In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Ilana Masad’s Beings is an extraordinary novel from one of our most talented young writers.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Three gripping narratives entwine as supernatural encounters and personal revelations transform lives in the 1960s and the present… Miraculously, Masad makes this dense braid of stories easy to follow, elegantly blending serpentine sentences, endearing and intimately observed characters, natural dialogue, and playful, generous asides to keep the reader in enthralled suspense. A dazzlingly original testament to companionship, curiosity, and faith in ourselves in times of fear and loneliness.”
In her own words, here is Ilana Masad’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Beings:
A few years ago, my partner and I were driving home from seeing a film when we encountered a wonderfully weird show on our then-local Lincoln, Nebraska, NPR member station, KUCV-FM. The music was downtempo, electronic, not quite ambient but definitely approaching the genre. After a couple tracks, we heard the dulcet tones of Stephen Hill and learned that the show he hosted was called Hearts of Space. Founded originally in 1973 in San Francisco, by 1983 HOS went national on public radio, and it’s been running weekly ever since—40 years and going strong. Its tagline: “Slow music for fast times.”
In my new novel, Beings, a couple driving home from their honeymoon in 1961 encounters a spaceship that irrevocably changes their lives. As soon as I had the idea for the novel, I knew one of the epigraphs would be Stephen Hill’s iconic line with which he ends every weekly transmission: “Safe journey, space fans, wherever you are.”
It was only much later that I realized the connections between my fictional couple (based on the very real Barney and Betty Hill, widely considered to be the first alien abductees) and my discovery of Hearts of Space (and its founder and host’s last name) with my partner.
In putting together this playlist, I pulled liberally from our favorite Hearts of Space episodes, as well as from the Spotify playlist I’ve been building for years, titled “Study / Read / Atmosphere” (which is currently 1250 tracks and 96 hours and 43 minutes long, and which features almost entirely wordless music, because I am one of those people who simply can’t listen to anything with lyrics while I’m writing). Scattered among these are a few of the songs that would have been playing everywhere in the 1960s, when large sections of Beings take place.
“This Place” by Jeff Oster, from True (2007)
https://jeffoster.bandcamp.com/track/this-place
This is the first track in Program No. 953 of Hearts of Space, titled “SPACEJAZZ 7: YEARNING,” and it’s a velvety trumpet and piano track with ambient electronic elements mixed in. For a long time this was the program I listened to while going to sleep—which meant that, because I never fell asleep until at least halfway through the program, and because whether the writing was going well or not I tended to stew over it before falling asleep, this track was in the background of so much of the planning and musing and imagining that was going on when I was in the process of researching and writing Beings. As such, it feels to me like a title track, if a book were to have such a thing.
“Inside” by Moby, from Play (1999)
Another first track of a Hearts of Space program (No. 1123, “MOBY: AMBIENT WORKS”), this spacey ambient piece has an arhythmic sort of piano line that is seared into my brain despite how unpredictable it is. It makes me think of the couple in Beings driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, tired but happy, on their way home from their honeymoon… It’s the calm before the storm.
“Nocturn” by Inofaith, from Dawn is Late EP (2011)
https://inofaith.bandcamp.com/track/nocturne
One of the few songs here with lyrics, of a sort, “Nocturne” feels like the Archivist to me. A seven-minute electronica track with techno trip hop elements, it’s best listened to on headphones. Its hypnotic rhythms remind my of the Archivist’s anxiously spinning mind and the song’s words, spoken rather than sung, resonate deeply with how the Archivist survives:
“It’s important for people to create their own worlds.
You have this world in which you live in.
But I think that we should be creating a sub-world to protect us.”
“Benedictus,” performed by 2Cellos, from IN2ITION (2013)
Try listening to this piece with your eyes closed and imagining that it’s the middle of the night, you’re all alone in a field, and something entirely out of this world is descending upon you… Imagine that you’re terrified, because you’re witnessing something that feels utterly impossible, but at the same time, a feeling of utter calm is washing over you, despite yourself. Imagine the very impossibility of what you’re seeing and the contradiction of what you’re feeling are both bringing on, too, a strong sense of indescribably awe…
This is what I imagine the abductees in my novel feeling as they encounter beings from another world, and this track evokes that for me. It’s another Hearts of Space find (Program No. 1296, “CELLO ELEGIES”). Fittingly, it was composed by Karl Jenkins for a mass titled The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace—whatever else the aliens might have done, they did not seem at all interested in harming the humans they abducted.
“If I Had a Hammer,” performed by Trini Lopez, from Trini Lopez at PJ’s (1963)
Originally a protest song written by Pete Seeger, Trini Lopez’s version was massively popular in the US in 1963 and would have been playing on radio stations everywhere, which is why it’s on when Phyllis goes to her first psychiatrist appointment in December of that year. Phyllis is a reader more than anything else—I don’t think she even owns a radio—and so my sense is that she mostly listens to music when other people are playing it, whether that’s at her job at the Boston Evening Traveler, at the laundromat she goes to every two weeks, or at the pubs she goes to for lunch with her boss or the girls at work. “If I Had a Hammer” is so cheerful sounding, and I love the discordance of it playing when Phyllis is racked with nerves.
“Favorite Lover (Dead Astronauts Theme)” by Dead Astronauts, from Favorite Lover (2012)
A darkwave, synthpop anthem, “Favorite Lover” is definitely an Archivist song, the sort of thing they’d play while pumping themself up in order to talk to their mother, or while have a cigarette on their fire escape. Another of the rare songs with lyrics on my personal playlist, these words are incredibly fitting for the Archivist, who spends the novel struggling to recall a strange event from their childhood:
“I’ve been selling my memories
like stars to be bought…”
“He’s So Fine,” by the Chiffons, from He’s So Fine (1963)
This is the second song that features in the same Phyllis scene I mentioned above, when she’s at the psychiatrist’s office, and like the Lopez song, it would have been on the radio constantly, as it had topped the charts in the spring of that year. In an effort to put her at ease, the psychiatrist’s secretary, Alice—who becomes pivotal to Phyllis’s life later on—points to the treatment room and mouths along with the song’s second verse when it comes on: “He’s a soft-spoken guy…” It helps Phyllis feel a little bit better.
“Ghostwriter” by RJD2, from Deadringer (2002)
With samples from songs by Betty Wright, Paul Desmond, Cream, Elliott Smith, and the Delfonics, “Ghostwriter” feels like the years after the couple at the center of Beings are outed as alien abductees and begin needing to reckon with their newfound, unasked for fame and what it brings them. There’s something about this track that feels like what a montage looks like in a film.
“Audrey’s Dance” by Angelo Badalamenti, from Soundtrack for Twin Peaks (1990)
I don’t know how to explain it—and there’s probably a very clear reason, honestly, having to do with the development of genre signaling in film and TV soundtracks or something like that—but this song sounds like a trenchcoated detective bending over with a magnifying glass in hand. It sounds like snooping. And although the Archivist is very romantic about the archive (as am I), I also think they do delight a little bit in the fact that some archival research can really just feel like reading other people’s mail. (I also think the Archivist would enjoy this meme from @the_memeing_archivist a lot:
“America” by Simon & Garfunkel from Bookends (1968)
My first book, All My Mother’s Lovers, was very much a road trip novel, and it wasn’t until putting together this playlist that I realized how much movement there is in Beings as well. The couple who experience an alien abduction spend hours and hours driving back and forth along the highways winding through the White Mountains in an attempt to figure out where exactly their abduction occurred. Phyllis, late in the novel, ends up on a cross-country bus trip, heading back to what used to be her home. And even the Archivist, who would probably rather stay put, has to visit their mother where she lives, a few hours train ride away. And this Simon & Garfunkel song is just the most painfully beautiful sonic embodiment of feeling untethered and yet utterly alive in movement.
“America 2” by The Midnight from Kids (2018)
A spiritual sort of sequel to Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”—listen to the echoing melody in “I’ve come”—this feels to me like the ending of the novel. It feels like the coming together of generations through the act of making art and creating a record for a future that we must keep believing can and will be better.
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism whose work has been widely published. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and is co-edited the anthology Here For All the Reasons: #BachelorNation on Why We Watch.