In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Idra Novey’s novel Take What You Need is a powerful, compassionate, thoughtful consideration of art, family, and inherent bias. Easily my favorite book of the year so far.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Novey explores the mysteries of the creative process, the precariousness of family, and the inherent biases toward unconventional behavior. Novey’s richly complex third novel shows not only a nuanced appreciation for the artistic process but also places such creativity within the toxic distrust sewn by poverty, misogyny, and xenophobia.”
In her own words, here is Idra Novey’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Take What You Need:
My novel Take What You Need is set in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where parts of my family have lived for over a century. The novel is about an off-the-grid metal artist who welds sculptures out of the discards of this often-disregarded region. It is also a novel about stepmothers and daughters, and about cultural estrangement, the painful divides between where I live now, in New York, and where I return often to visit my family in rural Pennsylvania. These are the songs I played while working on the book, and on endless car and train rides, moving across the vast geographic and cultural expanse between New York and the gorgeous, sinking mountains where I was born.
Blue Ridge Mountain, Hurray for the Riffraff
I played this song often to shake myself out of pandemic stupors, when my own head felt like an overgrown fountain. The song’s catchy refrain:
I never never knew,
never knew, never knew…
stayed with me as the perspective I wanted to keep throughout the early drafts of this novel. Caricatures of Appalachia abound and I wanted to avoid defaulting to easy assumptions about the artists and other people I interviewed in the process of writing this book.
Look at Miss Ohio, Valerie June
Valerie June’s voice has accompanied me through three novels now. Her extraordinary range, her unabashed openness to laughter and genuine feeling, compels me in the right direction. Her music renews my proprioception, that inner sense of orientation that helps locate the emotional truth of a scene, what line could risk tipping a little more north, or south. June’s rendition of this Gillian Welch song is so admirably sly and nuanced. When she sings about wanting to do right, just not right now, all sorts of emotional directions for a scene feel open again, and possible.
Crater Lake, Lady Lamb
I discovered Lady Lamb through the metal artist Julia Murray, who taught me to weld and helped with the welding scenes in this novel. Her partner Ben is the founder of Ba Da Bing Records, which first introduced Lady Lamb’s alluring, husky voice and songs to the world. Crater Lake, and all of Lady Lamb’s transfixing songs, have become welding music in my mind.
Sexual Healing, Kygo Remix, Marvin Gaye
The flea market scenes in the novel all come from day trips with my friend Helen, who insists on heading to flea markets at four thirty in the morning, in order to arrive at the fleas before the best things get picked over and taken. The driving rhythm in this Kygo remix of “Sexual Healing” kept us awake on pre-dawn rides up and over the mountains of western Pennsylvania.
Tezeta, Mulatu Astatke
Throughout the pandemic, I listened to Mulatu Astatke, known as the father of Ethio-jazz. This rapturous song of his, Tezeta, was the music I most craved while editing Take What You Need. The pared down beauty Astatke achieves in his songs felt in sync with what I sought to find for each sentence, to strip away any word or phrase that called too much attention to itself.
Hit’Em Up Style, Carolina Chocolate Drops
I’ve been listening to the Carolina Chocolate Drops for a number of years. I’ve pictured the back and forth of the violin bow in this song numerous times. The exuberance of all the musicians in this song is contagious. I get a rush of energy no matter how many times I play it and hum along. I find “Hit’Em Up Style” has a manifesto element to it. Do something with your day, this song asks, get off your phone and finish the next page, or at least get off your phone and dance instead.
Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novels Ways to Disappear and Those Who Knew. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She teaches fiction at Princeton University and in the MFA Program at New York University.