In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Tennessee Hill’s novel Girls with Long Shadows is an atmospheric debut that startles with its exploration of sisterhood.
Bustle wrote of the book:
“Echoing The Virgin Suicides, this Southern Gothic literary thriller explores what happens when teenage angst and female desire turn deadly.”
In her own words, here is Tennessee Hill’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Girls with Long Shadows:
In Girls With Long Shadows, like for most young people, music is an electric, reviving current through the days of narrator Baby B and her triplet sisters, Baby A and Baby C. The girls are singers themselves, forming a bluegrass cover band each summer to perform at a local festival. The songs they cleave to are of-the-land and feel covertly linked to their late mother who died at the same age the girls are during the summer of the novel’s events. In the depths of swampy South Texas, the twang of classic, narrative country resounds as the girls reach for reason through music–as we all seem to do at nineteen years old–to make sense of the tumbling world around them. I tried to arrange the songs in a way that would compliment and inform the progression of the novel.
“Summer Girl” – HAIM
The year I spent drafting the novel, I listened to HAIM’s junior album Women in Music Pt. III and nothing else. Literally. My Spotify wrapped was *just* this album. “Summer Girl” is so cool that I want to wear it like a jacket and masquerade as a cool-girl myself. It’s the song I imagine playing when a reader first opens the book, like one of those musical greeting cards.
“House Song” – Searows
For the dilapidated golf course the sisters grow up on that is falling apart around them which they have no real tools to repair. The auditory equivalent of desperately looking out a foggy window.
“Walkin After Midnight” – Patsy Cline
As much a jazzy, forceful lament for a person as it is a geography. The analog reverb of this song spins you around in the same way I picture Baby B in the first few chapters, spinning and grasping at the familiar people and places around her but still feeling rejected.
“4:35am” – Gemma Hayes
Iconically, this song opened the ‘06 film adaptation of Flicka, so if it sounds familiar that’s probably why. I love that it captures the gentleness of the crack of dawn when most people aren’t awake, and if you are, it’s because you’re about to work your tail off. The Binderup triplets are part of that flock of early-riser hard workers and struggle not to feel isolated by this. I think they’d have had this album in their truck glove box.
“Wildflowers” – The Wailin’ Jennys
When I wondered what Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C would sound like when they sang together at the Bluegrass Festival, this was the song I played on repeat. The blend of the Wailin’ Jennys’ voices is staggeringly bewitching. I’d always received the lyrics of this song as being pointed towards a lover, but the muliebrity of this cover positions the lyrics towards the self. In the case of the novel, I hear the lyrics in this version as an almost-offering the sisters can give to each other amidst moments of unconquerable tension.
“Lucky for You” – Novo Amor, Gia Margaret
A tender, confessional duet. The valley between the two verses echoes the novel’s division into two parts.
“Heart for Hire” – DeYarmond Edison
When I write, I can’t really picture faces, just silhouettes and colors. When I was crafting Pete in early stages, I could not visualize him at all. Then I figured he was the kind of twenty-something dude that would bring their guitar to a bonfire and force people to listen to them sing and play, which told me everything I needed to know. This was the song I imagined him learning in the dark of his bedroom, his sister Julie banging on the wall intermittently, screaming for him to shut up.
“Galveston” – Glen Campbell
This song puts a lump in my throat every time. It’s so quintessential Texas. So wait-for-me-sweetheart that it tugs your gut. In the universe of the novel, I imagine this as one of the songs the Binderup triplets sing when they try to imagine what their mother’s youth was like.
“You’re Gonna Go Far” – Noah Khan
Instant classic, in my opinion. The song captures the tenuousness of leaving a place you are inextricably tied to but need to escape from, which Baby B feels to an extreme. This is one of those songs that I wish could have liberated her from some of that weight. I feel lucky to listen to it, each time.
“Steady” – The Staves
A folky electronic lucid dream. The lyrics orbit the sensation of trappedness that can propel us away from logic and into the arms of danger. The Staveley-Taylor sisters’ voices are perfectly eerie and underscore that feeling of being where you’re supposed to be, but still feeling deeply unsettled, and realizing maybe what is unsettling is not the place but you. As the novel progresses towards a difficult and deceptive end, I think this sensation consumes Baby B.
“Soon or Never” – Punch Brothers
Crescendos of the string instruments matched by vaulting vocals are like victorious little wolf howls. And that’s what I think it feels like very often to be a sibling, particularly a multiple like the Binderup sisters; howling over each other, whilst sitting beside one another, to be heard but also making a kind of music together in the frustrated tussle.
“Hallelujah” – HAIM
An ode to girlhood steeped in somber gratitude and “lucky-to-have-had-you”-ness. Is there anything better?
“Spring Into Summer” – Lizzy McAlpine
Such indulgence and reverence in this song. Lizzy McAlpine’s voice brims with a peaceful self-awareness that makes it feel like being a better person is totally possible, which was the hope I tried to capture with the novel’s end. If a song could play for readers when they finish the novel and close the cover, I’d want it to be this.
Tennessee Hill holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has been featured in Poetry magazine, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Adroit Journal, Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She is a native of South Texas, where she still lives and teaches with her husband and their dog.