In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Andrew Krivak’s novel Mule Boy is brilliantly atmospheric and lyrical.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Krivak brilliantly succeeds at plumbing the depths of the human spirit and showing how the dead live on in memory. This is flawless.””
In his own words, here is Andrew Krivak’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Mule Boy:
My father’s father died in a mine collapse in 1927, leaving a family of five with a single mother and not much else to survive the Great Depression. I’ve tried for years to write a coal mine novel, but couldn’t get the form right. Until I realized I wasn’t writing a coal mine novel but a novel about moments of darkness and light, stillness and wind, prison and freedom, loss and longing, silence and story. Then, when I sat down to write, the composition of what would become the novel Mule Boy itself came out as a kind of moment, a breath, and I realized—That’s how stories get told, not in sentences but in the breath. Mule Boy is a novel written paratactically, which is to say, its form is the form not of sentences but of clauses separated by commas, in the same way a storyteller separates what is spoken with the intake of breath. During the year it took me to compose Mule Boy, I found myself going back to songs of longing, told like stories, and sung as though these might be the last songs a songwriter sings.
“Only a River” (Bob Weir, Blue Mountain)
I’ve always been a quiet Dead Head, and Bobby Weir has always been my favorite member of the band. So, when his solo album Blue Mountain came out in 2016, I felt like I had reconnected with an old friend. “Only a River” is the first song on the album, and it strikes chords with Mule Boy not only in the serendipity of many western names for places coming from eastern counterparts—Blue Mountain, and Shenandoah—but as a song about memory and desire, loss and longing, story and time in a land of rivers and mountains. It’s not only that “a river gonna make things right” in the song, but that we are in need, if we live a life of any consequence, of things being made right—right up to the end.
“The Hitter” (Bruce Springsteen, Devils & Dust)
Bruce Springsteen is one of America’s greatest songwriters because he knows the difference between lyrics of image and lyrics of narrative, and he’s able to write both. Devils & Dust is full of narrative songs of loss and longing, but “The Hitter” has taught me a great deal about story, about the arc of a narrative, and the perspectives from which a storyteller can tell a narrative. Sung in the space of an afternoon, “The Hitter” tells the story of a man who has spent a lifetime as a fighter, both professionally and existentially, with the struggle of winning and the struggle of losing taking on their own narrative arcs. In the song, the hitter rests on the front porch of his mother’s house, out of the rain, looking for a place “to lie down for a while.” Until he gets up and moves on, the longing and the fighting never over.
“Burlap String” (Courtney Marie Andrews, Old Flowers)
I listen to college radio these days mostly to hear new voices, the DJ’s bringing them out like story-tellers in their own right. Courtney Marie Andrews is a singer I heard on WUMB in Boston while I was writing Mule Boy. Her voice has a depth and airiness to it that is like a fulcrum between longing and hope. Immediately, her voice became the voice of the character Magda Chibala in the novel. “If I could go back now…” is in many ways a leitmotif of Mule Boy, the constant questioning of what could have been done, what might have been done, all the while accepting that what’s done is done.
“Beeswing” (Richard Thompson, Acoustic Classics)
Richard Thompson is another songwriter who, like Springsteen, knows how to tell a story in a song. “Beeswing” is a hardscrabble love story about a woman who could not be held down by love. It’s not a song of longing so much as a song of running, a song of restlessness, and the realization by the one who has lost this love that there is no other way for some souls to live. I have mentioned in a few places that Mule Boy could be read as a re-telling of the Jonah story. What might the story of a prophet sound like if it were about a laundry girl, lost and “running wild” in 1960s London, sung by Richard Thompson and accompanied on solo acoustic guitar?
“Break in the Clouds” (Mark Erelli, Lay Your Darkness Down)
Light. That’s what Ondro Prach, the main character of Mule Boy, longs for more than anything in the novel. Longs for it like the peace of story-telling. Mark Erelli is a local Boston singer and songwriter (who also plays a mean Telecaster) whom I have seen often at Club Passim in Cambridge, and whose song “Break in the Clouds” from Lay Your Darkness Down gave me solace and light when I would emerge from days of writing Mule Boy. Erelli himself has struggled with a degenerative eye disease that will one day lead to blindness, and he wrote this album as a way of coming to terms with that. It’s here as a reminder to me that every story, no matter the subject, has some element of hope in the seams of its telling.
“Dust” (Lucinda Williams, The Ghosts of Highway 20 [Disc 1])
I have a thought-experiment I like to play, in which a person is asked: if you were given the skills and means to become (occupationally) anyone or anything, who or what would you be? I toggle between fishing guide and backup rhythm guitarist for Lucinda Williams. “Dust” is here not only because I love the deep sounds and hard lyrics Williams combines on everyone album she puts out, but because the surname “Prach” means “dust” in Slovak. Nomen est omen is a foundation in most of my novels, and here especially. Ondro Prach reminds those who live in the wake of the men whose lives were cut short in the mines, lives only story-telling keeps alive, that eventually, when no one is left to tell the stories. Even your thoughts will be dust.
“Have a Little Faith in Me” (John Hiatt, Bring the Family)
I knew a woman who loved this song for the solo piano, John Hiatt’s ragged voice, and the unabashed declaration of faith in another person’s love. I have always believed that the mines are a fascinating metaphor for the depth and seams of what faith and longing, loss and love are like: Enter out of both need and risk, emerge both rich and with less. The woman I knew died too young, about a decade after this song came out. She expected nothing in return but faith.
“Bluebird” (Lana Del Rey, single)
No one can sing of her own pain and turn it into a means of freedom for another better than Lana Del Rey. The singer in “Bluebird” knows she is lost, but she wants nothing more than to save the one who has not yet stepped into the room of her loss, and so can still get out. It’s a song about imprisonment and salvation, acceptance and sacrifice. I first heard the song the day after I had finished the final edits for Mule Boy, and I couldn’t stop listening to it, hearing in it the voice of every character, setting, and theme I had somehow managed to conjure.
“The Man Comes Around” (Johnny Cash, American IV: The Man Comes Around)
I have mentioned the parallel to the story of Jonah in Mule Boy, and another theological theme I have tried to examine is the memento mori: the reminder that death is inevitable, that “the man comes around,” and we’ll be asked then what we made of our time here. Traditionally, the Stoics understood the moment of death as a meditation on how we might live better until that moment. Cash’s song—one of the few he himself wrote for the album American IV—is classic fire and brimstone, capable of giving The Man in Black the title of Great American Theologian as well (though he would have rejected that). Here it reminds me that the men and women I grew up around—men and women who knew what the mines took as well as gave—knew they were in the hands of some God, exacting as well as just. Work that close to the earth, live that close to the edge, and one cannot not believe. This song is a reminder.
“The Stable Song” (Gregory Alan Isakov, That Sea, the Gambler)
I have to finish with “The Stable Song” because this is the song that holds Mule Boy in its lyrical and musical arms. It’s the song that would play at the end of the movie while the credits roll. It’s the song I heard first when I sat down to write, and played last every night. There’s not a line in here that does not find its echo somewhere in the novel, right up to the last line, when the singer aches for a heart that, in the end, rings like silver and rings like gold, and “turns those diamonds straight back into coal.” Listen close.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Andrew Krivak’s playlist for his novel The Bear
Andrew Krivak’s playlist for his novel The Signal Flame
Andrew Krivak is an award-winning writer whose books include Mule Boy; The Bear, a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection; and the freestanding novels of the Dardan Trilogy: The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist; and Like the Appearance of Horses, a Library Journal “Best Book of the Year” and Indie Next List for Reading Groups selection. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.