In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Rebecca Chace’s novel Talking to the Wolf is a heartfelt portrayal of female friendship over time.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Brilliant, heartbreaking, and hopeful, Talking to the Wolf is a deeply empathetic novel with friendship at its core.”
In her own words, here is Rebecca Chace’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Talking to the Wolf:
My novel is about the complicated love of long-term friendships and a painful friend breakup. Which means it’s also about love, grief, and growing up in a tight knit group that is closer than family. Actually, they are your family. This is a set list of brokenhearted love songs, so listen to it when you want exactly that. One thing I’ve thought a lot about while writing this novel is that it doesn’t hurt any less when you break up with a friend–in fact it may hurt more. If you’re anything like me, you’ve counted on your friends to see you through all the other endings that turned your heart inside out. When you were flat out on the bathroom floor and your best friend sat on the tiles next to you, listening to you go on and on about that asshole you should have walked out on before they beat you to the door. That’s the friend I’m talking about. The one you never thought you’d lose. This playlist is for her.
Track 1: Nothing Compares 2 U/Sinead O’Connor by Prince
This had to be the first track on my brokenhearted play list. Only Sinead could cover a Prince song and own it. The four women in my novel are middle-aged, but their hearts haven’t been hardened by the decades. Maybe the opposite. Our friends can become our most intimate adult relationships, depending on how things are going with that person you thought was “the one.” I sung along with this one when my kids were young enough to ride in car seats in the back. It still gets me. Every time.
Track 2: Buckle/Florence and the Machine
One of my characters is a failed rock star. Val is a hugely talented songwriter and performer who was Almost Famous for a little while. Now she’s working as a dog-walker in her fifties. I’ve known a lot of people like that. I love everything about this song but especially the lyrics–the way that one word: “Buckle” is a verb and a noun. Worthy of Val at the height of her downtown fame. I can imagine her cranking this one up when she gets home, peels off her dog-walking clothes, and gets in the bathtub with vodka and a drugstore facemask. She’s “much too old for this” – but we never get too old for this.
Track 3: All My Little Words/The Magnetic Fields
I’m sure Val and Cora–the one who ghosted her and broke her heart–are Magnetic Fields fans. The chorus kills me with the harmonies and the lyric turn from “All the tea in China” to “All of North Carolina.” The first time you hear it feels like an inevitable surprise. Plus, the whole album is a novel with each song a chapter on the theme of heartbreak. This one gets played on repeat.
Track 4: I Get Along Without You Very Well/Chet Baker
Chet Baker was the original hipster, a crooner junkie that every single character in this book would have fallen for–hard. There are almost no men in the novel, but there is one episode when Val and her band, the Joypoppers, are on the rise in back in the 80s. Val and her lover climb the fence of Gramercy Park after partying all night at the once-hip Gramercy Park Hotel. The park is locked and gated, only the wealthy residents or hotel guests have a key–unusual in New York City. But no fence can keep Val out when she wants to get in. Like she says when she’s lying on the grass at dawn, “nothing hurts anymore.”
Track 5: At My Window, Sad and Lonely/ Billy Bragg, Wilco
Cora is Val’s oldest friend, the one she’s closest to in the foursome. When Cora ghosts Val it’s the first fissure in their lifelong friendship:
“I need a break, Cora wrote to her the next day. Texting instead of calling.
We don’t get breaks! Val texted back, before she understood she wasn’t getting an answer.”
Do you ever think of me? Asks Billy Bragg in this contemporary/traditional ballad off the album, “Mermaid Avenue.” That’s the thing about ghosting. We don’t get an answer.
“Was Cora thinking about Val as much as Val thought about her? No, said Sasha; no, said Lauren.”
Track 6: Slow Learner/Val and the Joypoppers
Val recorded some albums. She even had a hit single, “Like A Girl.” The album went platinum with her ballad, “Beautiful Boy” on the B-side. “Slow Learner” is the song she recorded after her anger burned out. Unplugged. Just Val and her guitar. The track was never released. Until now.
Track 7: Friend/ Stella Donnelly
Stella Donnelly wrote a whole album about a friend breakup. It opens with what sounds exactly how I imagine the unanswered texts Val writes to Cora. “Was I happier now, than when I was then?” There is no answer. The album travels all the paths of friendship to this unanswered question.
Track 8: If You See Her Say Hello/Bob Dylan
“Blood On the Tracks” may be the greatest breakup album ever written. This track is a raw letter to the one he lost forever. He doesn’t argue, he doesn’t rage, he even tries to give her his blessing. This is when you know you’ll never get over this one. You can only keep moving. “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time.” Sometimes you never get free.
Track 9: Shim el Yasmine/Mashrou’ Leila
H Sinno’s voice drenches this song with longing and tenderness. The band, Mashrou’ Leila, was a Lebanese Indie band fronted by Sinno, whom The New York Times called “the only openly gay popstar in the Arab world” back in 2017. How to write about this beloved, now disbanded group of musicians in this time of brutal war in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and the entire region? Sinno and the band endured hatred, threats, and abuse because of their support of LGBTQ identity. A Palestinian student recently taught me an Arabic word pronounced “Tawk” in English. It means longing for something you have never had. In German it’s “Sehnsucht.” These words have no direct translation into English, but we all know what this feels like. Somewhere between myth and desire. Like love. Like peace.
شم اليسمين
Smell the jasmine
ودوق الدبس بطحينة
And taste the molasses with tahini
و تذكر تذكرني
And remember to remember me
يا اخي أوعى تنساني
Oh brother, don’t forget me
يا حبيبي يا نصيبي
My love, my prize
كان بودي خليك بقربي
I would have liked to keep you close to me
عرفك عأهلي وتتوجلي قلبي
Introduce you to my family and have you crown my heart
أطبخ أكلتك أشطفلك بيتك
Cook food for you, clean your house
دلع ولادك أعمل ست بيتك
Spoil your kids, be your housewife
بس إنت ببيتك وأنا بشي بيت
But your in your house and I’m in another
والله يا ريتك ما بعمرك فليت
Oh god, I wish I never let you go
وشم اليسمينة
Smell the jasmine
و تذكر تنساني
And remember to forget me
Track 10: Go Leave/Anohni by Kate McGarrigle
Kate McGarrigle wrote and recorded this song for the self-titled 1975 debut album with her sister, Anna. It’s one of the saddest songs ever written about her breakup with songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. The Wainwright/ McGarrigle music family invited Anohni to interpret the song for one of their tribute concerts to raise money for the Kate McGarrigle Fund established after her death in 2010. Anohni is like no other singer, no other interpreter could tear it open the way she does. This song says goodbye and while never saying goodbye.
Rebecca Chace is the award-winning author of Leaving Rock Harbor (New York Times Editor’s Choice; New England Book Awards Finalist, June Indie Notable Book); Capture the Flag; Chautauqua Summer (New York Times Notable and Editor’s Choice); June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny (middle-grade). She is also the author of plays, screenplays, and literary essays. She has written for The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, The Yale Review, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. Grants and fellowships include Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, American Academy in Rome (visiting artist), Dora Maar House, and many others. She is faculty associate and program manager at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.