Lola Milholland’s Group Living and Other Recipes is an eye-opening and imaginatively told exploration of community living through the lens of food.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“This thought-provoking memoir will resonate with those seeking solutions to the current loneliness epidemic, or for those challenging notions of what it means to live as an independent adult. Ultimately, it is an inspirational read about someone who consciously chooses to live according to her own values, without ignoring the work it takes to move through discomfort as it arises.”
In her own words, here is Lola Milholland’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Group Living and Other Recipes:
Recipes crown each chapter of Group Living and Other Recipes. When I mention them to other people, they often ask, “So they’re recipes to feed a crowd?!”
“No,” I respond quickly (although that would make sense in a book circling the topic of communal living). Instead, I chose recipes I’ve learned from people I love and, in some cases, have lived with. I wanted to illuminate something about each person, about their sway over my tastes, and about the influences we exert on each other in shared spaces. I also selected each recipe as a continuation of the themes from the chapter that came before: hot pot as a metaphor for camaraderie; broken rice salad to represent building something, tearing it apart, and starting anew.
These songs serve a similar function. Most were shared with me by loved ones. Like food, music becomes communal when played in shared spaces, and we play a lot of music in our house. Almost every one of these songs is about love, friendship, or the impact of closeness—the central themes of my book. But they aren’t your standard Top 40 fare, just as my household doesn’t follow the 3/4 nuclear family beat.
Groove to the Beat—Keith & Ken
As far as I know, the mysterious Keith Lyn & Ken Lazarus only recorded a few songs, one of many Jamaican acts in the 1960s that made pitch-perfect Rock Steady music and then disappeared into the ether. Their voices merge so seamlessly that it gives me goosebumps. The harmonies remind me of lovers or best friends who can finish each other’s sentences. The line “Smile a while and give your face a rest now” always feels upside down. Is smiling a form of rest? But why not, when you have such easy, guileless company?
Zadie Bobo—Ernesto Djédjé
My boyfriend, Corey, and I were driving along the rim of the Grand Canyon in the fall of 2020 when he first played this song for me. I began dancing loosely and happily in my seat, stretching my seatbelt to its farthest length so I could lean out the window, feel the wind, and glimpse down the precipitous cliffs.
Ernesto Djédjé hails from the Ivory Coast and pioneered a blended, upbeat dance-music style with punchy horns and melodic guitar. This is party music for keeping your spirits high. Because of the moment when Corey shared it with me, this song reminds me of the ways we all tried to keep our spirits up as they flagged during months of COVID isolation—and how small acts of sharing felt healing both for the person receiving and the one giving.
Somebody’s in Love—Sun Ra & The Cosmic Rays
My brother, Zak, first burned me a copy of Sun Ra’s compilation Singles when I was visiting him in Rochester, New York, where he was in graduate school, over my middle school Thanksgiving break. We played the album on repeat as we drove the lead-gray November streets, and the heaviness lifted thanks to our mutual delight. Sun Ra’s music has felt right at every era of my life since, because Sun Ra is cosmic and I need vastness and vision.
This doo-wop “Space-Bop” earworm was one of my favorites at age twelve, and I still love it today. On the surface, the crooning harmonies of the Cosmic Rays describe unrequited love, the repetition of “somebody’s in love with somebody” always referencing someone new: “John’s in love with Joan / Joan’s in love with Jim / Jim’s in love with someone I know.” But when I was a prepubescent girl, it meant something more expansive, exciting, and futuristic: that someday I would be in love with somebody; that someone, somewhere, is always in love with somebody. That idea didn’t feel unrequited—it felt messy, hot, and promising.
Zungguzungguguzungguzeng—Yellowman
This Dance Hall megahit became the anthem for a backpacking trip that my friends Peter, Gary, and I took in the Wallowa Mountains in Eastern Oregon. The long five-hour drive from Portland was eased by Dance Hall. I kept singing this song—also one of my dad’s favorites—throughout the trip. We each have partners, but none joined, which, given the co-ed nature of our party, truly scandalized Peter’s grandmother. After our first night camping near a pine that was bonzai-ing itself over icy Mirror Lake, I discovered I had lice. The next several days, after long mornings hiking, Peter spent hours in the afternoon pulling the nits from my hair as his partner Lauren had taught him to do when she’d had them. After our trip ended, in another act of love, Gary shaved his head to avoid potentially infesting his partner Manu’s long, flowing mane.
Yellowman said of the word “zungguzungguguzungguzeng,” “It can mean anything.” For example: that backpacking trip with my dear friends was so itchy, so uncomfortable, and so sweet. Zungguzungguguzungguzeng.
Heywete (Instrumental)—Tèshomè Meteku
Portland, Oregon, where I live, has a large Ethiopian and Eritrean (and specifically Tigrayan) population, and they occasionally bring some of their biggest stars to town to play shows. I’ve never seen Teshome Meteku, but I’ve been lucky enough to see Mahmoud Ahmed and Hailu Mergia, and both concerts felt like encounters with supernovas. Since Zak gifted me my first Ethiopiques comp, I’ve been devoted to the long-running series, which introduced so many people outside of Ethiopia to the profound music being made within—a whole galaxy of outsize talent. Meteku makes jazzy, shoulder-bouncing music, his voice flowing like liquid. The keyboard sets the mood; the horns come in as backup singers. I can’t help but snap my fingers and nod my chin. For me, this is hangout music.
I’m So Proud—Pat Kelly
I love Jamaican soul and a crooner who isn’t too schmaltzy. This song teeters right on the edge for me, but it also cracks my heart wide open. It reminds me of when I was in my twenties and became part of a close group of friends. Although Kelly is singing about his sweetheart, the lines “I’m so proud of you / I’m so proud of being loved by you” describe the gift that group of friends gave to me—which I write about in the book—almost too precisely. Pride is an intense emotion to feel for oneself. In our culture, it’s embarrassing to admit pride, to others or to oneself (even those of us raised outside the Christian and Jewish faiths know the aphorism, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall”). But oh,to feel pride for someone else. And oh, to feel their pride in you. What a strange pleasure! My friends’ love and our mutual pride pulled me out of a hard place of self-disgust, and I’ve loved them ever since.
Let’s Live—Aaron Neville
Speaking of crooners, my ear is tuned to love Aaron Neville’s smooth voice on this track. The way he sings the word “love” across five notes, then eight notes—so lingering and flexible—affects me powerfully. When he sings, “Let’s live before it’s too late,” and “Why deprive yourself of the wonders of life,” I feel like he’s giving me a pep talk for living in the twenty-first century. We need constant reminders that caring enormously about upsetting and heartrending things shouldn’t prevent us from enjoying each other’s company and taking time to bask in the beauty around us. It’s really the only way.
Enola Gay—Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
My roommate Chris loves to karaoke—in fact my whole friend group loves to karaoke—and recently he chose this hit from 1980. I’d never listened to it carefully, but as the words scrolled on the screen before me, I realized, to my excitement and horror, that this synth-pop anthem is deeply anti-war. Famously, Enola Gay was the plane the United States deployed to drop an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In the book, I write extensively about my uncle Doug’s anti-military and anti-nuclear activism. I feel a sense of covert glee when I spy his sentiment in unexpected places, wishing as I do that it will continue to grow, song by song, person by person.
Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It?—Buffalo Springfield
You know the scene that introduces the Summer of Love in every movie. Every time, on comes Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”: “There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear.” My mom lived in San Francisco during that summer of 1967. Once, when I called her while I was visiting the Bay and asked what she’d do if she were there, she casually said, “Maybe take some acid and look at flowers.”
I’m a huge Neil Young fan, but it took me a while to learn that he was a member of Buffalo Springfield, and even longer to listen to their songs, jaded as I was from the heavy soundtrack rotations. This song captures my heart though. I find the combination of reticence, annoyance, and sweetness relatable and charming. Does everything always need to be put into words? Can’t we learn to communicate in other ways?
This I Know (Demo)—The Kinks
My friend Rachael noted that this song sounds an awful lot like Elliott Smith, who was a big deal in Portland when I was a kid. I can recall eating pizza with my dad at American Dream on NE Glisan St. when I was ten, in 1995, and hearing Smith over the speakers for the first time. From the first chord, his pop-rock-folk acted as a kind of trance-therapy ushering me into my emotional teen years. I do love Elliott Smith, but it always sounds like hurt to me. This Kinks song, on the other hand, feels like a lullaby sung to a sweetheart as they fall asleep.
Sparrow Command—Dragging an Ox Through Water
Brian Mumford, who performs as Dragging an Ox Through Water, is one of my favorite living musicians. Fortunately, he’s a member of my community and plays regularly at perfect venues in our neighborhood, like Turn Turn Turn. His folk-rock-noise music is an uncanny mixture of experimental and approachable, catchy and melancholic, riven with piercing politics and easily accessed emotions. When he sings, I am on the edge of my seat, eyes glued, ears flooded, feeling alive. “Sparrow Command” lulls me into comfort while also hurting my heart. Is it a song about heartbreak because of a lost love? Heartbreak because of greater collective trauma? Whatever it is, it helps me feel my sorrow and it bandages my wounds.
You Don’t Know What’s Going On—Exuma
I’m obsessed with the Bahamian musician Exuma aka Tony McKay. I adore his tight, seven-song album Exuma, the Obeah Man from its beginning crickets to its finale of chanting and cymbals. Exuma conjures the musical traditions surrounding mystical practices that arose among enslaved Africans in the Caribbean—voodoo, festivals like Junkanoo, and the medicinal tradition of Obeah. This song, “You Don’t Know What’s Going On,” is a perfect encapsulation of the truth of existence: Why be too cocky or too insecure? None of us really knows what’s going on. Uncertainty doesn’t have to equal desperation. Instead, it’s an invitation to come together and care for each other: “Come go with me / Come take my hand / I’m going home.”
Mother’s Love—Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s sinuous, celestial piano music is what I turn to when words become too potent and disturbing. She died only this past March, at age ninety-nine. Emahoy lived a full life. Born in 1923, the daughter of a mayor in Ethiopia, she went on to study piano in Switzerland, sing for Emperor Haile Selassie, live as a prisoner of war in Italy, serve as a leading Ethiopian national music figure, and spend ten years as a nun, before adopting a reclusive life and devoting herself to music. Through her music, Emahoy touches the divine and gives us brief passage.
I share a love of her music with a broad community of devotees. Just this year, one of our local record shops, Mississippi Records, put out Souvenirs, her only collection of vocal songs. I can think of no better way to end a playlist than her melodies, which, like Sun Ra’s, open out onto the universe.
Lola Milholland is a food-business owner and writer. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunch.