In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Lisa Slage Robinson’s collection Esquire Ball is filled with stories fantastic in every way.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“In these 13 tales, murky mythologies mix with the letter of the law…A former corporate lawyer and litigator, the author demonstrates assured craft, vivid imagination, and a strong point of view that comes from experience…A collection as enigmatic as it is precise.”
In her own words, here is Lisa Slage Robinson’s Book Notes music playlist for her short fiction collection Esquire Ball:
Music (and sound) is an important part of my creative process. Music helps me imagine the world at the moment of the story. Beyond invoking emotion, it’s also landscape and streetscape, energy and rhythm and metaphor. I’ve been known to spend hours searching for the perfect sound or song. Procrastination perhaps – but for me it’s active meditation. Sometimes the music finds its way into the narrative, but more often than not, it becomes the silent soundtrack running in the background as I write – such that the place and the characters are infused with all the good stuff, the texture and motivation that the music brings.
Because Esquire Ball is set in the ‘80s, I returned again and again to that decade, listening to Billboard’s Top 100 list. I reconnected with Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Whitney Houston, Prince, Lionel Ritchie, George Michael, John Cougar Mellancamp, although these usual suspects did not make it into the playlist. The music conjured big hair and shoulder pads, white anklets with high heels, Jane Fonda dance aerobic videos, and MTV. It conjured anxieties of the era, trickle-down economics, cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall, conspicuous consumption, hunger for success and my own anxieties as I navigated law school, listening to Cleveland’s WMMS – the Home of the Buzzard – as I drove to and from school and to my waitressing jobs that paid the rent, traversed the interview circuit, studied for the bar exam, and made my way into those initial years of practicing law, having a piece of paper that certified that I had become an “Esquire” without really knowing how to actually “practice” law.
While there’s a lot of ‘80s music in Esquire Ball, as the stories veered from realism into fabulism, sounds from other eras and genres seeped in: swamp music, Cajun, zydeco, old-timey Appalachian hymns, classical jazz, circus and carnival marches, ‘60s TV theme songs and movie soundtracks. My playlist includes most but not all of it.
Thriller
Michael Jackson
Thriller
(1982)
Halloween Disco Funk
In the title story “Esquire Ball,” it’s Halloween eve. Trevor celebrates passing the bar exam at Jukes, a downtown afterwork bar. Trevor should be happy but he mopes in a booth because he had always pictured celebrating this moment with his fiancée, but she’d dumped him at the altar. In a boozy haze, he contemplates his future. He watches Cissy, his nemesis, and other newly minted lawyers line dance and zombie claw under the fractured disco ball light to “Thriller.” Trevor remembers the gossip – that the firm deployed some sort of swamp Voodoo to help promising young associates secure a wife.
“Esquire Ball” is the fourth story in the collection. It’s the first time we see that uncanny forces may be operating in this world. “Thriller” is a cultural touchstone of the era and offers the perfect mood with its creaking door, thunder, footsteps, wind, howling wolves and the spoken word sequence voiced by Vincent Price.
When Sorrows Encompass Me ‘Round
Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham
Back Roads to Cold Mountain (2004)
Tent Revival Hymn
When Sorrows Encompass Me Round
Kaia Kater
Sorrow Bound (2015)
Folk, Old-Time, Roots
Later, things start to get weird. Trevor and Cissy attend the Esquire Ball, a lavish party hosted by a partner’s wife. Mrs. Stash, the hostess, finds Trevor under a weeping willow tree. Together they hop a lily pad and float through a sewer pipe and into wetlands. She delivers him to a strange man with a handmade banjo used to summon wifely candidates – tadpoles. The Banjo Man leads him to a clearing where members of the law firm are gathered for the summoning.
Before draining the swamp in the second half of the 19th century, the wet forest and marshland surrounding Northwest Ohio, in and around Toledo, was a breeding ground for mosquitos, malaria and frogs. Toledo acquired the nickname Frogtown.
I read somewhere that a male frog’s mating call sounds like plunks similar to the plucking of a loose banjo string. One summer evening, as I was jogging along a trail that followed a stream, I heard their twangy call, which indeed sounded like banjo. I tried to capture the sound on my phone without success. So, I turned to YouTube. I spent hours listening to frog sounds which ultimately led to clawhammer videos, Americana, old timey revival music and finally to “When Sorrows Encompass Me Round,” the best versions of which are rough-hewn, off-key mournful wailing, a slow hardscrabble lament and longing for deliverance accompanied by clawhammer banjo. I was immediately drawn to the Tommy Jarrell-Fred Cockerham rendition.
This seemed like a perfect song for the Banjo Man in “Esquire Ball” to play as he summoned forth prospective brides for Trevor, with all the men around the campfire reminiscing about their own struggles in the days before they found a perfect mate.
These are the sounds I had in mind when writing the scene but I later found and fell in love with the version reimagined with new lyrics about slavery by Grenadian-Canadian singer, songwriter, banjo player, Kaia Kater who is known for her R&B-inspired, Appalachian sound.
Mack the Knife
Bobby Darin
1959
Swing jazz, lounge, big band
In my story, “Mack the Knife,” Cissy is a summer associate working late at night at the request of a senior partner. She finds herself staring out the window at the tugboats dragging coal through the muddy Maumee River. As it gets dark, the bridge lights twinkle, giving it a romantic glow, and she imagines she could be anywhere – Paris or London or Venice. The partner interrupts her musings. She soon finds herself in a compromising situation from which she is unable to extricate herself. The intimate moment turned sexual assault only stops when they hear another lawyer walking down the hallway singing “Mack the Knife.” At the end of the summer, Cissy will get an offer for permanent employment.
“Mack the Knife,” the Bobby Darin version, has this wonderful, upbeat tempo. It’s big band, punchy brass, hipster, Las Vegas show–Rat Pack jazz. It’s impossible to listen to it without dancing, or at the very least bobbing your head, tapping your feet, and popping your shoulders left and right to the beat. But it’s sinister at its very core. How many people have gleefully sung this breezy show tune without deciphering its menacing lyrics, a ballad about a charming criminal who commits a series of murders:
Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly whites
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it … ah … out of sight.
Ya know when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, though, wears old MacHeath, babe
So there’s nevah, nevah a trace of red.
For Cissy, the song represents a turning point. Notably, she never reports the incident. She adopts the “grin and bear it,” “laugh it off,” “pretend it didn’t happen” strategy. It’s the ‘80s.
Hungry Like a Wolf
Duran Duran
Rio
New Wave, 1982
Cissy is literally hungry. We see her eating steak after a successful collection case, and fueling late night document production and brief writing with Ding Dongs, and Cheese Puffs and licorice. Her appetite is insatiable. She’s hungry for her life to begin. She’s hungry for success.
In “Devil’s Hole Road,” a judge orders Cissy to drive out to an old farmhouse to inspect damaged windows that her client is trying to collect payment for. Cissy catches a ride with Liza, the defendant. “Hungry Like the Wolf” is playing on the radio as they drive from the courthouse across the flat farmland, what used to be a vast impenetrable swamp, to Devils Hole Road. Cissy finds herself attracted to Liza, who asks her why she wanted to be a lawyer. Cissy shrugs – perhaps she just wanted to feel important. Liza encourages her not to be so uptight and will later facilitate the examination of Cissy’s soul.
Circus Polka (Composed for a Young Elephant)
Igor Stravinsky
From Russian Dances Orchestre de la Suisse Romande & Kazuki Yamada
2016
Neoclassical
In “Circus Polka,” Robert Barnum is a bedraggled, down on his luck lawyer, without fancy credentials. In search of clients who may have been exposed to asbestos, he meets Norma, a former ballerina and cabaret dancer, and the little girl in her care, named Tulip. Norma, a modern-day Svengali, transforms Barnum into a respectable looking attorney and offers suggestions for success. Among other things, she teaches him how to dance.
In 1941, Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus commissioned George Balanchine to choreograph a ballet for elephants. Balanchine in turn asked Stravinsky to compose the music. Circus Polka premiered in 1942 at Madison Square Garden with 50 ballerinas and 50 elephants clad in pink tutus. Described as the “juxtaposition of the graceful and grotesque,” Circus Polka features cacophonous clashing cymbals, lumbering low brass – trombones and tubas to mimic elephants and bright and playful piccolo trills and a thread of a triumphant military march.
Circus Polka centers the imagination: the grand entrance into the big tent, the clowns and the lion tamers, the contortionists and flying trapeze artists, the master of ceremonies with the beautiful dancing girls and the elephants taking center ring. An audio metaphor for the life of a lawyer, the three ring circus of a lawsuit, the pageantry, the tricks of the trade.
Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin
Performed by London Symphony Orchestra & Andre Previn
Classical Music in the Movies (1971)
Jazz and Classical Fusion
In “Parade of Horribles,” Cissy recounts the moment her brother arrives on the doorstep. The manic energy of “Rhapsody in Blue” seemed like the perfect anthem for this boy who would become the catalyst for change in the family, and the brutality of a moment which would alter Cissy’s life:
Jimmer came to us one night, carried in by the East Wind. A souvenir, more or less, from my father’s travels…
All these years later, when I remember this moment, my mind conjures Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the United Airlines version, not the one Jimmer would come to play imperfectly on the piano next door, and not the long symphonic version with the sexy, two-and-a-half octave clarinet glissando, with all that anticipation, the slow inevitable climax. Instead, the scene and the music cuts right to the airplane soaring above the clouds and the full orchestra, the bright overlay of horns, the intermittent and urgent piano chords, the triumphant clashing cymbals. The commercial wouldn’t come out for another thirteen years, but there it is indelibly seared in my mind as the soundtrack for Jimmer’s arrival, because that’s the way memory works. The longer you live, it jumbles with specificity.
What’s New Pussycat
Burt Bacharach (music) Hall David (Lyrics) sung by Tom Jones
From the 1965 movie soundtrack What’s New Pussycat
In the “Parade of Horribles,” we learn that Cissy’s father travels the continent shilling frozen diet food. Along the way, he acquires various mistresses and perhaps a son. The title song from the movie “What’s New Pussycat,” about a notorious womanizer addicted to sex, who calls every woman “pussycat” so he won’t have to remember her name, captures an era, spanning decades, where sexual conquests – without consequences for men – embodied Cissy’s father as well as many men Cissy would later meet in the professional world.
I Dream of Jeannie (TV Series Theme)
Hugo Montenegro (music)
Cissy’s father casually mentions that he may have had a liaison with an actress who may have starred in a similar TV series. A woman trapped in a bottle, who calls her love interest “master” and is only let out to satisfy his needs.
Pat Benatar|
Heartbreaker
In the Heat of the Night (Album)
1979
The last story of the collection is the strangest of all. Inspired by Borges’ “The Aleph” and Susan Simard’s memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, “Legend” flashes forward to sometime in the present day. A gaggle of successful men play poker in the basement of a McMansion, recalling their salad days as college students on the verge of their bright shiny futures. From a scratchy LP on a refurbished turntable, Pat Benatar sings. They reminisce about their college days and a mysterious young woman, a “crazy-haired chick,” who lived in the swamp somewhere beyond the campus. While the group gossips about her, Rusty remembers, but keeps to himself his intimate relationship with this woman, whose name was Cassie, and how she was the catalyst for his success. The University rejects her PhD dissertation but Cassie refuses to be silenced. Using her hair and the roots of an oak tree as a conduit, Cassie takes Rusty on a metaphysical journey from the beginning of time into the future, revealing the secrets of the universe. Rusty cashes in on his new knowledge without giving Cassie credit. Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” – the fierce, hard rock vocals, the relentless drum beat give voice to Cassie’s choice of Rusty as her avatar:
Your love is like a tidal wave, spinning over my head
Drownin’ me in your promises, better left unsaid
You’re the right kind of sinner
To release my inner fantasy
The invincible winner
And you know that you were born to be
Bonus Tracks: Other songs that made an appearance in Esquire Ball:
Girls Just Want to Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper
Delta Dawn – Tanya Tucker
Cold As Ice – Foreigner
What You Need – INXS
Everybody Have Fun Tonight – Wang Chung
Beat It – Michael Jackson
Manic Monday – Bangles
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria – Rodgers and Hammerstein (The Sound of Music)
Lisa Slage Robinson writes to explore invisible landscapes and magical feminism. She is the author of Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp (Black Lawrence Press, February 2026). Named a finalist for Midwest Review’s Great Midwest Fiction Contest, her work appears in Iron Horse Literary Review, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, PRISM International, Necessary Fiction and elsewhere. Lisa serves on the board of Autumn House Press. A former litigator and corporate attorney, she practiced law in the States and Canada. Lisa lives in Pittsburgh with her husband where they keep the lights on for the daughters. You can visit her online at lisaslagerobinson.com.