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.
Ben Ehrenreich’s book Hold Still is a brilliant elegy to his mother, author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, told through short stories and journal entries.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Ehrenreich is wrestling with the idea of story itself—what it takes to put a life in order, what’s sacrificed when you do so, and whether it’s possible or fair to try. . . . A meditative and wide-ranging response to loss.”
In his own words, here is Ben Ehrenreich’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Hold Still:
In the months following my mother’s death in the fall of 2022, I assigned myself the task of writing a story every day. I did it to keep myself anchored, without any thought of publishing, or even reading them again. I gave myself no further guidelines: it didn’t matter how long they were, whether they were “factual” or “fictional,” or whether they contained any of the narrative elements conventionally regarded as essential to a “story.” All of which opened up the question of what a story is. Hold Still, the book that I later compiled from these efforts, tracks my engagement with that question as much as it does my grief, or the passage of those days.
It helps that when I was writing these stories—often on the bus or on the subway or while walking to or from work—I was almost always listening to music. Most of the songs I’ve chosen here are ones that I was listening to then and that in one way or another informed the stories that I wrote.
1. Duke Ellington, “Single Petal of a Rose”
This track is the subject of a story in Hold Still called “Duke Ellington’s Left Hand.” It’s a short song, deceptively simple, and so gorgeous that it actually hurts to listen to. More than any piece of prose or verse, it helped me to understand how this book might be structured, how I might make things hold together—and even move—in the absence of any traditional narrative supports.
2. Love, “Everybody’s Gotta Live”
“Everybody’s gotta live,” sings Arthur Lee, “and everybody’s gonna die. Everybody’s gotta live, I think you know the reason why.” But I don’t know, Arthur, and I don’t believe that you did either. Probably worth asking nonetheless.
3. Philip Glass, “Metamorphosis I”
Just an immensely powerful piece of music. What do you become when you can no longer be what you always thought you were? What choice do you have but to find out?
4. Patrick Shiroishi, “If Only Heaven Would Give Me Another Ten Years”
For a while I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics, at least not in any language I understood. The conventional chorus-verse-chorus structures of songs that I had once loved felt insipid and worse than false. I could only listen to songs that had been broken, or that somehow broke through. Like this one.
5. Archie Shepp, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”
I know, I know, this is a bit on the nose, but let the man sing. “Sometime I feel like I’m almost gone,” Shepp hollers, and then repeats an earlier refrain: “A long way from home.”
6. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, “Help, I’m a Rock”
You do what you can, but it happens sometimes that that you become a rock, in which case the only thing to do is scream for help. Except of course that as a rock you cannot scream in any way that will be heard by anyone who might be able to help. Which is how it goes. Don’t overthink it, just scream.
7. Pharoah Sanders “Love Will Find a Way”
Still, I have not yet encountered a darkness so dark that Pharoah Sanders can’t shine some light into. I hope to keep it that way. Enough triumphant love spilled out of his saxophone to save us all, if only we would listen.
8. Darondo, “Didn’t I”
There is always room for the agony of regret, which Darondo appears to have known better than almost anyone.
9. Don Cherry, “Hope”
Hope is a tired, old word, and worse than useless in most contexts, but Don Cherry blows enough ragged meaning into it to convince me we should maybe hold onto it for a little longer. Listen the whole album if you have time.
10. Michael White, “The Land of Spirit and Light (Part 2)”
An early draft of Hold Still included a story that referred explicitly to the music of the insufficiently celebrated jazz violinist Michael White, specifically to listening to it as I walked across the city, “the air suddenly alive with a lunatic autumn clarity.” This was the track I had in mind. The story didn’t make the final cut, but this should tell you all you need to know.
11. Shira Small, “Eternal Life”
Shira Small recorded one album while she was 17 and still in high school, not long after her mother’s death. She had 300 copies printed and then gave up singing and mainly forgot about it. The internet did not. “Ruled by human logic we sometimes confine ourselves to one plane of the universe,” she sings, and sings again, and again, and again. Sing along, it’s catchy.
12. Moondog, “High on a Rocky Ledge”
I don’t know what god of the streaming-service algorithm delivered Moondog to me when I most needed him, but I can repay the gift only by passing it on to you. You know how to thank me.
13. Frank Ocean, “Moon River”
This one gets the briefest of mentions in a story called “A Monster on a Hill.” Louis Armstrong sang it too, and Aretha, and Sarah Vaughan. Also Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra and Ben E. King and perhaps most famously Audrey Hepburn, but no one hit it as mournfully and perfectly as Mr. Frank Ocean.
14. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Ol’ Man River”
This track is also mentioned in the same story. It’s the only song I can remember my mother ever singing, always as a joke, her eyes shining wickedly as she sang it, waiting for you to beg her to stop. It’s really a dreadful song in every way, but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ version is full-throated and insane and slyly campy enough to almost redeem it.
15. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, “The Homeless Wanderer”
As a child, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru was imprisoned by Mussolini’s troops on an otherwise uninhabited island off the coast of Sardinia. As a teenager, she played piano for the emperor of Ethiopia. She became a nun at 21, and died in Jerusalem almost 80 years later. The music she recorded in the meantime sounds like it must have traveled from another world—one containing at least one piano, ten fingers to play it with, entire oceans of melancholy, and a strange, spare beauty powerful enough to burst from one dimension to another.
16. Mohamed Mazouni, “Écoute-moi Camarade”
My mother would not have forgiven me if I did not include at least one song that she could dance to. This one would have made her laugh first, and only then get up out of her chair.
17. The Lijadu Sisters, “Come on Home”
Here’s another one, mama, a little slower, but we’re none of us young anymore.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Ben Ehrenreich’s playlist for his novel Ether
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of four previous books, most recently, of the New York Times Notable Book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time. He has also published The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, based on his years of reporting from the West Bank, as well as two novels, The Suitors and Ether, which was also published by City Lights.