In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kevin Moffett’s novel Only Son is a profound testament to the connection between fathers and sons.
Leslie Jamison wrote of the book:
“Only Son is a great glorious siren song of desperation and double helixes―at once a love story and an elegy, a ballad of skate parks and snake nests, the swamp and the desert, bullies and borderlands. It’s a chronicle of imperfect attempts to the people standing right in front of us, living in our bones and marrow―and offering them the grace of seeing them differently. This book gripped me and didn’t let me go. I read it standing at a rental-car counter and looked up to find half-an-hour had passed, realized that I would walk away from that Alamo counter in Cincinnati a different woman than the one who’d arrived―reconfigured and oddly resurrected by this tale of sweat, surrender, longing, fathers, sons, ghosts, voicemails, highways, silences, laughter, and―above all―the surprises of life.”
In his own words, here is Kevin Moffett’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Only Son:
I came to reading quite late, well after high school—for years my intense, solitary, perspective-altering experiences weren’t with books but with music. My new novel, Only Son, contains lots of references to songs and bands, and I’ve collected them here. What surprises me about this list, is how unreflective it is of the music I used to love (and still love). Maybe it’s better this way. This is the soundtrack of my fictional rendition of growing up fatherless in Florida and, later, of raising a son in Southern California.
“The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” the Charlie Daniels Band
At night I bring the clock radio and tape recorder under my covers, waiting for The Devil Went Down to Georgia to come on. After nine p.m., stations play the version where Johnny calls the devil a son of a bitch instead of a son of a gun, and the jolt it gives me is as close as I’ve come to religion.
Maybe the first song I ever heard with a comprehensible storyline. Listening to it now… it’s a weird song, sonically, lyrically. Fiddles, guitars, Charlie Daniels playing the role of both the Devil and Johnny. I always thought it strange that the Devil, like some beleaguered salesman with a quota, is “way behind” on collecting souls and “willing to make a deal.” Who does the Devil answer to? On a second listen I’m convinced that he outplays Johnny and should demand that soul.
“Hungry Like the Wolf,” Duran Duran
I’ve made a recording of Hungry Like the Wolf and listened to it about eighty times. I’ve just figured out it’s about sex, not wolves.
Duran Duran confused me. Its members oozed varied gradations of an amorphous but unambivalent sexuality that I couldn’t yet grasp. (This was before I knew about Bowie, the New York Dolls, etc.) The girls I knew weren’t in love with them, they wanted to be them. One burned the double Ds into her arm with a makeshift branding iron (twisted wire hanger heated over a gas burner). She’s a pediatrician now.
“Punk’s Not Dead,” The Exploited
When he’s done he plays one of my tapes, the Exploited screaming punk’s not dead.
Whoa, he says, peeking in at the label. I like it.
He names a few bands that he thinks I’d like.
Both record stores I frequented as a kid, Atlantic Sounds and Criminal Records (formerly the Secret Service), miraculously still exist. Criminal Records relocated from Ormond Beach, Florida, to Atlanta long ago but for a brief time in the late 80s, Eric Levin, the owner, two years above me in high school, would pirate a pair of albums onto one 120-minute cassette tape for… I want to say $10. Everything about the transaction sounds archaic now, but much of the music my friends and I were exposed to for the first time in high school came to us this way. Dinosaur Jr., Firehose, Naked Raygun. Eric ran the store out of his parents’ optometry shop.
“Planet Caravan,” Black Sabbath
On the school bus a kid writes black sabbath rules on the back of the seat, and every day I return to see if they’ve written anything else. I want a list. I want to know exactly what the Black Sabbath rules are.
Ozzy, Dio, Iron Maiden. The devil they conjured was the devil I recognized, not Charlie Daniels’s fiddle-playing, deal-making devil. I was never into heavy metal music but I admired the kids who listened to it—they were like some special cadre, fully committed. I had never listened to “Planet Caravan” until recently. It’s wedged between “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” on Black Sabbath’s best know album, and it’s a strange, oddly wistful song.
“Superman,” REM
He listens to an old song that goes, I am, I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything, and he asks me whether the singer is saying can or can’t.
Can, I say.
The chorus repeats and he asks me again and I reassure him again. He has no tolerance for brooding superheroes who can’t do certain things. He likes Superman.
For a brief glorious time during my son’s childhood our car picked up some secondary KROQ station which played nothing but songs from the eighties. New wave, early alternative, etc. He grew to love the bands I used to love, especially Devo. This REM song gripped him like no other because it mentions Superman. This was on heavy rotation in our house for years, along with the Teen Titans and Darkwing Duck theme songs.
“Sunny Afternoon,” the Kinks
Who is this? son says, removing one of his earbuds and nodding to the radio. Father tells him the Kinks. Sunny Afternoon. It was one of the son’s favorite songs when he was very young, before he had favorites of his own, but father knows it’s tedious to remind sons how much they used to love certain things.
Sounds like circus music, he says, replacing the earbud.
You used to love this song, father says.
And then he and his friends found their own music and I upheld the parent-child covenant by thinking his new favorite bands sounded like ersatz versions of better bands. I remember, at his age, dismissing all the music my parents and friends’ parents listened to, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the dreaded Beach Boys. Insisting that some punk band’s cover of “Communication Breakdown” was way better than the original. Nobody’s parents, at least none that I knew, listened to the Kinks, but as a kid I probably would’ve slotted them alongside those other bands. What a mistake. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is a masterpiece
“Pearl Fountain,” Yung Lean (featuring Black Kray and Bladee)
The rappers I used to listen to rapped about selling drugs, I tell him while a Yung Lean song plays from his phone. The ones you listen to rap about doing drugs.
I just asked my son what I should say about Yung Lean. His response seemed to suggest: the less, probably, the better. He said his lyrics used to be ignorant and nonsensical but that he’s refined his song writing in the past few years and “probably has songs that even you would enjoy.” I will say that he is not one of those ersatz versions mentioned above—the first time I heard him, during the Covid quarantine when my son was exploring the nether reaches of SoundCloud, I couldn’t really figure out where he came from or who his analogues might be. Turns out he’s Swedish.
“You Are Everything,” Marvin Gaye/Diana Ross
Late afternoon and the day’s talent fades as we listen to You Are Everything on repeat. I’ve got nothing incisive to say about it except that it’s perfect. Better than Beowulf. Better than key lime pie.
While working on Only Son I woke up one morning with this song in my head. Strangely I have no memory of ever having heard it before. I still have nothing incisive to say about it (except that it’s perfect).
Kevin Moffett is the author of two short story collections, as well as The Silent History, a narrative app for mobile devices. His work has been awarded the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.