in Austin in our early twenties. This summer, Jordan and I went to see Paul Simon play at Forrest Hills Stadium in Queens, where Simon grew up—a full circle moment for both him and us. Simon did not play “St Judy’s Comet”, but he played another favorite deep cut from Hearts and Bones, “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” a crushingly beautiful song about the painter and his wife dancing naked in a hotel room to 1950s doo-wop. Another full circle moment: Jordan told me that he now sings “St. Judy’s Comet” at bedtime to his own young son.

Island Boy – “Ashes”

I met Jordan and another friend, Jes, during my junior year abroad in Australia. They both went to Columbia, and I’m not sure I would have ended up in New York if I hadn’t visited them there the following year and fallen in love with the city. On that visit I met Richard Hunter Rivera, who was Jes’s boyfriend at the time, and is now her husband. In 2014, he released a reverb-soaked Caribbean dream pop record called Basic Instincts under the moniker Island Boy that I’ve had in heavy rotation for more than a decade—Richard even performed songs from it at my wedding. There’s something very calming to me about his music, and I like to listen to it when I’m overstimulated, which was pretty much all the time while I was trying to write Fail Sons in a New York apartment as two energetic boys bounced off the furniture. I recommend playing it after one gin and tonic and half of a 5mg THC gummy, which is my ideal combination of substances these days.

Yo La Tengo – “Everyday”

I never used to write to music, but while working on Fail Sons I made an effort to wake before sunrise and work for a bit before my kids got up. I wasn’t always successful at getting myself to do this, but on the days that I did, I always put on Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out to set the mood. To me this album is the sound of pre-dawn, a specific shade of darkness that I wanted to capture. It’s the sound of two guys in a car on an empty highway in the dead of night.

Rilo Kiley – “A Better Son/Daughter”  

This is the other song that makes me cry, though by the end of it I’m screaming at the top of my lungs, ready to take on the world. It’s the song I listen to when I’m low, the song I reach for to feel less alone. It is a song about depression, and also about fighting your way out of depression, and I can’t think of another piece of art that so deeply resonates with my own experience of these subjects. Sarah and I saw the Rilo Kiley reunion tour when they came through New York last summer, and the catharsis of screaming along to this song with an entire crowd of aging Millennials was unparalleled.  

also at Largehearted Boy:

Adam Wilson’s playlist for his novel Sensation Machines

Adam Wilson’s playlist for his short story collection What’s Important Is Feeling

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

Adam Wilson is the author of four books: the novel SENSATION MACHINES (Soho 2020), the novel FLATSCREEN (Harper Perennial 2012) the collection of short stories WHAT’S IMPORTANT IS FEELING (Harper Perennial 2014), and the novel FAIL SONS (Soho 2026).

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.

Jocelyn Cullity’s novel The Nurse at Baker Hospital is a compelling historical literary mystery.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“An engrossing story that exposes past medical fraud at an astonishing level.”

In her own words, here is Jocelyn Cullity’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Nurse at Baker Hospital:

Set in 1939 and based on a true story, The Nurse at Baker Hospital follows a young nurse who takes a job at Norman Baker’s infamous cancer hospital in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Although I didn’t listen to Billie Holiday while writing the novel, her music haunted my imagination throughout the process. As I researched the era, Holiday’s voice embodied the contradictions at the heart of the story—hope and despair, glamour and hardship, intimacy and loneliness. Her songs became intertwined with my characters, especially Della, a working-class nurse from Kansas City, and Celia Washington, a wealthy New Yorker seeking a cure that might have been too good to be true. These songs belong to the emotional landscape of the novel and to the lives of the two women at its center.

“Easy Living”

While researching Kansas City’s jazz scene in the late 1930s, I learned about the tea pads—after-hours joints where musicians gathered to listen to music, smoke marijuana, and escape the constraints of everyday life. Imagining Della in the tea pads helped me understand her longing for community months before she arrived at Baker Hospital.

Della first meets Celia Washington while Billie Holiday’s “Easy Living” plays in Celia’s private hospital room. One of the sickest patients at Baker Hospital, Celia has traveled from New York City seeking Norman Baker’s cure. She’s brought her Victrola, packed in a portable leather suitcase, along with a collection of Holiday records. The song immediately carries Della back to the tea pads she frequented in Kansas City, places where she could go alone and still feel welcome.

“Strange Fruit”

Celia and her husband have had the opportunity to hear Billie Holiday perform “Strange Fruit” at Cafe Society. Their wealth grants them access to the clubs and concert venues that Della could never afford. Instead, Della’s musical education comes from the tea pads of Kansas City, where musicians welcomed her in to dance until morning.

“Strange Fruit” also reminds me that while Norman Baker marketed miracle cures to desperate patients, America was confronting other forms of brutality and injustice. Holiday’s recording anchors the novel in a wider national story beyond the walls of Baker Hospital, and the Ozarks.

“A Fine Romance”

Often, after midnight, when Della sits beside the very ill Celia, Billie Holiday sings softly from the record player. The song reflects Della’s own romantic disappointments, but it also serves as a counterpoint to Celia’s marriage. In 1939 Arkansas, Celia’s interracial marriage is not recognized and may even place the couple in danger. Yet theirs is the most loving relationship in the novel.

The irony of “A Fine Romance” reaches beyond the characters’ personal lives. Its title could just as easily describe Norman Baker’s hospital itself—a beautiful promise that turns out to be something far less than advertised.

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

Jocelyn Cullity’ s historical novel, Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons (Winner, Best Book Awards, 2018), was published in English by Inanna Publications (Canada) and Rupa (India), and translated into French and Tamil. The Envy of Paradise (Finalist for Multicultural Fiction, International Book Awards, 2020), was also published by Inanna Publications. Cullity is the Director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.

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.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s novel The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford is one of the year’s most striking debuts, a book both wholly transportive and masterfully told.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Droll characterization, wry humor, and storytelling chops [are] displayed by the talented Thompson-Spires in this debut novel, …Reminiscent of T.C. Boyle, another master of the darkly whimsical short story, Thompson-Spires packs a sharp, caustic wit that yields plenty of compassion for even someone as mean and misbegotten as her title character. Is this a whodunit, or a ‘how-they-did-it’? However you define Thompson-Spires’ novel, it’s shrewd, audacious, and funny.”

In her own words, here is Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford:

My debut novel, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford chronicles the final hours of Rich Milford, the most hated man in Newville, Oklahoma. Told from alternating perspectives by the townsfolk of Newville and the five women who attempt to murder Rich, it explores who gets to claim what stories, whether there’s such a thing as truth, and the lengths people will go to in order to alter or preserve their legacies.

Although I made a vibes playlist for the book early in my drafting process, I’m one of those people who can’t write to most songs because I’ll end up choreographing a music video before a single word lands on the page. I can, however, write to Billie Eilish. There’s something fully immersive and atmospheric about her work that always inspires me, and though I do often end up singing along, I can still maintain my focus on the project at hand. Her music only makes a brief cameo on this playlist, but I want to acknowledge that it has provided much of the background noise, along with Brooklyn’s unique diegetic sounds, for my years of writing and revision of this novel. Below, find my ideal soundtrack for The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford.

“Cha-Cha Slide,” DJ Casper; “The Wobble,” V.I.C; “The Hustle,” Van Mcoy; “Do the Urkel,” Family Matters

Line dances tell us so much about community. They mark insiders and outsiders to cultural knowledge, and Rich Milford is as far outside of Newville’s conventions as one can imagine. Four Wives is structured as one big line-dance tour through the towns, Rich’s life, and over his grave. Thus, the above songs—and more like them—figure into the novel’s pacing and the townsfolks’ joy over Rich’s death.

“Can You Stop the Rain,” Peabo Bryson

Bryson’s song is about the grief of romantic love lost, but the titular Rich, the novel’s antagonist, also grieves many things, most prominently his younger sister, and arguably his parents and the uncle who raised him. Rich is heavily influenced by barometric pressure, and it’s no spoiler to say that his lightning strike at a young age becomes a formative event.

“Blame It on the Rain,” Milli Vanilli

Yes, a theme is forming here. As the song says, “Whatever you do, don’t put the blame on you/ Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah.” And Rich, who becomes a worse cad than usual under the strain of inclement weather, takes this chorus literally.

Alternates: “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” Ann Peebles; “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” Missy Elliott

“For the Love of Money,” The O’Jays

“Money,” the O’Jays observe, “can drive some people out of their minds.” Rich Milford loves no one more than his sister, Mae, and his fat bankroll. And his lack of honesty about how much money he has directly influences one of his wives’ decision to murder him.

“Torn,” Natalie Imbruglia

“I’m all out of faith…. I’m cold and I am shamed/ lying naked on the floor,” Imbruglia writes in this pop song. Shame figures largely in each of the women who attempts to murder Rich, his first wife Lally no exception. Lally prides herself on respectability, so Rich’s continual degradations of her—including infidelity and sexual and financial humiliation—leave her with what she feels is no choice: To quote Ja Rule, “It’s murda.”

“Criminal,” Fiona Apple

If any of the women in Rich’s life feels especially guilty over her murderous actions, it’s his second “wife,” Sophronia, who worries about what to tell her children when their father ends up dead, presumably by her own hand.

“Petite Mort,” Meshell Ndegeocello

This song’s passionate emphasis on a queer romance suits Georgette, the only wife Rich lets handle his money. Though she is generally levelheaded and somewhat austere, her ultimate vulnerability is most visible when it comes to the secret affair she’s been having with another character in the book.

“I Love You,” Billie Eilish

There are multiple Eilish songs I could have chosen (“My Strange Addiction,” “Hostage,” or “Hailey’s Comet,” for example) to describe Vivianne’s near obsession with Rich. As the last woman to enter the family, she pines over him with a burning but mostly unrequited love that drives her to do wild things. “I can’t escape the way I love you,” Vivianne, like Eilish, might sing, “and I don’t want to.”

“Tears Dry on Their Own,” Amy Winehouse

Vivianne receives so little in the Milford household—barely thrown a bone—that I’m giving her a bonus song. “I don’t understand,” Winehouse sings, “Why do I stress the man/ when there’s so many bigger things at hand…. Even if I stop wanting you/ and perspective pushes through/ I’ll be some next man’s other woman soon.” Vivianne, too, is prone to this pattern.

“I Love the Lord,” Whitney Houston

Alberta, Rich’s lifelong cook, has seen it all, and she wishes she hasn’t. Ever trying to clean the “Milford stink” off of herself, she delights herself in the Lord in both true devotion and defense against the wiles of wicked Rich and his unconventional family.

“The Payback,” James Brown

My favorite James Brown song calls for “the big payback,” “revenge,” and, boy, does Rich Milford meet vengeance.

“Goodbye, Earl,” The Chicks

Very few people mourn Rich’s death. He’s a notorious brawler, a domestic abuser like Earl in this song by The Chicks, and he’s an unsteady, volatile presence in the book and to the people who know him. The townsfolk of Newville, as I mentioned, literally dance on his grave.

“Sweep Around Your Own Front Door,” The Williams Brothers

The townspeople of Newville are not without their own faults. In addition to being incredibly judgmental and sexist, they spend their time spying on Rich Milford and his family. This song encourages nosy people to tidy their own houses before they call out the sins of others, and Newville might take note of it and their own complicity in Rich’s demise.

“Motownphilly,” Boys II Men

This jam reflects Newville, which, in addition to serving as a Greek chorus of sorts, features competing bards. I’d like to imagine that its electric four-part harmonies and acapella riffs would complement the voices of the town’s lamppost singers, the Darker Brothers and the Dixon Boys, who write songs about the Milfords and perform them to passersby.

“Oklahoma,” Rodgers and Hammerstein

My novel is, in part, at its heart an ode to the all-Black towns of Oklahoma, of which there used to be over 50 and now only 13 remain. I wanted to both historicize this important part of the United States and pay homage, as in the book’s dedication, to the archivists who have kept these towns’ stories alive. One of Newville’s major beefs with Rich is that he takes up too much space in their town’s lore. At the end of the day, the townsfolk want to be remembered for their great contributions to a place they deem beautiful and important. As the song says, “Every night my honey lamb and I/ Sit alone and talk/ And watch a hawk/ Makin’ lazy circles in the sky/ We know we belong to the land/ And the land we belong to is grand.”

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

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the award-winning, National Book Award longlisted short story collection, Heads of the Colored People.

In addition to a debut novel with Scribner, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Rich Milford, her young adult debut is forthcoming with Make Me a World (Penguin Random House). She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Grant and a 2019 Whiting Award.

She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications.

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by David Naimon is an enlightening and informative collection of interviews with one of our greatest writers by one of our most talented (if not most talented) literary interviewers.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“An enlightening conversation about the writing process. Both authors adopt the tone of artisans discussing their craft, and each’s delight at debating with a like-minded professional is evident throughout. . . [Le Guin’s] expansive knowledge of the SF genre provides, most strikingly, a sharp perspective on how its female practitioners have too often been forgotten in favor of their male contemporaries. Her rapport with Naimon results in an exchange that is both informative and charming.”

In his own words, here is David Naimon’s playlist for his book Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by David Naimon:

The book that Ursula K. Le Guin and I created together began as conversations between us, one in each genre—fiction, poetry and nonfiction. And as we dived into questions of craft it became quickly clear that the music of words, the non-connotative elements of language, was of great importance to Ursula. As she herself put it:

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

Ursula would often borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf, “the wave in the mind,” to describe this very thing.

Today, however I have the pleasure of putting together an actual musical playlist to accompany the journey Ursula and I made through fiction, poetry and nonfiction. In thinking of how best to do so, I’m reminded of something Ursula wrote in the introduction to the book (an introduction she quite amazingly titled “Fear and Loathing in the Interview”!) where she said: “The good interview is like a good badminton rally: you know right away that the two of you can keep that birdie in the air, and all you have to do is watch it fly.”

Given the dialogic nature of our book it seems only right to have this playlist move back and forth between us, to volley between the music of Ursula’s world and the music of mine, as we make a third music together, one that invites you now to join in with us.

ON FICTION

“Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” by Willie Nelson

The question Ursula was asked most often was “where do you get your ideas from” and she often let Willie Nelson answer for her. In Ursula’s words: “One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought of his tunes, and he said, ‘The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.’ Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery. And a true one.”  Similarly, elsewhere she has said, “A story or poem may reveal truths to me as I write it. I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work.”  So, in the honor of Willie’s wisdom here is the song he himself considers one of his favorites.

“Misty Mountains Cold” The Hobbit: The Complete Original Soundtrack (1977)

The two writers that come up most often for Ursula when we talk about the musical rhythm of prose are Virginia Woolf and J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the unique strengths of her engagement with writing craft is her refusal to keep so-called “literary” writers and “genre” writers siloed, to instead present them together like this. Likewise she wouldn’t hesitate to cite an indigenous oral story as an example, alongside Dickens or Tolstoy. In honor of Tolkien’s rhythms I chose a song from my childhood, from the 1977 animated film The Hobbit. This song is an adaptation of a sung poem in the book itself. For the Spotify playist I was limited by what was available (the soundtrack of the recent Peter Jackson directed film) but I’m really thinking of the version of this song from the 1977 animated film, a film that was so formative for me growing up. I hope you’ll listen to the much more charming version as well. You can also hear a recording of Tolkien reading the original poem-song from the book here.

“Scene 2: Recantation” from Philip Glass’ Opera Galileo Galilei

Ursula loved opera and found Philip Glass’ Galileo “completely beautiful.” In speaking about craft she liked to distinguish between writing rules that are genuinely useful and writing rules that were really simply there to uphold the status quo, whether around class or gender or level of education. She also cautioned against getting swept up in the latest trend in style, to take a longer historical view on what is available to you as a writer. Both of these impulses speak to the importance for Ursula of puzzling out how to stay true, which sometimes means violating norms, either of tradition or contemporary (often capitalistic) pressures on what writing is supposed to look like. This scene in the opera is a dramatization of when Galileo is forced to recant his astronomical findings which he nevertheless knows are true.

ON POETRY

“Promise is a Pendulum” by Big Thief

In the introduction to our book Ursula reveals she was nervous for our poetry conversation, even as poetry is the writing practice that is the true throughline of her writing life. In the 1950s, the work she first submitted for publication was poetry, and she continued to meet with her poetry writing peer group and write poems long after she stopped writing novels. It wasn’t until the Poetry Foundation commissioned me to write a piece reflecting on what her poetry tells us about her more well-known work that I learned that it was only with her final collection of poetry—in a long wonderful career as a poet—that any true editorial attention was given to her poems. We talk about how, for her, poetry is more contemplative than imaginative (perhaps one of the reasons we don’t have science fictional poems by her) and I got the sense that to be a poet in this way required always putting yourself back in beginner’s mind. Quieting the mind, becoming acutely aware of the limits of human knowledge and welcoming in influences from the more than human world (as much of her poetry engages with the natural world and our role within it). It makes me think of one of my favorite songs from Big Thief with lines like:

I could never build a rainbow
Or any kind of flower
I could never make a sparrow
Or a meteor shower
I could never build an earthworm
Could never make the earth turn…

I’ve been listening to the laughing
Of the fox down the trail
I’ve been clasping to the listening of the moss to the snail
The shimmer of the beech leaves
As the wind does a big sneeze

“Beautiful Reward” by Bruce Springsteen

One of the things that Ursula notes about poetry is that dictators are afraid of poets. And in one of her most powerful moments, receiving the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she delivers a fiery speech warning against the commodification of books by the likes of Amazon who were both a sponsor of the event and sitting just below her as she spoke. In that speech she uses the phrase “beautiful reward” four times, but because few caught the reference, she later clarified she was referring to the song by Bruce Springsteen, one of her favorite songwriters. So in honor of the poet facing down the powers that be on behalf of art, we have to include this song on the playlist.

ON NONFICTION

“On the Banks of the Wabash” by The Mills Brothers

One of the things that concerned Ursula out in the real world, and which she wrote about in her nonfiction, was the erasure of women. Sometimes she would write about direct theft and erasure, like that of the case of Wallace Stegner and Mary Hallock Foote but other times she would worry about women who in a given contemporary moment are being celebrated and centered and then as time passes, unlike similar male contemporaries, they seem to not only drift out of the conversation but never fully enter the canon. When we spoke about this, she said she worried about Grace Paley in this way.

It made me wonder if Grace Paley ever wrote about songs she loved and I came across her short story Mother which begins with the lines: “One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway.” I believe she is referring to the song “On the Banks of the Wabash” with its lines: “But one thing there is missing in the picture;/ Without her face it seems so incomplete./I long to see my mother in the doorway,/As she stood there years ago her boy to greet.”  I imagine this incomplete picture without Grace Paley, and with Ursula imagining her in the doorway, and now us doing the same with Ursula.  (another resonance is that the Wabash was also the site of a 19^th century utopian socialist settlement called Harmony and later New Harmony).

“Heron Dance” from Music & Poetry of the Kesh by Ursula K. Le Guin and Todd Barton

Even if Ursula was most nervous for our poetry conversation, as a genre she seemed most uneasy with nonfiction, even as she has written not only some of the most unforgettable ground-shifting essays, but also some of the most insightful critical appraisals (i.e. book reviews) of her writing peers’ works. These book reviews often serve as deep instructional insights into craft themselves. I suspect her uneasiness with the genre, something we explore in some detail in the book, partly has to do with her ideas about the imagined and fantastic. In many ways she saw them as fundamental to reality, more real than realism. It reminds me of her oft-quoted declaration: “I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.” Or the line:  “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

Thus, for this penultimate song, I choose a work of Ursula’s herself, a “real” work of an “imagined” people, the Kesh, from her 1985 novel Always Coming Home. The original 1980s edition of this book came with a cassette with this very music on it. The track I chose of this future imagined culture, became the real theme music for the 2022 limited series I did on my podcast, Crafting with Ursula.

“Try” by Dolly Parton

If you were lucky enough to see the exhibition in Portland, Oregon in 2025, called A Larger Reality, on the life, thought and work of Ursula (an exhibition that will hopefully one day travel), you would’ve encountered a large mural of a giant tree whose branches were populated by many of Ursula’s influences and loves, whether Charles Dickens or Joy Harjo or Dolly Parton. After seeing Dolly in that tree, I looked to see if I could uncover any instance of Le Guin mentioning Parton and even better, particular songs of hers she loved, but I couldn’t find anything. But somehow I stumbled upon the perfect Parton song, performed in a perfectly strange circumstance, to serve as a final song for this journey.

The third time we talked about writing, it was no longer at the radio station but in the upstairs reading room of her house. We had established a warm rapport by then, and because of it we were both notably more relaxed. Her cat Pard even came into the room in the middle of it, checked us out, unimpressed, and returned to the bed in the other room. In this warm, loose moment, at the very end of the conversation I ask her to read a piece of hers, that I don’t believe she has ever read out loud before. Ironically, this incredibly funny, over-the-top and snarky piece is called “On Serious Literature” and it made her laugh so much to consider reading it that she snorted. My proudest moment.  In the spirit of that moment of uncontainable unseriousness, while reading about serious literature, I present Dolly Parton’s song “Try.” Again, not because of its version on the Spotify playlist but mainly because of the video of her performance of it during her cameo on the sci-fi comedy drama The Orville. Where she sits on a very human couch to sing it to a very appreciative alien audience of one. You may or may not snort when you see it, but thinking of the meeting of a very real human celebrity with a very imagined reptilian alien, I return to the realness of the imagined for Ursula. To wit, at the very end of our third conversation I say something like, “I can’t imagine who else I could’ve done this with, to look back across a writing life together, not only in one genre, but in all three.” And she said, let’s make it into a book.

And here it is.

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

David Naimon is a writer and host of the radio show and podcast Between The Covers in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Tin House, AGNI, Fourth Genre, Boulevard, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His writing has been reprinted in The Best Small Fictions 2016 and cited in the 2016 Pushcart Prize volume, The Best American Essays 2015, and The Best American Travel Writing 2015. His podcast and writing can be found at: www.davidnaimon.com.

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

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

Grace Byron’s novel Herculine is a brilliantly riveting and visceral debut.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A brilliant addition to the growing genre of trans horror…a piercing portrait of trans community and solidarity. The author brings enough humor to the proceedings to prevent the horror from becoming too all-consuming while keeping the pages flying with a thrilling plot and a moving examination of loneliness, desire, and hope in the wake of trauma. Byron proves an exciting new voice in horror fiction.”

In her own words, here is Grace Byron’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Herculine:

Hardwired, Metallica

My protagonist is a huge metal head, a sort of ex-punk. Her ripped Metallica tee shirt is an important motif, so I had to include one of my later favs. 

God, Tori Amos

Long one of my favorite songs about religion. “Do you need a woman to take care of you?” is one of the most withering lines of theology. I think of it often. 

Gibson Girl, Ethel Cain

I can’t but pay tribute to one of our best Gothic singer-songwriters. Her work was inevitably a big mood while writing Herculine. Sexy, sad, stormy. 

Devil Town, Bright Eyes

Always have admired Oberst’s lyrics, even though this is a cover. His twisty tales of Gnosticism imbued with Shakespearean language and political intrigue are breathtaking. No musician has influenced my prose more than Bright Eyes and its extended universe. 

Demons, Kim Petras

Someone joked this would be the credit song if Herculine was ever made into a movie. Maybe not emotionally the same, but sure, why not? 

Song for Sharon, Joni Mitchell 

Huge reflection point for the novel, a few riffs on Joni in the book. She’s a legend. My favorite musician of all time. Her thoughts on love and marriage are gospel. 

Mouths Cradle, Bjork 

I wanted the chapter of the same name to feel this creepy-crawly, once the demons are out of the bag. 

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams 

A girl’s roadtrip anthem. I do think in some ways, like Nevada, this is a road trip book. I was happy to write a brief chapter set in Pittsburgh which is halfway between NYC and Indiana. 

I Dreamt We Spoke Again, Death Cab for Cutie 

I almost had a chapter written as a letter years later at the end of the book—there’s a way that the protagonist is yearning to talk again to her ex-love—but perhaps it’s better left on a more ambiguous note. 

Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash 

I had to set a chapter in hell, of course, and there’s an echo of country music in my mind at least to a few of the chapters in the book. 

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

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York magazine, The Nation, and Vogue, among other outlets. Find her @EmoTrophyWife. Herculine 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.

Sébastien Dulude’s first novel Asbestos is as moving as it is inventively written.

L’Humanité wrote of the book:

“In the land of asbestos mines, two boys build a paradise bound to be lost. A sensitive, powerful debut novel … that captures the dark side of the Canadian dream.”

In his own words, here is Sébastien Dulude’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Asbestos:

…Asbestos for all!

Creating playlist is among my top favorite activities. It’s basically my love language. What a fun and stimulating thing to build one around my novel Asbestos, where music plays such an enveloping role.

Asbestos, as you may know or hopefully are about to, is a story about friendship, and about going from childhood to teenage under rough conditions: an asbestos mining town, a violent father, and grief. I believe these songs support the novel’s narrative while also taking the listener into a more personal dimension, where music evokes everyone’s individual memories and emotions. I’ve tried to select songs that reflects both the luminous and darker moments of the novel.

So here are 25 songs, because that’s the way my character Steve would’ve wanted it (he has a thing with number 5).

One important rule to remember: never put a playlist on random mode; that goes against the very idea of a playlist. It’s a list for crying out loud! Respect it and enjoy!

1. Les mystérieuses Cités d’or, Jacques Cardona

The Mysterious Cities of Gold was my favorite animated series as a kid. I fondly identified with the main character, Esteban, while my sister used to pretend she was Zia and my little brother wasn’t so pleased about getting to be the goofy Tao. I really liked that the three kids were parentless, and that they got to fly in a giant golden condor.

2. Boys Don’t Cry, The Cure

This one’s a no-brainer here: Asbestos is all about boys needing to cry safely. Plus I think it has a great kicking groove to start the playlist. I wish Robert Smith was my father.

3. Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Tears For Fears

Especially kids.

4. In My Room, The Beach Boys

If you’d asked me when I was 9, Steve’s age, what music I was into, I would’ve answered Mozart and The Beach Boys. Ugh, what a nerd. Well, turns out I discovered at an early age what a perfect melody is – an art that both Amadeus and Brian Wilson mastered. I used to skip the slow-paced In My Room, which is now one of my favorite tracks from the surfer boys. This one is for Steve, quiet in his room, in his fort, in the security of his best friend’s gaze.

5. Les aventures de Tintin, Pierre Pain

Here’s a confession: a lot from Asbestos is autobiographical, but one thing that is pure fiction is Charlélie Poulin’s character, Steve’s BFF. I never had such a close friend besides me. Here’s another confession: my best friend was Tintin. I used to hop off the bus back from school and run home to read another Tintin album. I read them all, in order, one per day. How I wished he was my courageous, tender and bright friend in real life.

6. Où Est Le Soleil?, Paul McCartney

Where is the Sun, where is the Father, where is the light, where is the fire. Everywhere. It seemed like all the bad deeds we did as kids were witnessed by the Sun. I used to have a funny theory about the lyrics of the song (Où est le soleil / Dans la tête / Travaillez; Where is the Sun / In your head / Work): it was about a man feeling the urge to sneeze, looking straight into the sun, finally sneezing, and getting back to work. Yes, what a nerd!

7. Orinoco Flow, Enya

This one is for Claire Robin, Steve’s mother, whom I describe to have dark brown hair: “black Irish, like Enya”, she says herself. Enya is a major guilty pleasure of mine, I can’t help to love Orinoco Flow’s dreamy vibe. No one but Enya can strike the orchestra hit chords this seriously. I used to hear and sing “C’est Noël, c’est Noël, c’est Noël” (“It’s Christmas”) instead of “Sail away, sail away, sail away”.

8. Venus, Bananarama

Venus is the song that plays in the school bus when Cindy Drouin is introduced. I always thought it was a wonderful dancing song (it’s a cover, did you know?) and it fitted just right for the playful and mocking 10-years old Cindy, to draw a contrast with her later teenage gothic years.

9. Hold Me Now, Thompson Twins

Another core 80’s killer hit. I kept hoping for it to play on my dad’s reel tape compilation he made from recording songs on the radio. I wasn’t allowed to mess with the machine, but on Sunday afternoons my father would play it. I wish he held me back then.

10. Bad Boys Running Wild, Scorpions

This is when I started listening to music standing up in my bed, feeling 10-feet tall, air guitaring the riffs, air drumming the beat, air shutting my mouth the lyrics. Fists clenched, shy little Steve was channeling his inner bad boy running wild. You better get out of the way.

11. Damn Good, David Lee Roth

Even for an unhappy, mistreated, unloved child, some days are beautiful. The days of childhood, those shrouded in perfect innocence, are damn good times indeed. We spend our whole lives trying to forget it. This is another song I used to skip in my yellow Walkman, that I now consider one of the finest on the much-underrated Skyscraper album.

12. S.O.S. d’un terrien en détresse, Daniel Balavoine

One of the very first intuitions I had while reflecting on the idea of writing a novel was to create a sexually ambiguous teenager character that would hide his love for the Starmania space opera soundtrack. S.O.S. d’un terrien en détresse is a stellar song from the late Daniel Balavoine, whose high-pitched and tremulous voice was a gift from Above to all bleeding hearts. How Steve wished he was a bird to see the world upside down. (You may wanna check out Dimash Qudaibergen’s version for extra out of worldly chills. It’s the most glam shit you’ll ever hear. You’re warned.)

13. The Great Gig in the Sky, Pink Floyd

“I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying, there’s no reason for it.” And then that voice, Clare Torry’s. For Steve, peace is to be found up there, higher, as far from the ground as possible, far from the giant hole behind the house. This is where the portion of Steve’s childhood on the playlist ends.

14. Good Times Bad Times, Led Zeppelin

This is Steve’s older brother Daniel’s music blasting in his Nissan 300ZX. “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man.” Indeed we were. They made an obsession out of it. And yet they all secretly fantasized about singing or playing guitar shirtless in front of a sweaty male audience. Oh, the irony.

15. Possessed To Skate, Suicidal Tendencies

Suicidal Tendencies were among the bands I hid the cassettes from my parents. But the very name of the band had put words on something that kept nagging at me. Unlike my parents dreaded, I didn’t become obsessed with death because of heavy metal, I was drawn to it because I felt different, unfit, unwanted. I learned to live with my darkness thanks to metal and punk music. I felt like a belonged to a community of misfits, which I still had to discover.

16. 18 and Life, Skid Row

Hair metal was the best. Period. Badass, erotically filled, poignant: everything I wanted to be as a teenager. Skid Row’s singer was named Sebastian Bach. Sebastian fuckin’ Bach. I mean, of course I fell madly in love with him. One day, one night actually, I’ll sing 18 and Life in a karaoke, I’ll hit all the high notes and everyone in the place will cry their lives out. I’ll be Sebastian fuckin’ Bach.

17. Somebody Save Me, Cinderella

Cinderella posters were probably the ones that made my father (I mean Steve’s father, sorry) tilt out.

18. Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Poison

Or maybe was it Poison’s posters? Laugh all you want, “Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song, every rose has its thorn” is plain poetry. Get dressed, Robert Plant.

19. Blaze of Glory, Jon Bon Jovi

A deep cut. I could’ve put Wanted Dead or Alive (“on a steel horse I ride”) but I like the fire analogy of this one. And boy, that snare hit at 1:04. Pow, dead.

20. Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana

Is there even anything to add here? There was a before and an after Smells Like Teen Spirit. When I watched that music video for the first time, it was exactly like I wrote it in the novel. Just swap Cindy for my brother! I was 14, and nothing would ever be the same.

21. Tornado of Souls, Megadeth

Megadeth was arguably thrash metal’s angriest band. For legal reasons, we couldn’t print out the lyrics of the song in the book, so there it goes: “You’ll grow to loathe my name / You’ll hate me just the same / You won’t need your breath / And soon you’ll meet your death”. Pretty cool huh? Also, insane guitar solo.

22. Deep Down Trauma Hounds, Skinny Puppy

Here comes the real Cindy, the toughest character of the novel. What a pleasure it was to create her. All I had to do was to imagine everything I’m not: cool, bold, strong, pessimistic as hell.

23. Blood Red Skies, Judas Priest

If you read all the way down to here, congrats, you’re a die-hard music lover. This isn’t an obvious one, but if I imagine a song playing during the last few pages of the novel, it’s Blood Red Skies. I get goosebumps when Rob Halford sings: “As the end is drawing near / Standing proud, I won’t give into fear / As I die a legend will be born / I will stand, I will fight / You’ll never take me alive”. Another karaoke fantasy.

24. I Want to Know What Love Is, Foreigner

In the end, that’s all Steve ever wanted. I’m crying just to write it down. I love you, Steve.

25. Smells Like Teen Spirit, Maude Audet

A lullaby to soothe the angst. Merci la musique, merci la vie.

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

Born in Montréal in 1976, Sébastien Dulude grew up in the Mitchell neighbourhood of Thetford Mines from the age of six to sixteen. A writer and publisher, he is the author of three poetry collections and an essay about typography and poetry. Asbestos is his first novel.

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

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

Clifford Thompson’s novel Let Us Go Then, You and I is a remarkable fiction debut.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“A midlife-crisis novel that searches for the meaning of life with sympathy and compassion.”

In his own words, here is Clifford Thompson’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Let Us Go Then, You and I:

The novel begins in 2002 with Theo Brown, who has lived in his grandfather’s house in Washington, DC, for all of his 37 years, lamenting the recent death of Charles Maddox, his best friend since fourth grade and a successful journalist in New York City. Charles died of a drug overdose, but there are questions about why. The song here is “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” performed by G.C. Cameron for the 1975 film Cooley High; Theo and Charles would likely have seen this film, which was a hit in black communities like theirs. In the film, the song plays during one character’s burial, watched from afar by the character’s grieving and guilt-ridden best friend. “It’s So Hard” captures Theo’s heartbreak.

And yet heartbreak is not all Theo feels. At Charles’s funeral, listening to the reminiscences by friends of Charles’s whom he has never met or even heard of, Theo begins to wonder if he knew his best friend as well as he thought—or if Theo really had much of a place in Charles’s life. A version of Solitude, recorded by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at their historic 1961 summit, evokes much of Theo’s emotion: Armstrong’s gravelly, mournful vocals and heart-piercing, introspective trumpet lines suggest Theo’s mood, full of feeling yet alone.

Soon the novel looks back at when Theo and Charles met as boys. Washington, DC, was the scene of a musical subgenre of funk called Go-Go. A leading light in Go-Go was the DC-based group Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, whose song I Feel Like Bustin Loose was all over the city airwaves during Theo and Charles’s growing-up years in the 1970s—and also captured Charles’s feeling of wanting to spread his wings and do all in life that he is capable of.

While the more retiring Theo stays in DC, Charles moves to New York after college. Peter Gabriel’s Big Time is the perfect soundtrack for this time in Charles’s life, as he confidently—though not always as confidently as he seems—takes on the big city.

Theo, meanwhile, continues to live with the grandfather who raised him beginning when Theo was abandoned by his mother as an infant—a rejection that left a hidden but permanent hole in his confidence. Remaining with Granddad as a young adult, partly out of inertia, partly from lack of confidence, Theo eventually feels unable to leave home—even when he is finally ready to—because of the old man’s growing dependence on him. Cat Stevens’s song Father and Son reflects the mix of love and frustration in the relationship between Theo and his grandfather.

When Theo’s grandfather dies, not long after Charles’s death, Theo is at a crossroads. Suddenly untethered, wondering about the reasons behind his best friend’s death, wanting to help Charles’s grieving sister, Melanie, find some answers, and grieving himself, Theo makes a—for him—radical choice: he moves for a time to New York, to meet those in Charles’s circle and try to figure out what happened. In other words, Theo becomes a detective, just like Johnson Jones, the hero of the crime novels he loves. The Ventures’ recording of Hawaii Five-O—the theme of the detective TV show of the same name, which aired during Theo’s boyhood—captures the excitement and drama of Theo’s adventure.

Theo first met Charles’s sister when he and Charles were young boys. A beautiful girl who ran with the “in” crowd, two years older than Charles, Melanie seemed to Theo to be his romantic ideal—and to be so far beyond his reach that he never considered actually pursuing her. But when Theo and Melanie are grown and reestablish contact after Charles’s death, Theo begins to sense that he has a chance with her. He wants her, and he thinks that she wants him. But, realizing that he has not lived much of a life until now, he feels reluctant to enter a committed relationship before he has lived a bit on his own. Will the potential love between them wait until after Theo’s adventure in New York? Lionel Richie’s Hello expresses both the desire Theo feels for Melanie and the distance between them. (Is it me you’re looking for?)

In New York Theo begins to put the pieces together and meets the beautiful Holly—the woman at the center of Charles’s life and the person who seems to hold the key to understanding his death. The more Theo comes to know Holly, the more he begins to understand what happened to his friend. Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible gives a feel for Holly’s power over Charles and other men—including Theo?

As Theo learns more about Charles’s love life, and looks back on his own, we hear OutKast’s Hey Ya!—a seemingly upbeat song that embodies both the excitement of romantic relationships and the melancholy when they don’t work out.

Indeed, because the novel is part detective story and part doomed romance, George Benson’s This Masquerade—whose bluesy melancholy is the perfect accompaniment to a noir tale—is the right soundtrack for Theo’s investigation. Meanwhile . . .

. . . threaded through Theo’s story is the story of his mother, Robin. Her abandonment of Theo is part of the pattern of her life. Robin lives by her own lights. She will not be held still when she wants to move, and she always wants to move, never quite sure of what she’s looking for, knowing only when she hasn’t found it. Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon nails Robin’s free spirit and perpetual dissatisfaction.

At the end of the story, Theo has discovered some truths, which do not come without a cost. He has arrived at a sense of a new beginning, one that helps him accept, but does not let him forget, old wounds. The saxman Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s achingly beautiful 1957 instrumental version of Spring Is Here, by Richard Rodgers and Lorez Hart, is the ideal coda for this story of friendship, love, and the joy and pain of both.

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

Clifford Thompson’s previous books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’ s Blues and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. His work has appeared in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. Thompson lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Nick Francis’s graphic novel The Tumor in the Clay is a stunning debut.

Shinichi Sakamoto wrote of the book:

“The Tumor in the Clay is an astonishingly immersive experience. My heartbeat quickened, my palms grew damp, and I could not stop turning the pages. I forgot every distraction of the real world and found myself completely drawn into the story.”

In his own words, here is Nick Francis’s Book Notes music playlist for his graphic novel The Tumor in the Clay:

A selection of songs from the writing and drawing process behind this comic. 

Contributions by Nick Francis and Yoh Philips.

The Tumor in The Clay was drawn over several years of Covid Isolation, spent sketching panel after panel of surgical utensils, flowers blowing in the wind, buzzing cicada wings, with the pages of the book illuminating the late nights with a cool blue light, all while line after line was soundtracked to endless endless music. This playlist, made in collaboration with Yoh Phillips, captures many of the pockets I found myself in for long periods of time, and hopefully speaks to the mental and emotional state I was in while writing The Tumor in The Clay. I hope you enjoy it.

Mémoire De Forme – Pierre Rousseau

After several months of lockdown, my friend Yoh and I itched for something new to experience – something to share and discuss, from locked in our own doorways three thousand miles away. We gave ourselves challenges to listen to music in very specific parameters for set periods of time. Only Non English Music for 90 Days, Only Music Recorded before 1960 for 60 Days, No Relistening to Music for 30 Days, that sort of thing. The Non English Music challenge was the most fun, we both had grown up with a bit of music influence from across the world, but fairly limited in scope and often without focus. I found myself listening to a lot of French music in particular, electronic and pop records. Synths. Pierre Rousseau felt like a great opener to set the tone of this playlist, capturing the strange etherealness I hope my pen achieved with The Tumor in The Clay.

Walk Thru Water Ft St. Panther – Overmono

Overmono is a quintessential Yoh pick, and very indicative of the sonic landscape that covered the ground when the very first inklings of The Tumor in The Clay began.  And what a dog. 

Break – Fugazi

Everything Built. Everything Gone. So much of The Tumor in The Clay is built on the grief of loss – and what the fuck do you do when you have lost the tools to repair, when you have lost the ability to imagine(!) how to repair, a new life. There are endless Fugazi records to throw on my playlists to speak to my emotional state when writing or drawing, Break cuts to the point pretty damn fast. Their combination of drums and fast chords clicks something beautiful in the back of my skull, the place hollowed out by years of chronic pain that is now just for good migraine music. 

Touch – Daft Punk and Paul Williams

“I need something more, in my mind…” …”I remember touch”… There is a scene of Paul Williams sitting at a counter in a vintage diner, eating I believe soup, or clam chowder, with oyster crackers. Eating very slowly, occasionally glancing around the diner, waiting for someone. I had that scene looped in my QuickTime media player with this song replacing the original audio. I would just leave it on and draw on very dark nights, the rest of the screen illuminating my studio in a deep blue color. I love this song. 

Out of Time – The Weeknd

This song is so shameless. It shouldn’t work at all. And yet it is one of the most infectious, perfect, pop records of the last decade. The whole dawn.fm album is very special to me. What a glorious music video. There were a few months where this album and the FKA Twigz, Caprisongs, felt like twins to me and were all I would listen to. Lots and lots of time drawing in the dark, with the sensation that the morning was just around the corner. 

Prepare Yourself – Yoshimasa Terui

Terui’s score here is just brilliant, light and charming with a light touch to the changing of currents – mental, physical. Something is coming, just lingering around the corner, just out of sight. Paneling The Tumor in The Clay was a practice in tension, building, cutting, tiny cut-cut-cut, relief, large gashing slices of skin and muscle, flowers. I adore how Terui handled the tension in the Hidden Inventory arc. It felt like a bomb dropped on the comic & animation world watching his, Gege & Mappa’s work come to life. What an astounding moment in time those few months were. I felt more inspired to be making comics than I had in a very long time. 

Urantia – Deftones

There have been days I’ve looped Urantia, this whole album on repeat. Go for a run. Draw. Weight Lift. Lay out a blanket and crawl into a cold bathtub for the day. All the same.  – On a complete tangent, as much as I like the Ohms album cover, in particular on vinyl, I wish this song had been on Gore – just so I can hear this song and look at those beautiful flamingos, that would be perfect. Gore has my favorite cover of all their work. 

Piggy – Nine Inch Nails

Every page of The Tumor in The Clay’s surgical sections is pure The Downward Spiral. Song after song, panel after panel. Just perfect. 

Gimme Danger – Iggy & The Stooges

Migraine Lyrics – though the beauty of these songs, these old blues songs remade in every genre and form imaginable, is how mutable they are. My migraine, my Crohn’s, your alcoholism, your loneliness, your cancer, your old emotional wound, your whatever it is that makes you the last man or woman with a guitar, a bottle and a gun on the road. Music of the self myth maker, the navel gazer, the oh woe is me, and hopefully – hopefully, the same one who is all those things and still gets up at the end of the day and makes something of it. Or else the song doesn’t exist, then we’re all fucked.

Shhh / Peaceful – Miles Davis

I don’t entirely know how “Shhh / Peaceful” became the singular song to describe The Tumor in The Clay We have memes about the song and the book together for god’s sake! When working on the book the jazz records I listened to the most were Coltrane tunes, My Favorite Things in particular, so I assumed that would become the singular record for The Tumor in The Clay, but no! Shhh / Peaceful reached out with its long slender fingers of green and blue and black and held tight. An incredibly dark and whimsical song. When I was animating the cicadas flying through the tall blue grass, the flower petals blowing in the wind through old columns, it just fit perfectly. 

I didn’t spend much time during the writing/drawing process listening to jazz on my runs, but this last weekend I took a nice long run along the Bronx River Pathway playing Shhh / Peaceful and other Miles tunes and it was a gorgeous time. 

The Tinker – Maruja

I think Yoh introduced me to Maruja during one of our Pandemic Music challenges. I have an affinity for songs, scores that rest in a natural space. As if you could walk off your mountaintop bivouac across the notes playing in the sky, walk through the trees, the flora, the snow, the creeks and swamps and rivers. Maruj, FM Forest, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bear McCreary, Imee Ooi. Whimsical and glorious. These scores all touch the same place I reached for in the later arc of The Tumor in The Clay. An unknown mysterious, dangerous, beautiful place. Somewhere we may desire to make home, but shouldn’t linger in too long, a place to be visited, learned from, and left. Two people, one person, reaching across the poles from place to place.

Michi wo Sagase – Hako Yamazaki

  Oh Hako Yamazaki. I reconnected with her glorious, haunting voice with the release of the 1975 classic Tobimasu in 2022. I must have spent weeks with just Tobimasu on repeat, and slowly began working my way back until stumbling upon Aruite, and Michi Wo Sagase. To Find a New Path. Ugh. A perfect folk song. To sit and draw, to write, to pull every chord, string, vein from your body onto the page, leave it out for a day’s work, paused to start again tomorrow. Sit down with a song, a drink…. To know for just a second before the doubt returns, that your efforts, your labors have been pure. 

Don’t Be So Nice – Chuck Senrick

A touchstone for our Surgeon, our protagonist in The Tumor in The Clay. He is so lost, so desperate, so without cause or reason. But he remembers how beautiful life can be, he remembers the touch of a loved one, of achieving something miraculous with the people around you, your friends, your colleagues, your team. He remembers achieving something greater than your former self. And he mourns it, so earnestly. Now at his wits end, our story of The Tumor in The Clay, he sees one last chance to set a path back – and if he fails, so be it, the current life isn’t worth a damn. He has to try…

Not Okay – Sophie

In the back of The Tumor in The Clay there is an interview with my editor where I discuss how much The Tumor in The Clay was driven by grief, the loss of friends, family, and by others in the creative fields around me. SOPHIE was one of those people. I think every artist in my demographic group with even the slightest interest in music was keenly connected to what SOPHIE was creating in the 2010’s. She created an entire underwater current that shifted so much of what we heard, danced to, and imagined that we are still feeling the repercussions of her work – and her loss today.

 I don’t intend to spend a lifetime documenting every gravestone we put down, an illustrated essay for each funeral that only gets fifteen minutes because too many people are dying and the world moves too quickly, but we might need to make it an honorable profession. 

Hot Pressed – Mahawam

I had the privilege of illustrating the cover of Mahawam’s album: Hot Pressed, and animating the music video for this song. When you animate a music video, you inevitably have to spend months and months listening to the song, thousands of times.  I have had my share where I get sick of the song. I fell in love with Hot Pressed more with each listen, and still do now. My favorite kind of lyrics. 

(You Can Watch The Video Here: https://youtu.be/bHsdoDqxpUU?si=5GVUu7Hp6o1eGjbs)

Portrait of My Heart – Spellling

I’m crazy about Spellling. Simple as that, my friend Michael Sneed made the introduction and I have been a huge fan since. I like this new record a lot and am very excited to see what direction they continue to push. I was listening to their album, The Turning Wheel, during the drawing process. Very ethereal, strange, catchy tunes. 

Unfinished Sympathy – Massive Attack

God what a voice Shara Nelson has. I would put this record and all its mixes on while I drew blade after blade of grass in The Tumor in The Clay. When inking drawings you often find yourself needing to breathe a certain way, in or out, to achieve the correct one from. The weight, curve, feeling can all come out wrong so easily, a song like Unfinished Sympathy is incredibly helpful for moments where you don’t just have one line or one part of a drawing that is difficult to get right – but pages and pages. Unfinished Sympathy becomes meditative, perfect for placing each grain of colored sand in its proper place in the mandala. 

Timid, Intimidating – BADBADNOTGOOD

I like a lot of the BADBADNOTGOOD records, they often exist on that border of easy listening, but not just background music. “Study, Working” music might sound dismissive, it might be dismissive. If it is – I am sorry, but I also have to imagine it must feel pretty nice to know that your music helps thousands and thousands of young scholars, artisans, on their path. I like to imagine a lawyer going through their briefs playing these records late at night, in some higher office. Pretty sexy in its own way.

Movement 3 – Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders

Pharoah Sanders has been a regular repeat on my jazz playlists for fifteen plus years at this point. Not enough time. I just love the simple strangeness of what he made in his final years with Floating Points and the London Symphony. Just remarkable. Lovely music. 

Hold on, Hold on – Neko Case

Hold on, Hold on feels like a full circle of The Tumor in The Clay to me, embracing her (his) vices, faults, with an aged wisdom that keeps the faith to continue to try. The humor in the dark that has been lived, knowing one will continue to make mistakes – but hopefully better ones. The song is tonally dark, the chords upbeat, a contemporary blues record. I think most good art is still revisiting the same blues chords over and over, because they are so pure, so honest, so true. We each can add our own flavor of Valium.

Riot! – Earl Sweatshirt

Some Rap Songs is a faultline running below the current Himalayas of contemporary rappers. To me, it all comes back to what Thebe was able to create with this incredible moment in time. It is so heartfelt. Yoh and Myself were privileged to work on marketing copy for the release of the album, and while I can still remember working on it up in the studio house at Sea Ranch it stays beyond my comprehension just how impactful this brilliant little album has been. What a great song, what great production. What an incredible world. 

Fuck This World – Rina Sawayama

Writing is a horribly depressing process, drawing is a horribly depressing process. If you don’t draw, write, fast enough then before you know it the pages you’re working on are at such a higher quality than the first that you are obligated to go back and begin again. If you cannot let go, the book will never end. This song, and Rina, always made those days where you have to let go a bit easier. Panels and panels of drawings that you desperately want to change, parts of your life you would give anything to rewrite, but have to move on. 

(I must have over a few hundred miles on my feet running to this song on loop just during the production of The Tumor in The Clay)

Delia – Blind Willie McTell

For all the talk of Classic Blues Records, how all our best work is still just retelling them over and over it felt important to include one of my personal favorite piedmont blues classics – Delia. The world keeps spinning on the same chords, same progressions, same yearnings, same love, same pain. How beautiful it is that we continue to find new ways to express it. 

My Favorite Things – John Coltrane

I have listened to this song more than any other song, throughout my entire life. It plays in the opening pages of The Tumor in The Clay, and in the last. I hope the same is true for myself. 

Dreams – Faye Wong

Recorded the year I was born. The principle message of The Tumor in The Clay is to continue to TRY, regardless of the circumstances, an effort must be made, belief must be had, a dream must be acted upon. In the final pages of the book, we see the Surgeon act on this in his own way, changed, and I can’t help but imagine such a purely earnest song playing out his actions. I need to return to Hong Kong with an extra suitcase just for all her CD’s. 

Thank you for listening, thank you for reading!

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

Nick Francis was born in San Francisco in 1994 and now lives in Oakland, California, with his partner & their three cats: Kiki, Noodle & Blue. Working as a disabled illustrator and storyteller for: Fantastic Negrito’s Grammy Award Winning Album “The Last Days of Oakland”, and PBS & ITVS’ animated documentary “BROTHER”, and for The NYU College of Nursing & The Monterey Jazz Festival.

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

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

Chital Mehta’s debut novel Have You Seen Romit? is a searing portrait of family and identity.

R. O. Kwon wrote of the book:

“A gripping, intensely moving portrayal of a woman whose ferocious love for her children ends up clashing with how others expect her to behave. I loved spending time with the rule-breaking Usha and with the complicated world Chital Mehta has conjured. Vivid, fresh, and resonant.”

In her own words, here is Chital Mehta’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Have You Seen Romit?:

My novel, Have You Seen Romit? takes place in Southern India, where a middle-aged mother, Usha, goes looking for her missing son in the forests. Usha has never broken the rules, but for once, she must step outside the realms of what she thought was comfortable and safe. It is a story of defiance and relentlessness, delving deep into the true nature of connection and kinship under the most daunting of circumstances.

I put together this playlist, songs that helped me take a deep dive into the head of my protagonist, Usha, and allowed me to step inside her world. Most tracks, especially the ones from Kishore Kumar, are part of my childhood, songs that my father played in our house, urging us to connect with the songs of his era. Back then, I was averse to this music. As I drafted Have You Seen Romit? I pictured Usha in her house with the faded walls; I picked these songs to put me directly into her settings, a slow domestic life that is disturbed by an upending problem. 

This soundtrack is like my brain – soft, loud, quiet, and cheerful. Pour yourself a cup of chai as you take a listen.

Kisi baat par main kisise khafa hoon from the movie Bemisal – Kishore Kumar

A timeless musical by singer Kishore Kumar. This song is filled with lyrics that speak about pain and love. I listened to it as it helped me flesh out the relationship between Usha and her husband, the quietness in their marriage, and the unsaid things. They enjoy listening to Hindi classics while they navigate life.  

Kala Chasma from the movie Baar Baar Dekho – Badshah and Prem Hardeep

An upbeat, energetic number. It’s hard not to shake a leg when this one comes on. The wedding party in Have You Seen Romit? features this song. I found it tacky with its catchy lyrics. It’s beautiful how this song can bring any dance party to life.  

Dekha Ek Khwab from the movie Silsila – Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar

This song doesn’t appear in the book. But I do mention the name of the movie, in which the characters Om and Usha enjoy watching it. This comes from having seen my father talk about this classic song while I was growing up. It’s an evergreen song. I played this song as I wrote the first chapter of Have You Seen Romit?

Mehendi Hai Rachnewali from the movie Zubeidaa – Alka Yagnik

Rich, colorful, vibrant. The henna ceremony of any Indian wedding is not just an event, but also about the unspoken future that comes after the wedding. In Have You Seen Romit?, Pari misses her brother but can’t help longing for a future that belongs to her. This song from Alka Yagnik is soft and soulful.

Musafir Hoon Yaaron from the movie Parichay – Kishore Kumar

Although I don’t travel so much, I walk a lot. This song talks about travelling, about how no one place is home, and about adapting to the changing landscapes of life. When I uprooted my character, Usha, from her home and put her in a place that was foreign to her, this song came to my rescue.

Phoolon Ka Taron Ka from the movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna – Kishore Kumar

Raksha Bandhan. The sibling ceremony. In my novel, I highlight the relationship between the siblings. It’s rocky, yet they come together every year to celebrate their bond. There are rakhis, the gift exchange, the tikka, the rice, and the sweets. The brothers are always there for their sister regardless of the rift between them.

Ekla Cholo re from the movie Kahaani – Amitabh Bachchan

A patriotic song originally written by Rabindranath Tagore was adapted in the mystery movie, Kahaani. In this song, Vidya Balan embarks on a journey to find the answers to the death of her husband. She is mostly alone. The lyrics are Bengali, but the emotions are raw. I pictured Usha walking alone to find her missing son in the thick forests with this song in the background. 

Kal Ho Na Ho from the movie Kal Ho Na Ho- by Sonu Nigam

This song defined my teenage years. Yet, the lyrics still help me navigate through life as an adult. As I wrote the draft, I was often tired, wanting to give up. Kal Ho Na Ho, which means you don’t know if there will be a tomorrow. This is the moment. Hearing this soothing number always brings peace to my chaotic head.

Happier by Marshmello and Bastille

As I wrote the pages when Usha decided to start looking for her son, Happier played in the back of my head. It’s hard to let go, but sometimes, so important. It evoked the mood as I slipped into Usha’s skin and made the decision to leave her home behind.

English Vinglish from the movie English Vinglish – Shilpa Rao

Sridevi outshines in this number. Her flaws, her fears, her imperfections – everything becomes crystal clear. I bring out similar characteristics in Usha as she embarks on unlearning and learning new things when she picks a deviation from her daily life.

See You Again – Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth

Pain can be a good fuel for writing. This song helped me pause on days when I struggled with the writing. Or, even on days when life seemed to move faster and I couldn’t keep up. The lyrics talk about meeting a friend on the other side of death, but it’s also a good reminder to slow down and connect with the ones who mean the most.

Muskaanein Jhooti Hai from the movie Talaash– Suman Sridhar

Uncertainity. Betrayal. Secrets. From the thriller, Talaash, this song accompanied me during times of not-knowing which was most days. Singer Suman’s voice played in the back of my head on nights when the words refused to come. This haunting, jazz infused track is a must listen to crush those evil voices inside your head.

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

Chital Mehta was born and raised in India. Her short stories have appeared in the Pinch, Oyez Review, SLAB magazine, and elsewhere. Her story “Damaged Gifts” won the SLAB fiction contest in 2022. She lives in Delaware with her husband and children. Visit her website at chitalmehtajey.com.

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