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.
Lee Bains’s poetry collection Work Lunch embeds the reader into the ever-evolving American South.
Kiese Laymon wrote of the book:
“Work Lunch is not simply the best of what poetry can be; it is proof that blues, soul and some god somewhere are real. This is what writing, witnessing with your senses, and giving a fuck can do. Lee Bains is one of them ones, y’all.”
In his own words, here is Lee Bains’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Work Lunch:
As somebody who has written songs for a long time, I’ve established the rule that, when I’m actively writing song lyrics, I very consciously stay away from listening to already existing music. I either listen to the piece of music that the lyrics will accompany, or just sit with silence. (For this reason, I’m usually way out of the loop with new albums by the time I finish whatever new album I’m working on!)
So, it’s kind of nice that, when I’m writing poetry or prose, I can listen to music! I love listening to music when I write, and the right piece or album can bring me to a much more inspired, connected, focused place. But, while writing, I largely stay away from any music with singing, and, when I do dip into sung music, it’s choral (and often in an unfamiliar language), so that I don’t register what they’re singing as words so much as sounds. I love all kinds of instrumental and choral music, and writing is usually the time I get to spend with it most.
Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92
The mystery and murkiness of this record is captivating, the melodies truly beautiful, and the beats mesmerizing. I struggle to think of any music I’ve heard where the familiarly distorted, warbling, dark sounds of cheap recording equipment and gear is used to such masterful effect. The sound of it all erases the lines between lo-fi and hi-fi, art music and dance music.
Julianna Barwick – Healing Is a Miracle
This album fit like a blanket of grace during 2020, as America was suffering from the pandemic, austerity, unaccountable white-supremacy, state violence, and social polarization. I don’t think I could name a single word that Barwick sings on this album, but I can tell you what it sounds like: a return home, a washing of the wounds, a girding of the loins, and easing back out there to fight another day.
The Chieftains – IV
There’s a brooding, rumbling energy to this record that is hard to find elsewhere. These ancient tunes feel immediate and urgent. When it’s time to strap into this one, the writing is fixing to get very focused and very serious.
Miles Davis – In a Silent Way
I could make this whole list into nothing but Miles records, but I don’t think any album can settle me into night-time writing like this one. There is a quivering intensity to the record and the way the band softly leans together. You can hear them listening. Nobody will ever make funk whisper like Miles Davis.
Brian Eno – Music for Airports
A constant fount of inspiration, mystery and beauty. It’s funny to think about it playing over loudspeakers in airports, as he apparently intended, because it’s so tender, reflective, and artful. Even if I am in as frantic a place as a busy airport, though, listening to this on headphones can give me a sense of solitude and focus.
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones – Come Sunday
If The Word is an ebullient altar call in a pulsating Pentecostal congregation, this record is a slow quiet Methodist gathering to worship in a small town. You can hear the handshakes and hugged necks, the sun lazily peeking through stained glass.
J Dilla – Donuts
These tracks crackle with a life and depth that are endlessly inspiring. Much has been made of J Dilla’s way of instilling a deeply human rhythmic feel in his beats (“Dilla time”), but he was also a great artist in his layering of sounds and textures, creating evocative pastiches in every track.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Blacknuss
It’s hard to think of a musician who marries soul with technical brilliance and singularity of voice more than Rahsaan Roland Kirk. I think that shines through particularly brightly on this record, since so many of the tunes are deeply familiar to me, yet rendered here in a way that seems impossibly new.
Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis – Deface the Currency
I’ve been listening to the rhythm section of this band since I was a teenager, and Canty and Lally’s propulsive, writhing grooves are completely unmistakable. They are the unified heaving crowd underneath the streaming flares and billowing teargas of Lewis and Pirog’s flashing lines. It is the sound of front-line American democracy.
Aine O’Dwyer – Music For Church Cleaners
These recordings are so incredibly intimate, secret, stolen. The creaking organ bench, the muted sounds of what might be traffic or air-conditioning, the whispers of custodial workers, all blending with the haunting, ancient, contemporary drones of O’Dwyer’s organ. They beg reflection and noticing.
Scientist – Scientific Dub
This record drags back time and thrusts into the future, drills into the earth and rockets into the cosmos. What a mesmerizing, hard-grooving movement through space and time.
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan – Ragas
There’s something so sprawling, deep and energetic about this album, and the two masters’ performances. For me, it can inspire a type of constant, fluid writing that feels like unspooling a thread.
William Tyler – Modern Country
This beautiful, meandering, textured album summons images of driving through the South, marrying the backseat experiences of an 80s/90s childhood with the contemporary experience of those rare blissful lazy sunny drives on tour.
Hildegard Von Bingen – Heavenly Revelations
The first line of the first song on this compilation of compositions by the genius Medieval Christian mystic, theologian, artist, and proto-feminist Hildegard Von Bingen, “O Euchari in leta via” is maybe the most immediately holy melody I’ve ever heard. Like it was sent down direct. When I’m in the right spot, it’s instant transportation.
The Word – The Word
This album has hummed in my spirit for over 25 years now, the pleading and exclaiming sounds of gospel music rendered without a single human voice. Truly a joyful noise.
Lee Bains is a poet and songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama, who since 2012 has released four studio albums of what Rolling Stone calls “Southern gospel punk,” and will publish his debut poetry collection Work Lunch with Hub City Press in 2026 after several of the poems were first published by the New Yorker in 2021. A cult songwriter forged in independent scenes, his work has carried him all over the U.S. and Europe, has received acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and The Guardian, and has led him to be a supporting musician for other artists like Lonnie Holley, Moor Mother, and Algiers. Lee has lent his work to support striking coal miners, immigrants’ rights groups, abortion funds, and anti-racism organizations. He has performed and read at Emory University, the University of Mississippi, Tulane University, Auburn University, and The Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden). He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works between tours as a handyman.