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.
Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s I Have This Thing for Flowers connect our humanity to flora in surprising and magnificent ways in one of the year’s most powerful essay collections.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The temporality of flowers is used as a metaphor for the transient manifestations of love in its many forms. Sawchyn scrutinizes her past relationships as both a scientist and an art critic, identifying recurring themes and similarities. Her memoir-in-essays acts as a commentary on how writers and other artists are driven to create a cohesive narrative, wrestling chaos into something that illuminates the human condition . . . . This confessional paean to flowers succeeds as a fascinating, unique model for examining the elusive nature of love.”
In her own words, here is Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection I Have This Thing for Flowers:
In general, my music-listening habits are seasonal and a little obsessive. As the weather starts to change, I’ll start a playlist with one or two songs I’ve been listening to on repeat and add to it slowly—something in a film score, an earworm my partner hums while doing dishes (replacing lyrics with the dog’s name), a deep cut from a band I see in concert, a song piped in at the grocery store—or, if it’s a quiet few months, tracks from another year’s season. This is what I will listen to almost every time I am in the car alone, until it gets consistently warmer or cooler or wetter outside. It’s an eclectic mix that tracks (ha-ha) my life, and sounds random and haphazard to everyone else.
As someone who writes mostly nonfiction, the skeleton of the playlist I construct for each book project are songs from particular times of my life, its muscles and sinew evoke mood. Eventually, the songs become background noise.
I Have This Thing for Flowers is about all kinds of love, and the patterns and relationships between those loves. Each chapter pairs a person from my life with a flower I’ve grown in a garden, but the book’s throughline is the narrative of my cancelled wedding and subsequent marriage to a good friend. Fittingly, I think of these songs as love songs—alternately full of longing, dissonance, rage, and humor—many of which I listened to while writing.
Talking Heads, “Nothing but Flowers”
Of course I have to start here. One of Flowers’ epigraphs is the line, “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower,” and this song’s title is the title of the book’s introduction. The song perfectly articulates the sensation of being in a place that is supposed to be wonderful but is not, presented in that recognizable upbeat Talking Heads tone.
The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back from San Francisco”
If I could mandate that readers to listen to the entire album 69 Love Songs, I absolutely would. In this particular song, Shirley Simm’s vocals are a little bit wobbly and keening and carry the whole thing.
Broken Social Scene, “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”
My ex-fiancé had been a musician, and we often went to shows together. I think we saw Broken Social Scene when we were both twenty-seven—the exact right age to hear this song and to think back to our tumultuous teenage years and feel surprised that we missed parts of them. Also, the memes are excellent.
Fiona Apple, “I Want You to Love Me”
The title pretty much says it all, but there’s something about the warbling vocalizations at the very end that complicates the song—it’s like the suggestion of perspective, that she’s put on an old feeling to show it to us, but it’s no longer what she carries every day.
Iggy Pop, “Gardenia”
It’s a bit on the nose, but I did first hear this song (and then obsessively listen to it) while writing the “Gardenia” essay in Flowers. Maybe I just imprinted on Train Spotting, but he does great junkie music. Iggy Pop’s voice is sleazy and grimy, and it’s the kind that I don’t mind sleeping in.
Animal Collective, “Summertime Clothes”
The lyrics from this song’s chorus do make an appearance in Flowers; I think it’s the perfect soundtrack for warm-weather early-stage love.
Hop Along, “How Simple”
I mentioned earlier that each of the book’s chapters each pair a person with a flower, and this is how they are titled: “Dicentra | The Digger,” “Magnolia | The Mothers,” etc. The one exception is the center of the collection, and this is the song for “Laurel.”
TV on the Radio, “Ambulance”
“Ambulance” sounds to me like a quintessential love song; it is slow and earnest. That it is a cappella also gives it an unembellished quality, like you’re in a movie and a group of crooning backup singers have appeared behind your partner who is singing to you.
Jimi Hendrix, “If 6 Was 9”
The opening to this song is the exact right amount of anticipation. Most of the songs on this playlist feature a “you,” but in this case, the address feels much more general. It’s peak 1960s—a case for making one’s own way and looking good while doing it, and I’ve included it on here as a long for the self.
Pavement, “Gold Soundz”
Apparently, Gen Z likes Pavement, which I find hilarious. Pitchfork voted this song the top track of the 90’s—the whole decade! I enjoy the dissonance of “Gold Soundz.” It is an upbeat breakup song, and in the music video, the band members are dressed in Santa suits and go on a scavenger hunt.
Florence + The Machine, “South London Forever”
Like “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” this is another song about looking back, a love song to a place and also to misspent youth. Few people can wail and belt it out like Florence Welch, as the chorus goes, Over and over and over and over again.
Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”
And speaking of amazing female vocalists.
Townes Van Zandt, “Rex’s Blues”
The last chapter of Flowers is titled “Zinnia | Townes Van Zandt,” so I felt like I should also end this playlist with one of his songs. In the book, I mention “Waiting Around to Die,” but in making a playlist for the book, I think “Rex’s Blues” is a more fitting choice. It’s a complicated song of tribute to a friend—in the version on Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, recorded in the same place that Rex used to “half-own,” you can hear Van Zandt talking about his friend during song’s the lead-in.
Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. Her essay collection A Fish Growing Lungs was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards, and her second book, I Have This Thing for Flowers, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books. Formerly the editor in chief of The Rumpus, she has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.