Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s second novel The Tree Doctor is bold, profound, and simply unforgettable.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Through a yearning first-person narration, the protagonist’s trials evoke difficult but vital questions about survival and endurance. . . . These interrogations are threaded seamlessly into the narrator’s pursuit of her own power, a pursuit that reveals just how liberating the decision to dismantle and reassemble one’s self can be. An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic.”
In her own words, here is Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Tree Doctor:
I persisted in disguising the setting of The Tree Doctor until my editor Ethan Nosowsky pointedly said: “Let’s just say it’s Carmel, if it’s Carmel.” Maybe my attempt at obfuscation is the result of a kind of fear of commitment, but I would like to think that I want readers to be able to imagine a location themselves. The truth is that as a reader I have always hated having the feeling that a writer is withholding the name of a location. And so, Carmel-by-the-Sea it is. This playlist, then, is meant to evoke Carmel the place by paying tribute to its musical history and setting and by capturing something of the psychological and cinematic quality of the novel.
In its current incarnation, Carmel, where I grew up and where The Tree Doctor is set, is a small town on the coast of California whose mild climate and abundant nature has produced an idyllic, easy-going culture. Think of Carmel as the laid-back older sister to her high-powered cousin Silicon Valley or counter-culture sister San Francisco; same DNA but different frequencies in completing the New York Times Crossword Puzzle per week. The Monterey Peninsula, of which Carmel is just one town, hosts a variety of events including Concours D’Elegance Car Show, the ATT Pro Am Golf Tournament (when I was a kid it was the Crosby tournament), the Bach Festival, and the Monterey Jazz Festival. I am a trained classical musician and grew up playing in our local theaters for various musical productions, in addition to playing Bach and Vivaldi in a string quartet hired to appear in churches, weddings and school functions. And, when Carmel was being settled, I like to think that some of the earliest music would have been formal and classical. But given its stunning setting, Carmel is perhaps more properly associated with cinematic, emotive rock. As a child, my classmates would whisper about Earth Wind and Fire living up the road from school. Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, John Denver and Sammy Hagar all have or had ties to Carmel. More recently, the Oscar winning composer Alan Silvestri relocated to the area, in addition to founding a winery; you can’t get much more cinematic than booze and movies combined. Music greatly shapes our emotions and sense of the narrative in which we participate, and this is true of the heroine in The Tree Doctor who is responding as much to the physical stimuli of the place, her memory, and relationships as she is to the narratives which the local culture purveys, whether she is aware of this or not.
Bach, Air on a G string
Every July, musicians from around the world convene in Carmel to play for the annual Bach Festival, first held in 1935. Despite growing up in Carmel, I have never truly been to this festival as a ticket paying audience member: I have always sat in the wings when local theater technicians, who were my friends from other shows, let me hide out for free. I think of Bach as probably being some of the earliest music the genteel settlers of Carmel would have listened to—and I imagine they still do. For years our early morning classical music station ran a program called “Baroque and Eggs” before shifting into the news from NPR. I have always had a love hate relationship with this kind of music. In my teenage years I felt like anything too classical was holding me fixed into history, and I wanted to embrace the world as it was unfolding. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to have more appreciation for Bach and music from his period in history.
I think there is something about the way classical music captures nature and forces of nature that other forms or art music can’t quite do. And I imagine the narrator in the early pages of the novel, staring out of the window not at the Hong Kong skyline from her balcony, but at a mass of trees and flowers. She wants desperately for the pandemic not to trap in her home, and not to be part of a global tide slowly approaching death. She wants to listen to the shimmering strains of Bach and to feel that life can be ordered, metered, harmonic and beautiful. In other version of this playlist I would have included Beethoven’s Moonlight Serenade, in addition to some Chopin. But ultimately, I don’t want this soundtrack to consist of too many classical instruments. I like this song, though and the way the tinniness at the end slides into….
Hazy Shade of Winter, The Bangles
…“Time, time, time, See what’s become of me, While I looked around for my possibilities, I was so hard to please, Look around, Leaves are brown, And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.” This feels like a pretty good description of what the world can look like when you are fifty something, as the unnamed heroine is in The Tree Doctor, staring down a pandemic that may or may not end. The leaves are brown. I know there is a Simon and Garfunkel version—the original. But I love the 80s-very-LA way in which the Bangles delivers this version which is from the Less Than Zero movie soundtrack. I grew up in the 80s and recognize the California captured in the tonal quality of this Hazy Shade of Winter, as does my character. There is so much sorrow and nostalgia and grit. So what exactly is the narrator going to do to get away from this patch of snow on the ground? She is from GenX and her sense of rebellion originates in that time—the time of Less than Zero.
Mambo Carmel, Errol Garner
The seminal Carmel jazz album has got to be Errol Garner’s “Concert by the Bay” recorded in downtown Sunset Center. The most famous composition is “Misty,” (I’ll get to that), but I like this tune, which includes Carmel in its title. As a child, my family went to Sunset Center often. My mother sang recitals here, as she prepared for an international singing career that never materialized when she became extremely ill and developed health problems that followed her for her entire life. We visited travel films here as a family, fueling in me a desire to see the world. My music recitals were in the hall and I participated in music competitions here, playing violin, which I hated, but did to please my parents. Sunset Center has been revamped and its acoustics improved and world class artists now include Sunset Center on their travel itineraries. But all that is recent.
Concert by the Bay was recorded in secret in 1955 by Jimmy Lyons, who went on to found the Monterey Jazz Festival the following year. I have only the slightest sense of what it might have been like to be Black and in Carmel. I know that Carmel would at that time still have been a very white town—as it remains today. Nearby Fort Ord (where Jimi Hendrix trained) was still active when I was a child, and in 1955, servicemen were bused over from Fort Ord to be part of the audience for Garner’s concert. Was Garner referencing anything about Carmel when he composed this tune?
As a young person growing up in Carmel, I was desperate to learn about jazz; I thought of it as a living art form and the classical music that I listened to and played, to be relics of the past. I remember thinking if I could listen to jazz, and appreciate it, I could escape the past. I was pretty shocked the first time I was in a record store in New York, and saw the cover of Garner’s album, with the familiar Carmel coast and a 70s model wearing bellbottoms staring back at me. My husband said: “That’s a famous album.” The unnamed narrator has some of my tortured relationship with her sedate hometown. It’s quiet, and she longed to escape it, but the beauty also is a balm to her.
Good Vibrations, Beach Boys
Some time in the 1980s, a new house popped up in my neighborhood and we all admired the cobblestone driveway and the faux Tudor style. Then my dad came home and said: “I just heard one of the Beach Boys bought that new house.” I don’t know which one and I’m not even sure he bought it. I do know that one of the Beach Boys lives in Big Sur and another one lived or still lives over in Pebble Beach. So, there is the bona fide Beach Boy/Carmel connection. Maybe more importantly, even I, a person who knows little about pop music, can recognize this as the absolutely masterpiece of composition that it is, with its starts and stops and twists and turns. It’s a funhouse labyrinth MC Escher of a song. There is the whole major minor thing going on, that captures the duality of the highs and lows of California living and which, for me, is echoed in the earlier Bangles tune in this list. And then there are the repeated lyrics about good vibrations and the whole New Age ethos this encapsulates. My heroine is from a place of good vibrations, but she also got the hell away from it. And for what, she wonders? But the song is definitely about a man looking at a woman; this novel is about a woman making good on good vibrations and acting on them for herself.
I kind of see Good Vibrations, Hazy Shade of Winter and California Dreamin’ as a set. All have this fuzzy and tinny quality and tell us how fantastic California life is, while shifting quickly into minor keys to suggest that too much of a good thing can also be harmful. As a kid, I only heard the “Good Vibrations” part and felt vindicated by how the chorus embodies an emotional high. As an adult, I really appreciate the variety and texture in this song.
Cherry, Rina Sawayama
Japanese British pop star Rina Sawayama is the pop star I have been waiting for almost all my life. She has the best fashion sense and I live for her outfits. We haven’t had many Asian pop stars; as a child I was always looking for Japanese pop bands and artists when I went to Japan with my mother. Another version of this soundtrack might have included some of those artists. But this soundtrack is for The Tree Doctor and this song, Cherry, by Sawayama about a woman on a train feeling a surge of longing and attraction for a stranger mirrors the way the narrator in The Tree Doctor feels a sudden and irrefutable attraction for a stranger—and acts on it. This and the next two songs for me make up the groove portion of the story, where our narrator is having and enjoying lots of sex in the middle of a pandemic. I think of Rina Sawayama saying “hello” and waking up the narrator out of her stupor and into her body and off on an adventure. “When they tell you that you’ve got to stay the same…” Sawayama understands how this heroine feels. In The Tree Doctor, the heroine does not want to stay the same and wants to “feel alive.” No more leaves on the ground for her.
Purple Hat, Sofi Tukker
The other day on Reddit I typed in “Sofi Tukker” and read through a thread where someone–most likely a young person– asked why it was that suddenly so many people had heard of Sofi Tukker. I’m one of those someones. I came across this song somewhere—okay it was on an exercise music playlist—and then played it over and over. This song uses the words “people” and “dance” over and over and that’s where the narrator goes—she’s thinking about her body.
Control, Emmit Fenn
I have no idea how I heard of Emmit Fenn. I literally think an algorithm fed this tune to me and I stopped what I was doing and listened and understood immediately this was about the most California ever song I have heard in my recent memory. “Let the feelings take control” indeed. I’m not sure there is a more clear direction from California; what you feel is natural and it is your right to act on it, which the protagonist certainly does. I think it is pretty deeply embedded in California culture that whatever you feel is right and should be honored. The infectiousness of this sound, the way it just propels forward should answer questions for you like: “Why do people go to Burning Man when the weather forecast is bad” or “Why do people persist in building houses on cliffs” or even “Why do Californians say it’s all good even when it clearly isn’t.”
Then I saw a photo of Emmit Fenn. I mean, he’s obviously young and handsome and has this whole surfer extremely smart engineer vibe going on—a look that feels precisely like home to me. You look at someone like that, and hopefully, stop asking “wait, why did the tech boom happen in California and why do they ride scooters and like cell technology?” And that still isn’t why I think of this as a quintessential contemporary California song: yes, there is the groove and attitude, but it’s fundamentally about the sound. Fenn hears the potential for music in any sound capable of emitting a wave whether that is what we have traditionally thought of as an instrument or not, and I cannot think of a more California way to make music. This and the three previous tunes capture what it is like to turn off the intellectual part of the brain, and to engage the body via a groove. That’s pretty much what the heroine of The Tree Doctor does in order to stay alive.
Misty, Erroll Garner
Yes, Clint Eastwood lives in Carmel and yes we all saw him when we were growing up in Carmel. He set his movie, Play Misty for Me in Carmel, and when I first saw the movie as a rerun on TV, I was amazed to see local scenery as part of the story. “Play Misty for Me” says the woman obsessed with Clint as DJ. This is the song she wants—written by Erroll Garner. When I hear the song now, though, I invariably think about the coastal fog from home—the vapor that is supposed to support the special Monterey Pine trees that drink in moisture via their needles. As The Tree Doctor goes along, the narrator does start to become just the slightest bit unstable. She never loses it, like the stalker in Eastwood’s film, but she certainly understands the nature of obsession. I like to think that the inclusion of Garner’s tune at this point in our soundtrack is a reflection of these emotions.
September, Earth Wind and Fire
Earth Wind and Fire bandleader Maurice White had a home out in Carmel Valley—not too far from where the initial action in The Tree Doctor takes place. I don’t want to spoil the novel for you, but it is fair to say that the valley in the novel becomes a place of earth and wind and fire at a critical moment and yes, the month is December . This song is also about looking back with the slightest regret, which anyone fifty or over can do. And in true California fashion, the song emphasizes yet again, as so many of these other tunes do, the importance of being in the moment.
California Halo Blue, AWOL Nation
Beautiful song that calls back Earth Wind and Fire with the lyrics “Remember, ninth of November,” though the date here refers to a specific time and not something mythical. AWOL Nation is singing about the Woolsey Fire, which does inspire the fire in The Tree Doctor. “Don’t forget about the trees and the birds, And the families, Humanity, now I can see the devil’s hold on this world,” the song goes. This is what the narrator of The Tree Doctor is thinking too.
California Dreamin’, The Mamas and the Papas
I love that this song is in a minor key. So much emphasis is placed on California as a sunny and optimist place—and it is. But there is something specifically sinister about this kind of happiness too, which I think the tonal quality of this pop song captures. I also think this song is a great call back (or the other way around) to Hazy Shade of Winter. The lyrics: “I’d be safe and warm if I was in LA, California winter dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.” Here we are again and it is winter and time is passing and death is calling. Within the context of this novel, I do think California is a dream that makes people think death can be cheated even on a winter’s day. And our heroine does attempt to make a stand against illness, her aging and her mother’s illness in the one way she intuitively knows how.
Moon River, Jacob Collier
Jacob Collier made a lot of music during the pandemic—bless him. And it was phenomenal, virtuosic music which took full advantage of YouTube and the internet. The Tree Doctor is a pandemic novel. Most of the world exists for the heroine inside a computer—including her students. Collier was able to make something beautiful out of these restrictions, as you can see if you go through his YouTube playlist. He’s also taken on Moon River and made something stirring out of what can be a tired old classic. Collier also really leans into the lyrics, and I feel him singing with optimism—in spite of everything. Our narrator feels this way too at the end of the novel. She’s not going to be defeated. There is, as Collier sings, still such a lot of world to see. Collier isn’t from Monterey at all, but he did, in 2016, make is Monterey Jazz Festival debut, so I know he has at least been to the home of the cute sea otters.
Over the Rainbow, Dave Brubeck
I remember standing in the audience at the Monterey Jazz Festival when Dave Brubeck performed his “Cannery Row” suit. Clint was there too. You bet he was. And he played the piano. My first great “adult’ relationship with a writer was Steinbeck and for years Cannery Row was my favorite novel, capturing my home in a way that nothing else really ever has. Brubeck was also one of the first jazz musicians I discovered when going through my dad’s old reel to reel music collection. I can’t find a recording of that performance, and I’m also not sure that the lyrics “Monterey Monterey a hell of a place to work and to play” are really showing Brubeck at his best. But Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a classic and, again, a reminder of what it is to be a Californian. It is to believe that in spite of it all, climate change and the death of Roe Vs. Wade, we can in fact go over the rainbow. We do believe this, without any irony. We really do.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s playlist for her novel Picking Bones from Ash
Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother. American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf) won both the 2021 Northern California Book Award and the Nebraska Book Award, and is a tribute to the complicated and nuanced history of the United States and its people. Her memoir, “Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye,” was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. She lives in San Francisco, and teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a Fulbright Fellow to Japan for 2022-2023.