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

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

Shinichi Sakamoto wrote of the book:

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

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

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

Contributions by Nick Francis and Yoh Philips.

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

Mémoire De Forme – Pierre Rousseau

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

Walk Thru Water Ft St. Panther – Overmono

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

Break – Fugazi

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

Touch – Daft Punk and Paul Williams

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

Out of Time – The Weeknd

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

Prepare Yourself – Yoshimasa Terui

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

Urantia – Deftones

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

Piggy – Nine Inch Nails

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

Gimme Danger – Iggy & The Stooges

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

Shhh / Peaceful – Miles Davis

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

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

The Tinker – Maruja

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

Michi wo Sagase – Hako Yamazaki

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

Don’t Be So Nice – Chuck Senrick

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

Not Okay – Sophie

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

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

Hot Pressed – Mahawam

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

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

Portrait of My Heart – Spellling

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

Unfinished Sympathy – Massive Attack

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

Timid, Intimidating – BADBADNOTGOOD

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

Movement 3 – Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders

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

Hold on, Hold on – Neko Case

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

Riot! – Earl Sweatshirt

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

Fuck This World – Rina Sawayama

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

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

Delia – Blind Willie McTell

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

My Favorite Things – John Coltrane

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

Dreams – Faye Wong

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

Thank you for listening, thank you for reading!

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

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

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

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

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

R. O. Kwon wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mehendi Hai Rachnewali from the movie Zubeidaa – Alka Yagnik

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

Musafir Hoon Yaaron from the movie Parichay – Kishore Kumar

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

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

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

Ekla Cholo re from the movie Kahaani – Amitabh Bachchan

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

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

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

Happier by Marshmello and Bastille

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

English Vinglish from the movie English Vinglish – Shilpa Rao

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

See You Again – Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth

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

Muskaanein Jhooti Hai from the movie Talaash– Suman Sridhar

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

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

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

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

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.

Erika Meitner’s poetry collection Assembled Audience lyrically distills our current troubled world to reveal its wonders and joy.

Camille T. Dungy wrote of the book:

“Assembled Audience is a tour d’force to treasure. With sharp attention and bright wit, Erika Meitner’s poems gather the good, the bad, and the ugly of our present day and refine what’s assembled into pure and splendid glory. I love this book.”

In her own words, here is Erika Meitner’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Assembled Audience:

1. Come Together – Daphne Willis

Assembled Audience is a book I wrote over four years from 2019 to 2024, about the ways people gather together: in celebration and in mourning, in public and private, in airports and on beaches, for leisure or to protest.

This Daphne Willis cover of the Beatles song “Come Together” from her 2016 five-song Beatles cover album has her great raspy alto vocals over catchy updated percussion, but Willis is a really interesting genre-hopping singer-songwriter—she’s done pop, hip-hop, R&B, soul, rock, folk, and even EDM. As a poet, I aspire to what I think of as the ‘delta factor’—being a little stylistically unpredictable from poem to poem—and Assembled Audience has all different kinds of work: documentary, narrative, enigmatic, lyric, prose, colloquial, braided, formal.

Fun fact: the original “Come Together” was written by John Lennon in 1969 as a campaign song for Timothy Leary’s run for California governor. It’s original title was Leary’s campaign slogan: “Come together, join the party.” Leary was the father of the psychedelic movement and introduced LSD to many as a way to promote social interaction and raise consciousness, which is basically what I always want poetry to do. Lennon eventually added nonsense lyrics to bulk out the campaign song, and Paul McCartney added swampy bass, and it became the opening track for Abbey Road.

2. Tumbalalaika – The Barry Sisters

My book opens with a poem that’s all existential questions, then moves to the beach. I wrote a lot of Assembled Audience at a few different residencies at the Hermitage in Manasota Key, which is this magical place you can’t apply to; they just send you a tiny vial of sand and seashells in the mail one day and invite you down. Manasota Key is a nesting beach for endangered sea turtles, and I grew up going down to Florida to see my grandmothers, who both lived in Hallandale. The Barry Sisters’ “Tumbalalaika” has the upbeat slightly comedic rhythm of shlepping to the beach with all your stuff: the towels, the umbrella, the chairs, the cooler. The Barry Sisters—Minnie Bagelman and Clara Bagelman (who were originally known as the Bagelman Sisters before they anglicized their performing name) sing it entirely in Yiddish—and it reminds me of my Yiddish-speaking Holocaust-surviving grandmother, who appears later on in the book in “A Strikingly Unsettled Portent” and “To Survive I Need You to Survive.”

3. Despacito – Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee

Since 2017’s Hurricane Irma, I’ve been going down to Miami with photographer Anna Maria Barry-Jester to work on a long-running documentary poetry / photo project on sea-level rise and the built environment. We listen to a lot of Zeta 92 in the car driving around the city, and the first year we were there “Despacito” was on the radio like every other hour—it’s a Spanish-language reggaeton pop song—and we could change the station and it would just be on the next station too. It was like we had an actual theme song that came on every time we started our car. Many of the poems in the book take place in Miami, and are part of that ongoing project.

4. Self Control – Laura Branigan

As part of the Miami project, and while I was often down in Florida at the Hermitage, I took it upon myself to watch (or in many cases, rewatch, since I was a big fan as a kid) every single episode of all five seasons of Miami Vice—114 episodes. Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” features in what is potentially one of the worst episodes ever of the show: “The Great McCarthy,” in season 1, where Crockett and Tubbs use information from Izzy, their informant, to catch a drug smuggler who’s also a powerboat racer. In the actual episode the song is covered by a local Miami band called (no joke) “The Gloryhole Drillers” and they’re wearing these amazing sequined outfits. There is a poem in the book made entirely of lines from Miami Vice episodes called “Watching Miami Vice Reruns at the Vagabond Motel.”

5. Mercy Street – Peter Gabriel

The album Mercy Street came out in 1986 when I was eleven years old, and it has some of my favorite songs of all time on it—“Don’t Give Up” (his duet with Kate Bush) and “In Your Eyes” are two songs I spent a lot of time singing to myself as I wore out the cassette tape in my Walkman. Things take a more serious turn in Assembled Audience when I start writing about immigration and displacement, via Our Lady of Charity shrine and Cuban refugees in Miami, and my own grandparents—who fled the Nazis and eventually landed in Queens. The song “Mercy Street” also appears in the third episode of the third season of Miami Vice: “Killshot,” which also features a Jai Alai subplot. The song was actually inspired by Anne Sexton’s poem “45 Mercy Street,” and has some of her poetry in the lyrics, which is wild to me. It’s also super-haunted and melancholy and evokes the loss of a home country to me. Fun fact: Peter Gabriel and Sinéad O’Connor had an on-and-off affair in the early 1990s. You can hear her on his 1992 album Us on “Come Talk to Me” and “Blood of Eden.”

6. Holocene – Bon Iver

Bon Iver is fronted by Justin Vernon, who’s from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I live in Madison now, so I felt like I needed some Wisconsin representation in here. This song spoke to me deeply when I was writing some of the more simultaneously hopeful and depressing poems in Assembled Audience about climate change and pandemic existential despair, like “Gnostic Spring, or That New York Times Article on Languishing,” and “the world that has been entrusted to us.” Its rising and falling chord changes give the song a sense of motion, but it’s also deeply melancholy, with a little bit of upbeat hope at the end with “But I could see for miles, miles, miles.” I think a lot about poet-as-seer, or poet-as-oracle, and in this book the speaker is definitely a Cassandra of sorts. But that feeling is often tempered with this feeling from “Holocene”—“and at once, I knew I was not magnificent.” Fun fact: the B-side of the single is a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Come Talk to Me.” Everything is connected!

7. Wagon Wheel – Old Crow Medicine Show

Old Crow Medicine Show is an Americana string band out of Virginia, and since I’ve spent most of my adult life living in Charlottesville (6 years) and Blacksburg (15 years), I’ve been listening to the band since the early aughts. Ketch Secor, the band’s co-founder, used to play with The Hackensaw Boys, a popular Charlottesville band that started in 1999—the year I moved to Charlottesville, and they used to play around town all the time. Many of the poems in Assembled Audience chronicle the landscape and culture of rural Southwest Virginia—the area of Southern Appalachia where I lived from 2007 through 2022 as faculty at Virginia Tech. There are poems about the gun culture in the area (“Liquid Nitrogen” and “It’s Gunna Be All Right”), the political conservatism (“Light-Sensitive Puzzle Piece” and “What I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire”), the protests against the Mountain Valley Pipeline (“Another Possible Future / Hedge Yer Bets”), and the mountain landscape generally. The poem has a moment in the lyrics where it mentions Roanoke, which was the closest big city to Blacksburg, and whenever I hear it it’s some kind of weird stand-in for my entire time in the region. Also my husband’s old bar band in Blacksburg, The Mud Daubers, used to cover the song, and we’ve heard it everywhere—even in the public market in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where we lived for six months in 2015. It’s like the ultimate Americana song, and the poems in this book are distinctly American, with all this country’s flaws.

8. It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Billy Joel

This song came out in 1980, and reminds me so much the childhood summers I spent in the late ’70s and early ’80s in the Catskills at a Bungalow Colony—a series of rustic summer cabins arranged around a communal court where people from working-class (often Jewish) neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx and Staten Island (the outer boroughs) would spend their summers with their kids. Husbands would come up on weekends unless they were public school teachers. There’s a poem in Assembled Audience called “To Survive I Need You to Survive” that takes place at the bungalow colony and it’s an elegy to a childhood friend’s mother. There was a ‘casino’ at the one I spent summers at, which was just a big gathering space with a stage and a jukebox, and a soda fountain counter. When my dad came up on Friday nights or Saturdays we’d go to the casino for ice cream cones, and he’d put “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” on the jukebox. The kids roamed these places in packs, and when it was mealtime, whatever mom was around would usually feed us hot dogs or Kraft mac and cheese on picnic tables and paper plates. Also the first concert I saw once we all had Covid vaccines was Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden during his residency, and it was so joyful to gather again like that, even if we were masked. The whole crowd was on their feet the entire time singing every song, including this one.

9. It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Sinéad O’Connor

Sinead O’Connor died while I was writing this book, and the day it happened, I was at an artists’ residency—Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. We were all so distraught that we decided to gather that afternoon at the pool, and one of the composers brought a portable speaker down, and started playing all of her songs, including “Just Like U Said It Would B” while we drank beers and sang along in her honor. Later that night I went back to my studio and wrote “The Shape of Progress,” which is an elegy to Sinéad, but also a poem about invasive species, climate change, and the particular rural landscape of Amherst, Virginia, where the residency was located. There are a lot of songs that appear in poems in this book: “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye, which my kids were obsessed with for a while; “Okay I’ll Admit That I Really Don’t Understand” by The Flaming Lips, which appears in an elegy to David Berman set in Charlottesville (“I tell my students to listen for memory triggers”); “King of Oklahoma” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, which was on the radio all the time when my family and I were road tripping across the country through National Parks; “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard—but it kind of felt too obvious to put these in the playlist for the book.

10. Di Shvue – Isabel Frey

Assembled Audience ends with “Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform,” which is a poem that’s about the act of resistance—and nature’s survival and the way it’s inextricably tied to human actions. The poem cites an old Yiddish resistance song called “Mir veln zey iberlebn,” but the only version of that song performed that I was able to find while I was writing the book was by the Klezmer band Tsibele on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk_1pw70Qjc). For this playlist I swapped out that song for a rendition of “Di Shvue” by Isabel Frey, which literally means “The Oath” in Yiddish, was the anthem of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund in the early 1900s, and Bundists still sing it when they meet. One of the difficult things about publishing this book is that since I wrote many of these poems, our cultural moment has changed, and the current administration is using the memory of the Holocaust and what they define as antisemitism as a pretext to dissemble and defund higher education, curtail constitutionally protected free speech and the right to assemble, and disappear lawful US residents affiliated with universities who advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, as a professor at a major research university, and as an artist, I firmly believe that the only safety we have is through solidarity with others, and not via persecution, repression, and threat.

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

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.

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.

Scott Gould’s novel Beneath a Fallen Sky is a mesmerizing account of four northeast Alabamians facing predicted peril when Halley’s Comet appeared in 1910.

Ethan Rutherford wrote of the book:

“Scott Gould is a fantastic, natural born storyteller, and in Beneath A Fallen Sky he brings the Sand Mountain region and its inhabitants to full, singing life as they anxiously await the arrival of Halley’s Comet in the spring of 1910. The history here is deeply felt and fully inhabited, a true pleasure on the page—as are the cosmic questions this novel raises and turns over, which lift from the book to lodge in your chest.”

In his own words, here is Scott Gould’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Beneath a Fallen Sky:

Here’s Beneath a Fallen Sky in a nutshell: It’s May, 1910. Halley’s comet is hurtling toward Earth. A strange sort of panic grips the mountains of northeast Alabama as some scientists and astronomers predict the end of all life. The novel follows four characters in the valley town of Fort Payne and up on Sand Mountain as they navigate what could be their final days. The book is definitely setting-dependent, so it made sense to create a playlist that draws on the rich musical traditions of Alabama and the Appalachian mountains. In addition, I borrowed a great deal of family lore and traditions to write the story, so some of the songs have a direct connection to my family tree that’s rooted in northeast Alabama.

The Louvin Brothers – “In the Pines” and “My Baby’s Gone”

Ira and Charlie Louvin were from Henegar, Alabama, on Sand Mountain, a place where they developed their high-lonesome, close harmonies, a sound that influenced a number of acts to come (like The Everly Brothers and Gram Parsons). When I was writing the novel, “In the Pines” popped into my head and has become the de facto official anthem for Beneath a Fallen Sky. The Louvin Brothers have one of the great album covers of all time. The art on Satan is Real features a giant plywood devil and piles of burning, smoldering tires. Google it. (Also, I’m distantly related to the Louvins, but I can’t sing a lick.)

United Sacred Harp Musical Association – “Canaan’s Land”

If you’ve never heard Sacred Harp (or shaped note) singing, the sound of it will more than likely pin your ears back. Each summer, when my family gathers for its family reunion on Sand Mountain, the entire day is spent singing Sacred Harp hymns. This vocal tradition stretches back to the late 1700s and is alive today in small churches, like the ones scattered across Sand Mountain. When you listen to the acapella harmonies of Sacred Harp, you can hear where the Louvin Brothers found their inspiration.

Alabama – “Mountain Music”

Much of the story in Beneath a Fallen Sky takes place in the town of Fort Payne, Alabama, which happens to be the home of the band, Alabama, one of the best-selling country music groups of all time. I mean, they had 21 straight #1 singles on the country chart and sold more than 73 million albums. (For ten bucks, you can visit the Alabama Fan Club and Museum on Glenn Boulevard in Fort Payne.) In 2005, Alabama was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The Delmore Brothers – “Sweet Sweet Thing”

Alton and Rabon Delmore, from Elkmont, Alabama, were Grand Ole Opry stars in the 1930s, and along with musicians like the Louvin Brothers, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and Arthur Smith, are considered early pioneers of country music.

Hank Williams – “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”

About an hour and a half south of Fort Payne, just north of Birmingham, sits Mount Olive, the birthplace of Hank Williams. Williams’ legend is so large and looming, it’s hard to fathom that he died at the age of 29. In the midst of writing Beneath a Fallen Sky, I stumbled back into Hank Williams’ 40 Greatest Hits album. A line from this song struck me as pretty apt for the novel: “I’ve never seen a night so long/When time goes crawling by…”

Mister Ragman – “Halley’s Comet Rag”

In 1910, as Halley’s Comet bore down on the planet, rag time music was still a popular genre throughout the country. The excitement and anxiety about the comet’s arrival inspired Tin Pan Alley songwriters, and Harry J. Lincoln’s piano instrumental was one of the most popular tunes. (In the novel, one of my characters orders the sheet music for “Comet Rag” and plays the tune at a crucial moment in her narrative.)

Emmylou Harris – “When Halley Came to Jackson”

You’ll have to work at connecting the dots here. In 1910, Halley’s Comet flashed by Earth. Mark Twain was born in 1835, when Halley’s Comet appeared; he died in 1910, when it appeared again. In 2011, a double-CD called Mark Twain: Words and Music, was produced as a benefit for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. On this CD, Emmylou Harris performs a Mary Chapin Carpenter song entitled, “When Halley Came to Jackson” (in 1910.) Emmylou is from Birmingham, Alabama. Beneath a Fallen Sky takes place in Alabama. In 1910. When the comet is coming. There, see? It all sort of clicks together.

Shannon McNally – “Pale Moon”

This song, from McNally’s killer 2005 album Geronimo, has absolutely nothing to do with comets or Alabama or Mark Twain. But for some reason, I listened to it over and over while I was writing the novel, especially the sections that take place atop Sand Mountain. And I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s something in the rhythms or the delivery or the instrumentation. All I can say is that “Pale Moon” found its way into the story and took hold.

The Red Clay Strays – “Demons in Your Choir”

If you write about the South and the Appalachians, you’re going to find yourself writing about religion at some point. It’s as unavoidable as breathing. And in 1910, with a comet on the way, religion becomes a balm and an escape route. In Beneath a Fallen Sky, religion materializes as an unofficial female minister who concocts fake Bible verses and baptizes folks for a quarter a head to save them from the impending apocalypse. And as a snake-handling preacher testifying in a sweaty tent revival on Sand Mountain. While not a traditional gospel tune, this song by The Red Clay Strays (from Mobile) feels like it sprang from the religious fervor I imagined filling the air in the spring of 1910 in northeast Alabama.  

Lamont Landers – “The World Is Burning”

It’s 1910, and a comet is supposed to collide with the planet. Lamont Landers, from Decatur, Alabama, sings “the world is gonna burn up in flames tonight.” Then again…it might not.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Scott Gould’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Peace Like a River

Scott Gould’s playlist for his story collection Idiot Men

Scott Gould’s playlist for his story collection Strangers to Temptation

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

Scott Gould is the author of six books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His latest book is the novel, Peace Like a River (August, 2025). Gould’s other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Pangyrus, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, and New Stories from the South, among others. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina.

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.

Tomas Moniz is the rare writer whose books are charming in the best of ways. The King of Aloe Vera, his third novel, brings together a septuagenarian widower and 21-year-old queer woman in a love letter to San Francisco both present and past.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“One of the best parts of this truly sweet and never cloying novel is the tension between Rey’s willingness to venture out of his comfort zone (as when he discovers a velour Gucci tracksuit suits him well) and his determination to enjoy his quiet pleasures (bananas drizzled with honey, a barbacoa burrito). Beneath the sweetness lies deep sadness, and a choice Rey considers that will remind readers that grief takes many forms and can last a long, long time. The characters are so authentically rendered . . . readers will root for them.”

In his own words, here is Tomas Moniz’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The King of Aloe Vera:

I experienced a momentary wave of panic when I thought about writing this essay for Largehearted Boy. The reason for my concern: I barely mentioned any music in my new novel: The King of Aloe Vera, though now that I think about it Christmas carols do feature prominently in a key scene, which immediately gave me pause considering the possible marketing strategies around the holidays…could this help sell books?

And, of course, this train of thought left me aghast, chiding myself: Marketing? Sales? What have I become, to quote Saint Reznor.
You see, I love reading the essays other writers craft for the site: the playlists that provide inspiration, the way I feel so seen reading stories of how music provides focus and energy and release. Then it hit me: I may not mention songs or cite catchy pop lyrics in the story, but the book references so many places specific to musical life in the Bay Area: venues, events, bars. Everywhere in the Bay music thrives.
So here is my article’s premise: you all should consider visiting these places when you travel to the Bay.

So let’s start with them Christmas carols and the Davis Symphony Hall (201 Van Ness Ave, SF). For a period of maybe 5 years I was Carpool Karaoke Dad driving my tween daughter and 3 of her fellow SF Girls Chorus members to rehearsal, speeding over the Bay Bridge from Berkeley to avoid the late afternoon commuter traffic. Once there, I’d wait in a room adjacent to the practice hall, and there would be this moment when all the chatter would stop and their voices, my god, would rise and join into this harmonious, beautiful wave of sound. So if you visit the City in December, check out their Annual Winter Concert, but all year long, the SF Symphony hosts wide-ranging events. Plus they just hired a super young hip female conductor that people are celebrating: Elim Chan.

The next venue is easy: go to El Rio (3158 Mission St, SF) because it’s so much more than a bar. It’s a union organizing hot spot, particularly for teachers and it gets crazy every last day of school! El Rio hosts many community centered events: I’ve shucked oysters for charity, read poems and celebrated Pride, wound up there post various protests. I’ve witnessed dozens of bands, the highlight: The Coup with Boots Riley and Pam the Funktress (RIP). It’s a genuine SF musical and cultural landmark, a truly radical space.

Which, of course, leads me and hopefully you to the East Bay and its legendary 924 Gilman (yes, located at 924 Gilman, Berkeley). This is a bucket list trip, like paying homage to the former CBGB building in NYC (another RIP) or The Troupador in LA. Gilman (as the kids call it) truly puts its politics into practice. Well, it’s not perfect and there are a number of books and documentaries to learn about its history of volunteering and political organizing and fighting dumb ass Nazis and sometimes fighting their own community, but trust me go see a show: buy your yearly membership card (it’s 5 bucks and fits in your wallet and no you can’t by it online, only at the door), sit on the sticky couches, read a zine from the library, purchase earplugs, brave the bathrooms. And you have to take a selfie in front of the famous sign at the entrance:

● NO RACISM
● NO SEXISM
● NO HOMOPHOBIA
● NO TRANSPHOBIA
● NO ALCOHOL
● NO DRUGS
● NO FIGHTING
● NO STAGEDIVING
● NO MAJOR LABEL BANDS.

You probably won’t see the next Green Day, but hey, you just might. Also, you never know: you might see me!

also at Largehearted Boy:

Tomas Moniz’s playlist for his novel All Friends Are Necessary

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

Tomas Moniz is a Latinx writer living in East Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and a Lambda Literary Award. His second novel, All Friends Are Necessary, won the 2024 California Golden Poppy Award. He teaches at Berkeley City College, the Antioch MFA program and St. Mary’s College. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.

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.

Sarah Wang’s novel New Skin is a debut filled with dark humor and a powerfully poignant coming-of-age story.

BOMB wrote of the book:

“In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang renders a mother-daughter relationship with startling intensity and dark wit…Reflecting on the body as a site of history and expression, the performance of vulnerability, and the layered histories embedded in Los Angeles, Wang’s New Skin introduces a sharp, and often humorous, voice attuned to contradiction, where intimacy is as perilous as it is sustaining.”

In her own words, here is Sarah Wang’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel New Skin:

Fade Into You (Mazzy Star)

The protagonist of my novel, Linli, is obsessed with her mother Fanny, a botched plastic surgery addict. Linli’s love for her mother is, in a sense, overdetermined. What she impossibly longs for is to truly understand and be close to her mother, to fade into her, to hold the hand inside her.

New Skin (Siouxie and the Banshees)

Fanny has had every procedure under the sun, enough facelifts and nose jobs to rival the most operated-on Kardashian. This Siouxie classic is Fanny’s theme song, “Fuck you I win this prize /Stardom pardons the lies,” which I imagine her singing as she competes with other botched plastic surgery victims on the reality competition show America’s Beauty Extreme. “Rising from the ashes and grime /A new me on the other side.” It’s no fun to deny what you desire. What if you went all the way, and then a little further?

Wrong (Everything but the Girl)

Apologies, apologies… this is a song about betrayal, admitting your wrongs, repair, and devotion. It ends with “wherever you go, I will follow you ‘cause I was wrong.” This tracks the arc of Linli and Fanny’s relationship to each other, despite all the sabotage and damage they’ve waged in their private war.

Species of the Pod (Drexciya)

Drexciya is the ne plus ultra of matriarchal music. For those who don’t know, Drexciya is an underwater world populated by pregnant mothers who were thrown off ships during Transatlantic slave trades. In Drexciya’s mythology, the mothers gave birth in the ocean and thus an entire world thrives there. All of the music is made by Drexciyans and for Drexciyans. Mommy underwater techno? Yes, please.

You’re No Good (ESG)

This song is for driving down Pacific Coast Highway at four in the morning flicking the headlights on and off. Linli does it but you should not. (Unless you’re doing it in your nightmares, in which case—godspeed.)

Skulls (Misfits)

Have you ever done Misfits karaoke? I have. So has Linli. She sings “Skulls” in a Chinese karaoke parlor called Sing Sing after getting a horrendous makeover. She shouts the lyrics of the punk song “hack the heads off little girls and put ‘em on my wall” The song spites and scandalizes her mother, who ends up outdoing Linli when she sings her own demented song about a woman’s plight through prostitution and brothels.

The Ten Sighs (Teresa Tang)

Fanny’s embattling karaoke song is about an impoverished girl sold to a house of prostitution, then abused and abandoned by a man in adult life. The song uses the structure of ten sighs, each sigh representing an era of the woman’s life—betrayal, isolation, existential despair, each more dejected than the last. This song is the soundtrack for a Chinese film The Heart of a Fallen Woman, which is based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection.

Do I Ever Cross Your Mind? (Dolly Parton)

Linli’s boss at work, DB, is named after Dolly Parton. His mother, a number-one Dolly fan who sang all her greatest hits at karaoke while growing up in the Philippines, knew that she would get pregnant one fated night and that the baby would be named Dolly. In America, his parents decided that Dolly Bautista should be shortened to DB in the hopes of evading ridicule. In my opinion, this is a tragedy, and a form of whitewashing that immigrants often undertake when moving to the west. Dolly forever.

Carousel (Mr. Bungle)

New Skin is so demented, and so is Mr. Bungle. Deranged clown music produced by John Zorn, formed by the rejects of other bands, Mr. Bungle is layered, complex, unpredictable, and so California. Just like New Skin!

By Your Side (Sade)

As New Skin ends with love and devotion, so shall this playlist. Linli and Fanny are together again after all that’s happened between them and to them. They’ve survived near death experiences, more plastic surgery disasters than humanly possible, the gauntlet of reality TV, an FBI investigation, and most of all, the utter heartbreak of giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it: love.

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

Sarah Wang is the author of New Skin (Little Brown, 2026), which was named a best book by Apple Books, a favorite by NPR, a most anticipated book by Publisher’s Weekly and Debutiful, and was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, People, Dazed, and Bloomberg. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. Wang is a MacDowell Fellow, a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a Sewanee Writer’s Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a finalist for a Nelson Algren Prize, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.

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.

Ankur Thakkar’s novel Blow Yourself Up is a provocative and compelling debut.

The Chicago Review of Books wrote of the book:

“Blow Yourself Up is a love story for our modern times, exploring the ways in which the internet dazzles and destroys us with humor and humanity”

In his own words, here is Ankur Thakkar’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Blow Yourself Up:

Blow Yourself Up features a young music prodigy, Arjun, who can pick up almost any instrument with ease and uses his talent to win the heart of his first love, Payal. A gift like that can seduce you into thinking it’s what you’re supposed to do with your life, and Arjun goes on to play in bands and try to make it as an artist as Payal becomes a popular creator on a looping video app. Music is core to this novel, and although I mostly listen to ambient music while writing, these are the songs that make up its DNA, freckled with nostalgia but facing the future.

American Football – “Never Meant”

We must begin with Midwest emo. I worked at Vine for a few years and the last one I made, shortly before the platform died, featured a seamless audio loop of this song’s perfect guitar riff. It was my first attempt to say goodbye to a community I loved. My second attempt was Blow Yourself Up. One strategy at closure is to pretend it was never meant to be, because if you pretend for long enough, maybe it will become true.

Lorde – “400 Lux”

The novel begins and ends in a car, with two characters in close proximity, communicating without really speaking but maybe through music or a touch. Having grown up in a suburb, so many of my core memories growing up were on drives like this, whether there was a clear destination or not, because it was just important to learn how to waste time together.

Bloc Party – “Blue Light”

Another post-breakup banger that, like many Bloc Party songs, is structured like an effective novel. You have the narrator finding memories in small spaces, the quiet realization that everything has changed, the drums picking up as the stakes get bigger and the narrator goes further and further inward to a climactic release that feels like the space love fills when it’s no longer there.

Diljit Dosanjh – “Morni”

There’s this moment that happens at too many parties where the DJ puts on “Mundian to Bach Ke” aka “Beware of the Boys” ft. Jay Z, the ubiquitous Punjabi track, and everyone’s attention turns to the nearest brown person with expectant eyes, expecting us to do that shoulder dance. There are so many other Punjabi songs! I’m grateful for the recent explosion of artists like Raf-Saperra and Sidhu Moose Wala may he rest in peace. At the current helm is Diljit, the first Punjabi artist to sell out Madison Square Garden and creator of a viral dance when we performed this song on The Tonight Show earlier this year. Bhangra and Punjabi music play a strong role in Blow Yourself Up’s plot, and it was incredible to see the real world mirror its rise. Punjabi aa gaye oye.

Metric – “Calculation Theme”

One of the ideas I wanted to engage with was the impressions we leave online that have lives of their own, like we’re creating our own ghosts. It’s that feeling of stumbling upon a platform you stopped posting to a decade ago, and scrolling through who you used to be, even though it’s all in present tense. Or how reading through a dormant conversation with an ex can still feel so alive. This song’s outro introduces two ghosts continuing a conversation between lovers no longer in touch, asking: “who put these bodies between us?”

Kanye West – “All Day”

Yes, but hear me out. Of course this novel was influenced by Chicago’s patron saint. There’s a defiance in Payal and Arjun that, for better or worse, affects who they become. Internet culture invented the troll, something both of them grapple with, and this song is the epitome of a troll, a manifesto, and a meme all at once. It goes so much harder than it needs to.

Djo – “End of Beginning”

And speaking of Chicago, what an amazing place to make art. Joe Keery attended DePaul and made music before getting famous, and there is something about being in Chicago in your twenties that makes it impossible to not get wistful about. This city gives you so many opportunities to interact with other artists without hierarchy. Chicago is obviously not without its deep systemic issues, and it was important to me to try and capture what makes it so special in this novel.

Swet Shop Boys – “Benny Lava”

This was the first release from brown boyband supergroup Himanshu ‘Heems’ Suri and Riz Ahmed. The pair strike a perfect transatlantic tension between their raps and I hope they make another album soon. Riz recently brought Heems on in an episode of his incredible show Bait, so I think it’ll happen. I was fortunate enough to begin Blow Yourself Up with an epigraph from Heems, which is perfect because every time I sit down to write I whisper the first line of his verse and lock the fuck in.

The Strokes – “What Ever Happened?”

I moved from Chicago to Williamsburg long after the post-9/11 rock scene dissipated, but a walk through town could lead you to The Levee, formerly Kokies, which was dubbed “Cokies” by the East Village kids that would walk across the bridge to partake. Down the street is The Four Horseman, the award-winning wine bar by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. The aughts also brought the tech platforms to the neighborhood and, along with it, the high rises, the Kickstarter headquarters which is now a hype house for TikTok creators, and the Sephora/Whole Foods/WeWork/Slop Bowl Industrial Corridor. It’s not ever clear what’s happening in the moment, but the wisdom of years is important to this novel, to ask “who’s culture is this and does anybody know?”

Radiohead – “Everything in its Right Place”

There is a scene where Arjun is describing to Payal how music feels in his mind, like patterns that map to emotions and memories. I haven’t listened to this song, or to Kid A, in years because I know how much it will affect me, as if by not listening to it I can preserve its power for when I need it most. Actually, the last time I listened to Kid A in its entirety was exactly twenty years ago. I was sitting in the empty McCarren Park Pool waiting for The Shins to come on stage and the DJ decided to just play Kid A in full. I don’t know why but it remains, to this day, the most profound concert experience I’ve ever had, and the band wasn’t even there. When you work on a novel for more than a decade, speculative elements can become embodied, or like an alternate history of what the future almost was, could still be, which is exactly how this song feels.

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

Ankur Thakkar is a multimedia artist and the author of the novel Blow Yourself Up. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2025 and his writing has appeared in Guernica, PANK, and TriQuarterly. Medium selected his piece, “Swipe,” as one of the best personal essays about the internet. His artwork has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai. He chose MFA, then NYC, and 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.

Regina McBride’s novel The White Deer is an imaginative look into the lives of Anton Chekhov and Vera Denisova.

Roxana Robinson wrote of the book:

“Regina McBride’s new book evokes a loving nostalgia for a place we’ve never known—Chekhov’s Russia. Set in the summer of young Anton’s twentieth year, the novel centers on a young woman whose family is losing financial control of their estate—an estate famous for its orchards. Anton is the guest of a neighboring doctor, and the two young people become entwined in a romantic friendship—une amitiée amoureuse. McBride’s story comes at Chekhov’s from the side, presenting us not only with the family’s eccentric and complicated history, but the vision of the author himself, as a character in the work. A beautiful and eloquent rendering of a place and time we somehow feel is ours.”

In her own words, here is Regina McBride’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The White Deer:

Scheherazade Opus 35, Rimsky-Korsakov
Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir of the Conservatory of Music
(opening measures)

A magical, at times emotional and playful symphony based on the stories of One Thousand and One Nights.

Anton, a visitor to the area, a guest of the local doctor, comes upon Vera when she is weeping convulsively. At first, through her tears, she cannot see him clearly in the doorway, but his voice has the same timbre and depth as her departed lover, Petya’s voice, who she is crying over. Anton leaves her to her privacy, but she seeks him out in a few minutes. Right away there is a kind of recognition between them and their first conversation becomes lightly flirtatious and at moments playful. Vera is charmed by this young man who asks to walk her back to Volkhov, the nearby estate belonging to her aristocratic family.

Song of the Indian Guest, Rimsky-Korsakov
Symphonic version (not the operatic)
(go directly to the melody, which comes up pretty quickly)

A hypnotic and unforgettable melody. In the opera, Sadko, a remarkable guest tells a party of people about his homeland.

Anton, the outsider at Volkhov, describes his childhood to a gathering of aristocrats over a meal. He came from a poverty-stricken background, which he does not try to hide. He is polite, maybe at times excessively so. He has a natural sense of decorum and believes that the mark of a refined person is kindness and consideration. Though his father was born a Serf, Anton is engaged and engaging and feels comfortable among aristocrats. And he is, by most, appreciated.

Afternoon of the Faun (Prelude a lApres-Midi d’un Faune), Claude Debussy
Leopold Stokowski with the Leopold Stokowski Symphony Orchestra
(begin at 5:20 and go as long as you can)

Stokowski called this piece “a miracle of delicate, erotic beauty, suggesting a dream world of pagan loveliness”.

A white deer has been spotted on the back acreage at Volkhov. Anton tells Vera that it is great luck to see a white deer because it represents future happiness and offers the opportunity to exchange an old life for a new one. They make it their mission to see the deer and spend many days alone for long hours in each other’s company, wandering the meadows and forests. Under these idyllic conditions a romantic friendship evolves. When, surreptitiously through Anton, Vera learns that the trees of her beloved childhood estate are destined to fall under the axe, their long hours spent together in nature become bittersweet and take on a certain urgency. They fantasize about stopping time.

In the Grove by the Danube (Ukrainian Folk Song)

Oh, in the grove by the Danube
A Nightingale chatters
To all the birds of his flock
To his nest, he’s calling…

Vera’s mother, Pelegaya, loves to sing old Ukrainian folksongs, though she does not always stay in tune. Still, Vera loves to listen to her mother sing, especially this song, which was her favorite when she was small.

Vera’s mother and older sister, Sasha, share a secret that Vera is left out of. Vera only knows that it is something terrible and related to the time her mother spent in Siberia where her older sister was born. Siberia hangs over everything in this story as a place of terror and loss. The Ukrainian folk songs are from her mother’s childhood before Siberia destroyed her family and her mind.

Marriage Song (Russian folk song)
Russian State Symphony Cappella

It is performed in Russian but here are the lyrics translated to English.

Here, everything has passed,
I am already under the wedding crown.
They have bound the young man
With a golden ring.

Only, it is not with you,
My dear one.
You are sleeping beneath the earth,
Sleeping because of me.

The song is written from the perspective of a man who is standing at the altar marrying someone else, while the woman he truly loved has tragically died (and he blames himself for her death).

Vera’s father pines for his wife (Vera’s mother), whose room he has been banished from for over a decade, and sings phrases of this song abstractedly as he walks along. These lyrics are often on his mind.

Nocturne 1, Clouds, Claude Debussy
Leopold Stokowski with the London Symphony Orchestra
(begin at 1:20)

Debussy said that this particular piece was meant to offer the impression of “the immutable aspects of the sky, the slow, solemn motion of the clouds fading away in gray tones lightly tinged with white”.

As Vera and Anton spend comfortable hours in each other’s company, wandering the forests and meadows of Volkhov looking for the white deer, they often enjoy introspection and silences that forge their closeness and lead to sharing confidences. This music suggests that slow drifting of thoughts.

Scheherazade Opus 35, Rimsky-Korsakov
Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir of the Conservatory of Music
(0boe at 11:53)

Vera is still often overcome with longing for the missing Petya, but she finds that Anton has begun to eclipse him. Vera tells Anton that he looks a lot like Petya, that he is just a little taller and his hair is darker, that Petya has blue eyes and Anton has brown. She tells him that the two are very different in personality but physically they are alike. “You both have the same heavy eyelids. Even when you are wide awake you look a little sleepy.” This observation seems to give Anton pleasure, and he loves the idea that Vera’s beloved Petya may be his doppleganger.

Vera has a drawing that Petya had done of her half naked. She imagines handing it to Anton and watching as he unrolls it. She imagines his silence as he looks at it, his eyes flashing to meet hers. “The drawing had left its gray silvery dust on my fingertips. And if Anton held it, if he unrolled it and touched it, it would leave the same gray, silvery dust on his.”

Bayu Bayushki Bayu

Anton sings this old traditional lullaby to Vera’s belly when she believes she’s pregnant.

Bayu-bayushki-bayu is a traditional Russian lullaby that warns a child not to sleep on the edge of the bed so a grey wolf will not grab them. Many traditional lullabies used scary elements to make sure children stayed safe and still in bed. It is an interesting combination of comforting and frightening.

from Six Consulations, Franz Liszt
Beatrice Berrut
(begin at 1:29)

Vera comes across her mother’s friend, Maxima Gabinskaya, a woman who dresses with a masculine flair and at one time played piano with the Petersburg Philharmonia, playing this piece in the empty downstairs ballroom. Vera appeals to her mother’s friend to reveal the secret at the heart of her mother and sister’s lives.

Tchaikovsky’s 5^th Symphony, Second movement
Russian Philharmonic

After the summer spent together, Vera and Anton correspond as their lives undergo profound changes.

It was Anton’s staunch belief in Vera’s gift as an actress that encouraged her to pursue a life in the theatre.

When Vera learns of Anton’s death from tuberculosis at forty four, she rereads all the letters he sent her since that idyllic summer. As she grieves the loss of Anton, she sees how the intimacy they shared continued throughout his life to have meaning for him. He based his final play, his masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard, on the summer he spent with Vera at Volkhov.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Regina McBride’s playlist for her novel Stranger From Across the Sea

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

Regina McBride is the author of eight books. The White Deer: A Novel of Anton Chekhov is her sixth novel. She is also the author of one memoir, Ghost Songs, and one book of poetry. Her novel The Nature of Water and Air was a Booksense Pick (Independent Book Stores Selection), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book, and a Borders Original Voices choice. It was optioned for a film. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she lives in New York City, where she taught fiction writing for thirty years at Hunter College and continues to teach privately.

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.

Jody Chan’s poetry collection Madness Belongs to the People is poignant and inventive in its use of language as both weapon against oppression and tool for understanding.

Gabrielle Bates wrote of the book:

“Like Tyehimba Jess’s Olio or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Jody Chan’s Madness Belongs to the People enlivens, with its interactive and interdisciplinary elements, the possibilities of what a book of poems can do and be. Taking madness as a series of guiding energies, formal possibilities, and generative constraints, these stirring, participatory poems are wise, layered, and full of gifts to such an extent I find myself finishing the collection eager, immediately, to reread them all. This erudite, passionate work evidences a deeply embodied politicization that understands, in relation to liberatory movements, both the powers and limits of language. Here are words that touch you, singing: ‘may language move you to action.’”

In their own words, here is Jody Chan’s Book Notes music playlist for their poetry collection Madness Belongs to the People:

Madness Belongs to the People exists as a book, as well as an accompanying ambient electronic album composed by the percussionist (and my friend) Yang Chen. What does madness sound like? For us, this question was a literal one, its answers including: organ, wood block, pearl barley, bass drum, bowed cardboard, knifed glass, ripped newsprint, and other unimaginable instrumental combinations, sometimes all at once. For writers like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and Bedour Alagraa, whose work underpins these poems, the question is also theoretical. Harney and Moten: How do we locate the wild beyond — a space of ungovernable noise, rather than regulatory sound — that already exists through our practices of stealing life back from professionalized institutions? Bruce: “How might music in madtime enhance our playlists for protest and soundtracks for revolution?” Alagraa: How do we “break the metre” of colonialism, slavery, and their legacies in Western liberalism? Not all the music on this playlist is easy listening, let’s say. But all of it is doing beautiful (or even better, weird) things with time and texture and silence.

“endless”, oklou (2025)

A soft entry to this playlist, and the inside of my writing mind. Glitchy scratches and submelodic rumbles. Also kind of a synecdoche: I listened to this whole album *endless* times during my final stages of revision, in addition to oklou’s “choke soundscape” NTS show, a languorous, loopy, low-percussion landscape of her own musical inspirations while writing the album. A nesting doll of sonic influences! I always mishear one of the lyrics, “is the endless still unbound”, as “is the endless still inbound.” Or maybe it’s the other way around. She’s said in interviews that the lyrics aren’t the most important part of the music.

“Freedom Time (Live)”, Ms. Lauryn Hill (2002)

“There’s a war in the mind over territory for the dominion,” Lauryn Hill says, “who will dominate the opinion,” her voice breaking, the guitar straining. “We have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness,” said Halberstam, in his introduction to Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons. “No artist that has widespread appeal is supposed to say this stuff. That’s why they called her crazy,” said @randomfools808 in this song’s YouTube comments. What else is there to say about madness as a tactic to counter cultural hegemony? Nothing! So I wrote a 120-page book about it! Fiery darts thrown by the workers of the arts!

“silt”, Yang Chen (2022)

Yang’s debut album is an archive of Covid lockdown longing. Each track in longing for _ is the result of an idiosyncratic collaborative process. They missed their friends! So they asked the friends to write music for them to play! Some pieces came to Yang fully formed, others as a sparse textual score, requiring their interpretation. “silt”, composed by and performed with Sara Constant, is the track that made me know I wanted to collaborate with Yang too. You can hear some of the same new music improvisational techniques and dissonant textures on the Madness album. Mad, genius. Watch the music video, directed by Serville Poblete and starring Esther Phua and Luisana Reyes, for some dialled-up, hair-splayed-on-the-floor, running-hands-along-the-hallway extra crazy energy.

“Dysfluent Waters”, JJJJJerome Ellis (2021)

Here’s the centrepiece. All of JJJJJerome Ellis’ work, really. Aster of Ceremonies, The Clearing, Vesper Sparrow. I had so many conversations with Yang about the relationship between text and sound, which was meant to subordinate the other, which to serve, how to ensure the sonic density of the album and the textual density of the book didn’t overwhelm each other. And Ellis just does it. Slavery, silence, “is dysfluency a form of perfect memory,” tripping flute, Toni Morrison, Édouard Glissant, “are my glottal blocks floods,” ebullient trumpet, keys and strings melting together, Christina Sharpe. A friend attended one of Ellis’ performances in 2022 and messaged me right after, “it sounded like the inside of my brain and maybe yours too?” Then I got to be at a performance in 2025. For weeks after, I couldn’t stop telling everyone how life-changing, how inspiring it was for me in terms of making my inter-disciplinary disabled art. They also brought a stuffed hippo onstage to ground them — a gift from their wife — which was inspiring for me in terms of getting a wife.

“Nights”, Frank Ocean (2016)

When I put “Nights” on a playlist it has to be right at the halfway point. Or else. It’s not a controversial opinion that this song is basically perfect. At 3:30 in the track, the exact halfway point of the album, Ocean downshifts the beat. From resentfully releasing an ambivalent lover to being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The grief of losing a relationship subtended by the grief of losing a place. “Nights” reminds me that form can allow us to feel what seems too obvious to say. Subterranean grief changes the time signature. Every ending is a rehearsal, and so is every beginning.

“All Rivers At Once”, Orphx (2016)

Here’s the reversal. Grimy, driving, repetitive, distorted. If this isn’t what the wild beyond sounds like, I don’t know what is. I could dance all night, sober, with tiny flashlights on my fingers! I could sit through four hours of a Marxist-Leninist reading group! I could charge through a line of cops (hypothetical)! The siren under the synth makes me feral.

“when i enter a room, i look to u”, Yaz Lancaster (2025)

A dose of tense, escalatory sweetness to get us through. To me, a track that clocks in under two minutes is like a prose poem: expansive in its concision, the proximity of everything inside it to everything else. For Madness, I stacked (what I would consider) prose poems into (sort of) lyric essays. Does that make the essay like an album? I don’t know, but I love when the violin splits into multiple voices. Haunted, haunting.

“Haenim (햇님)”, Kim Jung Mi (1973)

I wrote one such essay which explored Teresa Teng’s love songs being labeled as “bourgeois spiritual pollution” and banned during the Cultural Revolution. The essay got cut somewhere along the way from the manuscript’s first draft to its final; mostly because I was already approaching 150 pages, to my editor’s chagrin. In hindsight, I’m also glad about the cut because I did a pretty bad job of exploring the political nuances here, including that the anti-communist KMT used Teng’s music as propaganda and psychological warfare against the CCP, and that part of the reason for the CCP’s censorship of Teng was China’s imperialist relation to Taiwan (Teng was Taiwanese). Anyway! Kim’s music, like Teng’s, was censored — but under very different circumstances. Kim was arrested in 1975, under the anti-communist, American-backed dictatorship of Park Chung Hee. Futuristic and affecting, her psychedelic rock record was pulled off shelves and destroyed. Her producer, Shin Joong Hyun, had defied an order from Park’s office to write a song praising the dictatorship.

“Amber Waves”, Ethel Cain (2025)

And here’s the unravelling. The woo-woo-wooshing. I have to include some Ethel Cain. Perverts, specifically, another album I played repeatedly during my revisions. The overlaid static distorts Cain’s typically angelic vocals just enough for me to accept this song’s beauty as part of this world, not transcending it. Madness Belong’s last section includes a love poem, to which I tried to apply this same ethos. I’ve performed that poem at a few readings now. Once, I described it as a “Marxist love poem”, and then an audience member came up to me afterward and told me it wasn’t a very good love poem.

Honourable mention to Perverts’ “Housofpsychoticwomn”, which is just a bit too scary to put on this playlist.

“New World Coming (darkDARK Remix)”, Nina Simone (2020)

I was introduced to this remix by one of the participants in a poetry workshop I facilitated in 2025. The workshop theme was endings and beginnings. An excuse to further my obsession with death, structurally and thematically — for pedagogical purposes! I did have the group do some icebreaker activities, like making a collective workshop playlist. I did not force everyone to participate. I like that this is a remix of a cover (“New World Coming” was originally written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for Cass Elliot) which embodies, most truly and ineffably, the essence of what the song was always meant to be. There were moments I felt it, while doing the organizing I wrote about in Madness: that wild swell, belief’s long arc. In the titular essay from Of Weapons and Words: Al-Aqsa Flood and the Compass of Anti-Colonial Resistance, Amer Mohsen writes, “‘Certainty,’ for me, is when you believe in something, are convinced of it, and commit to it to the extent that you accept the possibility of victory just as you accept the possibility of defeat—because it is the right choice, or the only choice. And that is all the certainty you need.”

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

Jody Chan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer. They are the author of two previous books of poetry: sick (Black Lawrence Press 2020), finalist for the Lambda Literary and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry; and impact statement (Brick Books 2024), longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Jody was the 2023–2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab, and the 2023 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature from the Canada Council for the Arts. They live 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

May-Lee Chai’s essay collection My Hungry Ghosts is an ever-smart exploration of generational trauma and racism.

Megan Giddings wrote of the book:

“My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning collection that weaves together memoir, history, prayer, and intuition. May-lee Chai has a poet’s control of line and image and the essayist’s ability to take complex people and situations and make it possible for readers to comfortably sit in nuance. A lovely, thoughtful book!”

In her own words, here is May-Lee Chai’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection My Hungry Ghosts:

My musical tastes were quite eclectic as I was writing the essays in My Hungry Ghosts. I listened to some Chinese composers who were directly riffing on themes of ghosts and folk traditions in their music, but I also found inspiration in works by musicians and singers from around the world.

I first experienced the traditional Chinese Buddhist and Daoist “Ghost Month” (鬼月) and “Ghost Festival”（鬼節）when I was a teenager traveling with my father to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1980s. I was fascinated by the way everyone would set up altars on sidewalks and burn “ghost money” and offer incense and plates of food to feed not just one’s ancestors but also the wandering ghosts who might not have descendants or who might have been forgotten. The idea is that this act of good karma will help the ghosts, paying off their karmic debts so that they can be freed of their suffering and be reborn or transformed.

Remembering Ghost Festivals past, I worked on organizing my essay collection. I chose twelve essays that I had written, for each month of the year, representing a different kind of “hungry ghost.” These essays span the globe and the decades, exploring the things that have haunted me: from my father’s migrations and experience of war during his childhood in China to inherited trauma from my mother’s childhood abuse in the U.S. to current events like climate change, rising authoritarianism, racism, and misogyny. I also created a “word altar” for these ghosts, as a way to feed them on the page and thus stop them from haunting me.

In putting together my playlist, I wanted to give a sample of some of my favorite ghostly music. We all have our hauntings, and I appreciated the way this theme was explored by so many different kinds of music whether through vocalization—by a whisper or a stretched note or a wail—or evoked sonically through drum beats, percussive instruments, and even full orchestras.

My Hungry Ghosts Playlist:

1) “Bitter Love: Against Time of Desire” (Track 1), Ying Huang, Steven Osgood, Tan Dun…

Long before his Oscar-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, composer Tan Dun wrote the score for an avant-garde production of the 16^th century Chinese play, Peony Pavillion by Tang Xianzu, about a young scholar who falls in love with a ghost. Tan Dun mixes jazz, rock-and-roll, kunqu opera, Chinese folk music, and Western monks chanting in this ethereal love song between man and ghost.

2) “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” Sinéad O’Connor

This song gives me chills every time I hear it.

3) “Wuthering Heights” Kate Bush

Nothing is quite as haunting (or romantic) as Kate Bush’s high soprano as she portrays the ghost of Cathy calling out to her would-be lover, Heathcliff.

4) “O Death” Ralph Stanley (O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack)

A deeply moving track from the other Odyssey movie.

5) “The Here and After” Jun Miyake, Lisa Papineau

Hypnotic. I can listen to this track in a loop, over and over and over.

6) “Drown” Karen O and Danger Mouse

Not technically about a ghost but it could be, as Karen O’s expressive voice sings of a longing akin to drowning.

7) “Ghost” Beyoncé

“All these people on the planet working nine to five just to stay alive,” Beyoncé sings in a critique of a life lived just to survive but without joy. The song builds to an echoing chorus: “what goes up, ghost around…” The punning lyrics pack a punch.

8) “Hades,” The Odyssey soundtrack, Ludwig Göransson

I didn’t hear this piece until this summer, but it immediately resonated with me. WOW! It’s layered, gorgeous, eerie, haunting, everything you’d want for a scene in which the portal opens and the dead come to convene and tell their tales to the living.

9) “Heart Sutra” Faye Wong

Faye Wong at the peak of her talent singing the heart sutra is perfection. May she chant us all the way to nirvana.

also at Largehearted Boy:

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Tomorrow in Shanghai

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her novel Dragon Chica

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

May-lee Chai is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation including the 2022 short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for The Story Prize; and Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, which won a 2019 American Book Award; and her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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