Donna Seaman’s River of Books is a thoughtfully written and moving memoir about the power of books and reading.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A ‘constant reader’ who generously advocates for a wide diet of literature, from novels to poetry to narrative nonfiction to essays and all that lie between, Seaman counsels that ‘the more varied our reading, the more detailed, intricate, and vital our perceptions become.’ A lively and entertaining contribution to the shelf of books about books.”
In her own words, here is Donna Seaman’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir River of Books:
River of Books: A Life in Reading is a memoir-in-books that begins when I learned to read and follows the flow of books that guided me to my life as a book critic and editor for the book review magazine, Booklist. Along the way I write about my unconventional education, various rivers, working in libraries and a bookstore, and why reading and books and places devoted to books matter so very much.
Though books shape this finding-my-way memoir, music has also been a sustaining part of my life. When I was growing up in Poughkeepsie, New York, on the Hudson River, our household soundtrack emerged from radios tuned to classical and rock stations. My parents spun records downstairs while I listened to music in my bedroom, brooding and plotting, drawing, reading, and writing. After I left home for art school and beyond, I played music incessantly in my apartments, sitting and listening attentively or playing music to make doing chores tolerable or while dancing by myself, my preferred form of exercise. Music was also a bond with friends and lovers and the impetus for many adventures and misadventures, often wild experiences not included in my book-centric memoir. I’m not about to disclose them here, either. But I am happy to share some of my own personal anthems, songs I sang along to (so badly!) or wept or danced to in the hope of chasing away the blues with the exhilarating power of passionate, virtuoso, and transcendent performances.
As with writing River of Books, when I had to let so many books float by, forcing myself to reel in only the most crucial, I had to leave off many beloved songs as I created this playlist. No Beatles? No Rolling Stones? Bob Dylan? Marvin Gaye? Sonny Rollins? Patti Smith? Tracy Chapman? Oh, the torment of prioritizing, of curation! After much deliberation, I’ve selected cuts that I loved during my wonder years, those painful years, those stormy, lost and found years. Here are songs I heard on the radio, songs shared by friends’ older siblings, favorite songs on albums once I started acquiring my own. These are indelible cuts that I can listen to on my brain radio anytime. They’re woven into my DNA. These songs helped me channel my anger and my longing, my cynicism and my romanticism. I love lithe and brilliant lyrics and ravishing virtuoso instrumental performances. Music pulsing with soulfulness and protest, mischief and sexiness, wit and drama, heartbreak and redemption. Songs that pound open the door to the prison of the self, songs that lift your spirit and reconnect you to the human continuum, to life’s ebb and flow, light and dark. Songs that make you feel wholly alive and perhaps redeemable.
I Am a Rock, Simon & Garfunkel
“I am a rock, I am an island” How this line resonated with me when I was a moody, skeptical, guarded girl. In River of Books, I write about my fascination with the word “island” when I was a new reader: “I loved how the word was two words but wasn’t pronounced that way. I loved the very thought of a small irregularly shaped splotch of land surrounded by water. A holdfast, a place of solitude.” I was and I remain someone who needs space and time alone. I sought refuge in my bedroom, nursing my wounds and seeking wisdom and liberation in reading. I felt validated by the line: “I have my books / And my poetry to protect me.” I’m also, like the singer, a window gazer (“Gazing from my window to the streets below”), admiring the nearby world framed like a painting, like a movie, with me witnessing the changing light and shadows, rain and snow, passing birds, squirrels, people, and dogs, all at a safe remove. So much so that an elementary school teacher moved me to the other side of the classroom. Paul Simon’s declaration that he is a rock, imperious to pain was aspirational for hypersensitive me. I wanted like him, to be “shielded in my armor.”
“I Am a Rock” is not a lament, nor a gentle ballad of aloneness. Instead, it’s a bravado declaration of independence, an upbeat assertion of self-sufficiency, of strength and resourcefulness. But even though the speaker rejects friendship and love in self-defense (“I have no need of friendship/ friendship causes pain / It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain”), the song is not performed alone. Instead, Simon belts it out in stirring harmony with Art Garfunkel, backed by a band amplifying the powers of isolation and, ironically, contradicting it.
(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin’s elevating song of womanly empowerment is the opposite of Paul Simon’s “I Am a Rock” with its pull-up-the-drawbridge lyrics. Here the singer has opened herself to love and found a new appreciation for life and for herself, body and soul, as well as for womanhood, which is so often and so insidiously maligned. As a girl chronically insecure about every aspect of my being, Aretha’s unabashed, impassioned ode to the transformative power of sex was thrilling. All my anxious longing for romantic love, all my agitated confusion as a shy if oddly daring young woman was soothed by Aretha’s wholehearted embrace of erotic pleasure.
Aretha’s voice, as always, is exhilarating, resonant with spirit, pain, and joy. Her tone and range are so rich, so lush, so vital. This is both a song of earthly happiness and soulful gratitude for life, a hymn to womanliness and love, to expression and realization. I loved every implication of what a “natural woman” could be. A woman who was herself, who wore what she wanted to wear, said what she wanted to say, did what she wanted to do, and did not deny her body or its hungers. Her lover sprung the lock on her happiness and her power and her true self was released. She came into her full being.
I did sense danger, however, in giving the man too much credit, in becoming too grateful and too attached. This verse worried me:
Now I’m no longer doubtful
Of what I’m livin’ for
And if I make you happy
I don’t need to do more
I had no doubt that love was crucial, but boy-crazy as I was, I never imagined giving up my independence. That said, I soon discovered that I hated to let go, that I was traumatized by breakups. The gap between reason and feelings is vast.
It’s amusing to me now that the idea for a song for Aretha about a “natural woman” came from a man, Jerry Wexler, cofounder and producer for Atlantic Records, and that the lyrics were written by another man, Gerry Goffin. Carole King (she and Goffin were married at the time) wrote rapturous music. Carole King also recorded the song, and it also became a defining hit for her.
Later, as I found myself in situations that were far less conducive to ecstasy, Aretha’s RESPECT became a favorite and my credo.
Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” is a brilliant, slyly catchy, and essential eco-song, one that had an immediate impact on me as a young person awed by Rachel Carson and living along the magnificent, criminally polluted Hudson River, which people like musician Pete Seeger were devoted to rescuing and cleaning up. How I thrilled to Mitchell’s wise, widely applicable refrain:
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?
And its specific target: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”
There’s also her keen attention to Carson’s alert in Silent Spring:
Hey, farmer, farmer, put away your DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees, please
Please!
How clever of Mitchell to make this hard-hitting song so bubbly with its infectious upbeat pace and cheerful backup singers—that’s the way to get people to listen. This song has been raising awareness since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day.
I love so many of Mitchell’s songs. I could have chosen the exquisite River to echo my book’s settings and reigning metaphor. But it’s the title track on her rambunctiously saucy and intrepid ninth album, a double album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, that synced so electrically with my own recklessness. I found this shake-loose cut exciting and empowering. It’s intricate, frank, poetic, soaring, slivering, edgy, and gorgeous. Every word reverberated for me then, during my first wild years, and now, when my restlessness is more covert.
Mitchell draws on myth as she conjures opposites: the eagle and the snake, humans versus the rest of nature, Native American life versus the crimes of the invaders. This is another of Mitchell’s wry and disarming socially critiquing songs, complete with mocking snippets from “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s lowdown, a bit noir:
Our serpents love the whisky bars
They love the romance of the crime
But didn’t I see a neon sign
Fester on your hotel blind?
It’s also personal, sensual, vamping:
Behind my bolt-locked door
The eagle and the serpent are at war in me
The serpent fighting for blind desire
The eagle for clarity
What strange prizes these battles bring
These hectic joys, these weary blues
Puffed up and strutting when I think I win
Down and shaken when I think I lose
The driving guitar beat, and the precision of Mitchell’s rousing articulation of her complex lyrics are captivating. There’s no simple rock-song repetition here; instead, these imaginative lyrics are rife with observation and dissent, desire and vitality.
All the astutely written songs on this chromatically lush, careening, snake-hipped, winged, witty, explorative, and percussive album are worth multiple listens. Mitchell is accompanied by Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, Jaco Pastorius on bass, and Don Alias and Manolo Badrena on percussion.
I now feel the need to conduct a new Joni Mitchell immersion.
Take Me to the River, Al Green
I have to include one river song, so let it be the river song by Al Green, a classic with infinite impact. The perversity of love, Green’s screams, the punches of the horns, the heartbeat-steady bass and drums, all are incantatory and redemptive. This is a gospel of anguish, helplessness, and cleansing that brings us to catharsis.
All of Me, Billie Holiday
This is another classic that reverberated with me as I tried to cure heartbreak with music. Holiday’s rendition makes it endlessly evocative as she wrings out the wry drama of the lyrics with rich, tough and fragile expressiveness, with her signature blend of pain, wit, and resilience.
All of me, why not take all of me?
Can’t you see I’m no good without you?
Take my lips, I want to lose them
Take my arms, I’ll never use them
Add to that the commiseration of Lester Young’s saxophone solo and the it-will-be-all-right beauty of the strings and the band, and you’ve got a ballad to live by.
Angel from Montgomery, by Bonnie Raitt
How struck I was by this song’s plaintive and determined lyrics and music. Written by John Prine, this was a key feel-sorry-for-myself song. I was finding out that adulthood was hard and a bit of a grind. That living with a lover could sap the romance out of a relationship. That working lousy jobs to support creative endeavors took an emotional toll. Just barely scraping by, I found this song deeply moving; it spoke to me of the frustrations of fading dreams and the relentlessness of time. I was still young, but I felt weary and discouraged. While the lyrics are haunting, the music is ringing and rising. This song is good medicine. I love Raitt’s rough honey voice, her warmth and compassion, her bluesy, sexy phrasing, her chiming guitar playing. This song pegged my heart when I was struggling with intense angst and yearning.
And what a chorus:
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go
I Refuse to Lose, James Brown
How to choose only one James Brown cut? By realizing that you can’t go wrong. This is a real spirit-lifter, a push-back, a jump-up and dance-it-out number from the album Get Up Offa That Thing (Be sure to listen to this version.) “Let the good times roll,” Mr. Brown tells us. You have to cheer up, take heart, get back to it. This rousing, funky jam swings you out of your gloom. It’s a funny, teasing, joyous refusal to be thwarted, kept down, or underestimated. Full of punchy and sinuous horn solos, clapping and chanting, call-outs, party sounds, and a deep-into-the-earth beat, this is a raucous call to resist absurdity and brutality. Brown sings, “I refuse to lose” over and over; it’s a mantra, a spell, an affirmation, a fighter’s taunt. Brown refuses to lose and he doesn’t want anyone else to succumb either.
Right Off, Miles Davis
Again, how to choose one performance by Miles Davis, another genius and rebel warrior? Davis turned being cool into a weapon and then, like Bob Dylan breaking out of the strictures of folk music and going electric, Davis glided away from performing in small groups wearing suits and playing traditional instruments as jazz, that righteous leap of artistic freedom, began to acquire its own rigid conventions and expectations. Davis, too, understood the magnetizing power of electric guitars and organs, the propulsion of rock, and he made it his own without sacrificing jazz’s fluidity, nuance, and deep inner quest.
I reveled in the molten energy of all of Davis’ daring albums from this period: Bitches Brew, Live Evil, Agharta, Pangaea, Big Fun. But I’ll choose “Right Off” for this list. It’s the entire first side of the album Jack Johnson. At the start, Billy Cobham’s unceasing cymbals and drums dominate until they’re joined, dramatically, by Davis on trumpet, soaring, dipping, trilling, rat-tat-tatting. Eventually the trumpet makes a statement and the electric guitar, wielded by John McLaughlin, responds. The two engage like fancy-footwork fighters in the ring as Davis pays tribute to legendary boxer Jack Johnson, who became the first Black world heavyweight champion during the Jim Crow era, and whose victory over a white boxer triggered race riots.
After ten raucous minutes, all simmers down, the trumpet sighs and sings. It’s beautiful and searching, and then the band (which also includes Herbie Hancock on organ, Steve Grossman on soprano sax, and Michael Henderson on bass) surges again. “Right Off” is a work of commanding subtlety, of high tides and low, combat and meditation, ferocity and precision.
Bad Boy, Eddie Taylor
Musicians have been part of my life since high school, when friends formed a string band and performed in humble bars and roadhouses. When I ended up in Chicago, I was drawn into the city’s blues scene when my boyfriend began playing bass with singer and guitarist Eddie Taylor. I became a roadie of sorts, helping schlep equipment—why were so many gigs on cold, snowy nights?—passing a beer pitcher around for tips for the band in crowded, smoky clubs, and making sure to bring a thermos of piping hot coffee for Eddie, made the way he liked it, with lots of milk and sugar. Eddie was smart and funny and talented and rueful. He’d seen and survived it all: the ups and downs, snubs and betrayals, behind-the-scenes shenanigans and all-out tragedies, while the gap between his immense talent and his compensation was maddening. Eddie played classic blues by way of Mississippi and Chicago, and he had traveled the world. Now we had fun in town at the best of the blues clubs and at gigs in the region, including one at a racetrack, where, if memory serves, the band played between races on a stage-on-wheels that was hauled on and off the green. Eddie and company played on a party boat on Lake Geneva, and we hit the road and went to Kansas City. Eddie Taylor was a key figure in my early Chicago years and I’m grateful for the time I spent with him and his family. There’s not a whole lot of Eddie’s music online, but this is a signature song.
Don’t Get Me Wrong, The Pretenders
Chrissie Hynde was a revelation, fronting her band, The Pretenders, with allure and swagger. She’s whipsmart, utterly her own person, and caustically witty. I was exhilarated by the songs she wrote, including “My City Was Gone” and “Middle of the Road;” they are hard-driving, pissed-off, edgy, elegiac, evocative, and funny. In “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” you experience Hynde’s toughness and elegance and fully appreciate the sensual and taunting modulations of her voice. It’s a poetic, romantic, yet spiky song of attraction and skepticism, of love’s pitfalls and her own contrarian tendencies.
In this verse Hynde takes a fresh approach to love at first sight:
Once in a while, two people meet
Seemingly for no reason
They just pass on the street
Suddenly, thunder showers everywhere
Who can explain the thunder and rain?
But there’s something in the air
While these lines offer offhanded beauty:
Don’t get me wrong
If I split like light refracted
I’m only off to wander
Across a moonlit mile
Listening to Hynde and her band is always cheering and recalibrating. Their music is a boost, inspiration to stop fretting, to find the humor in one’s predicaments, to be mad instead of glum, assertive instead of passive. To strut instead of sulk.
Mandinka, Sinéad O’Connor
Sinéad O’Connor’s first album, The Lion and the Cobra, arrived like a meteor. Who was this gamine beauty with the shaved head and the monumental voice and the no-bullshit attitude? Another tough gal, like Hynde, O’Connor lifted my spirits. As readily as “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” surfaces on my inner playlist, I’ll call out “Mandinka,” a swooping, rocking, vocally thrilling song widely open to interpretation even in light of O’Connor’s explanation that it is about the Mandinka people of Africa. I loved the pulse of it, the call for some kind of justice, for something courageous and vibrant. This was woman power in a startling, arresting, and disarming mode, gorgeous and angry, delicate and implacable. “Mandinka” is good kickass music after a day that has you feeling ground down, stomped on, erased.
It starts out a bit poetically, and then turns fierce and political as the beat and the rise and fall of her extraordinary voice take hold. This is a song that silences sadness and pulls you into its bravado enchantment.
I’m dancing the seven veils
Want you to pick up my scarf
See how the black moon fades
Soon I can give you my heart
I don’t know no shame
I feel no pain
I can’t see the flame
But I do know Mandinka
I do know Mandinka
I do know Mandinka
I do
The Great Curve, Talking Heads
“The Great Curve” is a wholly transfixing work. Deeply inspired by Fela Kuti and Afrobeat, it’s six-and-a-half minutes of entrancing, high-energy, intricately rhythmic and polyphonic sonic magic. With its tidal melody, ravishing harmonies, kundalini-raising drums and bass, and exceptionally lush layers and textures, it’s music for a holy ritual, for summoning the deities, for exorcising the demons, for cleansing one’s soul, for a leap into another dimension. It’s jazzy, it’s rock and roll, it’s voluptuous, it’s ecstatic.
Produced by Brian Eno and passionately and consummately performed by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth, and including a vehement guitar solo by Adrian Belew, “The Great Curve” is a work of innovation, intricacy, abundance, and vitality. Its lyrics are as complex and cosmic as the music: deep-breathing, sexy, and mysterious, celebratory and cautionary. Here’s the chorus:
The world moves on a woman’s hips
The world moves and it swivels and bops
The world moves on a woman’s hips
The world moves and it bounces and hops
A world of light
She’s gonna open our eyes up!
A world of light
She’s gonna open our eyes up!
She’s gonna hold it, move it (Hold! Move!)
Hold it and move it, (Hold! Move!)
Hold, Hold, Hold! (Hold! Move!)
Hold, and move it (Hold! Move!)
A world of light
She’s gonna open our eyes up!
This whirling-dervish performance allows us to escape the everyday, transcend the deadweight of the self, dance with the archetypes, sense the ancients in our blood, the sun and moon in our very cells. It’s an elixir.
Donna Seaman is the Editor-in-Chief and Adult Books Editor at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, an adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, School of Professional Studies, and a recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness; her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. She lives in Chicago.