In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Rowan Beaird’s novel Tenderness is both propulsive and moving, a book both literary and thrilling.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“A mystery from the first page to the last…The family’s secrets threaten to spill over as anticipation builds, and the result is a novel that feels like a true event, written with snappy prose and a pace that stretches out the mystery but never feels too slow. This book is great for readers who love complicated entanglements and secrets galore”
In her own words, here is Rowan Beaird’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Tenderness:
I received my first mixtape when I was 14. It was from a boy named Max who had a lip ring and the large, wet eyes of a deer, and I fell in love. Not with Max (sorry, Max!), but with the idea of curating a series of songs, provoking emotion, sending a letter of major and minor keys. Since then, I’ve made them obsessively. I make playlists for friends, family, moods, parties, road trips, and of course, I make them for my books. Nothing gets me into the world of a project faster than music.
My sophomore novel, Tenderness, takes place in 1976 over the course of a wedding weekend on a remote island off the coast of Virginia. It revolves around three main characters: the bride, Shay, who’s recently gotten out of a cult; her brother, William; and her best friend from college, Joel, who’s very much in love with her (and is also not the groom). I never thought I’d write historical fiction, but somehow, both of my books have taken place in decades I’ve never lived through, and a crucial part of my research has been focused on the music of the time. Discovering artists and listening to old favorites, deciding which records my characters would buy and which songs they’d change stations over on the radio. This playlist is Tenderness, all two-hundred ninety odd pages of it, distilled into ten tracks.
“Seabird” by Alessi Brothers
Tenderness is very much a book about siblings—William and Shay, a brother and sister, are at its heart—and so I thought it was fitting to start with a song from two brothers. This is a song you’d listen to on a sailboat, with the sun in your eyes. It’s very ’70s, in really the least cool way possible, with that high-pitched electronic keyboard in the background, and it’s a song that can be easy to dismiss if it’s not played loud enough. But when you dial up the volume, there’s a beautiful sadness to it. That plea to “fly home” breaks my heart.
“Nobody Knows” by Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir
I abide by the High Fidelity rule that song two on any mix has to kick it up a notch, and so here we have one of my favorites: “Nobody Knows.” T.L Barrett is a Pentecostal preacher from the South Side of Chicago who wrote and recorded this album in the early 1970s with his church’s youth choir. I love songs like this, where you can somehow feel and hear the room you’re in. I know nothing technical about how you record music, but I know when a track has that sort of texture. Tenderness is in large part about faith—the characters are all adrift, desperate to find purpose, community, love—and for research, I went to a handful of church services across Chicago. No choir sounded as good as this.
“Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex
This was my sister’s first dance song at her wedding. The wedding in Tenderness, planned mostly by the groom Andrew and his WASP-y, east coast family, is not cool enough to have this playing during the reception, but the mood of this song is the mood of the book. There’s a darkness and a lightness to it, somehow both melancholic and triumphant.
“Golden Years” by David Bowie
For a book about a wedding, I felt like I needed a song on this playlist that would actually get people on the dance floor. I needed to write party scenes, where people were having too many drinks and saying the wrong things. In the book, the song that gets people dancing is “Crocodile Rock,” but I could not bring myself to put a song that I actively dislike on any playlist of mine.
“Something on Your Mind” by Karen Dalton
This is a song for Shay. In the original draft, I only wrote one scene from her perspective; for a book that’s very much about whether or not we can ever know the people we love, I wanted the structure of it to explore whether you as the reader could know her only through the eyes of two men who love her. It turns out, you couldn’t. Every wonderful reader I had asked for more scenes with her, and so I felt like I got to know her better with each draft. This song unlocked a part of her character for me. The lyrics “You can’t stop crying/You haven’t got a thing to say/You feel you want to run away/There’s no use trying anyway” conjured this image of her, alone in her apartment watching Donahue, that ended up appearing as a critical scene in the book.
“Road” by Nick Drake
In Tenderness, the character of William is deeply connected to music—he’s wearing a Stooges shirt when you first meet him, he’s leaving records at his great aunt’s house, he’s playing his sister a Nick Drake song on the telephone. I think a tremendous amount about the music my characters love; it helps me understand who they are, and this song helped me find William’s heart. He’s just trying to find his road.
“Everybody’s Gotta Live” by Love
Love should be so much more famous than they are. This song is from their final album, when it was really just Arthur Lee left standing, and after this, his life was overcome with wave after wave of tragedy. My sister sent me this song during the pandemic, and I remember lying on my bed, listening to it and crying. Sometimes the simplest of lyrics hit you the hardest—something I always try to remember when writing.
“I’ve Been Loving You too Long” by Aretha Franklin
This is a song for Joel. With Tenderness, I really wanted to write a love story—something I’d been terrified to attempt for many years, worried I wouldn’t be up to the task (you, potential reader, can be the judge of whether or not I succeeded). Joel, flaws and all, is my lovesick hero, and I know he’d hear this song at a bar late at night and feel it deep in his soul.
“Atlantis” by Donovan
It’s possible that certain people can’t divorce this song from the scene where Joe Pesci loses his shit in Goodfellas. I am not one of those people. I first discovered this song as a teenager, and I remember when Donovan first starts talking a few seconds in, I thought, “What is this?!” Then there’s the odd, frail way he says “Hail, Atlantis!” at the 1:47 mark, right before the drums kick in and it suddenly becomes incredible. It’s a song that should not work, but it does work, and inspired a metaphor I use in the final chapters of Tenderness.
“Land”
Horses came out the year before Tenderness is set, and I was lucky enough to hear Patti Smith perform during the album’s 50th anniversary tour last year. There’s no one like Patti Smith. She’s a singular artist, a singular human. What she does with this album—it’s poetry, but it’s got hooks. That’s what I aspire to with everything that I write. Just be like Patti Smith. How hard can it be, right?
Rowan Beaird’s fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. She is the author of the novels The Divorcées and Tenderness.