In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jason Morphew’s poetry collection Eject City is impressive in its range and language.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote of the book:
“I’ve listened to lason Morphew’s poetic voice develop over many years. Eject City is the first full-throated singing of it. Here is authentic American word-music. wounded into form by what he describes as ‘fatherless energies.’ Dark, funny, painful, gutsy.”
In his own words, here is Jason Morphew‘s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Eject City:
A book of poems is always about music—in the sense of orbiting something, being about it—but the lyrical content of Eject City also directly addresses music. From roughly 1995 to 2007, I devoted the bulk of my time and energy to being a singer-songwriter. I released albums, toured the US and UK, moved to NYC and then to LA to pursue that vocation. It paid the rent and then it didn’t.
Eject City is a lot of things—a love song to the dead, a love song to the dying, a love song to the rising. But on a basic level, it’s a lot of poems about music.
Here’s my playlist:
“Fathers in the Clouds” by the Magnetic Fields
To set the tone for the book.
I dedicate Eject City to my father Gary Joe Morphew (1953-2018). The day he died, the Magnetic Fields’ 50 Song Memoir was still recent, and I drove the two-lane highways of rural Arkansas blasting this song on repeat in my rental car. Lyrically, it’s an example of the rule that extreme specificity results in universality. Playing it that loud, making Pike County my headphones, also revealed a strange and charming flaw in the recording—toward the end, it sounds like a channel gets blown. Check it out.
“Should I Go Home (Or Should I Go Crazy)” by Gene Watson
To accompany “Gene Watson.”
I have several GW records on vinyl, inherited from my father, who despaired of what he perceived to be a steep decline in the quality of Merle Haggard’s music after the Hag’s discovery of Willie Nelson, whom my father considered an insufferable hack. A Muppet, basically. So, in an admirably pure aesthetic spirt, Dad started listening to Merle Haggard imitators. He would play these mimics’ records to me on Saturday afternoons during our allotted every-other-weekends together, encouraging me to appreciate the richness of the vocal tones, the virtuosity of the accompanying players, clearly wishing the Hag still cared enough to practice what made him famous. This album has a beautiful cover.
“Courting Another’s Muse” by Jason Morphew and the Old Babies
To accompany “Ikey” and “When there was a music industry.”
I don’t know how anyone’s going to find this track from my album The Duke of Arkansas—I just gave it a five-click failing try—but Ikey Owens (1974-2014) is outrageously good on this recording, which I got live on an Alesis Digital Audio Tape in the Eagle Rock warehouse where I lived with guitarist Matt Snow and drummer Tom Sanford. In the late 90s, along with bassist Brian Abel and keyboardist Ikey, we comprised Me and the Old Babies. Ikey is the reason several of my best recordings are my best, and he went on to play with the Mars Volta and Jack White and nine-thousand other excellent bands, often simultaneously. Ikey’s professional promiscuity taught me to approach the working world as if you can do it all, because if you ever get to the point where you have more gainful employment than you can handle, you’ve made it. He was sly and generous and as talented as anyone I’ve known. He used to ride in the back of my roofless Jeep Wrangler from Long Beach to Cole Studios in rush hour, puffing on his asthma pipe, wearing a wife-beater and Buddy Holly glasses.
“Before They Make Me Run” – The Rolling Stones
To accompany “Visitation” and “Brakes.”
In my family, the truth has always been a scandal. I was banned from my father’s funeral because I had the temerity to publish the correction of a significant lie in his obituary. The lie was that he had two other biological children. These people were really his stepchildren. I am my father’s only progeny—a vexed distinction, to say the least. My teenaged parents conceived me in the backseat of my Chevy-salesman maternal grandfather’s ’55 Chevy, on the shoulder of a road groping the outskirts of Glenwood, Arkansas. Virgin mom was seventeen, ambitious Dad was eighteen. They married. It was bad. They divorced. It was worse. I always felt like I was fighting for my father to know me, to acknowledge me as his. I’ll be damned if I let a latecomer take that blood-fought, often miserable distinction from me. Especially when it’s untrue.
“Just As I Am” (low-church Protestant hymn)
To accompany “Unconditional Love.”
This is the song my dad wanted sung at his funeral, and I’m told it was. It’s on the funeral program I keep in my desk. It’s a strange thing, being raised a Southern Baptist, as Dad and I were. You’re taught that you’re worthless, born of sin, destined for eternal torment in hell…unless you say Billy Graham’s three-pronged prayer and ceaselessly iterate your salvation by never for an instant neglecting to Believe. I’ve learned that other religions don’t as frantically convince their followers that they’re worthless. I’ve found—and I think that my father’s premature death reinforces this finding—that absorbing the Panicked Worthlessness Doctrine leads to suicide by slow degrees. But since the world is also worthless and the only thing that matters is eternal paradise in Heaven, maybe the quicker the better, right?
“Life is…Too Short” by Too Short
To accompany “I love you time,” “Suzanne,” “Suzanne II,” and “Murder Rap.”
It’s possible that I’ve listened to this track more than any other recording in my life. It has always enthralled me. The rapper’s name is Too Short. The song is called “Life is…Too Short.” It’s simultaneously arrogant and existential. Yes, please. My BFF Lance Porter used to blast this song while racing us home in his 1987 Nissan Pulsar to make curfew after sucking face with Hot Springs High girls in condos overlooking shit-brown Lake Hamilton. Life was too short then, life is too short now. It’s eternal that way.
“Murder Rap” tells the true story of an afternoon I spent with my wife the novelist Lauren Kate, streaming local Denver news as FBI agents dug up a yard that my first cousin and childhood hero Barry Morphew had recently landscaped. The agents were looking for the body of Barry’s missing wife Suzanne, whose decomposed remains have more recently been discovered. Poems consist of imagery and metaphor, but the longer I live the more I see that art depicting the insane fantastical truth around us is the strangest, most conceptual expression there is. Bosch painted what was invisible but real. I can’t stop idolizing Barry, despite my conviction that he murdered his wife in cold blood. The only thing weirder than love is family.
“Sweet Child O’Mine” by Guns N’Roses
To accompany “Bell’s Palsy.”
Slash performed at a concert thanking the donating parents of my kids’ public elementary school in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. If you think that’s an annoying sentence to read, imagine writing it, much less living it. On the night of the concert, I had Bell’s Palsy, which renders half of your face lifeless, droopy, dead. So when I saw a drunk local caterer to the stars hitting on my wife, only half of my face was able to register disgust. The other half was anybody’s guess. This is a shape poem, one of two in the book. I’ve long tried to write a poem called “Lover’s Palsy,” which is also a thing, and a horror movie waiting to happen.
“San Francisco B.C.” – Silver Jews
To accompany “Where is all the fun hidden?” and “Jerry Jones.”
On the day my family and I visited the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in post-dystopian Dallas, Texas, singer-songwriter and poet Dave Berman was committing suicide. I didn’t know it at the time, of course. Nor did I realize that Dave was from Dallas, as my wife Lauren is (which is why we were there). But I knew that failed suicide Owen Wilson was from Dallas, and there he was in the museum, narrating the Big Bang.
Berman called his band the Silver Jews. In an interview before his death, he said that if you’re having kids now, you’re just not thinking. Not thinking is one of my characteristic traits. I choose this song, despite the wrong city in the title, because it’s so good, and because the cover band I was in with poet Joe Wenderoth—the House Crackers—used to perform it. I was once introduced to Berman, backstage at a CMJ showcase in NYC. When informed I was the creator of the album Transparent, he threw his head back and laughed.
I have lived in San Francisco. Bona tera, mala gens.
“Opus 132 in A-Minor” – Beethoven
To accompany “Classical Music” and “Naramore Sonata #1 in T-Minor.”
Two married Harvard Law School graduates lived across the street from my dad in 1990s Little Rock. I have no idea why they were there. I never met them. Dad said they were impressed that I was at Yale and that I had a lot of vinyl. One unsurprising day, the Crimson crüe abandoned Arkansas, leaving behind their entire collection of classical records for me. This is how I discovered the most terrifying music I’ve ever heard, the Budapest String Quartet’s recording of Beethoven’s “Opus 132.” This is suicide on wax, opening onto unspeakably unearned joy, followed by a soft descent. It truly frightens me. I look for things to hold onto when I hear this music. Once Lauren and I heard the LA Phil play it at the Disney Music Hall. I tried to explain why I was crying to the teenaged ushers. Lauren gently pulled me along.
The Naramore poem may seem surreal, but it’s absolutely true. Look him up—Judge Wade Naramore of Garland County, Arkansas. Needless to say, if Judge Wade weren’t white and a judge, he’d be spending the rest of his life in one of Arkansas’ finest penitentiaries.
“Be-Bop-A-Lula” by Gene Vincent
To accompany “The Paris Review.”
When impressively rich and cultured students at Yale and Harvard used to ask how a poor hick with no connections got into Yale, I would say that in high school I published a poem in The Paris Review. Total lie. I used to lie a lot when I was young, a skill I perfected during the four-hour drives between Corning, Arkansas and Hot Springs, when my dad would get twelve-year-old me for our staggered weekends together. I filled those eight round-trip hours with the biggest whoppers I could devise—that I was to play the Paul McCartney role in a group called the New Beatles, that I was already getting recruitment letters from the basketball programs of Indiana and Kentucky. My dad would nod and say, “Is that right?” while lighting his next Marlboro Red with the one he’d just finished. These lies reflected my father’s passions. On one of those weekends in Corning, watching commercials on late night TV, he relented and let me order a rockabilly cassette tape box set over the phone. This prized possession was stolen from the basement of my Yale residential college, one summer when I foolishly left it behind. I’d still lie now, if telling the truth weren’t more interesting.
“Diamonds on Your Birthday” by Ho-Hum
To accompany “Slow Burn.”
As I type this, on January 19, 2025, the Great Fire of Los Angeles rages around me. The air is full of lead, asbestos, and ash. My family was evacuated last week, came back home, read the news, and self-evacuated again. Now we’re home, staying indoors, anxiously eyeing the sky. We live in Laurel Canyon, and for many years the idea of fire has obsessed me. What makes a landscape lovely also makes it deadly. This poem came to me a couple years ago, as I was writing the pilot script for a TV show that mashed up Shakespeare characters in the same world. It wasn’t my idea—a producer approached me and asked me to write it for him. Every time I turned in another draft, the producer would tell me to make the story more of a “slow burn.” As with the vast majority of the many scripts I’ve written, a show never materialized. But a fire did. Ho-Hum is my all-time favorite rock band and appears in the poem that way.
“Overture” from Idomeneo by Mozart
To accompany “Fucking in Teatro La Fenice.”
Lauren and I have been married for sixteen years. I don’t know how I got so lucky. She saved my life and continues to do so daily. I’m not easy to live with (see above). Living with Lauren, however, is remarkably easy. We’re partners in love and work. We’re parents of two shining souls. We have also been known to get down in opera boxes.
Jason Morphew lives with his family in Los Angeles and teaches at Stanford Online High School. Eject City, is his second full-length collection of poems.