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

Hugh Ryan’s My Bad melds personal experience with history to form a book as inspiring as it is informative about queer life in the modern era.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Bracing…A clear-eyed reckoning with a decade that promised freedom and delivered transformation, unevenly and at a price.”

In his own words, here is Hugh Ryan’s Book Notes music playlist for his book My Bad:

I got my first Walkman in the fall of 1992, right as I started my freshman year of high school. It was safety yellow and indestructible, and though at the time it seemed like magic, I now realize it added a backing track of hiss and grain and warp to every song it played. It was my most precious possession: a portable bubble between me and the world.

I only had a handful of cassettes, the most important of which was a mixtape my older brother left behind when he went off to college, which introduced me to Arrested Development, the Indigo Girls, Pink Floyd, and (unfortunately, obsessively, for a short while) Rush. The internet barely existed, and the closest thing to streaming music was the scream the modem made when you went online (in retrospect, that should have been a warning). If you wanted to find new music, you had three options: spinning the FM dial and hoping to find a cool new station (this was before the Telecom Act of 1996 killed local radio), standing in the listening booths at Tower Records, or getting a mixtape from a friend.

Receiving a mixtape was the highest honor; making one, the greatest responsibility. When I started writing my new memoir in essays, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond, I imagined it as a mix from me to my readers – in fact, one of my early working titles was “Mixtape.”

As a historian, I use music to get at memories we can’t access in other ways. I’ll ask the person I’m interviewing what music was playing in the moment they’re describing, or I’ll put on an artist they loved and ask who they were when that song meant everything to them. I did the same with myself while writing My Bad, so the book is studded with music – mostly the ambient hits that were inescapable at the time. If you were alive in 1995, The Bayside Boys remix of The Macarena is now physically encoded in your DNA, and you may be liable for compensation from Los del Río.

Listen: I would never have put The Macarena on a mix. That would have been a violation of the sacred bond between mix-maker and mix-listener. The mixtape revealed your soul; put on a top pop hit and you branded yourself a sellout, the worst thing you could be in the Nineties (well, aside from a fag, but that ship had already sailed for me).

I couldn’t have known at the time that the mixtape, like so many other things, was about to disappear. In 2001, Apple released the first iPod; in 2002, I won a cheap knockoff MP3 player by being the 100^th caller on the Z100 Morning Show, and I never made a mixtape again. And let’s be real: streaming is nice, but clicking “add to playlist” in no way compares with the adrenaline rush of slamming the “record” button when you heard the first notes of a new favorite song, catching the last words the DJ said over the intro, permanently transforming the phrase “and this is for Diana in Lackawana!” into a private joke with your friends.

RIP: The Mixtape, 1992-2002. I miss you; or I miss the you I was when you were around. It was a micro-generation, part Gen-X, part Millennial. I guess they call us Xennials now. As with everything else, we grew up with one way of doing things, and right as we hit adulthood, the internet “disrupted” (or perhaps “ruined”) that way of life. The loss of mixtapes is just one among a million tiny cuts that have permanently separated us from the way we lived in the 20^th century. That’s the heart of My Bad: a reckoning with how life changed in and around the millennium. The 1990s were a hinge decade, which started analog and ended digital. We lost and gained so much, I had to write a book about it.

So: this is my requiem for the mix, a personal, 11 track playlist, one song for each of my former musical selves, my mixtape years – the same years that make up the majority of My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond.

1992: Closer to Fine, The Indigo Girls

Thanks to my brother’s mixtape, The Indigo Girls were my first musical obsession – so much so that I became a minor hub on the Indigo Girls bootleg trading circuit, a loose network of lesbians, not-yet-lesbians, and guys-who-wished-they-were-lesbians, which I found via early internet Bulletin Board Systems. Their 1990 album “Nomads, Indians, and Saints” had a tiny pink triangle on a teal background; it was the first time I encountered the secret language of queer people that guided me through the rest of the decade. But the soaring, soul-searching “Closer to Fine” was the song that capped off every party, every road trip, and for a while, every mixtape I made.

1993: Crucify, Tori Amos

Trish was a year younger than me, a clove-smoking proto-goth who was as unpopular with her classmates as I was with mine. We bonded in biology lab, where we were partnered to dissect frogs and sheep uteruses under the watchful eye of our creepy bio teacher, who harangued us about how lesbians would one day take over the world because they did not need men. Budding misandrists that we were, this sounded like a pretty sweet deal. Trish introduced me to Tori Amos on the first mix she made me. We’d get home from school, put on Little Earthquakes (Tori Amos’s masterpiece of synth and fury), and immediately call each other so we could listen to it at the same time.

1994: Send Me On My Way, Rusted Root

I was a weird gendered kid in a cloistered suburb; I wasn’t clear on what it meant to be gay or trans or queer. But I was obsessed with long-haired, androgynous men. There were 42 of them in the band Rusted Root, give or take, and I wanted them to play me like a pan flute. This was my first experience of musicians as style icons, so I grew my hair out, got a bracelet with Kokopele woven on it, and cut all my jeans into bell bottoms – neo-hippie flair as a way of queering gender. Still to this day, Rusted Root is the band I have seen in concert the most, and “Send Me on My Way” sets me spinning, arms out wide, like the stoners at the back of every jam band concert.

1995: Be My Lover, La Bouche

WKTU – Keep it Turned Up! – was our local dance station, and my limbic system was permanently tuned to it in 1995. I channeled all the energy and emotions of puberty into midnight solo dance parties to Eurotrash techno. No one – no one – appreciated it when I put them in the middle of a mix tape (where the highest energy songs should go, I felt). The late 90s and early 2000s were the best years for queer clubbing: far enough post-Stonewall that there was less danger in going out, but not yet so acceptable that the bars and clubs were flooded with straight people. Although underappreciated on a mix tape, everyone loved La Bouche on the dance floor.

1996: Untouchable Face, Ani Difranco

Jennifer was the coolest girl in town. She sat at the back of the bus in elementary school and told dirty jokes with the boys; in high school, she was the first person to rock vintage t-shirts and ironically enjoy disco. Our school had a tradition called senior sleep out, where the entire senior class partied in the woods all night and rolled into class the next day looking absolutely gross. I didn’t drink and Jennifer could outdrink anyone, so at 5am, we found ourselves the only (sort-of) sober stragglers tending the bonfire, and we bonded over knowing every word to We Didn’t Start the Fire. The next day, she introduced me to the cool CD store, the one on Central Avenue that you needed a car to get to, which sold rarities, foreign imports, and bootlegs. We both bought copies of Dilate, the new album by Ani DiFranco, and “Untouchable Face” became the song I put on the mixtape for every person I secretly had a crush on (which was pretty much everyone I ever made a mixtape for). Tori’s slow, angry longing – her desire and her anger over that desire – felt far too relatable.

1997: Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday

I assume I heard jazz before I got to college – as hold music, or perhaps when my parents listened to NPR. But the genre didn’t really penetrate my tastes until the second semester of my freshman year, when an older dyke took me under her wing and made me a wacked out mixtape of cult music I should already know, everything from Patti Smith to Skinny Puppy to Billie Holiday. “Strange Fruit” was a gateway drug to Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Django Rheinhardt, Duke Ellington, and the entire world of jazz standards. I don’t think I ever felt this cool again (don’t worry though, I was not actually cool: my other musical obsession in this moment were 3^rd wave pop ska bands like Dance Hall Crashers and Reel Big Fish). Now the algorithm suggests new music for me, and though it’s often right, it’s much less exciting.

1998: Street Spirit (Fade Out), Radiohead

In the summer of 1998, I backpacked around Europe with two younger, wealthier friends, because I had somehow convinced their parents that I was an appropriate chaperone for a pair of sixteen-year-old identical twins. Nothing went right and it was perfect. At some point, I lost my 10 CD holder, and was forced to listen to their music, which was a lot of classic rock (they were both guitarists) and Radiohead. Previously, I thought Radiohead was for pretentious try-hards. But listening to Thom Yorke’s plaintive wailing as our train tracked the Danube River from Vienna to Budapest, I realized I was a pretentious try-hard, and Radiohead was amazing.  

1999: Glory Box, Portishead

I met my first serious boyfriend in 1999, and although this is inexplicable to me now, “Glory Box” by Portishead was my fuck music – along with a wealth of other (mostly British) trip-hop bands like Massive Attack, Tricky, DJ Shadow, and Morcheeba. If this appeared on a mixtape I made, I was trying to get some. If you read My Bad, put on the Portishead album “Dummy” when you get to the essay “Never Let School Get in the Way of Your Education.”

2000: Shirley, L7

Around the end of college, I went from fetishizing androgynous hippies to fetishizing androgynous punks. “Homocore” was a genre I discovered via Riot Grrrl zines and Take Back the Night rallies. Furiously feminist, we slammed our bodies together to L7, Tribe 8, Skunk Anansie, and Pansy Division. Within a year, my long hair was replaced by bleached spikes, and my dangly hippie necklaces with a spiked velvet dog collar.

2001: Get Ur Freak On, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott

“Hot Boyz” and “The Rain” were already on my radar, but Missy Elliott’s third album, Miss E…So Addictive was, as its title claimed, absolutely addictive. No skips. Many a bad party was saved by simply letting it play through on repeat. It became a litmus test for the bars: how did the DJ react when we requested Missy? The music throbbed with energy and sex and everything you wanted from a night out. If the DJ refused to play “Get UR Freak On,” they were probably racist.

2002: Book of Love, The Magnetic Fields

After September 11^th, my musical tastes took a turn for the mopey. I don’t know if those two things are related, but when I look back, the turn is unmistakable. The Magnetic Fields triple album, 69 Love Songs, was my first dive into the world of acoustic, sad, twee, monotonemumbleboy singers who would rule my world for the next few years. Still to this day, if I want to have a good cry first thing in the morning, I pop on The Magnetic Fields or Elliott Smith.

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

Hugh Ryan is the award-winning author of When Brooklyn Was Queer (2019) and The Women’s House of Detention (2022). He teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars and runs the Queer History 101 Book Club with world-famous performer Peppermint. He 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.

Amy Crider’s Catching an Orange is an epistolary memoir, a book exceptional in both its form and exploration of how mental illness can shape our lives and creativity.

Amanda Eyre Ward wrote of the book:

“Once you begin reading Crider’s utterly transfixing, vulnerable, and honest memoir, you won’t be able to stop. Crider’s stylish sentences investigate the space where brilliance and mental illness collide. Her story is heartbreaking and important.”

In her own words, here is Amy Crider’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Catching an Orange:

In January of 1993, I was hospitalized in a psych ward because a manic episode had worsened into a psychotic break. There, I met the psychiatrist who was head of the ward, Dr. L. When we met and I said hello, I gave him a big smile, which was meant to say, “I know I’ve been crazy. I’m embarrassed.” He gave me a small, shy smile, and said, “Hi.” I thought he had a cute smile. I only stayed in the ward for three days. The circumstances are all in my memoir, Catching an Orange. When I left, a nurse invited me to write to them at the ward. I started writing to him obsessively, and gradually felt I was in love with him. In true ’90s fashion, at one point, I sent him a mix tape.

I have never been someone who could follow music, to know who did what songs, not for lack of interest, but lack of resources, before the Internet made research easy. But as that long-ago time comes back to me, here is my playlist.

Be My Yoko Ono, by Barenaked Ladies

This was the first song on the mix tape. I recited a letter to him, and then said, here are some songs I thought you might like, and it cut immediately to this. I didn’t even know mix tapes were an actual thing at the time. I sent this before I had decided I was in love, despite how obviously romantic this choice was.

If I Had a Million Dollars, by Barenaked Ladies

This was the second song on the mix tape. I don’t remember what, if any, other songs were on the tape.

You Were Meant for Me, by Jewel

Foolish Games, by Jewel

After years of not owning a radio, I acquired one, and these two songs were being played a lot when I bought it. I wrote to Dr. L. saying I was listening to Jewel, and how plaintive the music was.

Music for Flute & Guitar, Jean-Pierre Rampal and René Bartoli

I owned this cassette in college and listened to it repeatedly. When Jean-Pierre Rampal died, I wrote to Dr, L. about it and told him how much I loved the album. I assumed as an erudite kind of man, he would know who Jean-Pierre Rampal was.

Tainted Love, by Soft Cell

Where Did Our Love Go, by Soft Cell

My memoir ends on my marrying my best friend from college, Sam, when we were reunited twenty years after we first met. In the winter of 1982, we took a bus from Goddard College in Vermont to MacGill University in Montreal to visit a high school friend of mine. There was a party one night that weekend, and though Sam and I are nerdy people who don’t dance, we danced together to this mash-up by Soft Cell, and I remember it vividly. I loved the beat as one song morphed into the other. I consider my knowledge of popular music to have mainly ended in the ’80s, and I definitely have a soft spot for that era of music. I graduated in December of 1982, and have sometimes wished I was in college for more of the ’80s in order to have heard more of the music of that time.

Wee Croodin Do, Scottish traditional

Love Song, by Joan Armatrading

In 1988, I sang these songs a Capella in a college talent show in the Haybarn Theater when I went back for my low-res MA from Goddard. I became manic during the residency week, and when I sang these two songs, I blew the roof off.

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

Amy Crider is an award-winning novelist and playwright who has won honors for both fiction and drama. Born in Ohio and raised in rural upstate New York, she studied theater at Goddard College and later trained at Second City and Chicago Dramatists. Her work explores themes of redemption, courage, and compassion. She lives in Chicago.

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

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

Caitlin Shetterly’s The Gulf of Lions is an enchanting novel of motherhood, family, and France.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Shetterly writes with intimate, journal-like immediacy, threading humor and longing throughout Alice’s journey. Without veering into the maudlin or the morose, her prose is warm and self-aware. Readers who cherished the self-reinvention of Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), the emotional depth of Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour (2017), and the fish-out-of- water perspective of Nicki Chen’s When in Vanuatu (2021) will enjoy Shetterly’s luminous and life-affirming novel.”

In her own words, here is Caitlin Shetterly’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Gulf of Lions:

My new novel, The Gulf of Lions, is the story of a mother called Alice who takes her two daughters, Sophie and Iris, on a once-in-a-lifetime camping-and-road-trip across France. They start in the Alps and drive down to Provence, then across to the Pyrenees, making a big circle to drive through the Dordogne river valley and on to castle outside of Lyon, where the book concludes.

Alice has recently recovered from breast cancer and a mastectomy and her marriage is on the rocks. Before she was diagnosed with cancer, she had found out that her husband, Pete, was cheating on her, and they briefly separated. During her illness, they came back together. Like in many long-term relationships, there is deep pain and loneliness in their marriage, but there is also the still-beating thrum of connection and tenderness.

In France, for the first time in a long while, Alice starts to feel like herself again: She diverges from her strict post-cancer diet and she starts to enjoy the tastes and textures of gorgeous French food; she begins to regain confidence in her beauty, feeling sensual in her dirty jean shorts, her linen shirts, and notices that her hair is fuller than it’s been since chemo; she finds sensuality in the breathtaking landscapes of France, the salty Mediterranean sea, a perfect, ripe raspberry with a glass of liqueur de citron while sitting on a beach towel. And then she meets a man who is the opposite of her husband, Pete. Or so it seems.

And this is where Alice, who is regaining some joie de vivre,  starts unravel the thread of what she set out to do: to take a bonding adventure across France with her daughters.

What unfolds is a journey of self-discovery, kids and families, and all the ways we can lose ourselves, even when try hard not to, even when our kids are watching.

I have aimed to write an honest book about marriage, illness, family life, being a Gen-X mother, and the experiences of  young girls in a family with problems. France is also a character (and so is a huge almost-600-year-old linden tree)!

Because the entire book is set in the summer of 2022, I write about the climate and how Europe was going through a terrible heat wave, and the Pyrenees are burning. I write about the healing importance of Nature and global violence and what it’s like to live in our world at this specific time—a large outer circle of fear inside the complications and pains of just regular human lives.

I listened to so much music as I wrote. I love music. And I included a lot of it, knitted into the writing. I can’t imagine writing novels without music, honestly. My husband sons helped me a ton, suggesting songs for me to listen to, or to include, each with their own perspective about what music might be playing here or there, or what music some of the characters might cotton to.

So, put these summery and beautiful songs on shuffle, grab a glass of rosé and a hunk of Brie, and take this journey with me until the moon goes down.

Johnny Hallyday, written by Edith Piaf, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” (2019):

When the book opens, Alice is already camping in the Alps with Sophie and Iris. Alice is sitting in a plastic chair with her notebook while Iris takes a shower. In the distance she can see white-capped Mont-Blanc. Someone, somewhere in the campground is “playing Johhy Hallyday singing, ‘Non, je ne regrette rien…’ in his low, sad, repentant voice,” I wrote. I wrote that paragraph and never looked back. The mood was set.

Sam Cooke, “Another Saturday Night” (1963)

When Alice, Sophie and Iris leave their campsite in the Alps, just over the border from Switzerland, they start on a long and meandering drive through national parks and mountains. Alice misjudges how long that route will take, and soon they are lost. In the dark, they come upon a chalet hidden in the woods with a long, lighted tree-lined driveway. It feels a bit Narnia-esque to them. Inside, are candles and long wooden tables, an actual Matisse, elegant guests, and incredible smells wafting from the kitchen. Hungry and travel-weary, they sit down to eat a delicious meal and Sam Cooke is on the stereo singing his jaunty song, “Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody…”

Serge Gainsbourg, “Vilaines Filles, Mauvaises Garçons” (1963)

This was an addition from my older son, a late catch. I noticed, while rereading the book last year that I had two Johnny Hallyday songs in the book. I don’t usually like to double up on artists in my work, I like to find one perfect song. I asked my son what he thought I should change the second one to and told him a bit about the scene, which is when Alice is drinking an Aperol spritz and this song comes on, the bouncy and insouciant sound of it making her want to “wiggle” her knees. The song , called “Bad girls, Bad Boys,” is one I hadn’t heard in years and years from one of my favorite French singer-songwriters, Serge Gainsbourg. Honestly, you can’t write a book set in France and not include Gainsbourg!

Walk the Moon, “Shut up and Dance” (2014):

One of the great things about having kids, is that they introduce you to all kinds of fun stuff you might not come across otherwise, they are always broadening your horizons. My kids have introduced me to so much music. My younger son really got me into Taylor Swift (see below) and we used to (guiltily) rock out, when he was little,  to the Hamilton hit, “Helpless”—which we both loved and my older son couldn’t bear. His musical taste has started to change more in the direction of his brother’s—The Beatles, Bob Dylan, rap–but he’s still good for a fun dance party in my office (when his older brother is away!) to Walk the Moon’s “Shut up and Dance.” I put this song in the novel at a point when Alice and her daughters are driving out of the Alps, and they’re so full of joy, as the road is “dipping down and up and the mountains are sparkling” and Sophie puts “Shut up and Dance” on the stereo. For a moment, Alice takes her hands off the wheel as they all clap and sing and bounce. (True confession: I have done just this—oh the joy when my kids and I are all singing and jiggling in the car!)

The Kinks, “Misfits” (1978):

I don’t know how I came across this song while I was writing, but somehow it must have played on the radio or something, and it jogged something in me, some old memory from way back. At that time, I was writing a scene where Alice and her daughters are setting up their tent in a long, long, field that stretches to a cliff that drops right into the Gulf of Lions, and the Mediterranean beyond. And this song comes into her head as she walks across the field, particularly, this line, “You’ve been sleeping in a field but you look real rested….This is your chance, this is your time/So don’t throw it away/You can have your day.” I can’t think of Provence anymore without hearing this song in my head.

Aya Nakamura, “Djadja” (2018):

When Alice and the girls are in Provence, they become friendly with the family that is renting them their spot in the field, overlooking the ocean. This family is that kind of blue-blooded and landed aristocracy Europe is known for, their house more like a sprawling manor, or even castle. The adult son, and the father of four teenaged boys, is married to a Senegalese woman, named Marie. Marie and Alice become close while Alice and the girls are camping there, and there’s a scene when, early in the morning, Marie massages lemon rosemary oil into Alice’s scalp to help stimulate her hair growth. To build the character of Marie, I had to do a lot of research on Senegal to understand not only the culture, but also foreign influence on the country, what the wars were about, and why a French man would come to Senegal and meet his wife there. I fell so in love with Senegal, I am hoping to one day visit. I also wanted to think about whether Marie feels like an outsider Marie in France, despite four French children, a studio for her fashion design company in the Marais in Paris, and living on her mother-in-law’s estate in Provence. I loved researching Marie, and while I was at it, I found this oh-so-catchy tune called “Djadja,” by the French Malian singer, Aya Nakamura. This song was a huge hit in Senegal when it came out, so it made sense to me that Marie might be singing it. I love this song!

Eminem, “Lose Yourself” (2002)

Pete is back in New York, working, when Alice and the girls go to France, and he feels a bit out of sorts. He is not sure where his relationship is with Alice, he’s been struggling with depression, something he’s never really talked to Alice about, and he knows he’s made a lot of mistakes. When Alice and the girls are driving out of the Alps to Provence, he tries to call them, but the call keeps dropping, the sound gets contorted and he can’t read Alice’s vibe. This totally rattles him. Then, on the subway on his way to work, he puts on Eminem’s song, “Ope there goes gravity.” That’s just how he feels, he’s falling.

Ed Sheeran, “Perfect” (2016)

This is such a beautiful song. And it’s just the kind of song that teenage girls love (and their moms love to!) It’s about tender young love and it could melt the hearts of even the most jaded amongst us. Alice, Sophie and Iris listen, all lost in their own stories, to this song as they drive from Provence to the Pyrenees. Iris can grasp that it’s about more than she yet understands, she’s only 8 after all, but she can sense the import of perfect love, or at least perfect love stories, as it felt by her mom and older sister.

The Beatles, “Two of Us” (1970)

When Alice and her girls are driving from the charred Pyrenees to the Dordogne river valley, across south western central France, through fields of sunflowers, that are listening to the remastered Let it Be album (one of my favorite albums of all time.) “The Two of Us” is playing and Sophie is thinking about how they are, indeed, on their way home—after this stop they will drive on to a castle at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers and then fly home. Paul McCartney is singing, “We’re on our way home/We’re on our way home.” And Sophie whispers, “We are, too.”

Led Zeppelin, “Fool in the Rain” (1979)

When Alice is in the MRI machine getting scanned to find out she has breast cancer, she asks the technicians to put on “Fool in the Rain,” because her father has told her that he had had an MRI and asked for Beethoven and couldn’t even hear it over the loud clicks and clunks of the machine. “Fool in the Rain” is a long song and she is grateful that she has it with her for as long as she does while in the tube. I love this song—every time I hear it, I think “This may be the most amazing musical feat I have ever heard.” It’s incredible. And it makes me happy, too.

Taylor Swift, “Blank Space” (2014)

Toward the end of the book, Sophie thinks of this song when she starts hanging out with an older riding instructor, Marc. For a second, her mind registers that the song is both a warning and, also, a celebration of the bad guy. My younger song tuned me in to this song, and I absolutely love it. It’s about everything that’s wrong with what we’ve been taught as girls and women and, yet somehow, Swift turns it, also, into an anthem of power. I think, in many ways, I’ve written a novel about the resilience of women, how we make mistakes, we get knocked down and hurt, and yet we are strong enough to make long journeys back to each other.

Queen, “I Want to Break Free” (1984)

In our family, we called this song “Collioure,” after a small French town on the Mediterranean sea near the Spanish border. When we were in France in 2022, we rented a small apartment there on the water. And we had many dance parties to this song—it became the anthem of our entire trip. The freedom and joy we feel when we’re in France is just how this song makes me feel—and I hope that, in this summer of crazy gas prices, my novel will give all of my readers a trip they long for. I imagine a reader putting this song on their speaker when they close my book, and then dancing around, wherever they are, no matter what they are wearing, no matter if it’s morning or night. Joy can be fleeting—it’s now or never. Break free!

also at Largehearted Boy:

Caitlin Shetterly’s playlist for her novel Pete and Alice in Maine

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

Caitlin Shetterly is the author of Modified, Made for You and Me, and Pete and Alice in Maine. She the editor of the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce. She won the Maine Literary Award for Modified in 2017.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Orion, Elle, Self, the Boston Globe, Medium, LitHub, Romper, and on Oprah.com, as well as on This American Life, Hidden Brain, Studio 360, Weekend Edition and various other public radio shows. She an editor-at-large for Frenchly, a French arts and culture online news magazine. A Maine native, she graduated with honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband in her home state. Caitlin is passionately committed to helping preserve, in every way she can, the peace of wild things. www.caitlinshetterly.com

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

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

Rebecca Chace’s novel Talking to the Wolf is a heartfelt portrayal of female friendship over time.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Brilliant, heartbreaking, and hopeful, Talking to the Wolf is a deeply empathetic novel with friendship at its core.”

In her own words, here is Rebecca Chace’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Talking to the Wolf:

My novel is about the complicated love of long-term friendships and a painful friend breakup. Which means it’s also about love, grief, and growing up in a tight knit group that is closer than family. Actually, they are your family. This is a set list of brokenhearted love songs, so listen to it when you want exactly that. One thing I’ve thought a lot about while writing this novel is that it doesn’t hurt any less when you break up with a friend–in fact it may hurt more. If you’re anything like me, you’ve counted on your friends to see you through all the other endings that turned your heart inside out. When you were flat out on the bathroom floor and your best friend sat on the tiles next to you, listening to you go on and on about that asshole you should have walked out on before they beat you to the door. That’s the friend I’m talking about. The one you never thought you’d lose. This playlist is for her.

Track 1: Nothing Compares 2 U/Sinead O’Connor by Prince

This had to be the first track on my brokenhearted play list. Only Sinead could cover a Prince song and own it. The four women in my novel are middle-aged, but their hearts haven’t been hardened by the decades. Maybe the opposite. Our friends can become our most intimate adult relationships, depending on how things are going with that person you thought was “the one.” I sung along with this one when my kids were young enough to ride in car seats in the back. It still gets me. Every time.

Track 2: Buckle/Florence and the Machine

One of my characters is a failed rock star. Val is a hugely talented songwriter and performer who was Almost Famous for a little while. Now she’s working as a dog-walker in her fifties. I’ve known a lot of people like that. I love everything about this song but especially the lyrics–the way that one word: “Buckle” is a verb and a noun. Worthy of Val at the height of her downtown fame. I can imagine her cranking this one up when she gets home, peels off her dog-walking clothes, and gets in the bathtub with vodka and a drugstore facemask. She’s “much too old for this” – but we never get too old for this.

Track 3: All My Little Words/The Magnetic Fields

I’m sure Val and Cora–the one who ghosted her and broke her heart–are Magnetic Fields fans. The chorus kills me with the harmonies and the lyric turn from “All the tea in China” to “All of North Carolina.” The first time you hear it feels like an inevitable surprise. Plus, the whole album is a novel with each song a chapter on the theme of heartbreak. This one gets played on repeat.

Track 4: I Get Along Without You Very Well/Chet Baker

Chet Baker was the original hipster, a crooner junkie that every single character in this book would have fallen for–hard. There are almost no men in the novel, but there is one episode when Val and her band, the Joypoppers, are on the rise in back in the 80s. Val and her lover climb the fence of Gramercy Park after partying all night at the once-hip Gramercy Park Hotel. The park is locked and gated, only the wealthy residents or hotel guests have a key–unusual in New York City. But no fence can keep Val out when she wants to get in. Like she says when she’s lying on the grass at dawn, “nothing hurts anymore.”

Track 5: At My Window, Sad and Lonely/ Billy Bragg, Wilco

Cora is Val’s oldest friend, the one she’s closest to in the foursome. When Cora ghosts Val it’s the first fissure in their lifelong friendship:

“I need a break, Cora wrote to her the next day. Texting instead of calling.

We don’t get breaks! Val texted back, before she understood she wasn’t getting an answer.”

Do you ever think of me? Asks Billy Bragg in this contemporary/traditional ballad off the album, “Mermaid Avenue.” That’s the thing about ghosting. We don’t get an answer.

“Was Cora thinking about Val as much as Val thought about her? No, said Sasha; no, said Lauren.”

Track 6: Slow Learner/Val and the Joypoppers

Val recorded some albums. She even had a hit single, “Like A Girl.” The album went platinum with her ballad, “Beautiful Boy” on the B-side. “Slow Learner” is the song she recorded after her anger burned out. Unplugged. Just Val and her guitar. The track was never released. Until now.

Track 7: Friend/ Stella Donnelly

Stella Donnelly wrote a whole album about a friend breakup. It opens with what sounds exactly how I imagine the unanswered texts Val writes to Cora. “Was I happier now, than when I was then?” There is no answer. The album travels all the paths of friendship to this unanswered question.

Track 8: If You See Her Say Hello/Bob Dylan

“Blood On the Tracks” may be the greatest breakup album ever written. This track is a raw letter to the one he lost forever. He doesn’t argue, he doesn’t rage, he even tries to give her his blessing. This is when you know you’ll never get over this one. You can only keep moving. “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time.” Sometimes you never get free.

Track 9: Shim el Yasmine/Mashrou’ Leila

H Sinno’s voice drenches this song with longing and tenderness. The band, Mashrou’ Leila, was a Lebanese Indie band fronted by Sinno, whom The New York Times called “the only openly gay popstar in the Arab world” back in 2017. How to write about this beloved, now disbanded group of musicians in this time of brutal war in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and the entire region? Sinno and the band endured hatred, threats, and abuse because of their support of LGBTQ identity. A Palestinian student recently taught me an Arabic word pronounced “Tawk” in English. It means longing for something you have never had. In German it’s “Sehnsucht.” These words have no direct translation into English, but we all know what this feels like. Somewhere between myth and desire. Like love. Like peace.

شم اليسمين
Smell the jasmine

ودوق الدبس بطحينة
And taste the molasses with tahini

و تذكر تذكرني
And remember to remember me

يا اخي أوعى تنساني
Oh brother, don’t forget me

يا حبيبي يا نصيبي
My love, my prize

كان بودي خليك بقربي
I would have liked to keep you close to me

عرفك عأهلي وتتوجلي قلبي
Introduce you to my family and have you crown my heart

أطبخ أكلتك أشطفلك بيتك
Cook food for you, clean your house

دلع ولادك أعمل ست بيتك
Spoil your kids, be your housewife

بس إنت ببيتك وأنا بشي بيت
But your in your house and I’m in another

والله يا ريتك ما بعمرك فليت
Oh god, I wish I never let you go

وشم اليسمينة
Smell the jasmine

و تذكر تنساني
And remember to forget me

Track 10: Go Leave/Anohni by Kate McGarrigle

Kate McGarrigle wrote and recorded this song for the self-titled 1975 debut album with her sister, Anna. It’s one of the saddest songs ever written about her breakup with songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. The Wainwright/ McGarrigle music family invited Anohni to interpret the song for one of their tribute concerts to raise money for the Kate McGarrigle Fund established after her death in 2010. Anohni is like no other singer, no other interpreter could tear it open the way she does. This song says goodbye and while never saying goodbye.

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

Rebecca Chace is the award-winning author of Leaving Rock Harbor (New York Times Editor’s Choice; New England Book Awards Finalist, June Indie Notable Book); Capture the Flag; Chautauqua Summer (New York Times Notable and Editor’s Choice); June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny (middle-grade). She is also the author of plays, screenplays, and literary essays. She has written for The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, The Yale Review, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. Grants and fellowships include Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, American Academy in Rome (visiting artist), Dora Maar House, and many others. She is faculty associate and program manager at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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

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

Nick Cutter’s novel The Dorians is literary horror both unsettling an compelling.

BookPage wrote of the book:

“A descent into body horror, [The Dorians] is brimming with squirm-worthy moments and pure textural malevolence that feel like classic Cutter, but it also offers new ways for [him] to explore deeper themes…Cutter’s gift for tension as tight as piano wire kicks into gear. The book moves at breakneck pace…an up-all-night horror story…[and a] warm character drama that is one of the author’s best works.”

In his own words, here is Nick Cutter’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Dorians:

Over the years I’ve been writing, my musical tastes have changed, as has the manner I listen to music. Back in the late-’90s and early oughts, I’d hear a song on the radio—we still reliably had those around back then, in homes, taxicabs, and restaurant kitchens, blaring at worksites. The radio was the background noise of road trips where one station would fade out of range and you’d have to scan the dial to pull in a fresh, new voice playing the same hits. As a sidenote, I used to spend summers up in northern Ontario, and it dawned on me how so many of those stations (most of which played a heavy rotation of ‘Classic Rock,’—Creedence, Foghat, Thin Lizzy, AC/DC)… all had animal names: 97.9 The Wolf, 101.1 The Moose, 99.9 The Grizz, 102.7 The Fox. They were almost interchangeable from the music they played to the DJ’s voices: the same sandpapery, just-got-out-of-bed rasp of a Wolfman Jack acolyte.

Back then, if a song took my fancy—if I heard it topping the charts on the Top 7 at 7 or the Top 10 at 10—then I’d head to the record store and buy the album. Of course, by then the record store didn’t sell records; they sold CDs, though maybe there were still a few cassettes kicking around in the rapidly-dwindling tape section. And maybe… maybe… I’d be pleased and relieved to discover that the album would have not only one good tune (the tune I’d heard on the radio), but three or four or five or maybe even six. That was rare indeed. I can count on one hand the albums that, to me, had a great percentage of bangers to duds. The first Counting Crows album was almost wire-to-wire (for me and my own musical tastes): not only “Mr. Jones,” which drove millions of us to pick up August and Everything After, but “Round Here,” “Omaha,” “Anna Begins,” “Raining in Baltimore.” There were others like that, but it they were rarities. Also rare (thank goodness) were the albums you’d buy for the one big hit only to discover to your dismay that it was the only really listenable track on the whole album (looking at you, Spin Doctors… “Two Princes” was a good one, though).

Back then, I wouldn’t listen to the radio while writing. Too many commercials, too much DJ chatter, too much uncertainty about a given song coming on that would throw me out of my rhythm. I’d have my trusty old boom box on the desk next to me, much spattered with paint from its secondary role as a jobsite boredom reliever the summer I spent whitewashing houses. I’d cue up a CD and, if it was a great one, listen all the way through as I wrote. If a certain song was really stirring me, I’d put it on repeat to accompany the scene I was writing. Later, my brother learned how to burn CDs and he’d put together mixed CDs, which I was grateful for as it generally prevented me from having to stop writing to replay a favorite track.

I look at those long-ago days with the wistfulness that those of a certain age often view their younger selves and their habits. Nowadays, of course, I’m more “hip” and “with it” and have a Spotify account. My musical tastes have changed a great deal, too, for reasons I can’t quite account. I was never honestly a fan of Classic Rock—I got stuck claiming I was, in certain company, purely out of abject peer pressure (“Yeah, cue up ‘Free Bird’ again, I can’t get enough of it…”)—but the music I truly enjoyed as a twenty- or thirty-something… it’s not like I won’t listen if those songs play on the radio (though I usually listen to podcasts while driving nowadays), but it won’t be with the fervency of my youth.

The songs I list below roughly coincide with those I listened to during the timeframe I wrote The Dorians… though not while writing; that’s also something I don’t do as much of anymore. I listened to these at the gym or on my way to pickup basketball or out on an autumnal walk… They’re downloaded off Spotify. None of them are songs I’d have listened to in my youthful writing days.

Times change. People change. It’s inevitable, I suppose. You can’t stop progress.

SUNSET LOVER, Petit Biscuit

I still haven’t found the perfect writing outlet for this song, though I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. My cousin put it on at a family gathering, and as soon as I heard the first few seconds, I knew it was for me. There’s something in it that, to me, speaks of youth. Simply that. It’s a song made by a young person, primarily for young people I would think, that speaks to that time in one’s life. It will be a song that I’ll play in the future, perhaps, when writing a book or a scene that tries to capture the youth I feel so strongly in its musicality… and as you get older, and your own youth falls into the rear-view, you need every trick in the book to try to summon those memories, that feel, if you ever hope to write about it. Young Blood by The Naked and Famous also gives me this same general feeling.

OCEAN AVENUE, Yellowcard

OK, so maybe I lied. This one was recorded in 2003, meaning I would’ve been in my very late-20s when I first heard it. Whether it was in rotation while I was writing some of the stories that made it into my first collection Rust and Bone in 2005 (or some of the many stories that didn’t make the cut)… it may have been, along with cuts from Dashboard Confessional and Something Corporate. I was in my feels at the time. Such a disillusioned young man was I, and I suppose these were the types of songs and lyrics that spoke to me back then. This one does have one of the most ripping violin solos you’ve ever heard at the end, so worth a listen right to the last note.

BLOOD DRIVE, Joshua Burnside

I believe I first heard this one on one of my wife’s Spotify playlists. Coffee House Songs or something. I don’t know that this is the sort of song I’d want to listen to at a coffee house… I may want to ask the barista for a hemlock chaser and get it all over with. It’s kind of depressing if you know what I mean? But I like the moodiness, the atmospheric quality to both the writing and Burnside’s voice, and the (to me, though maybe I’m thick) inscrutability of the song’s meaning. It sets a mood, is what I really like, and, sometimes, when you’re looking for a certain entry point to your writing, a tone or mood or feeling (grim in this case), then it’s nice to have a song that can ease you into that mood as into a warm bath.

HOME – REMIX, by Baauer and Bipolar Sunshine

I first heard this one while watching an episode of Shoresy—which is an excellent show, and I say so as someone who couldn’t give a fig about hockey (the by-product of being a basketball fan in a hockey-mad home country). The soundtrack for Shoresy is awesome, too. I get a lot of my music by coming across a snippet in a TV show or film (I Saw the Television Glow is another recent one, both an excellent movie and an excellent soundtrack) and, then, mercilessly hunting down the song by slinging the lyrics into Google usually. Sometimes, this takes a while, but in most every instance, it’s worth the effort. This one is trippy, synthy, kinda… druggy? But buoyant, effervescent, and it makes me feel good. That doesn’t usually compel me to extend that same grace and bonhomie to my characters (I’m a horror writer after all), but so it goes. 

also at Largehearted Boy:

Craig Davidson’s playlist for his novel Cataract City

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

Nick Cutter is the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller The Troop (which is currently being developed for film with producer James Wan), The Deep, Little Heaven, The Queen, and The Handyman Method, cowritten with Andrew F. Sullivan. Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, whose much-lauded literary fiction includes Rust and Bone, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, and, most recently, the short story collection Cascade. His story “Medium Tough” was selected by author Jennifer Egan for The Best American Short Stories 2014. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

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

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

Chad Anderson’s graphic memoir Gay Mormon Dad is both moving and engrossing.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“The hard-won insights here will resonate for fans of queer memoir―and any reader who has faced major life transformations.”

In his own words, here is Chad Anderson’s Book Notes music playlist for his graphic memoir Gay Mormon Dad:

Gay Mormon Dad is a graphic memoir about my life in and out of the closet. An adaptation of my 2017 print memoir, with some poignant updates, the book weaves together between two times in my life, both stories moving forward. THEN, painted in blue tones, starts at my birth and ends the day I came out, guiding the reader through a life steeped by trauma and violence. And NOW, painted in warm oranges and reds, begins at my coming out, guiding the reader through a life full of complications, healing, and forward movement. The book is interspersed with poetry I wrote. It is my hope that this book will help people heal as they see themselves in my journey, and learn how to craft a life that they want to live instead of one they are expected to.

REM – LOSING MY RELIGION

The title of this song says it all, this song has become a queer anthem about leaving old systems behind. Leaving the religion I was born into was a singular defining moment in my life. I was on display, ‘me in the corner, me in the spotlight’, as everyone scrutinized my morality based on the singular fact that I declared I was gay. Leaving my religion, according to my family, meant severing ties to salvation and even family in the afterlife, and it came at no small cost. And it was the best decision I ever made.

DETAILS IN THE FABRIC – JASON MRAZ

In the days after I came out, I would sit in my small house, cut off from everything, with my kids, a toddler and an infant, with long nights ahead. Music brought me a lot of deep healing as I learned how to be okay. And this song soothed my soul. ‘If it’s a broken part, replace it. If it’s a broken arm, then brace it. If it’s a broken heart, replace it. Hold your own, know your name, and go your own way, and everything will be fine.”

ELEPHANT – DAMIEN RICE

Damien Rice is one of my all-time favorite artists, to listen to or even to perform covers of. The way he emotes loss and grief stuns me. In this song, Rice sings about a bittersweet break-up and the toll it takes, and it represents, to me, the end of old things and the beginning of new. The way he takes his time in the choruses, the way the music sings in my ears, makes this an all-time favorite.

DARK PARTS – PERFUME GENIUS

Perfume Genius is such a talented queer artist, with some amazing and powerful songs with gorgeous backdrops. This song is simple, but it’s about witnessing abuse and finding joy anyway.

WE FOUND LOVE – RIHANNA

When I first came out, I learned how to love dancing in gay clubs. Finding a rhythm and just leaning into the joyful places that gay clubs provide, there is something so very special about just getting lost in the beat, and nothing captures that feeling more than this song, which was big in the clubs when I came out.

MY MY MY! – TROYE SIVAN

When Sivan released his first album, gay love songs went mainstream in a new way, and this song captures some of the wonder of falling in love and being astounded. It’s an excellent feeling.

NONBELIEVER – LUCY DACUS

This song is all about saying goodbye to old things and expanding horizons as we transition from faith in systems to faith in ourselves.

BEAT AND THE PULSE – AUSTRA

I listen to a lot of music with great beats and vibes like this. My book is full of moments where I find safety in nature, in coffee shops, in clubs, with friends, while traveling. I have a song like this playing in my head most days, and this is one of the best.

BLESS UR HEART – SERPENTWITHFEET

At an art show once, I purchased a piece that showed an ant carrying a typewriter out of a burning city. The artist, as I made my purchase, said, “You must be a writer.” The cost of a story, the feeling of burden and duty in telling it, is a major part of me, and this song captures that energy really well.

WHAT I WANT – MUNA

The biggest part of my coming out journey was learning how to love myself despite all the complications. I’ve become my own favorite person, and it has made all parts of my life stronger. For most people, coming out late means a sense of lost time, of making up for all the time lost, and this captures that energy in the most joyful way.

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

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

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

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

Kirkus wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booklist wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

Steal Smoked Fish by The Mountain Goats

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

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

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

Little Fury by The Breeders

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

I’ll Stay by Roy Hargrove featuring D’Angelo

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

Unwind by Sonic Youth

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

The Freedom by Swan Lake

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

Pizza King by Wussy

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

BASQUIAT by Jamila Woods featuring Saba

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

Shadow Man by Noname featuring Phoelix, Smino, & Saba

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

Chinese Apple by Loose Fur

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

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

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

TJ Fuller lives in Portland, OR.

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

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

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

BookPage wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last”

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

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

Heart “These Dreams”

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

Bruce Hornsby and the Range “The Way It Is”

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

Belinda Carlisle “I Get Weak”

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

‘Til Tuesday “Voices Carry”

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

Amy Grant “Baby Baby”

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

Sheryl Crow “Leaving Las Vegas”

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

Donna Lewis “I Love You Always Forever”

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

Wilson Phillips “Hold On”

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

Mariah Carey “Can’t Let Go”

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

also at Largehearted Boy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Écoute-moi camarade
Mazouni

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

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

Come Down to Us
Burial

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Tomorrow
By Gene Clark
Performed by This Mortal Coil

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

Mohammed’s Radio
Warren Zevon

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

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

Biological Speculation
Funkadelic

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

Lorelei
Cocteau Twins

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

She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap
Craig Leon

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

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

Every Grain of Palestinian Sand
Muslimgauze

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

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

Ser Magu
Shahrem Nazeri, Keykhosrow Pournazeri

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

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

Ay Carmela
Coro Popular Jabalón

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

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

Tinariwen
Group Anmataff

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

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

Paduka Saigal Padoo
Umbayee

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

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

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

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

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

Donald and Lydia
John Prine

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

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

Spud Infinity
Big Thief

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeh Jo Halka Halka
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Benin’s Eyo’nlé Brass Band.

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

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

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

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