In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Lydi Conklin’s novel Songs of No Provenance is a powerful debut that deftly explores themes of making art, desire, and ambition.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Conklin’s comedy of manners has a shrewd undercurrent, and much of the novel’s charm derives from the teens’ easy banter with one another . . . It’s a winner.”
In their own words, here is Lydi Conklin’s Book Notes music playlist for their debut novel Songs of No Provenance:
My first novel, Songs of No Provenance, follows an indie folksinger named Joan Vole who, at the beginning of the book, commits a shocking act onstage and has to flee New York in the wake of an impending internet storm. The novel deals with Joan’s relationship to artmaking and fame and how that shifts over time—her toxic jealousy of the success of her best friend/mentee, her obsessive writing at all hours to the exclusion of meals, health, and romance, and the way she attempts to break from the cult of ego to achieve a process of songwriting that is free from authorship.
Besides the editing process, I never collaborate; writing is so solitary. And I like it that way. But I had the idea to ask musician friends of mine to interpret the songs and song fragments in the book and turn them into songs of their own. This side project fit perfectly for a book that is about songs that have no author or that get interpreted and claimed by different artists through the years. So far I’ve received eight songs for the project, which make up this playlist. At the outset of the project, I thought it would be more of an academic exercise, but I was blown away to receive such killer songs, songs that I listen to now on repeat in my car, sometimes just one song all the way across Nashville and back. These songs are each works of art in themselves, and have become something greater than the book, which I suppose was the hope all along.
Emily Bielagus of Wild Yawp
“Tomorrow, Yesterday”
This song is my obsession. Sometimes songs grow on me over the years, but this one I fell in love with the very first time I heard it, lying in bed at six in the morning—Emily lives in LA and sent it to me while I slept—and ever since I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. Emily and I had a friend, MC, who I met through her, who died two years ago, and Emily took a sentimental folksong that plays on the radio early in the book and made the song about MC. I never would’ve connected the song in the book to MC—who the book is dedicated to, which Emily didn’t know at the time she wrote the song—but it makes every perfect sense. As Emily reminded me, MC loved beaches and shrubs and trees, which all appear in the song fragment in the book. She took my catalogue of southern trees—“chokecherry, oak, linden, ash”—and added a roster of plants which MC lived among and loved—“sagebrush, primrose, lavender.” She wrote the absolutely crushing and beautiful line “there weren’t enough trees on earth to shade you from your pain.” The refrain—“all the time we had was all the time we had”—was all hers, and is so beautiful and haunting that it loops over and over in my head. I absolutely love the emotion in Emily’s voice in this song, especially when she sings “tomorrow, today, yesterday” and infuses these three common words in their crushing backwards order with the saddest longing I’ve ever heard.
John Shakespear
“Green Weeks”
“Green Weeks” is the song Joan Vole writes and performs at the end of the book. It’s the most complete song in the book, and so I wasn’t surprised that half of the artists involved in this project chose to interpret it. I was excited to see how the four artists would perform the song so differently. John’s was the first finished song I received, and I was so excited to collaborate with him because I’ve long admired his music and know him also to be an extremely talented fiction writer—a training he brings to his songs, which often tell interwoven narratives. I absolutely love how lush and full this song is. Its sound brings to mind the bright green trees and vines of Virginia, where most of the book takes place. Only two of the songwriters in this project read the book before interpreting the songs, since the book hadn’t come out yet. I was surprised how, even barely knowing anything about the book, John was able to infuse the song with all the longing and sorrow and nostalgia that Joan brings to the song in the text. Though I also love how the line “splash my water on your chest” has such different meaning when you read the book. A friend who was playing this song on Instagram said her husband stopped in his tracks and demanded to know what song she was listening to. Which didn’t surprise me at all. I especially love the stripped-down bridge and how the lush green of the song falls away to make room for John’s voice alone. The song is beautiful and inevitable and pulls you in.
Meriel O’Connell
“Lakeshore”
I was so glad Meriel picked the most important song in the book. Originally when I thought up this project, I considered asking everyone to interpret “Lakeshore” so the differences in the artists’ renditions could stand out most starkly. “Lakeshore,” which appears at crucial moments through the book, its history and various interpretations unraveling through the course of the narrative, is Joan’s only famous song, not a hit, but a song that plays sometimes on the radio, that people know without knowing who she is. The writing of the song was some of the most difficult writing in the book. I listened over and over to the songs of musicians I love—most namely, songs by Diane Cluck and Adrianne Lenker—trying to understand how they wrote such powerful songs that didn’t have rhymes or choruses or bridges or any obvious shape. That was how Joan would write and so I wanted to learn how to write at least one song that way. I had my friend, poet genius Margaret Ross, listen to one of these songs and break down for me how it was working in poetic terms. I had an idea about how “Lakeshore” would sound—husky and rough and half-spoken—but when Meriel sent me her interpretation, now this is exactly the way the song has to be. Meriel, while staying pretty faithful to the lyrics, added a few key lines: “and even though it’s not my turn, and my back is getting burned” which adds so much emotional mystery and depth—is this a poly situation, is this a masochistic situation, does the girl not want to see the speaker, or shouldn’t? I loved how much depth those few words added. I absolutely love the guitar in this song—it’s so sad and nostalgic and beautiful, and every time I hear it begin I want to be out on a beach at night. What gets me most is Meriel’s voice, so urgent and sexy and the way she snaps apart the word “Lakeshore,” investing it with mysteries and emotions that the listener isn’t allowed to understand.
JP Solheim
“Green Weeks”
JP is one of the two artists who had read the book in advance of making their song, and we had a great conversation about it for The Chicago Review of Books. So it was really cool to see how they used some of Joan’s style in the way they interpreted the song—low voice, talky singing that sometimes allows itself to break into emotion. When I listen to the song I think of Joan’s repression of hard feelings and serious wrongdoing and her self-protection that covers all that, but also how her wildness and feeling pop out even without her consent. The song is full of contained feralness, just like Joan. I love how in the song sometimes the guitar and other instruments sound like they are going to tumble apart and go haywire, and then each time, at the last second, they pull back into their pattern. I also love how the song shifts from its most emotional register directly into the flat, sinister low talking of the bridge, so much contained in those restrained tones, especially in the moment of the confession of love. Of the four interpretations of “Green Weeks” represented here, this is the one that is the most different and strange, and I love it for that. I told JP that the song reminded me of “The Velvet Underground,” and they said they are a fan of the band and that its influence is embedded in their DNA. JP says of the song: “When I was working on “Green Weeks,” I was thinking a lot about Joan’s willingness to be vulnerable and share a brand new song, a work in progress, with her students, with Sparrow, with a small audience. This scene is a moment of resolution for her, although the music doesn’t actually resolve in-scene, since the song is so new. So when I was working on arranging the song with Maeghan, Nathan, and Rob, and when Rob was mixing, we were thinking a lot about a kind of gentle meandering, an experiment, a willingness to coax open without necessarily knowing how to close. I thought about this when I was recording the vocal, too: I wanted it to feel hesitant, exploratory on the chorus.”
Borrowed Beams of Light
“Tomorrow, Yesterday”
Borrowed Beams of Light, my friend Adam Brock’s project, made this amazing and very different interpretation of the folksong “Tomorrow, Yesterday.” I absolutely love the marchy opening, which puts me in a good mood every time. Like Emily, Adam also added a few key, beautiful lyrics. One of my favorites is, “we stitched our footsteps to that place” which is such a weird, vivid line that hits me differently every time I hear it. I also loved the addition of “our hidden forest home,” those four simple words completely changing the meaning of the entire song. I picture a couple remembering a time they spent out in the woods, with maybe some hopeful feelings of eutopia and a return to nature. I love how Adam made the sequence of southern trees into the chorus, because I loved hearing that litany multiple times in different emotional registers. I love how the song darkens on “you’ll simply have to guess,” leaving a mystery as to why the speaker is not communicating which tree he grew for the “you” of the song. I also loved how the song deteriorates in the end into dissonant, sad whistling that disappears, as though the speaker and the “you” are heading back deep into the forest and yesterday, leaving the listener behind.
CF Watkins
“Green Weeks”
CF was one of the few friend set-ups of my life that took easily. The first night we met we ended up talking for many hours and not even noticing the time passing. She said it was a good thing I met her that night and not on a night when she was Shy CF. But now that I have met them both, they are both perfect. I was astonished when I received this version of “Green Weeks,” which somehow sounds like it is from a time decades in the past, like Linda Ronstadt or something. Her voice is rich and beautiful, and this version captivated an audience of MFA students and faculty in Florida where I debuted it last winter. No one wanted me to stop playing the track, even though my time on stage was running out. I love the simple, clear promise of the song, all the vulnerability CF gets in there. Somehow it reminds me of the sad hope of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” though she gets fierce on “as you’re next to me asleep.” It’s strange to write some simple words that someone else then makes so beautiful.
Jacob Milstein
“Gumball”
Jacob’s “Gumball” is the most wild and surprising interpretation I received from this group of artists. In the book, “Old Gumball” is a lost-to-time folksong about a racehorse that Joan longs to play as a comfort song one afternoon when things are rough, after she’s already sworn herself off music forever. The song was of course based off the traditional song of muddled origin, “Stewball,” a weird and charming ballad about an unlikely horse hero, a song I adored as a child. Jacob turned “Old Gumball” into an urgent, angry ballad about a relationship turned sour. Jacob’s song also contains the fewest lyrics from the original text. Certain words that were in the original lyrics, or the text around the lyrics, made it in—“rough,” “fortune,” “bone,” “blockhead,” “dog,” but were all used in different ways than I used them in the book. The only lyric I think that stayed preserved was “I know he’s a loser but he’s my only one,” and even that lyric’s meaning is completely shifted in the song, since the loser in the book was a literal losing racehorse whereas in the song it’s a romantic interest who is a cruel person and a dead-end for love. I was fascinated by the sour, unhappy but addictive relationship portrayed in the song, and unforgettable lyrics like “when I punch the clock it’s your knobby cock” that are so vivid and full of intensity. I also love how it’s unclear in the song who is causing the pain to whom, and as a listener I have to assume the harm goes both ways, which is spiky and interesting and just the kind of dynamic that’s so fruitful to explore in fiction. Jacob talked to me about how he wanted to use the horse of the song as a metaphor for a relationship that will never work. In his words, “Sometimes you keep betting on a losing horse—a horse that’s an affront to the very idea of winning—because it keeps you intimate with a hidden part of yourself you imagine can only be exposed through the degradation of your structure, your common sense, or your hope for a normal life.” This outlook is so much in keeping with Joan Vole’s approach to life that I’m shocked Jacob hadn’t yet read the book. I love the plucked-out piano notes at the opening that speak to frustration and the slow figuring out of a situation still baffling to the speaker.
Anna Vogelzang
“Green Weeks”
I wanted to end with the song that started it all. Anna is a friend from high school, who so generously helped me with the research in my novel, acting as a consultant many times through the course of writing it and then reading the entire book at the end all the way through. At one point in her reading, she sent me a voice memo playing the chord progression of one of the songs the way I’d written it—showing me how different chords would fit better for the song I’d described. In that scene, the last of the book, I wanted a simple, bright folk song, but I’d described the chords of a haunting, weird one. Hearing Joan’s song in Anna’s voice was surreal and wild, like my character had come alive—not exactly how I’d imagined her, but in a good way—alive from another artist’s head. I listened to that fragment over and over. I needed more! And that’s when I got the idea for this project. I absolutely love the heart and emotion in this version, and the stripped-down style. I picture Joan discovering the song for the first time in this rendition, the raw feelings she has for Sparrow that she can’t quite access yet pulling through the notes, “wrong” and “lives” breaking with longing.
LYDI CONKLIN is the author of Rainbow Rainbow, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, and The Paris Review. They’ve drawn comics for The New Yorker, The Believer, Lenny Letter, and other publications. Songs of No Provenance is their first novel.