As I wrote this novel, a fictionalized account of my mother’s life, I thought a lot about the important role music played in both of our lives. My mother was born in Eastern Kentucky in 1959 and she soaked up the popular music of the time, from the Beatles to Donna Fargo to Marty Robbins. She still treasures her scrapbook of song lyrics and pictures of album covers from the Hit Parader magazines she bought at every chance. I think music was a lifeline for her, connecting her to worlds outside of her own; this may have been invaluable when she found herself, at eighteen years old, trying to survive a tumultuous marriage with my father. Writing Someplace Like Home, I tried to step into my mother’s life through the character of Jenny so I could both give voice to her experience and deepen my compassion for her.
I was born in 1979 and raised about two miles from where my mother grew up. We lived in an isolated holler, though, and only listened to one radio station, which featured country music from the 1980s and older classics. In some ways, we had less access to the outside world at that time than my mother had growing up in the 1960s. But music was a lifeline for me, too. And one of the most interesting things it did for me was to teach me about storytelling techniques. As I listened to old murder ballads and stories of love lost, I discovered features like irony, understatement, and rising action. This use of words intrigued me as much as the songs entertained, soothed, and instructed me. Now, my children and I share music—some old, some new—and I find it to be a sweet kind of love language.
Most of the songs below all appear within this novel, with a few exceptions that connect to the real story that inspired Someplace Like Home. And all of these songs continually provide me with an avenue to explore the emotions and beliefs that shaped us as individuals and my family as a whole.
“You Are Not Alone” by Mavis Staples
I thought about this song constantly as I wrote Someplace Like Home. It is so rich in its relationship to this story—for one, my mother would have been listening to The Staple Sisters back in the 1960s and 70s, just like I later would as a teenager myself, when I fell in love with that musical era. I’ve also been a fan of Jeff Tweedy, who produced this song in 2010, since I discovered his Mermaid Avenue albums with Billy Bragg. The intertwine of Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy connected well with one of my overall goals in my novel, which is to explore the connections between past and present generations. I am in awe of how life binds us to one another and to our histories, and this artistic relationship captures that in a beautiful way.
Many of the lyrics in this song resonate with me, too. However, there is one line that impacted me more than others, and I wove it into my story: “Every tear on every face tastes the same.” One day, I wrote a scene based on real life, where Jenny’s husband brutally beats her on their gravel road. Shortly after writing the first draft of that scene, as I was listening to “You Are Not Alone” for the hundredth time, I realized that Jenny’s tears would have been mixed with gravel and blood that day—giving them a taste that most of us never experience, thankfully. And this realization made me question what it means to be alone, but it also made me ache in a new way for my mother, knowing she has gone through so much that I can’t relate to and maybe I can’t comfort, no matter how hard I try.
“With a Little Help from My Friends” by the Beatles
I discovered the Beatles when I was about fourteen years old—they weren’t on the one country station we could get as I was growing up in our holler—so I was surprised when my mother told me that she listened to them when she was a teenager. As I imagined her young life, I thought about a friendship she has had since then and which is still going strong. I modeled the character of Peggy after her lifelong friend and included that as a bright spot in Jenny’s life, which was otherwise often dull or painful. I love how this song has reminded me of the importance of friendship over many years, just as it must have for countless others in my mother’s generation, mine, and now my children’s.
“Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” by Donna Fargo
This song has always been my mother’s favorite and I knew I had to work it into the novel. It has always struck me as somewhat ironic that she loves it so much, with its overly cheerful chorus: Shine on me sunshine, walk with me world, it’s a skippidy doo da day, I’m the happiest girl in the whole USA.”
But through writing Jenny’s character, I realized my mother needed to hold onto hope, just as we all do, and these song lyrics could have provided her with a way to defiantly look forward to the future, no matter how challenging her life was in a given moment. Of course, this is also a love song and Jenny was eager for romantic love, which many of us mistake as the remedy for unhealed childhood pain. Regardless of whether it supported her denial or gave her hope, I’m glad now that my mother can still derive simple pleasure from a song that has been meaningful to her for almost fifty years.
“Stand by Your Man” by Tammy Wynette
I have to preface this by saying that I love this song and Tammy Wynette in particular. However, as I was writing Jenny’s story and imagining my mother’s life, I realized songs like this may have influenced her perspective on relationships for the worse. Released in 1969, it celebrates a woman’s ability to overlook her husband’s flaws and forgive him for “doin’ things that you don’t understand.” Jenny has an internal monologue in which she imagines what her married life will be like, and she thinks loving Rob unconditionally will be the formula for a happy marriage. Abusive relationships are difficult enough to navigate; if the cultural messages around us tell us that we just need to forgive and be compassionate, those messages can be misinterpreted as saying we should tolerate abuse. And so, while I can still enjoy this song and other idealistic notions about romance, I find it very important to listen to and think critically about all music.
“Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley
If I remember correctly, this one of the few songs that played on our radio when I was growing up that wasn’t strictly country. As I was writing about Jenny and Rob’s marriage, I imagined Jenny (and my mother) listening to this song and being able to relate to the narrator, who implores his lover to see the damage her distrust is causing. I see Jenny as a naïve young girl who initially thought she could convince Rob to accept her love and not to push her away with his abuse. Like many people in abusive relationships, she fundamentally misunderstands the problem because she does not think like Rob thinks; Rob is probably a psychopath, while Jenny has a normal psychology, but her low self esteem makes her vulnerable to predators like him. Listening to this song in the isolated holler, Jenny thinks she can help Rob—to be less jealous, to be more clear-minded in general—and that makes her think she can survive this marriage.
“He Stopped Loving Her Today” by George Jones
Ironically, this was George Jones’s first number-one hit in six years, and he recorded it after divorcing Tammy Wynette and going through a dark spiral into drug abuse himself. This song tells the heartbreaking story of a man who only stops loving his ex-wife when he dies, and the song structure stands out as one of the clearest examples of storytelling in music from my childhood. I wrote this song into the third section of Someplace Like Home, which is written from the first-person point of view of Charlie, Jenny and Rob’s daughter. Like Charlie, I grew up listening to my father talk about how much he loved my mother after she left him. He occasionally—very briefly—mentioned the idea that he had been too rough with her. And that was hard to make sense of, as a child. It probably helped further skew my understanding of what love should be, because I believed he loved her, as he did. It took me years to understand that his little remorse wasn’t enough, and his understanding of love still made room for violence—more like a murder ballad than a love song.
“Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” by Waylon Jennings feat. Willie Nelson
This song also appears in the third section of Someplace Like Home, which includes a lot of autobiographical material that my previous readers will recognize right away. As Charlie and her daughter sing along to this song in their car, Charlie reflects on how it was part of the soundtrack to her chaotic and painful childhood, but now it has a new meaning because her daughter loves it. In that sense, this scene represents one of the most significant themes in this book: Everything in life is constantly transformed. I used to love these old country songs because of what they did for me as a child who didn’t have much to enjoy in life. Now, I often love them because my children do, and they associate these songs with my love. I have come to believe that I will never have my childhood needs fulfilled by my parents but I get to experience something even better—fulfilling those needs for my children to the point that they can’t conceive of the lack.
“Way 2 Sexy” by Drake (with Future & Young Thug)
And now for something completely different…. Also in an autobiographical sense, I wrote about Charlie’s daughter quizzing her about different rap artists, which is juxtaposed to them listening to Waylon Jennings together. I used to say that I loved all music except rap and heavy metal; now, my children have lovingly forced me to listen to enough rap that I have a few favorite songs. Funny enough, this song samples “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred, which was released in 1991—I would have heard it occasionally at a skating rink.
In keeping with the concept of life constantly transforming, Charlie (and I, personally) is constantly thinking about how to create the life she wants, despite the weight of the life she was born into. The world around us changes, whether we are ready or not, whether we are whole or broken. And yet, we always have ties to the past—through songs, memories, and stories—that can remind us of what is important.
“Daddy’s Tune” by Zoe Speaks
This song comes from my good friend Carla Gover’s band. From the beginning, it sounds like it’s singing to Rob. These lines are sung early on: “I can’t help but ponder on your old age that came so early. You took a wife while still a boy, and children came soon after.” The song goes on to portray a complicated relationship between the narrator and his father, with the narrator focusing on his relationship with the next generation to redeem and overcome the faults of those that came prior. One of the things I love most about this song—aside from the beautiful, haunting melody—is that it also reflects the peace and resolve I gained from writing Someplace Like Home. We can’t fix the past, but we can choose a better future.
“Left Unsaid” by Friends Who Call
I left this song for last because in some ways, it aligns with the conclusion of Someplace Like Home. My son, the lead singer of Friends Who Call, is represented by the character of Orion in the novel. ”Left Unsaid” is part of a newer genre of music, not something from my, Charlie’s, or Jenny’s past. The lyrics explore the dark allure of a codependent relationship, which is a dynamic that leads us to look for salvation in other people, rather than in our own healing.
The song portrays a series of mistakes and misunderstandings perhaps best characterized by the lyric “And oh, what a fucking mess.” The speaker has a maturing perspective, as reflected by the declaration “Ain’t a cure for your growing pains/Couldn’t even dull the ache,” but the song ends with the frustration and futility of “Again my love feels misplaced.”
Reading the lyrics written by my son and hearing his voice across the airwaves, I believe we are getting better, generation by generation. This song is an attempt to grapple with relationships but also with an understanding of oneself—and the more we all engage in that work, the more likely we are to overcome the destructive patterns of the past. My children and many of their peers are much more self-aware and conscientious than previous generations at their ages. Seeing this gives me faith in people and our possibilities; it makes me believe in the ending of Someplace Like Home: “We can be better. We can do for the next generations what we needed done for ourselves. We start by telling a better story.”