In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The essays in Tom McAllister’s collection It All Felt Impossible coalesce together to form an engaging warm and vulnerable portrait of his life and world.
Hanif Abdurraqib wrote of the book:
“Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is a beautiful portrait of a slow and tender passage of time, and what it is to live through several eras of a life with a sense of gratitude, humor, warmth, and generosity. I felt carried, warmly, through these many eras.”
In his own words, here is Tom McAllister‘s Book Notes music playlist for his essay collection It All Felt Impossible:
In It All Felt Impossible, I wrote a short essay for every year of my life. The idea was not to focus on major events like weddings and funerals, but rather on the in-between times, the quiet moments that make up the majority of our lives. The hope is that each brief glimpse of a distinct moment gives the reader a full picture of who I am, have been, and am hoping to be. Each essay moves around in time and place, and the relatively minor events still touch on the grief and joy and anger and all the other emotions that animate our stories.
I considered writing a 42-song playlist, choosing one representative song from each year covered in the text, but that seemed too daunting, and I don’t think anybody would read past the third entry. I admit, I had a hard time coming up with a list that felt right and true to this book; although I listen to music constantly while drafting (the louder and faster the better), and many of my important relationships can be connected to particular bands or at least genres, I felt overwhelmed by the task of narrowing it down. After having written so many essays in which I had to make the same exact kinds of choices and difficult cuts, one would think I’ve learned something. But each time it feels like starting over.
“I Remember Everything” – John Prine
Besides the obvious resonance to the book, this song represents everything I love about John Prine, an artist who has become one of my favorites as I’ve gotten older. The deceptive simplicity of the lyrics is typical of his best songs, as is his ability to be poignant and even silly without being treacly and cloying. What I love about Prine’s music is how open-hearted and unabashedly sentimental it is. This is a man who appreciated everything he had in his life, even the regrets, the mistakes, and the pain. He doesn’t hide from the darkness either; he remembers it all and knows it all matters. That is the kind of art I aspire to make. If not for the fact that I would have had to pay for the rights, this would have been the epigraph of my book:
I’ve been down this road before
Alone as I can be
Careful not to let my past
Go sneaking up on me
Got no future in my happiness
Though regrets are very few
Sometimes a little tenderness
Was the best that I could do.
“Dance to the Music” – Sly and the Family Stone
My earliest exposure to music was whatever my parents played on the car radio while driving me to soccer games. Mostly this meant the oldies station. My dad, I understand now, was always tired when we were together, because he worked 12-hour days and had a 2-hour round trip commute, and he always slept poorly. He was not especially expressive, unless he was angry, and we all counted on him to be the steadying influence in our lives. When he smiled for pictures, it always looked like he was being forced to, like he was doing a bit, an impression of what it would look like if someone else were to have smiled. Now and then, a song that he loved would come on the radio, and he would briefly transform. As soon as the opening horns of “Dance to the Music,” blared, he would crank the radio, start jerking the wheel to make the car dance, and belt out the lyrics. When Larry Graham’s baritone kicked in to announce “I’m gonna add some bottom, so that the dancers just won’t hide,” my dad started pounding the roof of the minivan with his fists, and it sounded like bombs dropping on us. After the song he turned the volume down and didn’t say a word about it. He died when I was college, and his death hangs over everything I write, and now and then I like to crank this song just like he did and just whale on the roof of my car.
“It’s So Easy” – Guns N’ Roses
My older brother hid the Appetite for Destruction cassette in the top drawer of his filing cabinet, (hilarious to me, now, to think of a 14 year old with a filing cabinet—for all his files), and when he was at football practice, I snuck in and listened to it on his Walkman. I was only 8 years old then, too young to understand what was happening in any of the songs, let alone the obscene album art, but I knew the older kids were listening to it, and I knew Guns N’ Roses was important in some way. Really, all I needed to know was that it was a tape worth hiding, which meant it was worth finding. I especially loved “It’s So Easy,” with its driving guitar riffs, its aggressive vocals, and profane chorus. A few weeks later, riding home on the school bus on a rainy day, the windows fogged up, and I used my index finger to write the word FUCK in the condensation. My brother lunged across the aisle to wipe it away before the bus driver could see it and report me to the school. “Where the hell did you hear that word?” he said, not ironically. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew some words had more power than others.
“Head Like A Hole” – Nine Inch Nails
In sixth grade, everyone else in the class started getting into music in a new way. Suddenly they were aware of a whole crop of new bands, their songs, their styles. I didn’t have cable then, but everyone else at school did, which meant they watched MTV for 6 or 8 hours a night, which meant further that they had access to a world of information that was out of reach for me. I began spending all my spare money on CDs, randomly picking out one or two per week based on band names I’d overheard at recess. When I brought Pretty Hate Machine home, my mom confiscated it. “Nothing that’s pretty can hate,” she said (incorrectly!). I couldn’t have it back until my dad had a chance to listen to it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly censorious house, and I’m not sure what made this particular CD stand out. Later, my dad returned it, saying he didn’t like the song titles, and as soon as I was alone, I played it at max volume and felt like I’d dived headfirst through a portal into a whole new life.
“Lola” – The Kinks
I played soccer in high school for a maniac head coach who probably should never have been allowed to work with children, but who had a gift for getting us to want to play hard for him. He liked me better than most of my teammates because we were at a fancy private school in the suburbs, but I was from the city and so was he. For a brief period in my life, I wanted to impress him more than any other person, and although I never got especially good at soccer, I always played hard, so he let me sit in the front seat of the team van. On our drive home from a win over North Catholic, his alma mater and therefore our rival, he was in an especially joyful mood, and he popped a Kinks cassette tape into the deck (you know this was a fancy high school because our team van had a tape deck in 1998), and expressed absolute horror that none of us in the car were familiar with “Lola.” He slammed on the brakes in the middle lane of the Roosevelt Boulevard, famously one of the most dangerous roads in America, turned on the hazard lights, and made us all listen to this song while honking cars whizzed by. Only when we agreed it was great did he start driving again.
“Whipping Post” – The Allman Brothers
The first time I listened to blues music was when I was seventeen and hanging out in a local dirtbag’s basement apartment. He was twenty-four and dated high school girls, and he always had a fridge full of beer. He didn’t let anyone else play pool on his table, but he allowed us to watch him occasionally succeed at trick shots. His six-disc CD player was loaded with British blues: Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Snowy White, The Moody Blues. The only American band he deigned to play was The Allman Brothers Band (as he air guitared the opening riff of “Whipping Post,” we tried to teach ourselves to like the taste of beer, and then agreed with him when he asked, repeatedly, if this song wasn’t the most bitchin’ thing we’d ever heard). That same evening, my one friend with a pager was getting paged by his girlfriend every ten minutes or so; he’d been cheating on her, which everyone already knew, and he kept asking me what he should do about it. I’d never even held hands with a girl at this point in my life, so I was the last person to ask. “Tell me this isn’t bitchin,” the dirtbag said. We told him it was. My friend’s pager beeped again.
“1999” – Prince
The most important relationship I have in the writing world is with the other editors at Barrelhouse. I went to grad school with one of the founders, and when I attended my first AWP conference, I hung around with my former classmate and his editor buddies. Eventually, I’d hung around long enough for them to ask if I’d like to join the team. Since then, the growing, evolving crew at Barrelhouse has been a second family to me. We’ve published so many things, run so many events together. Spent countless nights staying up late and making increasingly stupid jokes that had us in tears. It’s like a high school friendship without all the bad parts. One of our group rituals is that the night before our Conversations & Connections conference, we all gather at someone’s house and spend a couple hours stuffing packets with name tags, schedules, and all the rest. We open a bottle of Four Roses (and maybe a second bottle of Four Roses) and take frequent breaks, and usually have to re-stuff about a quarter of the packets, and—by rule—we listen to Prince. Prince was never an especially important artist to me until this ritual was established, but now he’s always there.
“Let’s Stay Together” – Al Green
Any accounting of my life has to acknowledge this song, which my wife and I danced to at the start of our wedding. We picked it in part because it’s short (3:18), and neither of us liked the idea of a room full of people staring at us while we swayed awkwardly. There are a lot of things I understand now that I didn’t then; for example, if you don’t want to do a first dance, you don’t have to do it at all, or you can invite everyone onto the dancefloor with you. We were so young then, just barely 25, and none of our friends had gotten married yet, and 2 of our 4 parents were dead, and we did a lot of things we felt we were supposed to do. The wedding was quite nice. I don’t want to give the impression that I regret any of it, just that this was a time in my life when most of my choices were dictated by what other people wanted, or what I thought other people would have wanted, rather than by my own desires and interests. It would be another 10 years before I learned who I was, really, and what I wanted. The only thing I knew for sure then was that I was out there on the dancefloor with the right person.
“If I Had a Boat” – Lyle Lovett
One of the last live performances (of anything) I saw before the pandemic was a Lyle Lovett & John Hiatt concert at a historic theater in South Jersey, where I’ve lived for most of my adult life. Most acts pass over South Jersey for hipper and larger venues in Philly, but this intimate space was perfect for the rambling, loose, exuberant show we saw. The singers had a lived-in friendship, one where they could riff off of each other with ease and goof around with new songs on the spot. They took turns introducing songs by the other. When Hiatt introduced this song for Lovett, he said, “You’ve written an all-timer, my friend. This is what you dream about.” Besides that the song itself is beautiful and near-perfect, it was that chemistry on stage I found most exciting. Lovett was briefly famous in my youth because he had married an obscenely beautiful woman and he became a punchline because he looks normal. Thirty years later, here he was, making great art with his friends and still finding unfiltered joy in it. It’s hard to ask for a better definition of success.
“Loading Zones” – Kurt Vile
My wife and I were never big partiers, but these days we often spend weekend evenings at home, with the TV on mute (usually tuned to a Sixers or Phillies game), while listening to music, and inevitably I turn to one of the Kurt Vile albums that I love, because of their weird edgy tone that’s undercut by a dry sense of humor. Vile, who collaborated on the song “How Lucky” with John Prine, is a Philly-area musician who I first avoided because I assumed his name was some kind of silly punk thing that would annoy me, which is to say this guy was playing live shows to small crowds in my back yard for years and I was too stubborn to give him a chance based on a fact I had invented entirely in my own mind. This particular song is about illegally parking in “all the loading zones in my dirty little town.” Anyone who knows me knows how deeply this dirty little town matters to me, has come to define me, and, further, how much I pride myself on my parallel parking skills. In the song, Vile is not bragging about being able to pull off a perfect three-turn parallel park job as I can in any spot in Philly, but there aren’t many great songs about parking cars, so I’ll take what I can get.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Tom McAllister’s playlist for his novel The Young Widower’s Handbook
Tom McAllister teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Camden and is the author of 4 books. His most recent book is the essay collection It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays, out this month from Rose Metal Press.