B-Sides and Rarities for a Playlist for a Book



David Gutowski's Largehearted Boy website is a longlasting (longplaying) wonder of literature and music. I have been lucky to be able to create a playlist of music to accompany both my first book, Blood: Stories, and my new collection, The Last Vanishing Man. In both cases, I spent an inordinate amount of time creating versions of the playlists, listening to them, fiddling with them, adjusting and revising, shaping, tuning... 

(Largehearted Boy uses Spotify for playlists, but I also created an Apple Music playlist, which is what I use myself. If that's your thing, here's a link to it.)

I'm a relic of the mixtape generation, and I realized in putting together my first book that one of the attractions of story collections for me is that they function like literary mixtapes. This is based on something of a fantasy of control, however. Collections are actually more like CDs and streaming playlists, because you can easily skip around in a collection in a way you can't with a tape. That was part of what felt like the responsibility of creating a mixtape: you know the listener (often, if you're like me, yourself) can go forward and back, but there's no real way to skip around in a tape from the second track to the sixth and then to the fourth, etc. The fascination for me of the tape was its linearity, and I learned a lot about sequencing through the endless hours I spent trying to find just the right songs to pair together, just the right sounds to lead from one to another. A mixtape is something like a narrative (and in that sense maybe more like a novel than a story collection), and sometimes we want songs to blend right into each other, other times we want surprising and even disturbing juxtapositions.

In any case, I fiddled obsessively with both my Largehearted Boy playlists, so of course a lot got cut. I thought I would explore some of that here.

Creating the new playlist, I decided at the beginning to take a different approach from my Blood playlist, which assigned a song to each story in the book. That worked fine for that first collection, but one of the things I've tried to do with the new book is to create a cohesive reading experience, and I did not want to separate the stories out quite so much. They are grouped in the book into four sections, and that was more what I wanted to highlight.

That meant things got dropped that either repeated what other songs already achieved or were too specific to one story rather than any others. Here are some of those, with links to YouTube, just for fun...


"Cao Dai Blowout" by The Mountain Goats
This song about coming to terms with the ghost of a father is in many ways perfect for the first story in the book, "After the End of the End of the World". Almost too perfect, too on the nose, which is ultimately why I dropped it, though with a certain reluctance, since it's one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs, which is to say one of my favorite songs.

"Gun Show at the Church" by The Beat Farmers and "Gun" by John Cale
Obviously, I needed a song about guns. I went with NIN's "Big Man with a Gun" because its crudeness seems to me most appropriate for the intersections of masculinity and firearms. I tried to find a place for "Gun Show at the Church" because it gets at the absurdity of American gun culture so beautifully, but tonally it just didn't fit. Cale's extraordinary song "Gun" is a perfect fit for the story "A Suicide Gun" in its relentless beat toward oblivion and its refrain, "Once you've begun to think like a gun/ The days of the year have already gone..." but it was a bit too similar in force to "Big Man with a Gun" and I wanted the in-yer-face song to be front and center, so Cale's somewhat more poetic song had to be cut.

"Me and a Gun" by Tori Amos
As powerful a song as has ever been written about people and guns, and one I first heard not too long before I first heard "Big Man with a Gun". They are paired in my mind in many ways, showing two different, but equally horrific, sides of men with guns. The song's narrative, though, is too specific to the experience of a woman terrorized by a man to fit well with the narratives of my book, which are about different sorts of terror regarding men and guns.

"The Hearts of Boston" by Franz Nicolay
Franz has been a supporter of The Last Vanishing Man from the beginning, and when I was putting the collection together I kept thinking of the chorus of this song: "Never trust a man without a horror story/ Eros, the rose and the sore..." (Which for a long time I heard as "Eros, the rose and its thorn" — also a good line, I think.) There had to be a Franz song on this playlist, but ultimately I went with "Players in Wheat and Wine", a song off his most recent solo album, New River, which came out when LVM was making its way through the production process. I love New River, it's just one great song after another, but "Players in Wheat and Wine" captured my heart from its first notes. It's just one of those great feel-good songs for me, a song that fills me with a sense of expansion and transcendence. Sticking fast to my rule not to have more than one song by any artist on the playlist, I had to choose between Franz's songs, and I really wanted that transcendence at the end, so this is what I went with, but "Hearts of Boston" was hard to cut.

"Toe Jam" by The BPA (Fatboy Slim), David Byrne, and Dizzee Rascal
A happy, goofy song I just love. I first discovered it via Byrne's American Utopia when it was performed on Saturday Night Live in a particularly infectious version (in my memory — the video has since disappeared from the internet). The original studio recording is really light and fun, too, though, and tends to be the one I listen to, as I don't love the quality of the official American Utopia recording. In any case, as much as I wanted to find a place for such an upbeat, silly song, there just wasn't anywhere it fit in relation to The Last Vanishing Man, a book that is rarely upbeat or silly.

"Look Backwards on Your Future, Look Forward to Your Past" by Bonnie "Prince" Billy
The metaphysics and ethos of this song is pretty close to my own, and to one that fills the book. For a while, I had this song in the Third Movement, but as much as I like it, it finally seemed redundant with what was already there.

"The Desperate Kingdom of Love" by PJ Harvey
Tonally, this song could fit almost anywhere in the collection, and that was the problem. Thinking back on it now, I think it's kind of perfect for "At the Edge of the Forest", so perhaps could have gone into the third movement, but that became the fullest section, so had the most stuff cut from it. The end of the song is also quite good for the end of "After the End of the End of the World": "And at the end of this burning world/ You'll stand proud, face upheld/ And I'll follow you, into heaven or hell/ And I'll become as a girl" — but I had plenty else, and again it felt almost too accurate, too determining.

"Graveyard Love" by Bertha Idaho
I have this on the compilation ...I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces from Dust to Digital, a marvelous book-and-CD set that Eric Schaller gave me some years ago. The whole compilation could be a kind of playlist for my book, and we might have used any of the photos from the accompanying text, too.

"Am I Alone and Unobserved" by Martyn Green
Gilbert & Sullivan is important to the characters in "Wild Longing", and for various reasons Patience is the operetta most applicable and the song "If You're Anxious for to Shine..." is the most applicable from that operetta. I can say with some authority that it is Martyn Green's 1951 recording of that song that the characters most loved, but I had to go with John Reed's somewhat less hammy version for the playlist because all the available online versions of Green singing it include the song that leads into it, "Am I Alone and Unobserved" — which is a wonderfully creepy sort of thing, but not what I wanted for the playlist. So it goes.

"We Will All Go Together When We Go" by Tom Lehrer
Long one of my own personal visions of utopia, since the problem of death is, to me, not the problem of death itself but of the suffering your death leaves behind. This song particularly fits "On the Government of the Living", but the counterpoint of the song's humor and uplift seemed too great for the story's solemnity.

The Dark Places of the Earth by Lustmord
I could make an entire playlist just of ambient and drone music for The Last Vanishing Man. (See this playlist I made of dark ambient stuff — this is what I most commonly listen to when writing, which may explain some things...) Lustmord is one of my favorites in this mode, and The Dark Places of the Earth is a particular highlight — though see also Songs of Gods and Demons and Dark Matter and, well, everything. I ended up going with "Devolve" from their album Hobart, because it fit what I needed at that point in the playlist, but if any one group ought to create the soundtrack for the book, it's Lustmord.

"Anteludium" by Luke Schneider
I adore Luke Schneider's album Altar of Harmony (it's astonishing on vinyl), but I wanted to be careful not to make the playlist an ad for Third Man Records, since that would feel a bit incestuous, and there are tons of Third Man releases that I would include if I were not well disciplined. So only "Magical Music Box" from Public Nuisance made it on, since it fit best.

The Idea of North by Glenn Gould
I toyed with calling the collection The Idea of North. But it seemed too esoteric, because while the idea of north is, indeed, important throughout this book (and my work generally), The Idea of North itself is a fascinating radio documentary/soundscape by the great pianist Glenn Gould, and my idea of north is very much inflected by Gould's Idea of North. For a moment, I thought about putting the whole hour-long documentary on the playlist. But that seemed a little extreme, even for me...

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31 No. 2 "Tempest": III. Allegretto by Glenn Gould
There are dozens of Glenn Gould albums (never mind single tracks!) I could have chosen, since Gould's spirit is one that fits with a number of characters in this book. Of course, Gould is best known for Bach, and rightfully so, and you know how much Bach means to me (there are two Bach tracks in the actual playlist), but I adore the precise, rolling power of this particular Gould performance of Beethoven. It fit truly nowhere in the playlist, though I tried. For a moment, I also thought about starting the playlist with one of the fugues from Gould's recordings of The Well Tempered Clavier and then ending with one of the preludes (since I think the book begins more like Bach's fugues and ends more like the preludes), but the richness was too great and I could not choose.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more