In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Hayden Casey’s debut novel A Harvest of Furies is an imaginative and profound modern retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.
Matt Bell wrote of the book:
“A remarkable and ambitious novel about love, tragedy, and fate.”
In his own words, here is Hayden Casey’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel A Harvest of Furies:
The first draft of this book emerged during a two-and-a-half-month trudge at the top of 2022. The vast majority of the draft was written in one place: at my desk, which I’d just moved into a different corner of my bedroom, and at which I’d pointed one of those TikTokky sunset lamps set to a very sherbety color.
My music listening habits are very much dictated by what’s come out recently; I have a little party pretty much every Friday (or sometimes Thursday night) and listen to what’s been released that week. My writing playlist for this book was very much dictated by the December-through-February release of Beach House’s Once Twice Melody. They’re my favorite band, and an 18-track, near-90-minute behemoth from them was of course going to take over my life. I’ve peppered other influential tracks into this playlist, as well, but a run through the album might just do the job.
Sufjan Stevens – “Death with Dignity”
(First off, yes, this song was also on the playlist for my last book—sorry, a classic is a classic!) This song is deceptively peppy: the melody and instrumentation is lively and major-key, but the lyrics focus on the immediate aftermath of loss and the emotional complexity of mourning. It helped me tap into Orrie’s specific emotional tangle, the mélange of his bright-eyed, kidlike sense of wonder and his sharp grief as he experiences loss.
Beach House – “Superstar”
This song is relatively high on the Beach House energy-level scale, and its melodic turns feel like classic BH, but it’s still such a gut-punch of feeling. This is a novel of very heightened, intense feelings—escalated by the House and its Lore—and so I felt I needed to listen to music that’d help me get in that headspace. This song got many, many spins.
Joni Mitchell – “Let the Wind Carry Me”
When tapping into Emma’s narration, I hunted for songs that reflected, in some sense, the push-and-pull of her character—the desire to be a helpful and productive member of a large, complex family, balanced with the urge to rebel, to break away from everything and establish her own identity and autonomy. I found that reflected both musically and lyrically here in a way that helped me hone in on that dynamic.
Grouper – “Vital”
This is one of my favorite songs ever: I’m pretty sure it’s graced the writing playlist of every long-form thing I’ve written since I first heard it in 2018. I have lots of memories, as well, of listening to it on loop while walking around my Phoenix neighborhood on its rare overcast (or even, dare I say, rainy) days, talking aloud to myself (or to my roommate) about plot or structural issues I was encountering and trying to sort them out verbally.
Skullcrusher – “Whatever Fits Together”
This song wasn’t yet released when I wrote the first draft, but as I rewrote and polished the manuscript (and, years later, edited it with my publisher), so many of the song’s specific flavors felt exactly aligned with Orrie: the glitchy FM-ish sounds at the beginning and end; the wistful guitar chords; the airy dreaminess of the vocals, reverberating as if from a cave. I know if it’d existed when I was writing the first draft, I’d have been all over it while writing his sections.
Raum – “Walk together”
There’s an eeriness, a spectrality—which is apparently a word?—to this song that served me well in tapping into the voices of the novel’s ghosts. I feel almost like I’m receiving some sort of spiritual transmission when I listen to this, and it was a great accompaniment as I tried to help my characters experience those transmissions as well.
Beach House – “ESP”
There are some love stories—romantic and familial; healthy, unhealthy, and shades of in-between—in this book, and this song set the scene for some of the sweeter moments. I’ve always loved Beach House’s tender side, the way, even in the most beautifully romantic songs, there’s always a hint of wistfulness or melancholy.
Sufjan Stevens – “Drawn to the Blood”
Sufjan is another one of those musicians who works his way into the DNA of everything I make, and Carrie & Lowell is an album I go back to all the time, for millions of reasons. (“Drawn to the Blood” was one of the book’s earliest working titles, too—not only because of the, uh, blood in the book, but because of the tie-in to bloodlines and lineage and etc.) It’s really sparse and haunting, and properly minor-key; I listened to it a ton while brainstorming/outlining the novel, and also while I wrote some of the darker moments.
Nina Simone – “The Other Woman” (Live at Town Hall)
There isn’t an “other woman” in this novel, but there is an “other man.” I revisited this classic while exploring that character and the complexity of his dynamic on the page; a lot of his scenes involve him reaching into the past, and this song has a lovely nostalgic quality to it that made that reaching easier for me to access.
Grouper – “Clearing”
One of the many things I love about Grouper is that she never puts her lyrics up anywhere, and they’re incredibly hard to decipher, so her lyric pages are full of guesses, [?]s, and infighting. So a lot of the time the emotional resonance in a Grouper song is in what you bring to the table as the listener. This is one of those lovely canvases onto which I can write all sorts of emotions and scenarios, which makes it great writing music, adaptable to pretty much any scene.
Angel Olsen – “Through the Fires”
While writing the last third of the book, during some of the sparer moments peripheral to the action and drama, I remember hunting for music that reflected that spareness—and I remember latching on to this song as a lovely moment of pause.
Beach House – “Over and Over”
Beach House’s lyrics are often quite nebulous, which serves me well: I can cling to certain pieces that fit a narrative I’m trying to construct, and let others fall away. There’s lots of afterlife-related imagery (angels, halo, light, sky) and a repeated refrain of “over and over,” which made me think of the novel’s themes of the cyclicality of violence and the concept of free will as it relates to heritability—what runs in the blood. (Plus, the song has a really sick let-everything-drop-out-and-rebuild-it-instrument-by-instrument end section.)
Beach House – “Illusion of Forever”
This song, to me, has a very riding-off-into-the-sunset feel—not in a sweet or happy way, necessarily, but in the sense that it feels like the last thing you hear before the credits roll. It has that sort of epicness, that grandness, to it, and I remember using that to my advantage.
Beach House – “Many Nights”
Yes, this is on the playlist for my story collection, too, but sometimes it just has to be that way. When I listen to this, I feel like I am nearing the end of a long life, looking back on a love story that wove in and out of, and colored over, several decades—with a sense that that love story might just continue after I move on to whatever the next plane of existence is.
Sufjan Stevens – “Fourth of July – Version 4”
This version of the song didn’t exist during the drafting process, but I listened to it on loop during the copy editing phase, so I’m including it anyway. One of my favorite songs ever with a minimalist piano arrangement and a ten-minute ambient coda? Uh, yeah.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Hayden Casey’s music playlist for his story collection Show Me Where the Hurt Is
Hayden Casey (he/him) is a writer and musician who lives and teaches in Phoenix, AZ. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. His short story collection, Show Me Where the Hurt Is, was published by Split/Lip Press in spring 2025, and his novel, A Harvest of Furies, was published by Lanternfish Press in fall 2025. His short fiction has appeared in Witness, West Branch, Bat City Review, and elsewhere, and his long-form work has been longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction and the Palette Chapbook prize for poetry. Find him at haydencasey.co.