In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Nin Andrews’s Son of a Bird is a striking memoir about life growing up on a farm.
Hippocampus Magazine wrote of the book:
“Andrews’s gift for writing poetry makes each of her memories, no matter how large or small, light up the page.”
In her own words, here is Nin Andrews’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Son of a Bird:
My book, Son of a Bird, is a memoir of growing up on a farm in the South, the daughter of a gay architect and an autistic dairy farmer mother. Friends call it a Southern Gothic in the manner of Dorothy Alison, pointing out I had a most peculiar childhood. Before writing this book, I didn’t realize how unusual my life was. How, for example, drinking whiskey with my dad from the time I was six or seven was not exactly normal. But I loved so much about my childhood—the farm, the animals, the freedom, and yes, the whiskey. But it wasn’t a cozy life. For warmth, I turned to stories and music and others’ homes. The soundtrack to my early years and to the first chapter of prose poem in this book is the classical music my father had piped into the living and dining room of our house— most memorable, the Mozart sonatas, Chopin’s nocturnes. On special occasions, my father would put on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, my favorite. The record always skipped, right at the moment when Peter left the garden gate open. My heart would skip a beat, too, and I’d imagine the wolf lurking in the shadows as the French horn began—the horn a warning that I was no longer safe in the world as a listener, a child. So much of my childhood I felt unsafe. (I describe listening to Peter and the Wolf on page 96 of my memoir.)
My parents were largely absent parents, dropping me off at the barn to be raised by farmhands, and I often felt abandoned. But the farmhands and animals were great comfort to me, as was the country music and bluegrass that played on the radios in the barn from dawn till dusk. The farmhand favorites: Elvis and Patsy Cline. Looking back, I wonder if the radio station they chose only played Elvis and Patsy. I remember lead-training calves at dusk after school, humming “Blue Moon of Kentucky” or Patsy Cline’s “I go out walkin’ after midnight out in the moonlight . . .” as my calf first resisted, tugging wildly on the lead line, and then relaxed and walked beside me, sometimes stopping to kiss me by licking me with her long rubbery tongue. Some summer nights, the farmhands played bluegrass, strumming guitars and banjos and fiddles on their back porches. In the chapter, Hired Hands, on page 64, I describe dancing to their music, jumping and hopping wildly around the yard. Little grasshopper, they called me then.
The chapter, “A Lady, a Gentleman, and Two Strange Birds,” is about my siblings who were all older, whom I followed around whenever they allowed me close by. My sisters were always arguing about which songs deserved to be among the Billboards’ top 20. They collected 45 RPM records and listened to the radio when they did their homework, tuning in for WINA’s hour of love when boys called in and dedicated songs to the girls they admired. My sister, Sal, had her name announced nightly as boys dedicated songs to her, songs like “Groovey Kind of Love” or “Be My Baby” or “Red Rubber Ball,” which was dedicated to her by a boy she dumped. And when one of her boyfriends left town in eighth grade, she played the song, “Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain” over and over as she sobbed. The farmhand, Bud, loved her as well, and was always singing Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” saying once that looking at Sal in the eyes “just about done me in.”
By the time I was the girl in the final chapter of the book, a moody teenager, able to buy her own albums, I chose rock music that matched my darkly romantic self: Moody Blues, “Nights in White Satin,” Simon and Garfunkel, “Sounds of Silence,” Procul Harem, “A White Shade of Pale,” Kansas, “Dust in the Wind,” Neil Young, “Heart of Gold,” Pink Floyd, “I wish you were here.” I was also a huge Dylan and Cohen fan. Back then, I thought I was not long for this world. I sincerely believed that I’d commit suicide before I graduated from college, but music offered me these magical vibrating strands of hope, of longing, of something that touched my soul and reached beyond despair. I remember lying back on my bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to Simon and Garfunkel, “Hello darkness my old friend,” and thinking, If I could express myself even a fraction as well as these musicians express themselves, I could survive.
I still wish I were a musician. Alas, pen and paper are the only instruments I have mastered.
Nin Andrews is the author of the six chapbooks and ten full- length poetry collections including The Last Orgasm (2020), Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015). She is the recipient of two Ohio individual artists grants, the Pearl Chapbook prize, The Wick Chapbook Prize, and the Gerald Cable Award. Her book, Southern Comfort, was a finalist for the Forward Prize for Poetry 2010, and her collection, Why God is a Woman won the Ohiona Prize for Poetry in 2016. Her work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, four editions of Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, and The Best American Erotic Poems. Her poetry has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and anthologized in England, Australia, and Mongolia. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian writer, Henri Michaux.