In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Emily Hunt Kivel’s novel Dwelling is one of the year’s most magnificent debuts, a book as much fable as it is warning.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Kivel debuts with a rollicking and resonant modern fairy tale of real estate and its discontents… as [she] brings her weird and wonderful cast of characters to vibrant life, she never drops the incisive real-world commentary on the housing crisis and rising inequality. The result is a sui generis delight.”
In her own words, here is Emily Hunt Kivel’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Dwelling:
Simply put, Dwelling is about a meandering woman who is expelled from the city during a mass eviction crisis, and is forced to relocate to Texas and move into a novelty property that looks like a shoe. I was discovering Remedios Varo and John Lurie at the time and pulling from my abiding love for folklore, and I think (now with the clarity of retrospection) that the book is interested in an anti-capitalist possibility of self-determination.
I wrote Dwelling at one of my lowest points and it brought me to my highest. I don’t expect to have that kind of a creative experience again, but my hope is that this sense of darkness and possibility, disappointment and joy are present in these pages. Ultimately I wanted to make something that, like my favorite works of fiction, changes form and shape while in the reader’s hands. That refuses easy categorization in a sort of rapscallion way. Looking over this little playlist I’ve assembled, I think each of these artists are uniquely capable of making something that contorts and bends and becomes more beautiful over time. Rapscallions, all.
“Cold Hard Times” Lee Hazlewood
I don’t know if a single artist has changed my life more than Lee Hazlewood. I got a copy of his album Requiem for an Almost Lady upon moving to Texas from Brooklyn in 2020. We were living temporarily on a small farm and as the urban world was disintegrating around us, the natural world was coming alive. Bluebirds attacked us. Donkeys comforted us. Geese were super loud. Ducks were perverts. There is an incredibly insular, quiet, heartbroken warmth to Lee Hazlewood that felt—feels—medicinal to me. This song, “Cold Hard Times,” is from his album Cowboy in Sweden, which he wrote after leaving the States for Sweden after a bad breakup. There’s a special energy to this record and this song in particular—an admittance that the world is largely rotten and alienating but also a sense of hope within that: the promise of liberation and, through it, redemption. To me, that’s the real story of Dwelling.
“Paper Mountain Man” Linda Perhacs
“Paper Mountain Man” is from Linda Perhacs’ first record, a psychedelic folk album called Parallelograms. Often, when I find something that has a really unique and inspired mood—like this song, with its weird, accusatory twang and sense of mystery—I try to write to that mood.
“Brown Rice” Don Cherry
Don Cherry’s record Brown Rice was on repeat in the months that I was writing Dwelling. Listening to this record gave me a similar feeling to the one I had when reading Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. There is truly wild invention and creativity here, contained just so.
“Something On Your Mind” Karen Dalton
There are a few personas that narrate events in my mind, and one of them certainly has the voice of Karen Dalton. This is such a vulnerable song to me—in simple words it captures the deep unease of being human. I think that’s something that Evie has felt for a lot of her life.
“Liu Lian” Yao Lee
I discovered this song because it scores the ending scene of Goodbye Dragon Inn, a Taiwanese film that follows the last screening at a movie theater in Taipei, on the day of the theater’s final, permanent closure. It’s the kind of subtle heartbreak that I like best, and what I think readers can find in Dwelling: the pain of change; of big, bright ideas dissolving; of the world moving on past you. This song offers the entire film—the fading movie palace, its lonely staff and patrons—a kind of redemption that is only made possible by art.
“The Swimming Song” Loudon Wainwright III
I’ve been on about heartbreak but ultimately, there’s a real sense of playfulness in Dwelling. That’s at least where my head was at in telling this story: silly, unbridled, and defiant beauty. You find that in “The Swimming Song.”
“Chain of Love” Clive’s Original Band
The book is ultimately a hero’s journey, one about a woman’s personal resistance against a society that doesn’t value her. To me, this is an age-old tale and I wanted to inhabit the world of folktale and myth in telling it. Clive’s Original Band blends psychedelic mood with old folk instrumentation and lyrics to create something deeply rooted in an ancient musicality but ultimately utterly individual to this band, these songwriters, this time.
“The First and Royal Queen” The Lounge Lizards
I will never tire of this sneaky, gorgeous composition.
“Tear Down the Walls” Vince Martin and Fred Neil
“Tear down the walls/ Can’t you hear the melody/ Tear down the walls/ Hear every man/ Singin’ over the land/ Tear down the walls/ Tear down the walls.”
Emily Hunt Kivel is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, American Short Fiction, New England Review, and Guernica, among other publications. She teaches at St. Edward’s University and Columbia University. Dwelling is her first novel.