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.
Emily McBride’s novel Queen Mab is a brilliant debut that marries folklore to postpartum depression.
The New Yorker wrote of the book:
“The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry . . . The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.”
In her own words, here is Emily McBride’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Queen Mab:
Spooky lullabies and fairy tale songs from Queen Mab
In Queen Mab, Madeleine is a young mother who thinks her baby is not her baby, but a fairy changeling. The world seems full of menace and threat, especially at night, when she sits alone in the dark, feeding the endlessly hungry fairy child, and trying to sing it to sleep—but the words come out cracked. “I always liked the spooky lullabies best when you were a baby,” her own mother says. “The ones with a bit of menace.”
Some lullabies are written especially to sing to children, and others are just songs, sung low, sung slow. When the lyrics are dark, they hint at a world where a tired adult croons alone in the dead of night, and lets their own fears and anxieties roam over things they wouldn’t admit to in the daylit hours.
Here are the songs of forgotten babies, crab-monsters and unexpected violence that informed Queen Mab.
Highland Fairy Lullaby, Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor
This mournful Scottish tune is quoted outright in the novel. It’s about a mother who puts her baby down in the mountains, and never finds her again. Any parent’s nightmare. In the novel, hearing it feeds all of Madeleine’s latent anxieties that she did something wrong, left a window open, wasn’t paying enough attention. Was the baby really spirited away though, or is she just anxious about everything in the aftermath of birth?
Dodo Ti Pitit Manman, Claudette Thégat
Lullabies from all over the world will often follow a formula of “go to sleep or the crocodile/wolf/eagle/hag/insert-monster-of-choice will come and get you.” But for me, points go to this Haitian Creole take, where the bogeyman is in fact a crab.
V’là l’bon vent, Marie Laforêt
At one point in the writing of Queen Mab, I became obsessed with finding a French-Canadian folk song that would sound like a fairytale, for the novel’s final scene. I didn’t go into the song or its lyrics in detail, but this voyageur song with roots in the 17th century was in my mind. In it, the narrator laments that a greedy prince with a silver gun has shot and killed her pure white duck. In some versions, gold and jewels fall from the dead duck’s beak. I loved the imagery of this song but also its flexibility—it can be haunting and waiflike, folksy or choral, or played as a fiercely danceable fiddle piece.
Bíum Bíum Bambaló, Sigur Rós
I didn’t know this Icelandic melody until recently, and yet I’ve always known it (by another name). It tells of a mother singing her baby to sleep in a snowstorm, while a face looks in through the window from the storm outside! Is it the face of a troll or an elf of Icelandic legend? Is it the winter itself that needs to be kept beyond the glass? Perhaps what’s most frightening is that it isn’t specified… because we never really know what the future will hold when we sing a baby to sleep.
Beyond the menacing lyrics, the song shows the strange way folk culture reinvents itself. The tune is actually a traditional Irish melody, adapted by Peter Paul and Mary as “Gone the Rainbow” in the 1960s, and only joined with the Icelandic text in 1970. Folk traditions are often more recent than we think, or the versions we know of them are. Fairytales as well as music have gone through this process, and Queen Mab fits this pattern too.
Silver Dagger, Joan Baez
“Silver Dagger” is not a lullaby, it’s more of a murder ballad, though no one dies. The two genres have surprising overlap. It’s easy to imagine crooning this song on a dark night, because of its fairy-tale imagery (the father bears a literal chain of broken hearts). It also presents a strange inversion of the mother-child role. The narrator tells her lover not to come courting because her mother is lying by her side, holding a silver dagger and “she says that I can’t be your bride.” She concludes that she has decided “to sleep alone all of my life.” The mother here has taken her protective duties, and her lying next to the child in the night, to an extreme. Precluding romance, marriage…and therefore any more babies.
Aunque es de noche, Rosalía
Rosalía exploded on the scene around the time I was doing much of my night-singing, and although I couldn’t sing this at 4 am to save my life, the flamenco/pop mashup is, appropriately, all about darkness and light. “Although it is night,” say the lyrics, based on a poem by Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz, although it is night, there is meaning, there is faith, there is finally light.
Spooky Spooky Spooky, Casper Babypants
These songs are all pretty intense. But then one day, the sleepless nights are passed, the baby is older, and those once-tired parents are with their kid listening to a guy called Casper Babypants. And he has a spooky song too, which is hilarious, gets stuck in everyone’s head for weeks on end—which my own adult sister with no kids added to her Spotify list. The night has departed, and comedy has returned to the world.
Emily McBride is a Canadian-born editor, writer, and translator living in Barcelona. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Rumpus, and The Stinging Fly. Queen Mab is her debut novel.