The stories in Miles Harvey’s collection The Registry of Forgotten Objects beautifully connect the power of inanimate objects and human lives.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Harvey is prized for his exceptionally vivid narrative nonfiction… Here he brings astute observations and fluency in the unexpected to a book of imaginatively linked, mythic short stories lustrous with unruly passion, strange impulses, untenable loss, and the dogged pursuit of solace. … Harvey has created an intricately spun, deeply illuminating web of wondrously uncanny and compassionate stories.”
In his own words, here is Miles Harvey’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection The Registry of Forgotten Objects:
The stories in this collection are all connected to each other, though not in a particularly rigid or traditional way. Characters from the various narratives don’t necessarily know each other, nor do they share the same location, the same time period or even the same fictive reality. Instead, some of the tales are linked through inanimate objects, which show up in one story after another, taking on new meanings. Others are connected by a mysterious song, “everywhere yet evanescent,” which several characters listen to with wonder during the course of the book.
Music has a powerful ability to embody the irrational and the uncanny–precisely those unsettling aspects of our lives that intrigue me as a storyteller. For this list, I’ve selected one song for each of the tales in the book. It felt important to find a piece of music that somehow reflects the story’s subject matter, of course, but I was even more concerned with the vibe. My goal was to find a song that evokes the mood of each story, rather than simply echoing its themes.
The Drought: “Panorama” by Daniel Lanois
For this story, set in a town that endures 27 months without rain, I wanted a song that embodies the emptiness and aridness of the landscape, as well as the forlornness of its inhabitants.That’s why I selected this plaintive pedal-steel instrumental by the iconic music producer and songwriter Daniel Lanois. There’s also a sultriness to “Panorama,” making it the perfect score for the story’s doomed love affair between a TV weatherman and the wife of a local barber.
Beachcombers in Doggerland: “Ocean” by the Velvet Underground
At the beginning of this tale, a young man goes surfing and disappears forever, “no corpse, no clues, even the surfboard gone without a trace.” When I listen to the Velvet Underground’s majestic and foreboding “Ocean,” I can almost see him vanishing from view. “Don’t swim tonight, my love / the tide is out, my love,” Lou Reed sings in a half-whisper before moaning “Here come the waves” over and over, in what seems like a desperate and hopeless warning.
The Man Who Slept with Eudora Welty: “Traveling Shoes” by Caroline Herring
The novelist Eudora Welty believed that every piece of fiction contains “the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader”–a dynamic I explore in this tale about a chance meeting between two men, one of whom claims to have had a torrid affair with the famously chaste author. Like me, the Mississippi-born singer Caroline Herring draws creative inspiration from Eudora. Her “shared act of the imagination” with the late writer is this achingly beautiful acapella tune, which was inspired by Welty’s short story, “A Worn Path.”
Postcard from a Funeral: “Worried Man Blues” by Sara Carter
As a framing device for this tale of teenage love and vandalism, I used the lyrics of an old folk song, “Worried Man Blues,” which the great music critic Greil Marcus once described as having a sense of “absolute, almost supernatural loneliness.” The roots of this traditional tune have been lost to time, and the song has been covered (and altered) by everyone from the Carter family to Woody Guthrie to Van Morrison to Devo to Valerie June. I chose this recording by Sara Carter, because it’s both homespun and otherworldly–just like the uncanny visions that the main character experiences while ransacking abandoned farmhouses with her boyfriend.
Complete Miracles of St. Anthony: “Fish & Bird” by Tom Waits
“The ocean is filled with tears,” wails Tom Waits in this song of heartbreak and forced separation, one of my favorite pieces from his expansive canon. It’s a fitting theme song for this tale about a woman who yearns to be with her drowned son and a con man who yearns to be with her. “You cannot live in the ocean,” Waits sings. But the woman has other ideas.
Why I Married My Wife: “Not Ashamed” by Dolly Varden
Dear friend, there’s gonna be trouble–so opens this darkly beautiful ditty by one of Chicago’s best-kept secrets, the country-soul band Dolly Varden. I knew I needed a particularly complex love song to capture the vibe of this tangled story, in which a man is willing to lose everything for a woman–including his brother, his pro baseball career and his left forearm. And despite its gorgeous melody, there’s nothing saccharine about “Not Ashamed.” Singer Steve Dawson has noted that the song appears to be “about a relationship but might just be about playing music from the heart.” And that pretty much nails the theme of “Why I Married My Wife.”
The Master of Patina: “Feels Like We Only Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala
Tame Impala’s hallucinatory and sublimely melancholic piece of psychedelic pop sets the mood for this tale about an artist who attempts to reverse time after discovering an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures.
Four Faces: “Strangers” by Lucius
For this story about a woman who keeps encountering her double–or maybe herself–on the streets of New Orleans, I turned to this tune about a pair of strangers who come to believe “we are not two, we are one.” Instead of the original by the Kinks, however, I opted for a haunting cover by the indie band Lucius, whose singers, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, are known for looking and dressing alike–a joint persona just right for this tale about doppelgangers.
The Pied Piper of Fuckit: “Subterraneans” by David Bowie
David Bowie’s “Low” is one of my all-time favorite albums. Although I’ve probably listened to this enigmatic masterpiece hundreds of times over the last 45-plus years, I never cease to find it unsettling and transcendent. The instrumental composition “Subterraneans”–a cramped crawl-space of sound with moody, multilayered synthesizers and what one critic has described as “visceral groans of a submerged chorus”–is the perfect soundtrack for a short story about two men who try to run who try to run away from life by digging an underground tunnel.
Balm of Life: “My Favorite Things” by Foxtails Brigade
“Where did all these things come from?” wonders the aging protagonist of this story, as she gazes around at the countless knick-knacks on the shelves of her cluttered house. “Where would they go after she was gone?” As she will soon learn, these objects can’t protect her from her fears–a revelation at the root of Foxtail Brigade’s disquieting cover of “My Favorite Things,” which turns the Julie Andrews version upside down, from cheery show tune to creepy lament.
Song of Remembrance: “The Night I Heard Caruso Sing” by Everything But the Girl
This story explores the way songs outlive us, the way they survive in the netherworlds of our collective unconscious and the way they sometimes offer us hope for salvation. The transformative power of a single melody–that’s the subject of Everything But The Girl’s sublime “The Night I Heard Caruso Sing,” which, like my tale, is set in a time when “the chains are loosed and the world runs wild.”
The Registry of Forgotten Objects: “St. Elmo’s Fire” by Brian Eno
The title story of my book is a piece of speculative fiction, set in a future age when countless commonplace objects from our own time have lost all meaning. The nameless characters of this tale have traveled from far away, bearing various unidentified artifacts to an isolated mecca called the Registry of Forgotten Objects. When I imagine their quest, I think of the surreal road trip “through the towns and on the highways” described in Brian Eno’s atmospheric fever dream, “St. Elmo’s Fire.” I hope this final tale of the collection will leave readers with the sense of being transported to another world, one both familiar and breathlessly strange–the same thrill I always feel as I’m swept through the dizzying soundscape of this song.
Miles Harvey is the author of The King of Confidence (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection), Painter in a Savage Land, and The Island of Lost Maps. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher. The Registry of Forgotten Objects is his first work of fiction.