In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Candice Wuehle’s novel Ultranatural an immersive pageturner, a captivating story of friendship and fame.
Sadie Dupois wrote of the book:
“In a ramped-up retelling of the pop starlet mythos, Ultranatural charts the converse curves of fame-seeking and holy bestiedom through the literary tradition of posting like your life depends on it. Wuehle’s shades-dark humor and astute weirdness are pitch-perfect, autotuned to ring out an alien gloss of mystic uncanny.”
In her own words, here is Candice Wuehle’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Ultranatural:
Before Ultranatural’s protagonist becomes a pop star so big she goes by one name alone—Love—she is Lacey Dove Bart: a girl from Appalachia raised on the waves of a classic rock station, where she learns defiance from Tom Petty and longing from Bruce Springsteen.
Songs from Petty, Springsteen, Dolly Parton, and Elvis form the emotional architecture of Ultranatural, but they also establish its central tension: the relationship between work and freedom. So much of American rock music is about labor—about what you owe, what you endure, and what you’re simply never going to escape. As I was writing, I listened often to Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” rewinding and relistening to The Boss groan, “I got debts no honest man can pay.” It’s a line that quickly, quietly captures the raw desperation of trying to live with dignity inside systems designed to extract from you. Lacey isn’t a ‘70s rock goddess, though, she’s an early aughts pop princess, more reminiscent of Britney Spears than Bruce Springsteen. Identical initials aside, the commanality between these two artists that most impressed me as I was writing was the repetition the message of “Atlantic City” as it resurfaces the polished brutality of Spears’ 2013 hit, “Work Bitch.”
For both Britney and Lacey, fame is not a release from labor but its most intensified form—an existence in which the self becomes both product and worker, endlessly optimized, endlessly visible. We’ve already seen how the American dream of becoming self-made can collapse into something far darker. In her 2022 memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears’ details the way her Las Vegas residency unfolded while she was under a conservatorship that controlled nearly every aspect of her life, her labor extracted on a relentless schedule even as her autonomy was stripped away. The very talent that should have secured her freedom instead bound her to a system that treated her less like a person and more like a resource.
This playlist traces that arc: from classic rock’s narratives of survival to the hyper-produced imperatives of pop, where freedom is marketed as a reward for submission. It’s the sound of a girl becoming an icon—and the persistent, unsettling question of what it costs to keep working once your life no longer belongs to you.
“9 to 5” – Dolly Parton
“They let you dream just to watch ’em shatter / You’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder / But you got dreams he’ll never take away/ In the same boat as a lot of your friends”
I was an eleven-year-old totally hypnotized by this comedy about labor rights and sexual harassment. It’s possible that growing up thinking the messages in 9 to 5 were normal is the reason why I’m like this today, and it’s certain that in the movie’s titular song, Dolly Parton gets at something central to Ultranatural: the idea that we are allowed to dream only within limits. When Parton sings, “they let you dream just to watch them shatter,” she acknowledges the insidious system we’re all in; the hurt locker in which we position ourselves as both participant in and victim of a system that thrives on aspiration. Yet—crucially—there remains something that cannot be extracted or owned in the “dreams he’ll never take away.” This tension (and hope) became a kind of thesis for me while writing the book: what does it mean to have and hold a dream that resists commodification? In the final act of Ultranatural, Lacey enters a sort of astral plane untouched by capitalism, where her inner life is no longer colonized and desire exists outside of productivity. What I love about the next move in “9 to 5” is that is understands that even in the most exploitative conditions, there’s still a collective interiority—“in the same boat with a lot of your friends.”
“Atlantic City” – Bruce Springsteen
“I got debts no honest man can pay.”
If Dolly gives us structure, Springsteen gives us tension. This is a narrative song, a story about a man whose back is so against the wall he decides to do a job for the mafia. The nakedness of Springsteen’s reckoning with debt, obligation, and the sense that you’re already behind before you have even truly begun has always rung truer to me than a hopeful pop anthem. Ultranatural takes place around the 2008 financial crash and in addition to being a book about a pop star, is a book about a generation of American’s born back on their heels, obliged to take deals their parents never had to for a whole lot less. Lacey’s outsized, monstrous ambition doesn’t emerge from nowhere; it emerges from a soul deep sense that she’s got debts no honest man can pay.
“Born to Run” – Bruce Springsteen
“It’s a death trap/ it’s a suicide rap.”
I have a theory that no Springsteen song is about what you thought it was about the first several hundred times you heard it. Case in point, I grew up thinking “Born to Run” was a victory song, the soundtrack of getting to a better place. Actually, though, this is a song about trying to figure out a way to “live with the sadness” of knowing the game is rigged and hope isn’t coming to your town. The best-case scenario in this world, as in most stories about the crushing weight of capitalism, is to love each other “with all the madness” and to dwell in a spirit of resistance; of running even if there’s nowhere to go. Springsteen is mentioned directly by Lacey many times in Ultranatural and when she’s at the end of running, it’s the fact that art like his managed to exist at all that keeps her going.
“I Won’t Back Down” – Tom Petty
“You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.”
This lyric becomes an integral part of the plot of Ultranatural, but I’ll let you read to find out how…
“Take Me Home, Country Roads” – Lana Del Rey
“Driving down the road/ I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday/ yesterday.”
I’ve never met a successful American artist who didn’t carry a shattering sense of urgency—the feeling not just that there’s more to do, but that everything should have already been done. That pressure runs parallel to the truer fear that in leaving, you may have already gone too far to return. I think of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi”—“Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long”—a line that reframes departure not as escape, but as a kind of irreversible miscalculation. In Ultranatural, this is Lacey’s condition. Her life becomes a series of forward movements that can’t be undone, each success pulling her further from any real sense of home.
I chose Lana Del Rey’s version of this song because there’s a moment in the novel when Lacey begins performing covers of the music she was raised on—songs that feel, to her, like a private language—but her label refuses to let her record them. Meanwhile, another artist (modeled on Del Rey) is permitted that sort of authorship. The result is the realization that the things that feel most internally meaningful to Lacey are precisely the things she cannot express within the system that made her famous. Even her longing for home is mediated, managed, and, ultimately, denied.
“Dorothea” – Taylor Swift
“If you’re ever tired of being known for who you know / You know you’ll always know me.”
Famously, this is a song Taylor Swift wrote about one of her only real peers in fame, Selena Gomez. But it’s also one of the clearest articulations I’ve heard of what it means to be truly known. The line hinges on a quiet distinction: between being known for something—your proximity, your image, your status—and being known by someone who remembers you before any of that took hold. In Ultranatural, Lacey’s closest grasp at this salvation is her childhood best friend, Carrie-Anne, the one person who exists outside the machinery of her fame.
The older I get, the more I understand how rare that is—to have not just someone who remembers your past, but someone who remembers it the way you do. Someone who holds a shared version of you that hasn’t been revised by success, commodified by an audience, or distorted by time. In a life increasingly structured by systems that reshape identity, that kind of witness becomes a form of continuity. I believe to be known in this way by friend—a person who chooses you every day not because they legally have to, but because they really know you—is our closest portal to accessing the self that can survive being turned into something else.
“Work Bitch” – Britney Spears
“You better work, bitch.”
If you don’t hear a phantom Britney whisper “You wanna a hot body? You better work, bitch” in your ear every single time you do sit ups, you might not have been a young woman in the early aughts. I love how this song says the quiet part out loud. For the epigraph of Ultranatural, I pair a variation on this song with the Marx quote: “The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.” I don’t think any two statements more accurately sum up the double bind of American success.
“Oh No!” – MARINA
“I know exactly what I want and who I want to be/ I know exactly why I walk and talk like a machine/ I’m now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy”
I actually heard “Oh No!” for the first time after finishing Ultranatural, but I wanted to include it because it captures the moment where self-definition becomes self-surveillance—where knowing exactly who you want to be starts to feel like a trap you can’t deviate from.
“Everything Is Romantic” – Charli XCX (ft. Caroline Polachek)
“It’s like you’re living the dream but not living your life.”
Charli XCX is probably the pop star saying the most interesting things about fame right now, which is incredible since she’s also so deeply inside of the machine of fame at this point. One of the most compelling things about bratis that it takes place right before full blown household name Charli emerges. She writes from the threshold—close enough to see its full machinery, but not fully subsumed. She describes having one foot in the real world and one foot inside the spectacle, and it’s that in-between state that gives the album its tension. The question isn’t simply whether you want success, but whether you’re willing to cross the point where success becomes totalizing.
In Ultranatural, Lacey reaches that threshold and then passes it. What Charli captures as ambivalence becomes, for Lacey, a condition: the realization that going all in doesn’t just mean achieving the dream, but discovering that the dream may never have been yours to begin with. The closer she gets to the version of life she was supposed to want, the more estranged she becomes from the self who wanted it.
“Golden G String” – Miley Cyrus
“You call me crazy / have you looked around this place?”
This isn’t one of Miley’s biggest hits, but it’s my personal favorite. I love how explicitly “Golden G String” revisits the moment that was meant to define and diminish her—her 2013 MTV Video Music Awards performance, where her sexuality was treated as spectacle and then weaponized against her. Here, years later, she reclaims that narrative with clarity and control, reframing what was once scandal as something more like revelation and reckoning. An understanding that the system that called her crazy was just describing…itself. It’s a win not just for Miley, but for everybody who took what happened as a cautionary tale and made themselves smaller, quieter, less just to appease “the old boys who hold all the cards.”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Candice Wuehle’s playlist for her novel Monarch
Candice Wuehle is author of Monarch, Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed, Death Industrial Complex, and BOUND. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.