In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Beard is witty and tender memoir of love and loss.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“At once brave and tender, this is a candid look at the burdens of love and the challenges of discovering oneself.”
In her own words, here is Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Beard:
My book, Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage, details the story of my first marriage to a man who was forced to go through conversion therapy as an adolescent (a fact I was not aware of until well in our five-year marriage). Beyond that, my book is very much concerned with unpacking the various cultural tropes that intersect with our story, especially the image of the“beard” often defined as a woman who—knowingly or not—serves as social camouflage for her queer partner’s sexuality. I was also, once upon a time, a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies and Queer Theory, so a great deal of my book is concerned with popular culture seen through that lens: Old Hollywood stories of folks like Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, but also more recent cultural representations of the “beard” or the “hag” and the tropes that often serve as companions, the “tragic gay man” or the “gay best friend” or the “gay villain.”
All that to say, music is all over my book—from Judy and Liza to Tori Amos and The Verve Pipe. I had to remove many song quotes to avoid copyright and licensing fees, but here were MANY song quotes included in early drafts of the manuscript or songs that mattered to me in the aftermath of that relationship.
“Blood Roses” by Tori Amos
This is one of the few songs that made it into the final manuscript by name. I met my first husband (Devin) at a Christian summer camp where we bonded immediately over feeling like outsiders to a place where everyone else felt sturdier and more certain than either of us did. One of our first work assignments during our training week was to pick up trash along one of the rural highways that ran by our camp. We happened upon a little cluster of wild magenta roses that were growing by the side of the road, and Devin picked me a rose which I placed behind my ear and then he began singing this song, which I immediately recognized as a song from Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele album which had come out the previous year (we met in 1997). When I told him I recognized it, we immediately began to unpack all the music we loved (including Tori Amos) and that would be one of the main shared interests we’d have over the course of our relationship. It was especially meaningful in that Christian camp context though, because I knew from having worked there the previous summer that hardly anyone on staff knew who Tori Amos even was (Christian Contemporary Music tended to predominate the playlists and conversations at camp). And so the part of me that wanted to believe I shared some special thing with Devin immediately warmed to this idea that Tori Amos was our “thing.” The song itself is as captivating as it is weird. Most of it Amos plays on the harpsichord and there are eerie bell sounds and harmonium. There’s a line in this song, “You think I’m a queer, I think you’re a queer / Said I think you’re a queer” and as I was putting together a soundtrack to help me re-enter the time of the book, I found it striking, especially given the history of that relationship, that those lyrics were in the very first song my we ever connected on.
“Silent All These Years” by Tori Amos
Because of the way we connected over “Blood Roses,” Devin invited me (on the same day as the trash pickup) back to his cabin to listen to a live recording of Tori Amos singing “Silent All These Years” from the RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) concert. This was an incredibly important moment in our relationship as within the first 24 hours of our meeting each other, we’d spent about eight of them talking nonstop just with each other, and when we wandered off to his cabin to listen to that before dinner and a staff meeting, the rest of the counselors watched us walk off together and romantic rumors (which I didn’t mind because I was very attracted to him and liked him a great deal and it didn’t hurt my feelings one bit to imagine that people might think he liked me too) immediately began to circulate about us. There’s a great line in the song that I riff on in that chapter (though I don’t quote it directly), “But what if I’m a mermaid with these jeans of his with her name still on it? / Hey, but I don’t care cause sometimes I hear my voice / And it’s been here / silent all these years.” And there was a kind of instantaneous hopefulness and identification I felt with these lyrics as I sat on Devin’s bed across from him listening to those lines. Mermaids are magical changelings and they are hard to capture and they shimmer and disappear, and all of that felt really resonant to me as I already felt I wanted both to be the mermaid myself (and to hear my own voice) but also to capture the sense of magic that already felt so palpable with this person I was connecting with.
“The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe
This album released in 1996, the same year as Boys for Pele. And there’s a chapter that’s no longer in the book where I wander into one of the camp meeting rooms while Devin (who has a beautiful singing voice and is a really talented pianist) was singing this song, playing it on the piano. There’s a great stanza in it, “Can’t be held responsible / Cause she was touching her face / I won’t be held responsible she fell in love in the first place.” And again, at twenty-eight years distance, those lines felt poignant to me coming from him back then, as I re-listened to these songs. One of the refrains from the chorus also has felt incredibly apt, “We were merely freshmen.” And while it was close to being literally true—I was nineteen and Devin was twenty when we met—there’s a kind of grace there for the two sweet, earnest, well-meaning kids we were. There was so much we didn’t know, and often when I hear that song, I feel a pang of bittersweet tenderness towards the both of us there back in that room thinking of those lyrics. It makes me want to go back and give us both a big hug and tell those two kids they’d be okay eventually.
“Sullivan Street” by Counting Crows
One of my friends has told me repeatedly that my stories are cinematic, and I don’t know if it’s necessarily that the stories themselves are cinematic so much as the way I maybe impose or project some kind of retroactive cinematic filter onto them. I’ve also always been a lyrics girlie, and this is yet another song that we really listened to (and which Devin played on the piano and sang frequently) that feels freighted when you consider it’s meaning. One of the words/ideas that comes to really mean a lot in this song is “almost”: “I’m almost drowning in her sea / She’s nearly crawling on her knees / It’s almost everything I need.” And that feels so apt of that relationship. One of the many reasons that it was so easy to ignore the things that were wrong with that relationship was that there was so much of it that felt powerfully right. It was actually almost enough for both of us, which is why it lasted seven years.
“I’m on Fire” by Bruce Springsteen (Tori Amos Cover)
So, Tori Amos did a cover of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” (I’m an even bigger Springsteen stan than I am a Tori Amos stan, so this felt like a heavenly convergence for me) for the old VH1 Crossroads special in 1996 (it’s occurring to me as I type this what a big year this was for me and my little book soundtrack!). And somewhere in rural Georgia Devin and I purchased that CD at a Wal-Mart. It was our mid-summer break from camp in 1997, and we’d driven, just the two of us, to go see a camp friend whose family lived in Atlanta. We both had loved the performance of this song when we’d seen it on TV, and as we needed some new music to listen to in the car, we were thrilled to find this anthology album to play. Devin would later record himself playing and singing this song for me for our first Valentine’s Day as a couple. However, at the time we purchased it, we were still months away from becoming a couple, and the line, “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull / And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull” felt like a really apt way of describing how into him I was and how tormented by not being with him I felt at the time.
“6th Avenue Heartache” The Wallflowers (feat. Adam Duritz)
This was a scene/moment of the story that was ultimately cut out of the book, but we started to date several months after camp ended. We were riding in Devin’s old burgundy Ford Explorer. I was up front in the passenger seat and three of our friends from camp, who were in town for a wedding, were seated in the back. When the chorus was sung, “The same black line that was drawn on you / Was drawn on me / And that’s drawn me in,” Devin reached over and grabbed my hand. And it was a little like announcing that we were dating to our friends (who immediately giggled and clapped in the back seat). But it felt meaningful as well. The ways we were connected were the “black lines” that we both often felt placed us outside belonging.
“My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion
Adding this in here for a few reasons, one of which is that on that same trip where we began dating, we saw Titanic in the movie theater with a bunch of our friends (it had only been out for a couple weeks at that point). A couple months later, on Valentine’s Day, Devin included the Titanic soundtrack in a box for me. Also, one of our ongoing inside jokes (for the entirety of our relationship) was referencing a Celine Dion special where she introduced this song by referring to it as being from a film she pronounced “Tit-tanic” (hitting that first syllable so it sounded like “tit” instead of “tight”).
“No Pressure Over Cappuccino” by Alanis Morissette
Another scene that was ultimately cut was one well into our marriage. I think we’d been married two and a half years (?) or thereabouts. We’d been in Oklahoma (where he was from) visiting his family for Christmas and were driving home. From the time we’d met each other, one of the things I’d loved best about being with Devin was that we never ran out of things to say to each other. But by that point in our relationship, we’d sometimes have periods of time when no matter what we tried, we just couldn’t seem to speak or find words. So, occasionally, we’d just have these painfully heavy car rides (it was nine hours from Tulsa to where we lived in Jackson) when everything just felt hopeless and broken. But the moment we hit play on this CD, something about the energy in the car just shifted entirely. Her line, “Is it just me? / Or is it dark in here?” got to both of us. It felt like a necessary exhale. Once the song was done, we felt lighter and began chatting and then laughing and then it felt like it used to feel—easy. We pulled over and bought some of our favorite candy—especially some Spree, which we both loved. This song was a buoy when we needed it, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it.
“Land-Locked Blues” by Bright Eyes
When I got divorced, I moved back in with my parents in Yazoo City, MS, which is about a 45 minute-drive north of Jackson. I picked up a few literature classes at the college where I used to teach, and one of my colleagues burned me a copy of this two-disc Bright Eyes collection, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ashes in a Digital Urn. The 8th song on I’m Wide Awake was “Land-Locked Blues” which is a duet between Conor Oberst and Emmylou Harris. I was arrested by it from the very first line, which is, “If you walk away, I’ll walk away / Just tell me which road you will take / I don’t want to risk our paths crossing someday / So you walk that way / I’ll walk this way.” I was listening to it that first time on my way home from teaching a Brit Lit survey class, and just like a good song at the right time always does, it just punctured some carapace that was starting to grow over my heart around that time. I was able to just sit with the song and just sit with my own raw grief and hold it gentler than before. By the time, Harris and Oberst got to this stanza, “I keep drinking the ink from my pen / And I’m balancing history books up on my head / but it all boils down to one quotable phrase / if you love something, give it away,” I felt like the song had looked inside me and been written exclusively for me in that moment. That’s exactly how I felt about the way I’d been able to end things with my first husband, and it felt so complex and layered and kind and sad all at once. I just love that song. I still tear up sometimes when I hear it and I’m not prepped for it.
“Look for Me As You Go By” by the Innocence Mission
In the weeks after my ex and I split up, I went to my friend Stephanie’s house for a game night, and she had burned me a CD (it’s occurring to me as I respond to these questions how much I miss the making and receiving of mix tapes and CD’s) with this song on it. At the time, I was unfamiliar with the Innocence Mission. I’ve always been a sucker for a song with a big, sweeping crescendo at the end, especially if there’s a beautiful duet with an unexpected harmony as part of it. This song delivers on both those counts. I loved it so much and so immediately, that I went home that night and made these lines part of my email signature (which I kept for months): “Don’t see me only as I am / See me how I long to be / How I long to be / Shining like a flowering tree / Under the gray Pennsylvania sky / Look for me as you go by.” Not long after that, Devin and I were emailing something about settling up the stuff in our apartment, and he told me that he really loved that lyric and it felt very apt about how he was feeling at the time. And I kind of loved that even after we’d split up, we could still share that connection we’d forged seven years earlier over music.
“Both Hands” by Ani DiFranco
My friend Reva used to cover this song regularly, and I have always loved it. Random Ani connection: on one of the first walks we ever took together in the Boston neighborhood where we met, my second (current) husband quoted the entirety of Ani’s spoken word “I am not a pretty girl” to me, and I thought that was just about the coolest thing ever. But this particular song of hers really got me, and when I decided to dedicate the book to Devin, I knew that I wanted to use a quote from this song that I felt captured the whole story of our relationship as well as anything else I knew. It’s a song about a couple who are breaking up, and one of my favorite lines in it says, “I am writing graffiti on your body / I am drawing the story of how hard we tried, how hard we tried.” If you make it to the end of the book, you’ll see that this concept is of major importance to me in my story, but even if you just get through the first few chapters, I think it’s pretty clear just how incredibly hard both my ex and I were trying to be what we felt we were supposed to be. I was BUMMED to have to cut that quote from the dedication (because lyrics cost money I don’t have), but that song will always be really special to me.
Kelly Foster Lundquist teaches writing at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. A 2013 Milton postgraduate fellow at Image Journal and Kenyon Review writers’ alum, her work has appeared in Last Syllable Lit, Whale Road Review, and The Academy Stories among other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University and an MA in English from Mississippi College, and remains a PhD dropout. Lundquist lives in a little red house by the Mississippi River with her spouse and daughter.