In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Rachel Feder‘s poetry collection Daisy is an imaginatively told retelling of The Great Gatsby’s Daisy.
Shayla Lawz wrote of the book:
“Rachel Feder crafts a thoughtful, witty, and deeply compelling modern twist on a classic. Daisy, with new voice and agency, is now at the center of the narrative, and Feder, through her careful attention and vision, makes it feel like she’s always belonged there. Gatsby’s ‘green light’ is now hers, is now ours, is now a guide glowing brilliantly beneath each poem, waiting for a young girl to return—to herself.”
In her own words, here is Rachel Feder‘s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Daisy:
Daisy is a collection of poetry that retells F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby from the perspective of a brilliant, messy, confused, ambitious, secretive teen poet. As Daisy navigates the oppressive expectations of her parents, friends, and lovers, she also revels in creative self-expression, revealing her complexities, wrestling with her often contradictory desires, and giving the lie to the purity myth. In other words, Daisy speaks to and for herself, cracking the mirror of others’ idealizations and attending to girlhood as a vibrant component of intellectual and literary history. The consequences of her actions are both liberatory and catastrophic. Along the way, she crafts an elegy for the lost American dreams of the roaring 1990s.
Daisy isn’t me. But she does answer some questions I found myself asking when I first read Gatsby and other classics as a middle- and high-school student—and teen poet—in the very late nineties and earliest of aughts. And while Daisy is way too chic to be caught scream-singing in the front row of a Chumbawamba concert (I still love them) or blasting jam bands on the jukebox while she picks cherries in the yard, her soundtrack is, largely, my nineties soundtrack, as well.
Just a Girl / No Doubt
I can’t speak to the current state of Gwen Stefani’s feminism, but Tragic Kingdom was so important to me growing up—at one point, I even recorded “Sorry I’m not home right now/I’m walking into spiderwebs/So leave a message and I’ll call you back” on an answering machine. In the book, Daisy and her best friend, Jordyn, listen to the record while they get ready for a party, Jordyn transforming Daisy from a preppy schoolgirl into a vision from a dELIiA*s catalogue. The song “Just a Girl,” in particular, speaks to the sense of privileged confinement that structures Daisy’s world.
Torn / Natalie Imbruglia
I could probably sing this entire album from memory, honestly, but “Torn” was the chart-topper—itself a cover of a song by alt-rock band Ednaswap. With her lilting, pop-princess vocals, Imbruglia spoke to our shared cultural mythologies surrounding love, girlhood, and romance, constellating questions of shame, desire, intimacy, and vulnerability. Reflecting on her past with Jay Gatsby, Daisy asks, “Had I been torn/without knowing it, without noticing the damage”; in a poem called “Torn,” she shares a poem inspired by Sylvia Plath, of which she writes, “I call the sky the sea/I call the field the sea.” (“The perfect sky,” you’ll recall,” “is torn.”)
Wolfman’s Brother / Phish
This is the kind of song Daisy hears blaring near the West Egg campus (and the kind of song I used to blare while picking cherries).
When the World Ends / Dave Matthews Band
DMB is another band on the West Egg soundtrack. This song in particular is giving teenage Jay Gatsby.
You Learn / Alanis Morissette
There’s a subtle reference to this song in the poem “Yearbook” (I’ll let you find it).
Creep / TLC
My colleague Eugenia Zuroski once commented on how dystopian it is that mixtapes used to come from people who had crushes on us, and now they come from algorithms. I don’t want to give too much plot away, but this is the first song on a mixtape Daisy’s cousin Nick mysteriously delivers to her, one that raises questions about secrecy, fidelity, and what we ultimately owe one another.
When I Come Around / Green Day
Daisy takes this cheery chorus as reassurance—but maybe she isn’t listening, or reading, closely enough.
Tonight, Tonight / The Smashing Pumpkins
This is Daisy’s song with former flame Jay, an emblem of a summer when she lived in the moment and embraced intimacy and experience, however fleeting. In the light of her somewhat jaded nostalgia, the song also functions as a sort of statement of poetics. Drafting her college applications, Daisy muses, “What does it mean to experience//first love in relation to a particular/song? To hear that song again//with the wisdom we’ve gained/and feel changed but what if//the song is also about change—about how you’ll never be the same person//you are right now & maybe you aren’t already?” This sort of fraught nostalgia—this sense of a youthful dream slipping away—is central to Fitzgerald’s classic, too.
Big Poppa / The Notorious B.I.G.
This song is playing when Daisy walks into one of Gatsby’s parties. (He’s such a poser.)
Electric Boogie / Marcia Griffiths
At a particularly intense moment of epiphany, Daisy hears the muffled sounds of partygoers dancing the Electric Slide. Much like the participants in the iconic line dance, her steps have been directed by forces outside of her control, and she’s not really going anywhere.
Fake Plastic Trees / Radiohead
Gatsby listens to The Bends while he’s having big feelings in a coffee shop, and, as one of my students would say, he’s so real for that.
Semi-Charmed Life / Third Eye Blind
How much time do we have? The fieldhouse Third Eye Blind concert where Tom asks Daisy to prom is based on the first concert I ever attended, on the University of Colorado campus. Shoutout to my dad who chaperoned a whole gaggle of us, and whose ears are probably still feeling it. (Smash Mouth opened for them; can you believe?) This song is ostensibly about sex and crystal meth but I think it spoke to us as teen girls in the nineties because, on a deeper level, it’s really about that elusive “somethin’ else”—about ambition or connection or art or the desire, in Daisy’s case, to do or be something unexpected, unaccountable. This is one of the most visceral scenes in the book, and one of my favorites. (Also, if a member of the band reads this and wants me to write the libretto for a jukebox musical based on their 1997 eponymous album, could you please hit me up?)
Save Tonight / Eagle-Eye Cherry
Of all the ‘90s songs referenced in Daisy, this is the only one I quote directly, with a permissions acknowledgement and everything. It plays at prom, and hits Daisy like a prophecy. I needed the reader to hear exactly what she was hearing.
Rachel Feder is an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. She is author or coauthor of five previous books, including the poetry collection Birth Chart.