Maddie Norris’s The Wet Wounds viscerally addresses grief and love in its lyric essays eloquently and vividly.
The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays explores the grief I fell into at 17 when my dad died of cancer. He was a doctor and director of the state capital’s wound healing center, and I learned, going through his notes and lectures, that the best way to care for wounds, physically and emotionally, is to keep them open. This playlist dwells in the wound, prodding it, finding the beauty and love within.
These are songs I listened to while writing the book, and they are songs I think Dad would’ve liked (some I know he did). They’re all some subgenre of rock: pop, indie, classic, punk. Rock’s rawness matches grief: sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, sharp or soft, beautiful or ugly, always palpable.
“I Know Alone” by HAIM
This song starts with distortion and only amplifies. Danielle Haim’s voice is a steady ribbon throughout, intimate, like she is speaking directly into your ear. The instruments are on the same plane yet exist in a separate universe. Her voice is a part of and apart from the song’s larger world. “Found another room in a different place…” she sings, “but I dream the same.” There’s an eerie familiarity to grief. This was his chair, his jacket, his pen, but he’s dead. How do we reconcile that?
“Never” by MUNA
It doesn’t get more direct than “I’ll never love again.” MUNA’s Katie Gavin sings it again and again and again. The fourth time around, the drums come in, and then, the beat drops. Halfway through the song, this new energy emerges: a thrumming, pulsing heartbeat. When she vows to never sing again because it won’t make it better, we know she’s lying, because here she is, singing. It’s ecstatic, this heartbreak. And when she wails at the end, turned up and down, we feel it. The heart is a muscle, after all; to get stronger, it must break.
“Nobody Sees Me Like You Do” by Japanese Breakfast
This is a Yoko Ono cover, which was included in her first solo release after her husband, John Lennon, was shot and killed. She writes of wanting to rest in her beloved’s gaze, to stay there without the looming loneliness. Michelle Zauner (of course she was going to be on this playlist) strips the song back from its sonic grandeur and pulls it into a ballad: only piano and her sure and fragile voice. I could’ve picked a different Japanese Breakfast song, or I could’ve included Ono’s original, but there’s something about a cover that feels right. Loss laps the same waters, though shores erode differently.
“Nightswimming” by R.E.M.
My dad introduced me to R.E.M.. He was partial to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” but I always liked “Nightswimming.” The way it loops and builds, the return to the memory of vulnerability, the warmth the past gives the present.
“Bite The Hand” by Boygenius
It’s not a Sad Girl playlist without Boygenius. This song feels like a crackling fire in winter, like your body, freezing, is overwhelmed with warmth. Led by Lucy Dacus, the song melts from a solo endeavor into one that can only be carried by the supergroup trio. Guitar strums grow defiant with riffs, and drums become urgent and pleading until, suddenly, they drop out, leaving only Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker haunting Dacus’s smooth vocals. “I can’t love you how you want me too,” they sing, but the statement suggests, then, that there’s a different way to love.
“I Will” by Mitski
Honorable mentions: “Geyser” and “Nobody”
There’s another version of this playlist that’s all Mitski songs. She’s an artist willing and able to tap into the depths of emotion. This song is ultimately the one I chose because its simplicity allows space for complex emotions. The steady drum line, single-note bass melodies, and ebbing organ gather around Mitski’s almost strained voice—we’re constantly on the verge of breaking. This is what vulnerability, care, can feel like, like their loss or rejection might shatter us. Yet, they don’t. We don’t. We inhabit the fracture, the almost broken, and find space for something new.
“Lilacs” by Waxahatchee
“I won’t end up anywhere good without you,” Katie Crutchfield sings amidst the raucous chorus, and then, quietly, reaching for falsetto, “I need your love, too.” She sings of cycling back to the same things over and over again. In grief, we’re always circling, coming back to the same place, turning over the same stone, but that’s not a bad thing. In mourning, I keep my dad with me everywhere I go. Look at this painting, Dad. Read this book, Dad. Listen to this song, Dad.
“Santa Monica” by Everclear
At music trivia, my brother remembered this song because our dad used to play it. I started re-listening after that. The song’s opening line, “I am still living with your ghost,” floats over a guitar riff, joined, in the second verse, by a drum set. In this way, the song accumulates, growing louder with drums pounded and guitars slammed. Art Alexakis’s voice goes from scratchy and dreaming to yelling and desperate. He needs to swim out in the ocean and watch the world die. He must get there, to that place that doesn’t change reality but gives him peace.
“Elvis Is in the Freezer” by Ratboys
I was sitting in the grass, drinking a Jack and Coke in the afternoon sun, when Julia Steiner walked up to the mic and said, This one’s about our pet rat, Elvis. He died, and we kept his body in the freezer. I was in Texas for SXSW, and I’d never heard of Ratboys. It was four years after Dad died, but I felt him beside me. This mourning song is weird and whimsical, which only illuminates another truth about grief: that it can surprise us; it can delight.
“Once in a Lifetime – 2005 Remaster” by Talking Heads
One of Dad’s favorites. Even though he was incredibly studious, Dad went to a Talking Heads concert the night before a big med school exam. That’s how much he loved their music. David Byrne said he approached the chorus to “Once in a Lifetime” like a sermon, but my spiritual connection to the song goes beyond that. Producer Brian Eno initially misheard the bassline, so he counted the band off on a different beat. “This might seem like a ridiculously technical detail,” Eno said, “but it’s crucial. It means the song has… two centers of gravity.” Pulled between two places, we wind up in a space made new, and there’s only one question to ask: “well, how did I get here?”
Maddie Norris is the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and, before that, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at UNC–Chapel Hill. Her work appears in Guernica, Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily, among other publications. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and have been named as notable in Best American Essays.