Debutiful stated that Alexandra Tanner’s novel Worry, “could very well be the Great Millennial Novel.” I’ll say that this debut is funny and moving and possibly the Brooklynest book I have ever read.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A dark millennial comedy starring testy, needy Floridian Jewish sisters who move in together in New York City and drive each other nuts. . . . The kind of book you will constantly be reading out loud to others. . . . This hilarious, unremittingly jaundiced depiction of modern young adulthood hits rare extremes of both funny and sad.”
In her own words, here is Alexandra Tanner’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Worry:
For a stretch of six or seven years, I shared a Spotify account with my younger sibling Jess. It was a gray time in both our lives. We were constantly playing tug-of-war over listening privileges, texting each other NEED SPOTIFY FOR STUDYING RN PLEASE STOP LISTENING or PEOPLE OVER STOP SWITCHING from halfway across the country. Because I was older I paid for the subscription, which I resented; I leveraged my financial superiority over someone I loved nearly daily, which made me feel like I was rotting from the inside out, because I was, in part because every time I needed to listen to Seven Swans and cry in the shower, J.Lo would cut in. To a playlist called “~~~~~~~~”that started off with Rihanna’s “James Joint,” Frank Ocean’s “Pink Matter,” and “Cranes in the Sky” by Solange, Jess added “You Wouldn’t Like Me” by Tegan and Sara and “Breathe (2AM)” by Anna Nalick (????). They never used Private Session. I was embarrassed for my friends, who were into cool shit like Portishead, to see that “I” was listening to “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” so much.
Our more successful joint efforts were playlists like “songs daddy tolerates” (for when we were visiting home for the holidays: lots of Billy Joel) and “NOICE!!!!!!!” (Dirty Projectors into Hinds into Prince into Chaka Khan). We made playlists for our periods and playlists for Christmastime. Sometimes it was fun to open the app and see that Jess was listening, and that they were listening to something batshit or nostalgic or something I wanted to be listening to, too. But by 2021 my patience was out. I was nearly finished writing Worry—a novel about two sisters, Jules and Poppy, who share a home and way too much else with one another—and I was listening to a lot of weird, instrumental shit to get me through to the end. Finally I got verbally abusive when the frightening yawn of the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack gave way to Britney Spears’s Blackout while I was hunched over my laptop, trying to write an ending that felt like it said something about “our American moment.” I said much I regret; Jess forgave me.
Our joint Spotify account endured for far too long, as all miserable things in life do. Eventually I cut myself free and made my own. No one interrupted my free jazz anymore. My playlists were finally what I thought of as cool. But I missed seeing what Jess was listening to. I’d check in: The Chicks; Jimmy Buffett (our parents, by this point, had their password, too;) a playlist called “Easy!;” a playlist called “feminism,” lots of Megan Thee Stallion.
Sometimes, when I’m visiting Jess, we’ll drive around in their car and they’ll be playing the Juno soundtrack we burned onto a CD together track by track after we saw it in theaters or OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES and I’ll be like Hell yeah. Sometimes it’ll be the soundtrack to William Finn’s 1992 AIDS musical Falsettos. Sometimes Jess will pop into my room at our parents’ house while I’m playing my TIBETAN SINGING BOWLS WITH RAIN EFFECT playlist or “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” or “Heaven on Their Minds” and be like Are you unwell or Are you a Sim or See, everyone listens to fucking BROADWAY SOMETIMES!!!!!
Anyway, here are some songs I listened to while I was trapping Jess and myself together on the page, sealing up versions of the people we were before we learned to stop turning everything into a fight.
fuwarin, Ichiko Aoba
Ichiko Aoba is probably my most-listened-to artist of the last several years—her music is meditative, sometimes gentle, sometimes overpowering. I listen to her when I want to center myself and drop into my thoughts, so I start a lot of writing sessions by playing her tunes. I saw her play National Sawdust last year and cried the whole time. She sings in Japanese, so often I sit with just the music for a really long time before looking up the translation of the lyrics, and I’m always surprised by how she juxtaposes the soft and the raw in her narratives: “Let me reveal your secret / Underneath that mask hides / A terrifying face / Go on / Let the others see it too / Softly, floating softly / Lulled into lush slumber / Softly, floating softly / Gathering feathers / I wander through dreams,” she says in this one.
Wolves, Kanye West
I’ll be a fan of this album until I die. ima fix wolves was such a monumental pop culture moment to me; it still makes me feel emotional about the writing process, and about the way change and revision can feel dangerous, heavy, existential, like that episode of LOST where they have to carry the old dynamite around the island in backpacks. Wolves was a little better before he fixed it!
Too Much, Sufjan Stevens
Age of Adz is an album that I don’t think ever really lets you settle into it—so much is happening every second, so much is changing, there’s so much pain. “I Want to Be Well” is another one from this album I love, and “Vesuvius” is possibly my favorite Sufjan song ever. This record is about surmounting stuff you don’t want to, struggling through experiences both boring and difficult, feeling helpless. I wanted Worry to feel that way, too: frenetic, indignant, full of clash.
The Hem, Jonny Greenwood
Impossible to pick a favorite of his scores—I have a big playlist of them that I write to all the time, and I love getting so lost in the music and my own work that it becomes a kind of game to pinpoint when one soundtrack switches over to another. Dread, beauty, impossible technique, self-revulsion, self-obsession, discord—hardly anyone these days writes anything with such intent and such feeling.
Rondo in F Minor for Strings/Roman’s Beat: “Hearts,” Nicholas Britell
I think of Poppy as being a little like Roman Roy in some ways—bratty, sexually inscrutable, traumatized? The way these themes from Succession’s Season Two soundtrack echo each other really beautifully and ooze that same smarm in really different ways. I have a big playlist of all the Succession music that’s called SUCC IT and I listened to it all the time working on Worry.
Lonely Woman, Ornette Coleman
Scary!! Sexy!! They’re always playing Ornette Coleman in all the Brooklyn Union Markets, but I never knew that’s what we were all listening to in there until fairly recently. I think they play it as a way of getting you to feel stressed and hurried through the store, so you buy more and buy at random and shop quickly, and before I started listening to Ornette on my own, it would kind of work—now, I never feel stressed in there, because I’m listening to some of my favorite tunes.
I’m Going That Way, Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys
I spent a lot of time in Appalachia while I was working on Worry, especially during 2020—I was really into looking around online all day at these horrible, like, Holocaust deniers and Christian nationalists, which grew out of this mommy influencer obsession I’d started having sort of at the end of 2019/beginning of 2020, and that obviously grew into a huge part of the book’s psyche. But I wanted to listen to all this old gospel music to really feel the atmosphere of the mountains, and to feel immersed in the kind of awe that could warp your life. I get very emotional when I listen to it—it’s so primal. Begging to be with god, imagining how sweet it’s going to be—it made me feel tender about Jesus and it reminded me, at a time when I needed reminding, of what Christianity is: gratitude for life, and for life’s finitude.
Who By Fire, Leonard Cohen
A song I thought about and listened to a lot when I would take writing breaks and go for a walk or to get groceries or something while working on the book. The lyrics are bitten from a Yom Kippur prayer about how each year, when sealing people into the Book of Life, god decides who’ll live, who’ll prosper, who’ll suffer, who’ll die; all the ways the people who’ll die might die. I like what Cohen does with it by connecting fate and stupidity, the cosmic, the ordinary: “Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt/ Who by avalanche, who by powder / Who for his greed, who for his hunger?” Frightening, liturgical, sexy, wise about surrendering to the unknown, one of the all-time needle drops on The Americans: it’s when Pastor Tim’s wife finally has her baby, and Paige is holding it for the first time, visiting them in the hospital at this vulnerable, really private moment so she can work them. I like that this song kind of affirms that I’m right to feel scared of everything all the time.
Alexandra Tanner is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and The Center for Fiction. Her writing and criticism appear in The New York Times Book Review and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. She lives in Brooklyn.