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July 28, 2020
Caoilinn Hughes' Playlist for Her Novel "The Wild Laughter"
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.
Caoilinn Hughes' novel The Wild Laughter is a darkly comic family drama.
The Guardian wrote of the book:
"Powerful...darkly adventurous... An Irish Cain and Abel... Hart’s embittered anguish is resplendent throughout; his role in one of the book’s key scenes makes for an outstanding passage of manipulation, misery and culpability. The Wild Laughter’s reckoning is as much concerned with these far-reaching effects of history as with the ongoing brutality of austerity."
In her own words, here is Caoilinn Hughes' Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Wild Laughter:
I wrote a first draft of The Wild Laughter eight years ago when I was living in New Zealand. I rewrote it living in the Netherlands. But it’s a novel set in Ireland’s landlocked midlands about a family who has never left the island, so the extreme Irishness of this soundtrack (7 of the 10 tracks) reflects that: it’s a lock-in! A bit claustrophobic probably, and inebriatingly, romantically nationalist. Personally, I am extremely uncomfortable with nationalism and patriotism: I am happy to celebrate aspects of culture and community, but I believe they can usually be separated from nationality and place. Landscape and its weather can be part of what prompts cultural output, so you might call that the epitome of place/national situation, but I’d rather think of it as geology and meteorology. We can blame the rain for all this cultural output, for having nothing drier to do than putting ink to paper, but the rain isn’t ours. We don’t own the rock, even if paper likes to wrap itself around it. Down with paper flags. Up with culture. Up with general rain, with the ground’s capacity to absorb it. Here we go. A-one-two-three-four…
1. Lakum, “The Wild Rover”
An iconic song from The Dubliners, rewritten here by Lankum. The lyrics are only slightly revised, but the arrangement, instrumentation, tone, and style are totally different. The Dubliners’ version might prompt a listener to slap her knee, as if at the punchline of a great story told. In the original, the speaker thinks of himself as a sort of prodigal son (as does the protagonist of The Wild Laughter), and the final verse promises that the speaker will go home to confess to his parents and beg their pardon and, if they embrace him as before, then he “will play the wild rover no more.” Whereas in the Lankum version, the speaker lists the things he could have paid for with the money wasted on beer. There is such a haunting drive to Lankum’s song, and to my ear it has been musically reembodied uncannily. The speaker’s vow to stop drinking and roving falls not on deaf ears, but on ears who hear the prospect of a customer. The entrapment contained within the composition makes me for one listen on repeat. I love this beautiful, slightly trippy video in which the centre of all the landscapes widen and distort verrrry subtly so as to render the viewer “Gee-eyed.” If not, it draws you in and forward, warping one’s mood and perspective. There’s a medieval quality to the song, the harmonized vocals almost Gregorian chant-like. The instrumentation (Radie Peat on the harmonium) is non-obtrusive to begin with, so we can hear the voices almost as a capella, until the fourth minute when the instruments gather and stampede into strained, glissanding polyphonous chords with texture that has a physical effect on the listener.
2. Lisa O’Neill, “Rock the Machine”
From the County Cavan, Lisa O’Neill writes a brilliant protest song—her iconic “No Train to Cavan” for example. For seven years of her childhood, she played the tin whistle in a marching band, and that context thrums through her music. [Tangent alert! “The Dawning of the Day,” which gets a nod in The Wild Laughter, was the first tune she learned. “The Dawning of the Day” belongs to the poetic genre called the “Aisling” in which Ireland appears in the form of a woman-seer. Sounding deceptively like love songs (to evade British censorship), in an Aisling, the woman/Ireland laments the current state of the nation’s people and predicts an imminent revival of their fortunes (the “dawning of the day”) and Ireland’s deliverance.] O’Neill’s lyrics also mourn livelihoods and cultures lost, but she celebrates resilience and there’s the occasional call to action. In the Ireland O’Neill and I grew up in, most people couldn’t avoid associating music with Sunday mass and school (for Irish dancing) and that social/communal association shines through. This song is about and for the dockers. I would give the whole set of lyrics here if I could, but know that the song is as powerful as any one of its parts. “Machine with the strength of a hundred men / Can’t feed and clothe my children / Can’t greet a sailor coming in / Or know of desperation.” In an era in which the tech overlords have set up their cameras on every dock and port and cul-de-sac, we all feel the absence of greetings (by which I mean UBI/UBS already, ffs; which would surely be “gold enough to win back time”; which would make our “load a mountain lighter” and allow us to move into a new era rather than pine for an old desperate, defeated compromise.) I’m hearing O’Neill’s strong, unadorned, distinctive voice as one hell of a greeting.
3. The Gloaming, “Boy in the Gap/The Lobster”
This reel opens with such a gentle lullaby quality, between the traditional fiddle (Martin Hayes) and the timeless, raindrop-effect piano (Thomas Bartlett); the acoustic guitar (Dennis Cahill) there too is barely audible, and Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh on the second violin adds lingering tonal chords (almost acting a double bass) for a sort of synth/blue noise effect. It’s not so much that it builds as it gives us a little more of the song as it progresses—as if one is opening all the doors in the house. All the doors are open when the piece moves into its second phase/tune, where the second violin takes the mantle, with rich, harmonic double stopping, and the song adapts into something more venturesome and awakening. Beautifully subdued and familiar to Irish people as the scars on our hands, “Hughie Travers” starts up at minute 4.19—played with the ease of a tune being hummed in the shower, rather than being expressed in full. A second piano adds to the community this medley celebrates. It’s the first piano in particular that keeps this very much in the contemporary realm, with lots of seemingly improvised / gestural syncopation and variance — it adds something non-traditional to the trad palate, and I, for one, am not throwing it out of the pub! The fiddles are the most true-to-tradition here. A little trick for the non-Irish, how you can tell if violins are fiddles—that they’re playing “trad”—is that the players’ wrists tend to follow the wood of the violin; whereas for classical music, the wrist is arched away from the violin’s neck, which allows the player to play vibrato with their fingertips. In trad music, you rarely hear vibrato and the pads of the fingers are used. Essentially, the tension is totally different. It also means trad players have a surer grip of their fiddles, so they can dance around a bit, and their chins are doing less work to hold the instrument, so they can watch one another. There’s a cameraderie in this music, coupled with some child-like simplicity that is consoling, joyful, and expansive.
4. Christy Moore, “Ordinary Man”
A raging classic of Irish folk (replete with bodhrán, not seen in this video), Christy Moore’s album was one of the four cassette tapes we had in the car every time we took the long car journey out to our holiday caravan (years later, a cottage) in Connemara when we were kids. In The Wild Laughter, the family takes such a journey westward, caravan-ward; though no music plays to crackle through the tension. To English friends, I’d describe Moore as an Irish Billy Bragg, but more ardent (and less consistently political); for American friends, Bob Dylan might be the comparison for that magic nexus of great lyrics—great vibe, though no one sounds like Moore and no one sweats like him. Just watch that porous energy his music transfers to the listener! It’s the opposite of socially distanced music. The lyrics of this epochal track are connected to my novel, in that it’s a working-class song of protest against market forces and capitalist interests that enrich and protect the owners of the means of production at the expense of workers and the poor. Its renewed timeliness is a grim fact of neoliberal reality.
I’m very interested in self-admonishment and shame (“I’m an ordinary man, nothing special, nothing grand”) and, in contrast, self-aggrandizement, self-congratulation, and pride—how a person narrating their own story makes a certain pact with themselves, and how that self-portrait differs from the portrait a person fears is the truer portrait, the thread-veined, wide-pored likeness. This song doesn’t go there—that’s not what this song is interested in … but The Wild Laughter does, and this track was part of a collection of urgent voices heckling in the novel’s background.
5. Luke Kelly, “On Raglan Road”
The lyrics of this song are by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (important to me and to The Wild Laughter.) The lyrics are set it to the music of “The Dawning of the Day,” mentioned earlier. It’s a song about the futile but endless pursuit of unrequited love. “I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away.” There is the slightly uncomfortable blame seated on the beloved here: “I saw her first and knew / That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue./ I saw the danger…. / And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.” Do watch this specific live recording. The song’s story is based on a woman Kavanagh was in love with, but who didn’t reciprocate his feelings. As an excuse to meet with her without the prospect of courting, he often asked her to critique his work. Kavanagh described himself as a “peasant poet” but the woman was not wildly impressed and teased: "Can you not, then, write about anything other than stony grey soil and bogs, Paddy?” The story goes that Kavanagh vowed to immortalize her in poetry, and so he did, in this and other poems. The awkward macho-masculinity of the host and audience members—rendered limp by the unequivocating power of Luke Kelly’s voice and the sincerity of the lyrics makes this recording very much worth watching. (In The Wild Laughter, Doharty Black vows to tell his story at once, and not “wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain, as Kavanagh would have it,” but Hart has more Kavanagh about him than he can admit.)
6. Roberta Flack, “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
Flack won a Record of the Year Grammy Award in 1973 for this goddamn gorgeous, unforced rendition of a timeless, heart-soaring song (written by Ewan MacColl). The live version linked here is quite a lot faster than the official track, which changes the song considerably (the official track has a longing, melancholic quality, rather than this celebratory version), but I enjoy seeing the joy beaming through Flack’s performance here. The fact that she’s playing the piano with closed eyes much of the time is wonderful, and a member of the audience laughs spontaneously at the end. I love where that laugh comes from, which is to say the childish earnestness that’s accommodated here, so uncommon—even in a love song; even with congregants in the round.
7. Barry Douglas playing Ravel’s “Scarbo”
Manic, hand-overlapping, erratic-tempo’d, key-signatureless stuff! It also has the feeling of a chase: a track Hart hears whenever he steps outside… or opens a window.
8. James Blake, “Retrograde”
“You’re on your own, in a world you’ve grown.” A piney, self-flagellating, self-prodigalizing, soul-crooning (great) song about being alone, love-lost, and abandoned by everyone? Yes, Hart will be having that slow beat for inside his tractor, thank you very much.
9. Jóhann Jóhannsson, “A Pile of Dust”
Though the Icelandic artist I listen to frequently is Ásgeir Trausti (and I can’t resist sneaking in a link to his version of the Pixie classic “Where Is My Mind” for the exact same reason as the Blake track), I’ll share a piece by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson from the album “Orphée”, played by the Air Lyndhust String Orchestra. In general, when I’m writing I’m listening to either brown noise or instrumental music, as I’ve written about elsewhere. In terms of my preferences, I love genre-blending music, especially contemporary modifications of folk/trad and neo-classical with electronica/synthetic elements. This is a simpler neoclassical piece, that swells a little more than Jóhannsson’s often minimalist music does; it’s quite an emotional score, I think, though (at least to my ear) it isn’t surprising or searching; it doesn’t vault. It’s the sort of music I listen to frequently when reading and writing—especially when reading. I find older classical music too expressly emotive to be able to read/write alongside it. Those strict dynamics interrupt the atmosphere to too great a degree. While this is more emotive than many of Jóhannsson’s scores, I think it’s a lovely example of his style and tone.
10. Radie Peat (Okay, fine it’s Lankum again, but Radie is the artist I listen for. Here’s why.) “Hunting the Wren”
I think it’s the contrast of the languor of her voice and delivery and its downright strength and singularity that draws me to Radie Peat. This song matches that captivating tone with almost atonal instrumentation, a trudging tempo and heavy poetry. The lyrics call on the mythological associations of the wren, “hunting the wren day,” and it ties this metaphor in with the social group of outcast (abused, exploited) women referred to as the Curragh Wrens who lived on the harsh plains of Kildare (source). Some of the lyrics are devastating, as you’ll hear. Wren Day consists of a mock-hunt, of an effigy of a wren, followed by a procession wherein the effigy is hoisted upon a pole. So in the lines: “With cold want and whisky / She soon is run down / Her body paraded / On a staff through the town,” we hear the mourning of victim blaming, of violence towards women, and toxic masculinity. Paying homage to tragedy without romanticizing it is very hard to do, and I think this piece achieves that, with the quality and beauty of a dirge: perhaps a hymn’s opposite. Praise be.
Though this begs for a finale song, I’ll resist that culminative temptation. It’s a timeworn writerly trick to begin at the end, which is to say: when it sounds like an ending, often the story has just begun.
Caoilinn Hughes is the author of Orchid & the Wasp (Oneworld 2018), which won the Collyer Bristow Prize, was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards, the Butler Literary Award and longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Shine/Strong Award and was shortlisted for four other prizes. Her work has appeared in Granta, POETRY, Tin House, Best British Poetry, BBC Radio 3 and elsewhere. She has a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and she was recently Visiting Writer at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. For her short fiction, she won The Moth International Short Story Prize 2018 and an O.Henry Prize in 2019.
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