In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Karen Babine’s The Allure of Elsewhere is a fascinating memoir told through travelogue.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“This inspirational travelogue from Babine recounts a trip she took in her mid-30s to connect with her roots. . . . It’s a moving account from a restless questioner.”
In her own words, here is Karen Babine’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Allure of Elsewhere:
On the Road to Nova Scotia
It’s a blues-bluegrass heavy playlist, because something about that is just perfect for making my way about the world. And what’s not to love about music in your vocal range with a harmony line that calls just as strongly?
Wide Open Spaces
This album (and song) came out when I was in college and as I headed west from Minnesota across North Dakota and Minnesota when I graduated, aiming for Spokane, it was the perfect soundtrack, even as my dad also reminded me to check the oil.
“My dad’s love language is a language of the road; it’s windshield wiper fluid and air in my tires and that gas-line antifreeze stuff in the winter that I never think of. He’s been carrying on a love affair with seat belts for decades, ever since he wrecked his 1968 International Scout on winter roads when I was two weeks old, which led to my mother strapping a newborn into the car to go get him while the roads were bad enough to wreck the truck with four-wheel drive. She was maaaad at you, I say. She was, Dad agrees, ruefully. The replacement vehicle, a 1972 Scout, only came with front seats, and he sourced the back seat and other fripperies from the local junkyard, and it was full of all kinds of things he could find a use for. He sewed a holder for his Thermos that’s still being used nearly forty years later and straps for his camper leveling blocks. He had so many projects that my mother made him get his own sewing machine, because he kept wrecking hers. Where my dad had junkyards, I have thrift stores. It’s the same concept—build your life the way you want it to look. And I like that his most useful construction material is meant to keep its occupants safe. If my parents’ courtship is a road story, the story of my father’s parenthood is a road story, too, of making sure his children are safe as they make their way about the world.” -Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo
I-90
I’ve loved this song since college, since the first time my sisters introduced me to Storyhill. I wrote about it in my first book, this idea of the road having its own soundtrack, and it still holds true.
“There’s an importance to the road, to any road. There’s a relationship formed between road and driver, one that sometimes seems to defy consciousness. Some drive because getting from point A to point B means food for their family. Some drive because it is the lesser of several traveling evils. And some drive because they have to, because there is something elemental in that meeting of tire and asphalt that isn’t satisfied any other way. But motor vehicle travel exhausts me and makes me cranky, so I don’t like to do it—especially if it is an extended amount of time. However, if I-90 is involved, that’s a different story. And it is a story, quite literally—one that boasts its own sound track.” –“I-90,” from Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life
Free/Into the Mystic
“Drive until the city lights/Dissolve into a country sky”—I was thinking about all this in a COE campground in Iowa that’s become a favorite, just a couple hundred feet from the Mississippi River—and this time, I was lucky enough to get a spot on the river—and there was something about the absolute darkness, away from any light pollution, and the birdsong so loud that if I’d been with anybody we’d need to raise our voices to be heard. Lovely to be reminded that’s their place, not mine.
Recherche D’Acadie
I knew about the Cajuns long before I understood they were connected to my own Acadian history and I’d been listening to BeauSoleil for years. I don’t understand any of the French, but it’s music and longing and grief you can feel. It doesn’t need words.
“SAY IT IN FRENCH: AH-CAH-DEE. I repeat the unfamiliar pronunciation, ah-cah-DEE, putting the emphasis in different places than the English a-CAY-dee-a I’d been using. I learn to say it right over a tasting of L’Acadie blanc, sunshine gold, crisp in contrast to the roundness of French vowels, at the Domaine de Grand Pré winery. Later, I listen to BeauSoleil’s “Recherche d’Acadie”—“In Search of Acadia”—and Acadie is the only French word I recognize as Michael Doucet pulls something true and raw from his fiddle, the minor key clear and keening. Later that afternoon, I stand on the dikes the Acadians built in the seventeenth century, I learn that BeauSoleil takes its name from Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, a name not far from Babin on the memorial to families deported in Grand-Pré. Beau soleil. Beautiful sun, in a minor key.” -Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo
Fleur De Mandrago
I visited Montreal in 2012 for a conference and one of the night, we were treated to a concert with champion Quebecois fiddler Pierre Schryer and the amazing Irish musician and ethnomusicologist Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin—which was a moment of connection between Irish fiddle, Quebecois fiddle, and what felt familiar in Cajun fiddles. It would be a moment of joy that deeply contrasted with my experience on Grose Ile the next day, a moment that, two years later in Nova Scotia, would teach me how to read landscapes in a way I’d never get any other way.
“This is a place that resists narrative, resists story, takes the human desire to understand the shape of the history in front of us and upends it, asks the essential questions of at what point does individual history become part of the collective? and where is the opposite true? Even more specifically, Grosse Île is a place that causes us to ask what we do with the question at all. Is it even answerable?” -Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo
Next to Me
Tab Benoit was one of those Pandora introductions a thousand years ago and he’s become my favorite blues artist—not only is he a brilliant musician, he’s got an attention to the Louisiana land, the swamps and bayous, and putting value to them by singing about them. My family was only Cajun for about thirty years before the line died out (my six-greats grandfather and my five-greats grandfather’s three siblings)—my line stayed in Acadie because my five-greats grandfather was imprisoned by the British. My family isn’t Cajun, but it’s still part of the story.
Something More
“Some believe in destiny and some believe in fate/But I believe that happiness is something we create/You best believe that I’m not gonna wait/’Cause there’s gotta be something more”—A lot of the catalyst of getting the Scamp in the first place was this realization that I didn’t want my life to happen to me by default. If I wanted to travel, there was no good reason not to. If I couldn’t find anybody to with me, I could go alone. I’ve really embraced this idea of shaping our lives to what we want, rather than letting the universe or somebody else decide for us.
Feels Like Rain
There’s something about blues—and this song in particular, thanks to Buddy Guy and Bonnie Raitt—that just feels like a hot and humid night where you’re just waiting for the storm to break. Some mornings you wake up in the camper and you can just smell the storm that’s coming and all you can do is wait for it.
“Once I was Scamping outside of St. Louis when the morning started to heat around me in a way that felt dangerous, and I hung my pretty shade curtains on the sides of my awning in that heavy morning sunshine, so thick with humidity, so I could enjoy my morning tea more fully. The only times I prefer to be inside my camper are when it’s raining—otherwise, it’s like a little tent on wheels with a door I can lock. The air pressure was starting to become oppressive, though, and it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. yet. This felt like it was going to be a wild day, though I couldn’t have predicted two storms so severe that I barely had time to take down the awning, throw the cats in their kennels, and drive down to the shower house for shelter. The morning was quiet and dense and full of warning and still around me as I drank my tea, not even in a mood to read or write in my Scamp journal, too tired to do much but drink my very strong Assam and hope it would reach into my brain and threaten it awake. I’ve determined that camping with cats is like having kids, and I, of course, don’t want kids. They don’t go to sleep when you tell them, and they’re fighting before the sun is up. I think the actual fighting started around 5:00 a.m. When I finally get up, Maeve winds around my ankles, which is dangerous at any time of the day, complaining about no food in her dish and the state of the world in general and how she slept. Galway is a little different. He’s the strong, silent type. He just gives me judgmental faces whether or not I deserve it.” -Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo
Crossing Muddy Waters
Seeing I’m With Her in concert at First Ave in Minneapolis a few years ago was my birthday present with my sisters and this is how they opened. Not much I love more than good harmony with killer instrumentals.
Alone
Trampled by Turtles and Tab Benoit are my two favorite musicians/groups—and partially it’s the combination of vocals and really skilled instrumentation—but when it comes to the Turtles, something about the way the group builds and retreats with the emotions of the music is just incredible. “Come into the world/Alone/And you go out of the world/Alone/But in between/There’s you and me”—obviously the lyrics feel close to my experience, but very much like BeauSoleil, they are just magicians at building an emotional experience that you could understand without any words.
“Growing up in rural northern Minnesota, the only radio stations we could get were country and it felt good to sing along to our stories and lives, lakes and trees and dirt roads and Brad Paisley’s “Ticks” and The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces” and Little Big Town’s “Boondocks,” music that celebrated the place where we were, rather than the allure of elsewhere. I’ve lost a lot of interest lately in contemporary country music with women turned into objects and cruelty wrapped in patriotism, preferring instead to turn on blues, or bluegrass, from Trampled by Turtles to I’m With Her to The Wailin’ Jennys and Red Molly and let those strings set fire to the air in a way that clears everything from here to the horizon. It feels good to sing your place in the world sometimes.” -Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo
Karen Babine is two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life. She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.