In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Emily Nemens’s Clutch is a masterclass in the writing of an ensemble novel as it uncovers the lives of several middle-aged friends both cleverly and profoundly.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Nemens captures the complexity of maintaining friendships while reckoning with the challenges of middle age. It adds up to a chatty and sometimes insightful riff on The Big Chill.”
In her own words, here is Emily Nemens’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Clutch:
Clutch, a book about friendship and endurance and the ups and downs and trainwrecks of growing up and into midlife together, has a lot of music in it. There are references to era-defining Britney Spears singles and age-old Handel. I namecheck Freddie Mercury and Queen as the soundtrack to a victorious moment, and I paid out the nose to reprint one line of one song by medium-famous indie rock band because they have this one peppy-but-mean refrain in the chorus that was just too perfect for the scene not to reprint. I mean, how else might you plausibly get a whole, two-thousand person birthday party to sing-shout a very apt insult in unison? It’s about more than the lyric at that point, it’s about the power of so many voices screaming it together. But that comes nearly at the end of the book, and I’d like to not spoil the reading experience for you, dear reader, so let me back up and begin at the beginning.
“This Year” – The Mountain Goats
This track feels a bit predictable to include in a book whose throughline is if and how a group of friends can hang on to their New Year’s resolutions as things go off the rails (Clutch is set in the first three months of 2023). Before Gregg, Reba, Bella, Carson, and Hillary know it, self-improvement has slid into self-preservation and the kind of desperate clutching that feels very true to the chorus of this ear-worm of a song. I’ll be honest, “This Year” has also gotten me through some awful stretches; I didn’t and don’t mind repeating the repetitive left-hand piano line and the snappy drum beat, because there really is something cathartic about belting this one along with Mr. Dardenne, as so aptly demonstrated by Stephen Colbert.
“Doralice” – Getz/Gilberto
Clutch, as a reading journey, starts a bit slow and easy—an extended passage covers a short weekend in Palm Springs, the friends together on holiday, filling up on sunshine and hallucinogens. I’ve always love Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto; Stan Getz’s iconic album Getz/Gilberto was mygateway drug to bossa nova. I think any song on that album would be a good poolside soundtrack for the ladies’ weekend; I love that “Doralice,” about a lover fretting over his future with Doralice, is so peppy even as it devastates. After several verses of lament and worry and trying to get out of it (he’d rather be with his guitar), it closes with this line (translated from the Portuguese): How are we going to do it? The women of Clutch, unfamiliar with the Portuguese, listening to the track, would have no idea that a thing at all is wrong. This seems apt, as life in novels imitates art that evokes said novels sometimes, no?
“Hand In My Pocket” – Alanis Morissette
Okay, indulge my nineties nostalgia here, but like Britney Spears, this song is age-appropriate for the women of Clutch (all early eighties babies), and it’s a banger about duality. It’s also a good song of faux-profundity for the day they spend tripping together, on home-made, hand-dosed psylocibin chocolates. For much of the song, Alanis is crooning about the beauty of her contradictions, and by the end of it she’s reached some acceptance. So much of Clutch is about ambivalence, uncertainty, and accepting a limbo as the ongoing state of affairs: very rarely is life painted in black and white, and Alanis gets that. May we all figure out how to manage this contradictory, confusing life, whether or not we’re treating ourselves on/to mushroom chocolates.
“Emmylou” – First Aid Kit
The thing about New Year’s resolutions is that they hit at the bleakest times of the year: dark, cold, full of big lists of to-dos that seem to double in the night. February is short, but boy is it a slog—and I assume the Swedish singers behind First Aid Kit know from winters! This song is about missing the easier times of summer, but enduring through the storms, and—importantly—staying loyal to your friends. Propping each other up through the bleakest seasons is the only way we’ll get to another bright stretch.
“I’ll Never Be the Same” – James Carter
I am a recovering baritone saxophone player, and James Carter is longtime a favorite. I love this one in particular for the strange configuration—who ever thought bari sax, violin, and accordion (with supporting guitar) could sound like kismet? It’s a little like a scrappy writer (Carson) and high-flying lawyer (Bella) being such good friends—you might not put them together if they were standing in a lineup, but sometimes, life works in unpredictable but also perfect ways. Also, I love that Carter, known for absolutely wailing on his horn, is taking it easy on this one (mostly). It’s a feeling not unlike the quiet stretches in these women’s lives, post Palm Springs and before everything else… everything is waltzing along… until boom.
“Season of the Shark” – Yo La Tengo
There is no shortage of songs about friendship, but I think this portrait of compassion and patience is one of the best. Don’t be fooled the upbeat tempo, it’s about all the heartbreak in the world—and how we can come back from it. It’s not always about bootstraps or beating up your enemies or getting it perfect, it’s also being able to admit hurt and accept help. Clutch is trying to tell a similar story, in novel form.
Sarah Jaffe, “Clementine”
I often joke (usually to the befuddlement of others who haven’t wandered onto my narrow footpath of a reading journey) that Clutch is in the middle of the Venn diagram between Rona Jaffe, the mid-century chronicler of groups of college friends, and Sarah Jaffe, the labor journalist who wrote Work Won’t Love You Back. So imagine my delight to find another Jaffe to throw into the pot: singer-song writer Sarah Jaffe. “Clementine” speaks to the endurance sport of growing up, the regret management (“Let it go!”) that is so much easier to say than to do. The characters of Clutch are doing just this kind of reckoning, day after day.
“Spaceship” from Einstein on the Beach – Philip Glass Ensemble
I recently had the good fortune of seeing the PGE live, and I’m still dumbfounded. As a musician trained on a wind instrument, I had a sense of what’s required of Glass’s flutists—fast fingers and steady breath and a very good sense of timing. But to see Lisa Bielawa, who has been singing with the ensemble since the early nineties, perform the vocals—going between insanely fast intervals and these big, soaring notes, was staggering. Anyway, the experience of performing one of Philip Glass’s breakneck, technically challenging, physically exhausting pieces feels like an apt metaphor for these characters getting through the busy, nervy stretches of this story. It’s amazing how the rubato around 6 minutes feels like such a relief—but don’t be fooled! Even if the tempo dips a bit, keeping up with this chart is still a feat.
“These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”– David Byrne
This is a weird and delightful outtake/cover of the classic Nancy Sinatra tune. Boots—a specific, hard-heeled pair of Lucchese cowboy boots play an important role in Gregg’s trajectory, but the sentiment of this one—that sometimes you just gotta walk away from a bad situation, maybe with a stomp or two on the way, is a good reminder for all these friends that everyone should have their limits and know how to extract themselves from bad situations.
“I Feel It All” – Feist
I once joked that this song is the anthem for the guttering experience of the writing workshop—that delicious contradiction of “I knew more than I knew before” and “I don’t know what I knew before,” the poppy and the profound declaration: “I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart.” But it’s also the experience of growing up, past the initial triumph of the Bildingsroman into the Rest of Your Life. Don’t get me wrong, I find coming of age, and the related Kuntslerroman storytelling fascinating, but what about pushing past coming of age, and just being of age, an adult holding yourself up to the standards you’ve set for yourself, day after day? The gauntlet of acting as an actualized human, nominally capable of setting goals and reaching them, is a lot messier and more interesting to me at this moment than undergrad love affairs. Allowing yourself to have all the feels and realizations of “I Feel It All”—to say nothing of trying to sing along with Feist’s acrobatic, angelic lyrics—is its own exhausting exercise, and totally worth it.
“We Can’t Be Beat” – The Walkmen
I love this song about getting older and getting wise(r) and generally accepting the universe. The Walkment get points for the nearly a cappella open, the earnest, emotional harmonies that they mostly hit. The band is definitely the same one that sang-shouted the ranty and surly and so damn cynical tracks of their first album, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone a decade earlier (if you’re unfamiliar, you can get what you need to know from the title alone: these guys are knives out), but they’re also a bit unrecognizable for their new understanding of the big ol’ picture. As the women of Clutch are learning, one way or another, “I don’t need perfection/I need the whole.”
Emily Nemens is the author of the novel Clutch (Tin House/Zando).