Jedediah Berry’s novel The Naming Song is a marvel of post-apocalyptic worldbuilding.
Erin Morgenstern wrote of the book:
“The Naming Song is a wonder. A masterful, marvel-filled journey of language and ghosts, of monsters and meaning and mystery. This is a haunting, glorious train ride of a novel that feels both new and old at the same time, a creature of post-apocalyptic myth.”
In his own words, here is Jedediah Berry’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Naming Song:
Music—and this is probably plain from the title—is key to my novel The Naming Song. When the setting of this book revealed itself as a place that had lost all language in an apocalyptic event, the logic followed that music (along with theater) might serve as a tool for preserving the precious words and stories that are gradually reintroduced into the world.
The naming songs of the title are rhymes taught to children to help them remember newly delivered words, along with the webs of meaning that connect them. There’s more to it than that, but to say more would be saying too much. So here is this playlist, my own set of naming songs to map a course through the book.
“(Give Me Back My) Name,” Talking Heads
I’m fond of David Byrne’s apocalypses-in-song, which tend to feature an offbeat lightness shot through with desperation. The apocalypse suffered by the singer of this one is both personal (“something has been changed in my life”) and universal (“something must be returned to us”). A guitar bends toward—but never quite settles on—a certain pitch, like someone reaching for and failing to find a word.
The main character of The Naming Song is a courier of the names committee, one of those charged with delivering words to the things that lost them. She herself is nameless, however, walking the border between worlds—until she needs to run. This track, off 1985’s Little Creatures, captures a feeling of slip-sliding disorientation that might accompany someone seeking something lost in a world that’s stranger than they knew.
“Born on a Train,” The Magnetic Fields
The members of the names committee all live together on a train called the Number Twelve, and some of them were indeed born in one of its cars. I include this song for that reason, and for its ghosts and monsters, plus its sense of loss and leaving, all of which rhyme with elements of The Naming Song. I’ll have to go when the whistle blows / the whistle knows my name… So many train songs out there—and then there’s the train’s own song, full of restlessness and longing from whistle to wheels.
“Soul Alphabet,” Colleen
While writing, I generally listen to music without lyrics—like many writers, I can’t bear any extra words in my head when I’m facing the blank page. So often it’s electronic and instrumental tracks, anything from Tangerine Dream to Pauline Anna Strom, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith to Noveller. French composer Cécile Schott, performing under the name Colleen, is someone whose work I return to often (even some with lyrics)! “Soul Alphabet” feels like language under construction, its hypnotic brightness balanced by an alarming frenetic quality, plucked notes rolling under the surface, always threatening to tumble apart. That sense of playfulness is something I’m often aspiring to while writing.
“Funeral Singers,” Califone
In 2010, I took a girl to see Califone play live alongside a screening of All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, a film written and directed by the band’s lead, Tim Rutili. The film is about a medium who lives in a house full of ghosts. The ghosts wear all white, so naturally my date and I dressed all in white for the show. Maybe people thought we were part of the act, or unduly obsessed with the film or the band (neither of which we had seen before). Oh well, it was fun. The ghosts, or “funeral singers” in the parlance of the film, with their persistent presence and almost earthly solidity, were one of the inspirations for the ghosts in The Naming Song, including the patchwork ghost who is the courier’s closest companion. (As for the girl, she and I eventually got married, but that was much later, and neither of us wore white.)
“And Then There Was Fire,” The Suitcase Junket
Matt Lorenz of The Suitcase Junket is one of the most inventive songwriters and performers working today (if you get the chance to see him play live, you really should). I was thrilled to get to work with him some years back, when he composed an instrumental soundtrack to accompany my story in cards, The Family Arcana. What startled me about “And Then There Was Fire,” from his album The End Is New, is how close it feels to the concerns of The Naming Song. When Lorenz’s earthy crooning turns to lines like It got hotter and higher while I stared at the moon, he could be channeling my character Hand, the first namer, who broke the Silence by holding one hand in a fire until the pain summoned up the words hand and fire. The song is, of course, entirely Lorenz’s own, intoxicating in the way The Suitcase Junket always is when unearthing the mythic from the depths of his backwoods stomping grounds.
“Traveller in the Wonderland,” Susuma Yakota
I read somewhere that electronic musician Susuma Yakota, who died in 2015 at the age of 54, considered his album Symbol to be his masterpiece. It really is marvelous, composed of countless samples from classical music, cut and folded and overlaid with one another to form propulsive, dynamic compositions. It also serves as an excellent model for artists seeking to innovate by blending and reinventing familiar forms, styles, and genres. This song, with pieces plundered from works by Camille Saint-Saëns, sounds like an entire childhood that has packed up and gone to battle on behalf of Wonderland. In The Naming Song, only a few old stories survive from the world before the apocalyptic Silence, and one of them is known as the Story of the Child Who Went Underground. My hope is for the courier’s own adventure to similarly evoke Alice’s, and to suggest something of the transformative power of Yokota’s music.
“Carousing,” Alasdair Roberts
Some carousing does take place in The Naming Song, most of it aboard trains, though the namers have not yet divined or delivered the word carouse. The courier who does deliver the word will hopefully have a good time of it—but will carousing still be as much fun, once there’s a word for it? Anyway, Alasdair Roberts is probably my favorite living songwriter, and my excuse for including this song here is the following lines: Knower of knowledge and namer of names / Worker and shirker and player of games. As with so much of Roberts’s work, this song possesses a visionary quality derived from the blending of the mythic and the mundane. This would be a good one, surely, to accompany the drinking of some nameless spirits.
“Memories Are Now,” Jesca Hoop
This must be one of the most powerful songs written about escaping a poisonous partnership, a bruising yet triumphant meditation on memory, defiance, and forging one’s own path. In The Naming Song, the courier must face aspects of her past—particularly her father’s cruelties in her childhood—before she can see her own story through. I discovered “Memories Are Now” toward the end of writing The Naming Song and it broke something up in me, and helped me escape the last shadows of a long-ago abusive relationship. After that, I finally—finally!—finished this book. In this way, and maybe some others, my main character’s journey mirrored my own.
“Empty Trainload of Sky,” Gillian Welch
Let’s call this a bonus track, since it came out after I’d already finished the final edits on The Naming Song. But I knew I needed a Gillian Welch track on here, because she sings about places like many in the book—the kinds of places the courier visits to deliver the word trouble. And how could it not be this one, with its “boxcar blue / showing daylight clear through,” and its questions leading onward like the curve of an old rail line? It’s the kind of song I’d like to stow myself away on.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jedediah Berry’s playlist for his novel The Manual of Detection