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June 9, 2020
Cooper Lee Bombardier's Playlist for His Essay Collection "Pass with Care"
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.
Cooper Lee Bombardier's Pass with Care is one of the year's strongest essay collections. Bombardier examines gender, class, and identity with a compassionate and vulnerable eye.
The Rumpus wrote of the book:
"A gorgeously rendered response to what one might call the “Now what?” question: After an experience as metamorphic and all-consuming as a gender transition, what happens next? Who do we become after that becoming? Where do we locate meaning?"
In his own words, here is Cooper Lee Bombardier's Book Notes music playlist for his essay collection Pass with Care:
Writing is the purview of the obsessed. We dig, we sift, we tread and retread the same overtrod terrain, looking for that thing we were told through legend and family lore was there. We look for the places where what the culture promises and what we actually are overlap and we backtrack and get lost because often those places do not exist. Their existence is something sold to us, a quest to keep us marching forward, our steps and our sweat driving the engine of some vast machine that uses our lives as fuel. Through writing we try to peel back the simulacrum, to find the places that weren’t mapped. To try to get toward the real, even when we’re writing the fabricated.
The songs that buoy me most through life tend to be down-tempo, minor in key, melancholic in both form and substance, or else shining on surface as upbeat and exuberant in tone but still dragging a bursting suitcase of personal ballast behind. Maybe it is an affliction of my Gen-X status that I find comfort in creative expressions that capture the odd vagaries of human connection and the fractals that emanate from the quantum mire of our hearts’ fusions and fissions, why the sad songs make me happy. What could sooth more than listening, alone, to a record or mixtape, what could ever convey as much to the bird of one’s heart as the secret code to be unencrypted from the playlist of that mix, from the very order of the songs, and the scratchy pops between them. As a young queer and trans artist, I gravitated toward the music that made visible and spoken what hegemonic forces of normal strove to backhoe under as invisible and silent. I longed for someone to see me, to make me visible, too. I lived for music that named the unnamable. I found a way to name myself.
It’s hard to say if this is the soundtrack of my new book, Pass With Care: Memoirs, or if it is a soundtrack of five weeks into a global pandemic that has me, along with everyone I know, wondering where to find ground. How to connect, and perhaps, how to say goodbye. Is it time to write our living wills or to write our next books? Is it time to get quite and still, or to spend every waking hour struggling to figure out how to live our normal lives with others through the portals of our devices? I wonder when I will be able to ever cross the border again into my home country to see my aging parents. This crossing seems epic, a prophetic journey between distant lands, rather than a trip between adjacent countries that could be covered in a two-hour direct flight, if such a flight existed. Should we be saying goodbye to our jobs, or to our Earth? When it is over, we will all know someone who’s not survived. Maybe many. Don’t obsess (yet) over who might make it and who might not. Survival is more contingent upon the contents of one’s heart than you might think.
The songs I’ve chosen to accompany my book’s upcoming birthday reflect the melancholia that’s uplifted me through survival-modes and joys and devastations and sweet pauses of rest from the past; the years I wend through in Pass With Care, but they’re also the sweet aching obsessions I’m listening to right now as I try to do quarantine yoga in my living room or jog, masked, around the neighborhood park with my dog, dodging the other zombies who shuffle along also looking for sunlight to feed on.
1. “Fight Song,” by Or, The Whale
I had a psychic iTunes shuffle moment the other day while exercising in my living room. This song came on as an anthem to this particular moment of isolation and uncertainty where the creative reaches for connection emerge like the irises and tulips punching through the dirt around my neighborhood.
2. “Not” by Big Thief, Two Hands
This song sketches out the negative spaces, illustrating the unknown by naming what it is not.
How do we come to embrace the unfamiliar; how do we let go of what was. “Not” came across my radar just a few weeks before I knew why I needed it, and now I know.
3. “Listen Without Distraction,” by Laurie Anderson, Tenzin Choegyal, and Jesse Paris Smith, Songs From the Bardo
Multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson has been an inspiration to me since I encountered her music in the late 1980s. When I was a young art school punk, I attended a lecture of hers at the Berklee School of Music and it was here that I came to understand that Anderson was much more than the calm, clear, dispassionate voice behind the late-night videos of her most well-known songs. I saw a glimpse of all her permutations as artist, inventor, violinist, performer. Here, along with her collaborators, she invites us to contemplate the fate we all share and to reckon with our impermanence through this engagement with the Bardo Thodol, better known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “You’ll be attracted to the soft yellow light of the hungry ghosts…they are an obstacle blocking the path to liberation…”
4. “Shaggy Dad,” by Lightnin’ Hopkins, The Very Best of Lightnin’ Hopkins
“Shaggy dad, where you been/ I been walkin’ to see my friend/Knock on the door, she wouldn't let me in/That dirty dog, wanna know where I been.” This will be my theme song as I one day emerge from self-quarantine.
5. “Drugs Don’t Work,” The Verge, Urban Hymns
This song speaks of nostalgia, aging, and not being able to medicate oneself out of melancholy, all tucked inside an uplifting orchestral pop ballad.
6. “Vincent Black Lightning 1952,” by Richard Thompson, Rumor and Sigh
Quite possibly one of the greatest boy-meets-girl songs ever, complete with leather and motorcycles and bank robbery.
7. “That’s How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart,” by Aimee Mann, The Forgotten Arm
Allen Ginsberg said, “It isn’t enough for your heart to break, because everybody’s heart is broken now.” Carrie Fisher said, “Take your broken heart. Make it into art.” To riff off of the old bumper sticker adage, I’d say, “If you’re not heartbroken, you’re not paying attention.”
8. “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone, Compact Jazz: Nina Simone
This song is a magic spell to connect with nature and remember who you are and when you need to strut and remember a former, possibly more badass incarnation of yourself.
9. “Hood” by Perfume Genius, Put Your Back N 2 It
It’s a mood.
10. “This Land is Your Land” by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Naturally
This version brings back the political verses—against income disparity and private property—of the protest song by Woodie Guthrie, reminding us of his commie roots.
11. “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil, It’ll End in Tears
One of the most haunting songs I know, This Mortal Coil’s cover of the Tim Buckley song captures the essence of being possessed by love, of being ensorcelled by another to the point of one’s own peril. In the past I’ve thought I’d like it played at my funeral, but right now all I can think about are the people who are being buried without ceremony or witness all over the globe. Let’s play this song for them in our hearts.
12. “Blue Dress” by Depeche Mode, Violator
While the lyrics are simple and plain, the textures of this song make it feel coded as so queer and dirty. Even DM member Martin Gore referred to the song as “pervy.” It might pair well with the chapter “Antoinette, for Example.”
13. “Good Til Now” by Gillian Welch, Hell Among the Yearlings
There’s quiet, honeyed, lazy lust tucked into this song about circling the drain, and I love it. “Standing on a corner, sweating through yellow silk…”
14. “Especially Me” by Low, C’mon
Low, in this beautiful song that sounds like ceremony, alludes to “Cry Me a River,” and it invokes a yearning to know where one belongs in order to understand where one comes from.
15. “Make-Out King” by Eleni Mandell, Miracle of Five
Whether you’ve been the make-out king, or have been held in the thrall of one (or have been both), this upbeat waltz has a narcotic charm to it that makes it feel like a story about an old friend—or a story an old friend has written about you.
16. “F**k The World” by Unlovables, God Save The Queers
Another self-isolation pop-punk theme song. Play it loud, dance it out in your apartment, and stay home anyway.
17. “Looking at The Invisible Man” by The Dead Weather, Sea of Cowards
So much of Pass With Care is about visibility/invisibility and the stakes of both. It comes down to choice: we want control of how we are readable and by whom. And we all must constantly act to see others free of our own projections and distortions. A friend of mine once saw The Dead Weather live, and when I asked him how the show was, he said “it was so loud.” Even listening to them on my laptop, I feel like they’ll burst through the tinny speakers. I like that their music has a tangible impact.
18. “Alone Again, Or,” by The Damned, Anything
I love the poignant mariachi of this song. The narrator could be in love with just about anyone, but still pines for the beloved. I always thought that Calexico just amplified the beautiful Mexican flare of The Damned’s cover, but it turns out that The Damned’s version hews pretty close to the 1967 original by Love, trumpet solo and all.
19. “In Spite of Me,” by Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky, Droneflower
This atmospheric, ethereal cover of the great band Morphine’s song from Cure for Pain just guts me. Long ago, I worked as a cook in a take-out barbeque joint in Inman Square, Cambridge, Mass, and Mark Sandman, the lead singer of Morphine, would come in on occasion for some dinner. His long face and glum baritone were just as sad as his songs. I didn’t know how sad life could (and would) get back then but now I know and I think about what I saw on Mark’s face across the counter whenever I listen to his music.
20. “Capitol Hill,” Truckstop Honeymoon, Christmas in Ocala
Released in 2004 but unfortunately timeless. Homemade Haircut? Home is not a Hotel? Finding out that your home is in the middle of an apocalypse? Maybe they’re just the perfect band to be listening to right now.
Cooper Lee Bombardier is a writer and visual artist from the South Shore of Boston. HuffPost named him one of "10 Transgender Artists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art." He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pass with Care: Memoirs is his first book.
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Book Notes (2015 - 2017) (authors create music playlists for their book)
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