In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Nita Noveno’s memoir Mud on the Moon is an imaginatively told book about a daughter’s investigation into her Filipino father’s past.
Gina Apostol wrote of the book:
“Mud on the Moon is a lyrical, innovative memoir linking Philippine history to the American present, and the American past to Filipino lives, asking us to see contemporary America, especially but not only Filipino America, in novel ways, in both meanings of that word: as a complex and layered narrative demanding to be told and as an art experiment raising stakes on not only what it means to be American but also what it means to make art. Risk-taking, clear-eyed, but always artful, engaging, and above all embracing of multiple worlds and times, Noveno is, a voice for our complex moment.”
In her own words, here is Nita Noveno’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Mud on the Moon:
Mud on the Moon spans nearly a century and two continents, from my father’s Philippines to his adopted Alaska to the America I grew up in and keep becoming. This playlist is the music behind that arc, some of it in the book, all of it in my bones: his world, then mine, and finally what passed between us. Each section is a threshold.
Being Filipino
Rondalla ensemble / “Pamulinawen” (traditional Ilokano folk song)
I learned the words rondalla and bandurria later in life, but the sound of those strings was always there, woven into early memories of the Filipino community in my small Alaskan hometown: laughter, the mix of Ilokano and Tagalog, the smell of soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, chicken and pork, and steamed white rice. “Pamulinawen” is an Ilokano folk song that predates Spanish colonization, possibly the oldest song still known from that era, sometimes called the National Anthem of the Ilokano. The title is the woman’s name in the song, derived from alabaster, signifying a heart as hard as stone. On its surface a love song, but beneath it echoes something older, the persistence of a people, a language, a culture that survived centuries of colonial rule. I imagine it as a backdrop to my father’s boyhood in the northern Philippines, born in 1907 into a country still reckoning with the aftermath of the Philippine-American War.
Becoming American
“Swinging on a Star” — Bing Crosby
My father’s record collection was full of American crooners: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mario Lanza, their faces on the album covers as familiar to me as family. Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star” captures something of my father’s generation of manong laborers, men who came to this country with little and reached anyway, for work, for dignity, for a life. The song is hopeful in that particular black-and-white way, a seemingly uncomplicated America where the darkness underneath stays just out of frame, invisible and silent — the racism, the exclusion laws, the loneliness of men living far from home. For my father and his Filipino compatriots who gathered at the Diaz Cafe in Ketchikan, swinging on a star was both aspiration and promise, however improbable and deferred. That silence is history too.
Alaska on My Mind
“North to Alaska” — Johnny Horton
Johnny Horton’s voice carries the particular swagger of men moving toward something, chasing a dream just over the next ridge. For my father and the generation of Filipinos who came before him, Alaska was the last frontier in every sense, a place of hard work and hard weather and, for some, a place to finally put down roots. The leap from a tropical island to the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska is almost impossible to imagine, and yet they made it, drawn by the promise of the canneries, the fishing boats, the possibility of a new life. My father found his home there, and Mud on the Moon tries to understand what that cost and what it gave him. Johnny Horton’s song, corny and rousing and utterly sincere, is exactly that kind of hope.
We Are Family
“Unforgettable” — Nat King Cole / Mario Lanza (in the car)
After more than thirty years of bachelorhood, my father found a wife and two children followed. A dream deferred, now reality. Nat King Cole’s face was another on those album covers, his voice as much a part of my father’s American life as the records themselves. “Unforgettable” captures the sweetness of that late chapter, a man in his late fifties who finally had a family to come home to. And then there was Mario Lanza on the car radio, songs like “Because You’re Mine” and “The Loveliest Night of the Year” on the short drives around Ketchikan. Like many of his era, my father was drawn to those big, dramatic sounds, voices that seemed to reach for something just beyond the ordinary. A complete life finally arrived with its proud chorus.
Early Girlhood
Bee Gees / Michael Jackson / Earth, Wind & Fire / Bonnie Tyler / Shaun Cassidy / Donna Summer
I grew up in the 1970s, and my American girlhood had its own soundtrack standing right alongside my father’s record collection. Shaun Cassidy, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Earth, Wind & Fire, Bonnie Tyler, Donna Summer. Some of that music played at home, and some of it poured from the jukebox at the Diaz Cafe, my aunt’s restaurant and a gathering place for the men of my father’s generation, where music spilled out alongside cigar smoke from the back room where the men played cards. It was the decade of disco and pop and something opening up, even in an insular island town at the edge of the continent. The rhythm was expansive in a way that our small world was not, and we danced along with it.
Coming of Age
KISS / Heart / Duran Duran / Madonna
The 1980s arrived with a different sound, louder and more restless. My sister and I had all the KISS albums, and that music was like a doorway into something bigger and more disruptive than the 70s pop we’d grown up on. Then came tape cassettes: Heart, Duran Duran and Madonna and the expanding universe of 80s music, a sound that was curious and danceable and relentlessly new. Those music videos changed everything too, a whole visual language we hadn’t had before. My American youth was becoming something else, and the music was moving right along with it. To think that decades later, a whole new generation would find their way to this music and love it just as fiercely. Just wow.
Cannery Summers
AC/DC / “Don’t You Want Me” — The Human League
The world came to Ketchikan every summer, drawn by the promise of work and the legend of Alaska. From high school through college, I worked five summers on the slime line at the cannery, gutting and processing salmon in a particular stink that never quite leaves you. The music on the loudspeaker was both a jolt of energy and relief. “Back in Black” and other AC/DC songs played on repeat, and The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” had the whole slime line singing along badly, which is the only way to sing on a slime line. It was the same work my father had done decades before, and so many others before him. New and old Filipino immigrants, people from around the country and the world, college students, wanderers, all of us bound together by fish and the 1980s and the particular democracy of exhaustion. In Mud on the Moon, the cannery is where two generations of my family’s American story converge.
Out in the World
Charlotte Mbango / Prince Eyango / Guy Lobé / Tracy Chapman
After college I joined the Peace Corps and found myself in rural Cameroon in Central Africa, teaching English and living a tropical life I could not have imagined from those summers in Alaska. My students introduced me to a world of music and dance, Makossa, Bikutsi, Kwassa Kwassa, rhythms that were immediately, irresistibly physical. Charlotte Mbango’s “Konkai Makossa” is sheer joy and energy, a song that made it impossible to stand still. Prince Eyango, Guy Lobé — these were the artists whose music filled my small house and the paths between villages, words of celebration and heartbreak and hard lives set to beats so contagious you had no choice but to move. And then there was Tracy Chapman, whose “Talkin’ About a Revolution” was literally a Peace Corps training lesson, her voice timeless and compelling, a song about justice and equity and reaching for more that informed everything I was thinking and becoming. “Fast Car” was its own kind of escape and longing. Unexpectedly, living in Cameroon walked me closer to my parents’ world too, the dirt roads and rural poverty and resilience I would later trace in the Philippines. The music of a place and a time introduced me to the world anew.
NYC Schooling
“1979” — Smashing Pumpkins / Merengue / Salsa
I came to New York City for graduate school, planned to stay five years at most and then work and live around the world. But I stayed, the way people do. “1979” by the Smashing Pumpkins came into my life through a fellow teacher I met at my first Bronx high school, a New Yorker who became, for a time, the person I thought I’d spend my life with. He would air guitar the opening riff against his seat belt in the car, fingers pinching an invisible pick. The song stayed long after he did. For my first decade I taught in public high schools in the Bronx, where my students came from around the world, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Albania, Eritrea, Bangladesh, India, Ivory Coast, young immigrants and children of immigrants always, in some part of themselves, somewhere else, trying to fit into a new life in a city that is its own challenge for anyone, let alone an adolescent navigating a new language, a new climate, a new culture, the subway, the sheer in-your-face intensity of New York. To be in that classroom was to be immersed in nostalgia, not mine but theirs, the longing for a place and a life left behind. From time to time a student would break into merengue or salsa, a few steps, a few words, and just like that the room shifted. “1979” is a song about that exact feeling, nostalgia for a time just out of reach, a life still in formation. My students were teaching me to see my father and my own life more clearly, and I did not know it yet.
Writing the Book (Fits and Starts)
“Closer to Fine” — Indigo Girls
Writing Mud on the Moon meant sitting with what I could not know, the gaps in my father’s life that no document or photograph or memory could fill. For years it felt like writing in the dark, researching, experimenting, learning, discovering. On repeat. The Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine” became a kind of compass for that process. The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine. That line could be the epigraph for this book. Writing my father’s life meant learning to trust what I imagined as much as what I found, to let the not-knowing be part of the story rather than a failure of research. The Indigo Girls taught me that a long time ago. It just took a book to understand it.
Legacy
“Road to Nowhere” — Talking Heads
In my last chapter I am driving a Filipino American historian in his wife’s Cadillac while he sits in the passenger seat telling me stories of Filipino laborers on the West Coast, what he has spent his life gathering, what he is starting to lose. Aware of memory loss on the horizon, he told me he would not remember me in a few years. “Road to Nowhere” by the Talking Heads is an unlikely hymn, upbeat and unafraid, a song about mortality that somehow makes you want to dance. I have been thinking about these moments of revelation ever since that drive. We’re on a road to nowhere, come on inside.
Nita Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School, Nita is also the founder and host emeritus of Sunday Salon, a long-running reading series in New York City. Her work has appeared in Mãnoa, Identity Theory, Brink, Hippocampus, The Hunger, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City and The Margins, among other publications. Nita grew up in the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska and lives in Queens, NY.