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March 24, 2022
Kelsey Ronan's Playlist for Her Novel "Chevy in the Hole"
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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kelsey Ronan's novel Chevy in the Hole is a stunning debut, a thought-provoking invocation of community, family, and love.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"There is a particular kind of melancholy endemic to cities in the industrial Midwest. Chevy in the Hole does a wonderful job of capturing this kind of melancholy, in particular the melancholy of Flint, Mich., where August (Gus), who's recovering from an opioid addiction, falls in love with Monae, a hard-working activist...It's Gus who anchors this novel, as Ronan adeptly dramatizes one of the most dangerous monsters of addiction: self-loathing...He's thoughtful in every sense of the word -- he's kind and he thinks too much, and Ronan has a gift for propulsive sentences that make even his deeply interior moments somehow suspenseful and endearing."
In her own words, here is Kelsey Ronan's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Chevy in the Hole:
What I wanted was this: to write a novel that complicated the narratives of pity and derision so often imposed on Flint, Michigan, my hometown. I wanted to write a book that showed Flint too could be a place of healing and joy and fulfillment. So I wrote a love story about two urban farmers, August and Monae, who find each other just before the water crisis. Their story is interwoven with that of their families, moving back in time from the sit-down strike at General Motors in 1937 to the 1960s. For each episode in the city’s history, I had playlists that I listened to as I worked at my laptop, as I circled the track at the Y thinking through plot, as I kicked around the farms in Detroit’s North End for research. On those playlists was protest folk, jazz, '60s rock, Motown, hip hop, tormented male singer-songwriters. As well as a doorway into each of these eras, music was a means of hanging together all that preoccupied me: Love. Grief. Redemption. Faith.
At the center of Chevy in the Hole, there’s a fateful night in the summer of 1967 when, at Flint’s Atwood Stadium, The Who opened for Herman’s Hermits. The after-party at the Holiday Inn doubled as a 21st birthday party for drummer Keith Moon. The details are disputed, but somehow Moon drove a car into the swimming pool and The Who were banned from Holiday Inns worldwide. When I look back now at my Chevy in the Hole playlists, the songs move backwards and forwards in time and return to what might have played that night. What hung in the air the summer of 1967.
“My Proposal,” Soul Incorporated
My second cousin was in this Flint band, broken up by the Vietnam draft and General Motors. This was their only record, put out in 1967 by a little label called Coconut Groove. Decades later, the song was resurrected on YouTube, with record collectors forking over thousands of dollars. It’s a bop: the horns, the earnest sweetness. And it opened up so many questions for me, about the scene in Michigan and all the music happening on the peripheries of Motown and the garage bands that broke, like MC5 and The Stooges; about what’s been lost and what’s been preserved.
“One Piece at a Time,” Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash runs through the book as August listens to Johnny Cash read the Bible via YouTube. Johnny Cash played his last full show at the Whiting Auditorium in Flint. He stumbled on stage and explained to the public for the first time that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He had Michigan connections, having worked briefly at a GM plant in Pontiac before he went into the Air Force. I love how this song, about a shoprat stealing a car part by part, gets at a certain working class “take this job and shove it” type humor and the satisfaction of getting one over on The Man.
“Something About John Coltrane,” Alice Coltrane
When Monae first enters the novel, she’s listening to Journey in Satchidananda, Alice Coltrane’s exploration of spirituality and grief. Throughout Chevy in the Hole there’s a lot of jazz, as Monae connects with her dead father through his music collection. Her dad and I are both especially interested in female jazz artists with connections to Detroit.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” The Beach Boys
In Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s Flint documentary, there’s a scene where Ben Hamper, writer and former shoprat, describes driving home from the plant after being pink slipped. He broke down as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” played on the radio, trying to reconcile the sunny optimism of the song with his reality. The song then plays over a montage of boarded houses and headlines announcing the plant closures. A bonus that it’s another mid-'60s song about getting married.
“Come Live With Me,” Dorothy Ashby
I’m ashamed of how recently I learned about Dorothy Ashby—both because she’s so good and because she was from Detroit. During the pandemic my sister played me Afro-Harping and it became part of the soundtrack to my revisions. As an invitation, “Come Live With Me” is both seductive and chill. You couldn’t possibly say no to a proposal like this.
“God Is Love” & “Mercy Mercy Me,” Marvin Gaye
Motown runs all through this book, both as a soundtrack and as a landmark. In the first chapter, August is standing in front of Henry Ford Hospital, across the street from the Motown museum, remembering a trip there with his sister. For my money, there is nothing more perfect in all of pop music than "What’s Going On" and the moment “God Is Love” drops into “Mercy Mercy Me.” I placed this moment in the book when a car is jumped; the stereo kicking back on. It carries with it, I think, a sense of miraculous good luck.
“(Love Is Like A) Heatwave,” The Who
I’m interested in the way '60s pop songs bounced between Black and white performers—how Motown songs were interpreted by the British Invasion bands, how Motown artists and soul singers like Aretha and Otis covered the Beatles and the Stones. While Martha & the Vandellas’ original version of this song has a swooning energy, with the Vandellas in the background consoling, “it’s all right, girl/ain’t nothing but love, girl,” The Who is thrashing, frantic.
“The Loco-Motion,” Grand Funk Railroad
Of all Flint groups—the Dayton Family, Ready for the World—'70s rockers Grand Funk Railroad are maybe the city’s most commercially successful. There’s a gloriously cheesy VH1 Behind the Music where Michael Moore argues that they rocked harder than Led Zeppelin. Another cover, “The Loco-Motion” was first recorded by Little Eva in the '60s and a has a bubblegum sweetness. I like best the beginning sound, which I assume is supposed to be a train coming down the track, but sounds to me like slow, methodical work—a hammer falling over and over, a machine grinding.
“96 Tears,” Question Mark & the Mysterians
A 1966 break up jam from Mid-Michigan one hit wonders. The Mysterians were the sons of migrant farmers; Mexican guys with a penchant for sci-fi and surf rock. Question Mark (Rudy Martinez) said wild stuff in interviews about how his soul was thousands of years old, how he was from space. A lot of the characters in my book are trying to run away from themselves, hiding in plain sight. That may be a Mysterian hanging out at the Holiday Inn afterparty smoking a joint with Monae’s grandmother, but who’s telling you anything straight?
“Together, Alone,” Young Ritual
I can’t help but love a Flint guy with glasses and a guitar who’s been open about his experiences of anxiety. There’s a wry humor to this song and a disarming frankness. Like me, August is a dedicated bath-taker, and the lines “I think I’ll take a bath/think about what I have/and wash off some mental illness” both make me laugh and think of that line from The Bell Jar, “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”
“Ideal Husband,” Father John Misty
I listened to a lot of Father John Misty when I was writing from August’s perspective—the alternating agitation and joy of a neurotic man in love. I had I Love You, Honeybear on heavy rotation, but in this song particularly there’s an unpacking of flaws, a reckoning of self that rang true for my character. “Telling people jokes to shut them up/ resenting people that I love.”
“Praise the Lord,” Mary Lou Williams
Chevy in the Hole begins with a drug overdose: August has a vision, and he wonders if that was heaven he saw in those seconds when his heart stopped. Belief runs through the novel: faith in God, faith in the future, faith in each other. Mary Lou Williams is one of my heroes. After her retreat from music, exhausted and disillusioned, she converted to Catholicism and devoted herself to musicians struggling with addiction. Her comeback album, Black Christ of the Andes, a mass for St. Martin de Porres, patron saint of social justice, is a stunner. “Praise the Lord” is faith as ecstatic feet-stomping, hand-clapping joy.
“The Transfiguration,” Sufjan Stevens
“Flint (For the Underpaid & Unemployed)” might be the expected Sufjan Stevens track, from his Greetings from Michigan album, but it’s the tremulous joy in Steven’s singing about God that I returned to when I was drafting Chevy in the Hole.
“Doorway,” Tunde Olaniran & Yo-Yo Ma
I used to hear Tunde practicing when they lived across the street from my mom, and now they’re collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma. I’m grateful to Tunde for their work as an activist and for songs like this, that explode genre and look simultaneously at the past and the future. “Every memory is a puzzle piece” could double as a writer’s statement on writing the family saga.
“I Say a Little Prayer,” Aretha Franklin
While I was working on this book, Aretha Franklin passed away. She lay in state at the Wright Museum, a few blocks from where I lived then. I waited in line for hours while people sang her songs, played her music, filed slowly past the fleet of pink Cadillacs. I’d loved her since I was a teenager, when I got deep into '60s music and ripped all the rock and soul CDs at the Flint Public Library onto the family desktop. In the water crisis, Franklin donated hotel rooms to Flint families with small children, and I remember crying a little when I read the statement she put out: “Detroiters usually come to the aid of Detroiters -- and Flint is certainly regarded as Detroit. Hang in there.” I was so moved that I got to file past, to say goodbye. She was pure grace.
Kelsey Ronan grew up in Flint, Michigan. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She lives in Detroit and teaches for InsideOut Literary Arts. Chevy in the Hole is her first novel.
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