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.
Awarded the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize (judged by Alexandra Kleeman), Adam O’Fallon Price’s Objects of Desire offers stories of unforgettable characters at dark crossroads in their lives.
Alexandra Kleeman wrote of the book:
“Tremendously funny and deeply felt, Adam O’Fallon Price channels the voices of characters suspended between crisis and catharsis, hovering somewhere above rock bottom, wandering the maze of their own desires and dreams. In their tenderness, these stories demonstrate the special power of the short form to hoist up the heaviness of life, to give lightness and wit to what would drag us down. But in their pathos, the struggle of Price’s characters to see their way to being a just-slightly better version of themselves, they give heft to experiences that we might otherwise prefer to discard, illuminating a rare and peculiar kind of beauty.”
In his own words, here is Adam O’Fallon Price’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Objects of Desire:
I can’t listen to music when I’m writing, especially music with vocals. Jazz and classical are sometimes okay in the background, but pop/country/rock/etc.—forget about it. I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m a songwriter as well as a writer: music is simply too distracting—my attention is immediately split between the critical work of the writing, and the act of listening critically to a piece of music. I doubt I listened to a single piece of music during the writing of the stories on Objects of Desire, my forthcoming short fiction debut. Reading many of the Largehearted Boy entries, I’m very envious of people who can listen to music while writing—mixing those two pleasures seems like a blast.
Short stories and songs, especially pop songs, are very similar forms. Both are capable of structural perfection (unlike the novel, an essentially imperfectible form). They also both encode a kind of structural narrative, a logic into their writing, that a good version makes immediately clear to the audience. Having spent the last fifteen years at work on the stories in Objects of Desire, alongside the songwriting I’ve done with The Mayflies USA, I’ve thought a lot about how to craft a successful piece in each medium—and the overlaps between the two.
The following is a list of perfect songs that feel similar, from a craft perspective if not necessarily emotionally, to some of my favorite classic short stories.
“Rock the Casbah” by The Clash / “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” by Kate Braverman
One approach to hooking a reader or listener is simply to repeat the hook over and over. “Rock the Casbah” seduces us by insisting on the chorus, insisting on the opening guitar riff, and insisting on the fact that Sharif does not like it—many, many times. Likewise the cyclical descent into addiction in Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” and the sinister Lenny who keeps appearing and appearing like a bad dream the story’s protagonist can’t wake from.
“Wichita Lineman” by Jimmy Webb / “Helping” by Robert Stone
The most basic currency of narrative is cause and effect, the sense that one action leads to the next. Robert Stone’s “Helping” is a tour de force in the art of consequentiality, and we mercilessly track the way each scene in Elliot’s day brings about the next: an appointment with a lowlife who talks about Vietnam triggers Elliot’s PTSD, his PTSD triggers an alcohol relapse, the relapse causes his wife to say she’s leaving him, their fracture causes him to threaten a stranger with violence, and so on. Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman,” written by the great Jimmy Webb, has a similarly linear, causational structure; each quick change seems to summon the next shift in the harmonic structure, and, like a good story, the song has taken several ninety-degree turns and ended up somewhere unexpected before we’ve even realized what’s happening.
“Get Lucky” by Daft Punk / “Dog Heaven” by Stephanie Vaughn
There are narratives that take you on a linear journey forward, like “Wichita Lineman,” and then there are songs that feel like circular trips, a walk around wooded lake in which you keep returning to the same pleasant spots again and again. Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” with its four endlessly revolving chords, is this kind of circular tune. Certain stories also rely less on consequentiality and more on a circular, associative logic. The great Stephanie Vaughn’s “Dog Heaven”—and many of the stories in her wonderful collection Sweet Talk—operates this way, returning over and over to the same themes and ideas, each time digging deeper into their essence and meaning.
“Dry the Rain” by the Beta Band / “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver
Great songs and stories often have a funny way of focusing in as they go along, taking their seemingly trivial premise seriously, and, like life, accruing gravity as they careen toward their ending. In Carver’s “Cathedral,” an offhand anecdotal story of a blind man’s unwanted visit becomes a beautiful recounting of the somewhat awful narrator’s moment of empathy and grace. Similarly, in “Dry the Rain,” what begins as a rather silly mumbled ditty about dirty clothes and dust transforms, inexorably, into a head-nodding anthem of hope.
“Jealous Guy” by Donny Hathaway / “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel
One shared feature of classic songs and short stories is the way they often grab you immediately—they know what they want to do and waste no time doing it. It’s not always true—there are slow burns, of course—but many of the classics have something signature encoded into their DNA, and you can hear/read it from the first note and word. Donny Hathaway’s vastly superior version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” insists on itself from the first thump of the kick and bass and wobbling piano, and then Hathaway’s searing vocals seal the deal: we must listen, and listen again. Likewise, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” immediately establishes its central theme and spine with the opener, “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting… make it useless stuff or skip it,” reeling us into its narrator’s tale of her best friend’s tragic death.
“Orphan Girl” by Gillian Welch / “Emergency” by Denis Johnson
Sometimes a story or song showcases a voice so fresh and real and compelling that it’s as if you’re reading a book or hearing music for the first time. Most artists are, in their way, a composite of their favorite artists. But every now and again, the occasional artist seems to hatch from an egg, fully grown, in possession of a voice that is immediately and distinctly their own. “Orphan Girl,” from Welch’s first album Revival, showcases both her intimate alto and a rare skill for writing songs that seem to have always been in the American songbook. Denis Johnson, meanwhile, came along in the early 1980s as a kind of palate cleanser for the staid American lit at the time, muscling in with his tales of Midwestern spiritual junkiedom, like “Emergency,” a singular story that no one else could have written.
“I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)” by Nick Lowe / “Show Don’t Tell” by Curtis Sittenfeld
Some artists, on the other hand, seem to have digested the entire American canon or songbook, reproducing their version of it with such verve and style that you have no choice but to buy in. “I Knew the Bride” is an evergreen example of Lowe’s diverse mastery of songcraft, giving the listener a surprisingly sad precis of the titular bride’s loss of youthful spirit to age. And Sittenfeld’s “Show Don’t Tell” is a classic coming-of-age story, a roman-a-clef based on the author’s time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and journey to success—nothing groundbreaking, but done with such deadeye skill and sharp humor that we cannot help but submit to the story.
“Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap / “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin
Finally, there are stories and songs that offer their audience something utterly complete and comprehensive, compressed into the space of a short story or song. Both “Hide and Seek” and “Sonny’s Blues”—in completely different ways, of course—offer the lucky reader-listener something huge and emotionally complete, one in four minutes and the other in twenty pages. Reading stories and songs like these, I’m convinced that these are the only two artforms that, in such a limited span of time, can make us feel that we’ve been presented with a life in its entirety.
Adam O’Fallon Price is the author of two novels, The Grand Tour (Doubleday 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (Tin House Books 2019), which won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, and a collection of short stories entitled Objects of Desire, forthcoming in October 2026 from Autumn House Press. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, VICE, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, EPOCH, and many other places. He lives in Carrboro, NC and teaches fiction writing at the University of North Carolina. He is the bassist in The Mayflies USA.