In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Patrick Ryan’s novel Buckeye is a moving and highly compassionate novel.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Omniscient, sweeping, almost defiantly sentimental, Buckeye is a reminder of the deep pleasure of following a cast of characters over their entire lives, through births, deaths, marriages, tragedies and, in this case, hard-won reconciliations. . . The author clearly loves these people, and he makes the safe bet that you will, too.”
In his own words, here is Patrick Ryan’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Buckeye:
Buckeye is set in a small town in Ohio, spans forty years of the twentieth century, and has a backdrop of three wars. I don’t listen to music while I write, but it plays a big part in my process while I’m away from my desk—both in teaching me about my characters (what they might have been listening to at the time) and in helping me sink into the mood of a scene. This playlist is a mix of songs the characters were living with and songs I was living with during the eight years I spent writing and revising the novel. It’s arranged sort of chronologically, in terms of the events in the book, and it avoids major spoilers.
1. “Where or When” (Lorenz Hart & Richard Rogers) – Peggy Lee & Glenn Miller
This recording was made on New Year’s Eve, 1941. The country was reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor and braced for war, and Peggy Lee, Glenn Miller, and his orchestra got together in a studio in New York City and recorded this dreamy ode to déjà vu. There’s a key scene in Buckeye where two of the main characters are hiding behind a curtain, and on the other side is a turntable playing the 78 of “Where or When” over and over. They’re trying not to be discovered. They’re trying to stay perfectly still. But the song seduces them into dancing…
2. “John Brown” Live at Sony Music Studios, New York, NY, November 1994 – Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan wrote this song about the alure and brutality of war in the early 1960s, and he performed it again for MTV UnPlugged thirty years later. The 1994 version is as fast as it is furious. It builds tension by revving up, then softening, then revving up again. There’s a character in the novel named Everett who’s a veteran of the First World War, who willingly signed up and went off to fight and came back forever changed. This song tells of a fate that could have been Everett’s and a tragedy he fully understands.
3. “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)” (Lew Brown / Sammy H. Stept / Charles Tobias) – The Andrews Sisters
The Andrews Sisters were already popular before the U.S. got into the Second World War, and the used their popularity and talent (and volunteered a lot of free studio and stage time) to the Allied Forces at home and abroad, sometimes in war zones. They were a balm for worry. This song is a chipper ditty about a fidelity pledge, but it’s really whispering, I will come home alive, don’t worry.
4. “We’ll Meet Again” (Ross Parker and Hughie Charles) – Vera Lynn
Written and originally recorded in 1939, this song became an anthem for couples separating during the war. It would have played on Margaret Salt’s radio in Bonhomie, Ohio, in 1942, when Felix was preparing to go to war. It’s a rigidly hopeful song, almost stalwart in its deference to the unknowable (“don’t know where/don’t know when”). Vera Lynn was twenty-seven when she first recorded it. I find it fascinating that she was born during the First World War and lived all the way to 2020, when she died at the age of 103.
5. “Safe Ship, Harbored” – the Crane Wives
From the debut 2011 album Safe Ship, Harbored. I’ve long been a fan of The Crane Wives and of this song, in particular. One day, when I was deep into Buckeye, I was at the gym thinking about Margaret as a young woman and Margaret as a middle-aged woman, and “Safe Ship, Harbored” came up in a shuffle. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and I was surprised at how well it fit Margaret’s situation. She could be the speaker in the song. Listening to it helped me get a better handle on her at that particular stage of her life.
6. “Big Apple Contest” (composed by Lee Norman, arranged by Michael Coury) – The Solomon Douglas Swingtet
I was determined to get a Tranky Doo into the book somehow, and I did it by dropping a returning soldier with a penchant for dancing into a kind of dance hall setting, then having those around him encourage him to show off. Which was hardly original footwork on mypart, but it was a fun scene to write.
7. “Passing Afternoon” – Samuel Ervin Beam
This is a song I’ve loved for years, and when I listened to it while writing Buckeye, I heard it as being about Cal and Becky, on the other side of some of their challenges but in the eye of the storm, in terms of the hardships they’ll face. This song is so beautiful and soothing, so reassuring, and is a testament to days spent attempting to build and maintain a loving relationship. Then there’s that last line, which nods toward a loss and radiates a sadness that, seemingly, can’t be healed.
8. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – Bob Dyan
An imagistic foretelling of trouble ahead. A testament to man’s cruelty, to inequality, to the importance of putting words to what’s happening around us. Where have you been? What did you see? Who did you meet? What’ll you do now? The speaker declares his intention to climb the mountain and testify: things are not well, are about to get worse. Brace yourself, and find a way to carry on.
9. “Dear Uncle Sam” – Loretta Lynn
This song is in the same vein as “John Brown,” but from a different perspective.
10. “For What It’s Worth” – Buffalo Springfield
Just as relevant today as it was in 1966. It taps into that gnawing sense one gets that the people in charge of taking care of you do not have your best interests at heart despite their being elected and paid to do so, that the people tasked with looking out for the world are really only looking out for themselves, that the beginning of resistance and change is awareness.
11. “Ohio” – Neil Young
A painful song about the murder of four college students by the National Guard, after Nixon sent troops to Kent State University to confront protestors of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. This event occurs and makes the news at an emotional juncture for one of characters and resets his perspective. The song asks a question that punches through the anonymity of the headline: “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?”
12. “June Hymn” – The Decemberists
This is a beautiful song that spoke to me early in the writing process, when a close friend died suddenly, and I was figuring out how to grieve and stay productive. The line “And years from now when this old light/isn’t ambling anymore” cut through me, because my friend, who was fifteen years older than me, wasn’t going to get any older, and the best-case scenario for me was that I was going to get older and further away from the point in my life when we’d known each other. Which is the nature of things and is to be accepted. But what a sadness! This song makes me feel a little better each time I hear it.
13. “American Tune” (Paul Simon) – Shawn Colvin
This song is the sound the American Dream makes when it wakes up. Written and recorded by Paul Simon in 1973, covered by Shawn Colvin in 2015, it is as relevant now as it ever was. It telegraphs a toughness that carries the speaker through, but it also telegraphs a nearly defeated weariness, and a letting go of an earlier definiton of hope. It fits Cal and Becky’s frame of mind, I think, by the time they get into the 1970s. Colvin’s voice cradles Simon’s lyrics like a current of air.
14. “Valentine’s Day” – Bruce Springsteen
This also brings to mind for me Cal and Becky in the latter years of the novel. Springsteen is so good at that I’m-worn-out-but-going-to-try-to-tell-you-something-that-means-something pitch, and this song is a beautiful and almost sleepy affirmation of a love rattled with vulnerabilities but strong enough to pull you through hardship.
15. “Call It Dreaming” – Samuel Ervin Beam
I was going through the proofs of Buckeye when I first heard “Call It Dreaming.” There it was, and is: the emotional landing pad I’d been writing toward and had arrived at, set to music. The line “where the time of our lives is all we have” gave me goosebumps because of the way it echoed what I had on the page. It’s an uplifting song, learned but still full of wonder.
Bonus Track: “Where or When” (Lorenz Hart & Richard Rogers) – The Supremes
An outro! The Supremes covered “Where or When” in 1964, and it shoots the lights out (of course).
also at Largehearted Boy:
Patrick Ryan’s playlist for his story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts
Patrick Ryan is the author of the story collections The Dream Life of Astronauts (named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, Literary Hub, Refinery29, and Electric Literature, and longlisted for The Story Prize) and Send Me. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the anthology Tales of Two Cities, and elsewhere. The former associate editor of Granta, he is the current editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story. He lives in New York City.