In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Thomas Morris‘s collection Open Up is inventive, funny, and filled with characters who sing with life.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“No matter how abject the characters, their hope feels well-earned thanks to Morris’s impressive ability to plumb their emotional depths. This is unforgettable.”
In his own words, here is Thomas Morris‘s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Open Up:
Open Up is a suite of five stories, some short, some long, that took me six years to write. Below are the songs that influenced the course of the book, and/or are songs I strongly associate with the strange years from which these stories emerged.
STORY 1: WALES
‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ – Andy Williams
A ten-year old boy attends his first ever football match with his father. His parents have recently separated and he hasn’t seen his dad in three months. What happens next? You can read the story here.
At one point, I considered calling the story “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” after this song: it’s been the Welsh football supporters’ unofficial anthem since a 1993 BBC Wales Sport promo. But in the end. I opted for ‘Wales’. It felt less authorial, more open. I have other reasons, but you don’t need to know about them.
STORY 2: ABERKARIAD
Jupiter 4 – Sharon Van Etten
Though it’s my US debut, Open Up is actually my second published book. I’m from Wales originally and have lived in Dublin, Ireland, most of my adult life. After I published my first book in 2015, I saved up some money, and decided to move back to Wales to live with my mother who on a farm, on a mountain, to write Book Two. I thought: I’ll live here for a year, write a book, then move back to Dublin. I hadn’t grown up on the farm, and prior to my moving there I had tended to only stay for a couple weeks at a time during the holidays. The farm is a quiet place, and my book collection is there, so I thought it would be a good environment in which to get a lot of reading and writing done. What I hadn’t taken into account was the difference between visiting the farm for two weeks in summer – and actually living there, on top of a mountain, with my mother during winter, when I am thirty years old and can’t drive. In short: things got odd.
After a year of going mad on the farm, I moved to Cork City in Ireland to be Writer in Residence at University College Cork. I didn’t know many people in the city, and I was feeling really shit about my writing. I felt completely unable to progress anything, and I was losing motivation by the day. When I wasn’t teaching, I felt utterly bored and restless and useless. Eventually, after a long period of doing no writing whatsoever, I started playing and writing things with talking animals – just to amuse myself. Then one day I started mucking around with something about a seahorse.
Starting out, I knew as much about seahorses as anybody else: that it’s the males who get pregnant. But once I wrote a few lines I stumbled on a premise that felt like it might have some heat: a story about a seahorse whose mother “abandoned” him before he was even born, and a father who insisted she was coming back. I didn’t know where any of this was going, though, so I put aside the pages, and got on with life.
A year later, I was living back on the farm in Wales, and I revisited these pages about the seahorse; some energy was drawing me back to the idea, but I didn’t have a story, and I couldn’t find a way into the material. And then Sharon Van Etten released her album “Remind Me Tomorrow” – and I listened and I listened, and the album ended up having a huge bearing on the emotional register of the sentences I began writing. I wrote entire passages listening to “Jupiter 4”, as well as the track ‘Hands’. Suddenly, these songs – their mood, tone, atmosphere – pushed me through the choppy waters of the story when I was stuck and had no idea where to go.
‘Sea of Love’ – Cat Power (cover version)
Developing ‘Aberkariad’, I read quite a bit about seahorses. A year in, I learned that the males keep to one territory, the females to another, and that they meet in a mutual third to mate. So I took a dollop of poetic license, enlarged the scale, and gave this place a Welsh name of my own making: Aberkariad (‘Aber’ = the Welsh word for confluence of waters; ‘cariad’ the Welsh word for love.)
I first heard “Sea of Love” at a wedding. I was quite drunk and I typed the lyrics I into the notes app on my iPod, so that I could look up the song when I was sober. I loved the original Phil Philips version (which turns up later on in this playlist) but I’m also obsessed with cover versions. When I fall in love with a song, I’ll spend hours on YouTube looking up covers, watching and listening to the ways in which the same words and tune can sound entirely different when sung and played by another human.
‘Floating’ – Julie Cruise
I spent the first couple months of the 2020 lockdown living on that farm in South Wales, falling in love with someone over the phone in Dublin, often staying up till 5 or 6 in the morning taking to them. One evening, I went out for a walk into the woods, listening to this song, and I floated the whole way. The next morning (well, it was afternoon by the time I woke up) I went back to work on ‘Aberkariad’.
‘Mary’ – Big Thief
The scale of this song! The way it evokes a whole universe, an entire cosmos of feeling! On this album, Adrienne Lenker starts doing something she’d go on to do a lot more of in her songs: it’s as if she opens up a lyrical groove and just unspools it like ribbon:
With our aching planet, high and smiling
Cheap drink, dark and violet
Full of butterflies, the violent tenderness
The sweetest silence
The clay you find is fortified
We felt some focus, fade the line
The sugar rush, the constant hush
The pushing of the water gush
When I first heard this song, I stopped in the middle of the street to listen through till the end. It was spring, the sun was setting, and I felt still and calm and stirred, knowing I had just encountered something that touches the eternal.
‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’ – Neutral Milk Hotel
Another song mentioning the sea; and a song that has captivated me for over a decade now. One thing I aim for in my own work is intensity, and this song has an intensity that I really fucking love and admire. It’s not a song for all moods, but when I need it, I reach for it, and the final lines still knock me sideways.
‘Floe’ – Philip Glass
Did I mention intensity? I love listening to this song during night-walks, the landscapes around me transforming in time with the music. I listened to this song over and over while writing ‘Aberkariad’, especially the scenes set in Aberkariad itself. ‘Floe’: it’s an underwater factory, where each horn-toot is a chimney, pumping out thoughts and feelings!
Story 3: Little Wizard
‘Lost Cause’ – Beck
‘Little Wizard’ is set on a soul-sapping British winter weekday evening, when it’s already dark as you leave work. The protagonist is a man named Michael, who is known as Big Mike to his friends, because he’s 5 foot 3. Mike feels victimised by his boss; he is skint; he is confused, stressed, sad, and dissociating. He finds comfort in football, food, and his childhood friend Rhian. During a phone call, she urges him to take a risk in his life. And then he does…
Story 4: Passenger
‘Peacebone’ – Animal Collective
Synopsis: a man and woman go on their first holiday together. The man falls apart.
I worked on this story for four years. Each time I thought it was complete, some inner voice told me to go back in, and go deeper. For a long time, the story moved quite mechanically between the character’s interior and exterior; at some stage, very late in the process, I realised that the shroud between the two realms is very thin indeed – and maybe we don’t always know in which reality we’re residing. Looking at the story now, I can see the ways in which our inner landscapes are tablecloths which we pull out of ourselves to picnic on in the outer world. If you have an anxious inner picnic blanket, you’ll likely have an anxious picnic. As the song says: adjust your insides!
‘Spring 1’ – Max Richter (recomposed)
I didn’t hear this version until I was final edits on the stories. It was winter, but listening to the track on loop I felt as if I was soaring through a blossoming spring. Listening to the song helped me find the green shoots that were trying to push through in ‘Passenger’.
Story 5: Birthday Teeth
‘Daylight Matters’, Cate Le Bon
In this story, Glyn is twenty-years old and lives with his depressed, agoraphobic mother. He identifies as a vampire, and stays up into the late hours, “conversing” with fellow vampires, and moderating the philosophy forum on a major vampire website. The story takes place over one night and one day, but covers a lot of time, a lot of memories, including a long unspooling all about Glyn’s relationship with a woman named Alice…
The story took me two years to write. For the first year, living on the farm, I inadvertently kept the hours of a vampire, working very late into the night, and getting into bed at 5am. The story went into some really dark places and I could never get it work, probably because I was depressed in a way that stifled any meaningful capacity for imagination. After a while, and some time away in Cork, I resurfaced and managed to find in the work a lighter strain that was able to hold everything together.
For a number of years, I developed ‘Birthday Teeth’ with Lisa McInerney for a TV series; alas, in the end broadcasters turned it down. But in imagining the tone of that show, I made several playlists, and all of them included tracks by Cate Le Bon. If a TV show of the story is ever made, I will insist that Cate Le Bon is invited to appear, perhaps performing at the Vampire Ball.
‘All Of Me’ – Billie Holiday
As I say, I went through a tough time with this story. When my headspace started improving, I began stretching in the morning and just kept on top of daily life admin. I have very fond memories of afternoons in that room on the farm, listening to Billie Holliday. The atmosphere was suddenly different: there was calmness, and I could finally think again.
This song speaks, I think, to an unspoken feeling in ‘Birthday Teeth’: you left me distraught. And yet, the song’s tone is oddly, beautifully, defiant. I’ve just finished reading Holiday’s Lady Sings The Blues, and her defiance leaps off every single page.
‘Cellophane’ – FKA Twigs
FKA Twigs’s voice seems to channel feeling from such a deep place here: a place before and beyond language.
Filming the video for this song, she was recovering from fibroid surgery, and had to work incredibly hard to get into the physical condition to perform. Her artistry in this video is breathtaking; and there’s something astonishing about the combination of her physical strength, her mastery of movement, the plaintiveness of her voice, and the vulnerability of her questions.
I first heard this song after completing ‘Birthday Teeth’, but I had both the song and video in mind when I was working on the final edits.
‘Sea of Love’ – Phil Phillips
Call back!
This version of the song plays on the radio at one point in the story. It cost me a couple hundred dollars to clear the rights to quote a couple of the lines – and it was absolutely worth it.
‘See, Know’ – Julianna Barwick
The five stories of Open Up represent a slim wedge of the work that I produced over six years. I wrote other stories, other novellas, and a couple of TV pilots. An image that kept arising across these works was someone at a threshold – a hallway, a doorway, a wall – that they were desperately trying to break through. It’s in a couple of the stories in Open Up and it’s here in ‘Birthday Teeth’. In retrospect, I think that the person in all those works was also me, trying to push through the stuckness I was experiencing on and off the page.
Every time I wrote this kind of scene, this song was playing.
Wavelength – Van Morrisson
I wanted to finish the suite on an unexpected note, an opening out…
And then in the closing pages, Van Morrison threw his hat down on the table. It’s a passing reference, and this song is never explicitly mentioned, but it’s the one I had in mind.
Thomas Morris is a Welsh writer, living in Ireland. His debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing (Faber and Faber), won the 2016 Wales Books of the Year, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, and a Somerset Maugham Prize. His collection of stories Open Up was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.