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March 23, 2020
TaraShea Nesbit's Playlist for Her Novel "Beheld"
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, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
TaraShea Nesbit's Beheld novel is a provocative and compelling examination of the Pilgrims through the eyes of two women who landed with the Mayflower.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly … The novel is most successful where it allows itself to stray from historical fact and plot ― to invent and to play with language, to give itself imaginative time and space. Nesbit is brilliant in those moments, and captures a paradox of historical writing ― that it’s in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real."
In her own words, here is TaraShea Nesbit's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Beheld:
I once aspired to be a music snob. But too many years with a real music snob, a controlling person that once said, Only one person in this relationship can be in a band! which sadly was not his parting salvo, has given me a physical aversion to record shops and sixties fashion, particularly mop tops.
However, music is always on in my house. When I was writing Beheld, I turned to certain songs to evoke the emotional experiences of the characters as well as to suspend the voices from my everyday life writing in a small house with a partner who also works from home and at a small coffee shop in a small town.
Beheld is a novel about two women in 1630 who were part of the Mayflower journey—a former indentured servant and the governor’s second wife. It is a book about the mythology surrounding “The Pilgrims”, about the factions within the Plymouth settler community and about who gets believed and subsequently, who gets punished. It is about the stories that get passed down that shape who we think ourselves to be as a people and as a country.
“Introduction” The Boxhead Ensemble - Dutch Harbor soundtrack (available on PennSound)
I love how The Boxhead Ensemble’s song opens ominously as if someone far away is dialing in but no one is picking up.
Beheld begins with Alice Bradford, the Plymouth governor’s second wife, saying, “We thought ourselves a murderless colony.”
A small sound seems to come from a corner of the room—guitar, keyboard; one long note, then two. A human tries to connect to another human, but thus far in the song, contact is not made. The horn appears. Something nefarious is afoot.
I learned about this song from my friend, writer Eric Baus, who has this great writing exercise, “Three Imaginary Soundtracks” in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013). He asks students to write a prose poem that imagines what this song could be the soundtrack to. For many hours I listened to this song on repeat and imagined the Mayflower voyage section of Beheld.
Mitski “Your Best American Girl”
As someone who writes about American history from lesser-listened-to perspectives, and as a civilian with complicated feelings about what I am complicit in, via my tax dollars and so forth, I appreciate the questions emerging from this song. What is viewed as American and why?
I love how Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” critiques dominance in rock music, addressing the “American boy” of indie rock music directly. She creates her own fierce power ballad, which reminds me, too, of Audre Lorde asserting, For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, an idea I often think about.
Mitski’s song hinges on asserting and also wavering—Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me but I do, I think I do.
“My God Has a Telephone” by The Flying Stars of Brooklyn NY
In 1630, how one practiced their beliefs could have serious consequences—one might believe you could go to hell, but more immediately, you could be banished from the colony or be allowed to stay but ostracized. I love how this gospel song seems to celebrate an individual experience with whatever one chooses to name the higher presence they connect to—“My God”—and the soothing reminder to Put my faith over fear.
Pulp, “Common People”
One of my novel’s central conflicts is between the indentured servants that were on the Mayflower and their masters, what we often call The Pilgrims. I’d believed for years—as I was taught—that the Mayflower passengers were a unified group seeking freedom from religious persecution, and that proved to be untrue on several counts. About twenty to twenty-five percent of the passengers were servants to the separatist puritans, and many of the puritans—often called “pilgrims”—were living freely and practicing their religious beliefs in Holland before they boarded the Mayflower.
When I think of class conflict, I think of Pulp’s classic “Common People”. This song was my poppy anthem in college and grad school as I became quite aware of class. I love how this song twists between what is seen as authentic. I hear working-class pride but the word “do do do” gets stretched to sound like “boo-hoo” and I love how it expresses both sadness and self-mockery about one’s social and cultural position.
Florence and the Machine’s “Hunger”
One character in the novel is grappling with her grief about her friend’s untimely death, which sends her back to their shared childhood and back into the physical and emotional longing for her dearest female friend. I listened to this song as I thought about the physical longing and desire present in childhood before we have language for it.
I love how this song blesses a self or another—the ambiguity is part of what I love—with compassion. I love how the lyrics speak to misplaced want for adoration as a method for loving one’s self but also normalizes that want, that hunger, to be loved.
Karen Dalton “Reason to Believe”
I thought of Dorothy Bradford, the governor’s first wife, as I listened to this song. She was on the Mayflower when she mysteriously died. Her husband had just learned how to use a gun from the non-puritan soldier the elders hired, and he had rowed out on a small boat away from her, scouting land with other men, and it was just her and the other women and children, and the seamen, on Mayflower, near what is now Provincetown Harbor. She had left her only child, a four-year-old son, back in Holland, and the effects of scurvy were present in many of the passengers, likely her, too. They didn’t know that citrus could help. Before her husband returned to the ship, she was dead.
I wondered about her relationship to God and her husband and her life in the moments before her life ends. This song feels like it could speak into her conflicted feelings: Still I look to find a reason to believe.
Marconi Union – “Weightless”
My anxiety is amplified by coffee, and yet I haven’t the will power to let go of my two to three cups a day, so when I hate everything I’m writing and start checking Goodreads for a bit of self-flagellation, I put on Marconi Union’s “Weightless”. A study found that this song reduced participants' overall anxiety by 65 percent.
That I do not have a visceral reaction to how the track feels like you are stepping into a new age dream, or nightmare, might speak to having lived five years in Boulder. The song might not be for everyone, but it works for me, settling that scratching to get out of her cage and chewing her own fur part of my brain so that I can write.
Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”
Given that there are, according to the Mayflower Society, 35 million people that claim Mayflower passenger ancestry, I’m preparing for critiques I might get for writing the Mayflower passengers as humans rather than mythical beings of austerity and goodness, and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” is my rallying song for letting go of feeling like I need to be liked by everyone. I’m still working on it.
But also, You could be getting down to this sick beat. I read somewhere, in one of the zillion books I read for research, that one minister of the time described sex as one of God’s earthly blessings. This made sense to me: where there is a forbidden pleasure, we put an allowable one. Enjoying our physical bodies in connection with other bodies is a pleasurable action that transcends time: since there were people there was this pleasure and also, the potential for violence. Many of the Mayflower passengers had a lot of children. But curiously, William Bradford and his first wife only had one and the novel imagines some reasons why that was.
Shin Joon Hyun “The Sun”
For a bit of sunshine, bring you the folk-pop of Shin Joon Hyun’s “The Sun”. Hyun got his start at nineteen playing music to GIs at a US Army Base in Seoul. He built his own radio to hear American music, especially jazz, via the American Forces Korea Network. He garnered fame in Korea for a rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” and described that time of playing music as “the most beautiful time of my life." But when he refused to write an ode to the ruling President in South Korea, he was arrested for marijuana possession, tortured, and put in a psychiatric hospital. When the regime changed, he was released, and in 2008 he performed for the first time in America.
I imagine this song as evoking the tender yet melancholy moments in the novel when the women, nearing the end of their lives, go to gravesites to be again amongst their friends.
“The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell
I find it fascinating that Mitchell wrote this song to cheer up her friend, Neil Young, who was, at nineteen, depressed about growing older. In “Sugar Mountain”, Young sings: You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain. Mitchell said at the Gerdes Folk City in 1968: He was really depressed, so I wrote a song for him. The song isn’t particularly uplifting to me, except to remind us we are on a carousel of life, part of a cycle of birth and death.
When I started writing this book I was a newly-married Ph.D. student living in Boulder and by the time I turned in the final edits I was a professor in Ohio with two children under the age of five. Finding music that we all agree on is a challenge. My daughter thinks what her parents like is too sad. She might be right.
But this song’s tender-sweet narration of a person’s journey from childhood to the inevitable end we will all experience, death, is one I try to keep close to me, for fear that if I don’t I won’t appreciate enough all the things—annoying, beautiful, mundane—about the present. My daughter’s Montessori plays this song at a spring moving up ceremony, and she sings along. Though my children are a decade and a half away from graduating, this song and the slideshow of other people’s children at the ceremony bursts me open with feelings about mortality.
I listened to this song while writing the ending chapters of the novel when the main characters are aging. Many of their friends have passed on and it is a time of reflection. They consider the hopes they had for Plymouth colony and for their individual lives and wonder if they made the right decisions.
TaraShea Nesbit is the author of The Wives of Los Alamos, which was a national bestseller, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, and a New York Times Editors' Choice, among other accolades. Her writing has been featured in Granta, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her family.
also at Largehearted Boy:
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Largehearted Boy playlist by the author for The Wives of Los Alamos
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