In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Matthew Morris’s essay collection The Tilling brilliantly and inventively examines biracial identity.
Wendy S. Walters wrote of the book:
“Matthew Morris’s artful debut invites us to imagine the expression of affection as a political act, one that unites loved ones across distances, time, and the legacies of violence. These essays embrace the complexities of memory and personal history through his lucid, incisive voice. The Tilling is a wonderful introduction to a remarkable and wholly original writer.”
In his own words, here is Matthew Morris’s Book Notes music playlist for his essay collection The Tilling:
I couldn’t tell you the year, not exactly, but an image remains: At desert-dusk, I sit beside my sister, she at the wheel, on a single-lane road swooping past piled-high boulders and clustered cholla cacti, over cakey red-brown earth. We’re descending, and in the halflight, so soft, I look down, then farther down, at the cars below us and those again rising up, their tailights abeam like the small bodies of fireflies in thick-humid Virginia summer. And that’s all; that’s what I see.
Recalling that night in the car, when nothing much happened but my life, maybe my sister’s too, seemed to click ever-briefly into place, I hear a song, Frank Ocean’s cover of Audrey Hepburn’s “Moon River,” in my ear. So much of memory is, for me, like that: accompanied by, associated with, music. Moon river, wider than a mile. / Crossing in style, someday, Ocean intones, and I think of journeying, could then think of writing, of the distance between memory and inscription, between starting-outs and closures. Here, I suppose, I do.
I drafted the earliest essays in The Tilling in the fall of 2019 and, with my editor, poet Geoffrey Babbitt, made final revisions in the spring of 2024. I wrote the book in Tucson, where I then lived, and in Virginia, where my parents raised Erin and me, but I don’t spend much time in either place now, having moved to Missouri, my folks to Maine. Not so far gone, of course, these are the songs that remind me of that time, the songs that, to write the book I did, I had to hear.
“Drifting,” Andy McKee
Percussive and lyrical, in open-D tuning, McKee’s composition is among the songs of which I never tire. He slaps and finger-taps the body of his acoustic guitar as if it were a drum, keeping the rhythm even as he sustains the piece’s melodic line, which moves as if on a draft, on a wind, as do shards of language, the syntax holding the beat, generating the beat, as sound and image play in the readerly mind, resound in the readerly ear, drift like that.
“In My Life,” the Beatles
I first heard the song in, and think of it alongside, a scene from the kids show Sister, Sister: Roger sings it in a church, at a wedding or a funeral, his voice very boyish as is he, and Tia and Tamara look on. There are places I remember; so goes the tune, you know? And I never forget “In My Life,” no matter how long the pause between plays. Though I wouldn’t call The Tilling a memoir or memoir-in-essays, the book did find its center in the personal, in my experiences as the light-skinned child of a Black father and a white mother. In my life, I could say to them, following Roger, I love you more.
“Shadow Man,” Noname (feat. Saba, among others)
These essays brought me closer to a Black, mixed identity that felt true, true to life and true to me, however white (however else) I might look. My father was born in Chicago, as were his sisters; the family moved to Phoenix when he was eight, his father a law professor at Arizona State. As a kid, I rooted for the Cubs because my father did—and, I think, because Chicago signified Blackness, a Blackness from which I didn’t feel much apart. And Chicago artists like Noname, like Saba, have permitted me the same proximity, the same closeness. The Tilling also remembers my father’s mother, who died in April 2020. “Shadow Man” memorializes those who’ve left and does so poignantly, poetically: Bless the nightengale, goes the harmonized chorus. Darkness keep you well.
“Autumn Leaves,” Stan Getz and Kenny Barron
Getz and Barron played the jazz standard, Getz on tenor sax and Barron on piano, at a concert they gave in the period just before Getz’s passing, the song now sitting alongside so many others on the classic People Time recordings. Although churlish in his life, Getz was nicknamed “The Sound” because of the clarity and resonance of his tone. He and Barron share center stage as jazz duos, beautifully, must, taking turns as the lead, turns in support. The Tilling is also, at times, a duet, and really more, voices set alongside one another in harmony and dissonance, as in Emilio Carrero’s recent Autobiography of the [Undead].
“The Way It Is,” Bruce Hornsby
And I should specify the version of this song recorded on Intersections, wherein Hornsby, who my father would play on the stereo of his gold, coolant-stained Dodge Intrepid as we drove to my teenage basketball games, opens with a long classical statement that, for a good while, I thought improvised. The opening filters into the first bars of the song as you’d know it from the radio, which argues against apathy, against racial discrimination: That’s just the way it is. / Some things will never change. / Oh, but don’t you believe them. I heard that classical opening elsewhere a couple of months back, realized it’s a standalone composition by someone else. Hornsby put the two together, seams never rupturing. If I wanted anything for these essays, it was for them to cohere rather fracture, for them to cohere in spite of fracture, for my mixed body to be a whole body and for these pieces to form one long song.
Matthew Morris is a writer from Virginia and author of The Tilling (Seneca Review Books), picked by Wendy S. Walters for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. He is a graduate of the Arizona MFA program and lives in Columbia, Missouri, where he is a Ph.D. student at Mizzou.