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August 10, 2020
Tommy Butler's Playlist for His Novel "Before You Go"
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.
Tommy Butler's novel Before You Go is both inventive and profound.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Butler brilliantly imagines the creation of human life, and the toll its imperfection takes . . . . Beautiful, heart-wrenching prose . . . Butler’s treatise on the value of life with all its moments of darkness and light leaves the reader with aching gratitude for their existence."
In his own words, here is Tommy Butler's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Before You Go:
I tend to write in silence, but sometimes I don the headphones and let the music go to work—either to inspire the emotion I’m seeking in the story, or to distract the part of my brain that’s getting in the way of it. A few of the following songs played that role during the writing of Before You Go. All of them would be included on my imagined soundtrack for the novel—or, for that matter, Elliot’s life.
“Not With Haste” by Mumford & Sons
“Most great endeavors begin in stillness,” says Elliot. But some—like this song—begin with twelve gorgeous seconds of guitar. And then the words come, and strains of delicate beauty alternate with a rousing combination of jig and anthem. Like a hoped-for life. Like youthful hopefulness itself.
“North Dakota” by Lyle Lovett
A song of dreaming and longing. The melody alone broke my heart the first time I listened to it—and then I heard the lyrics. This tune would seem at home in Elliot’s childhood, though he grows up in New England rather than North Dakota or Texas. “And I dreamed I was a cowboy, and I rode across the border . . .” (I highly recommend the version of this song that Mr. Lovett sings with Rickie Lee Jones on his Live In Texas album.)
“When I Fall” by Barenaked Ladies
Though its narrator is an adult—a window washer on a scaffold on the side of a skyscraper—this song’s spirit, not to mention its refrain, is young Elliot through and through. Perhaps a good bridge from Elliot’s youth to his early adulthood.
“Die Young” by Sylvan Esso
Picking up the energy a bit, a little offbeat, a little edgy. Representative, I think, of Elliot beginning his adult years, when Sasha and Bannor enter his story. I can easily imagine this as “Sasha’s Song.”
“Purple Heart” by MUTO and Drifting Lights
And now a bit more offbeat and edgy, with a slight and somehow fitting discordance—I’m describing the song (or trying to), but I might as well be describing Elliot’s early years in New York City. Or, of course, New York City itself.
“Pig” by Dave Matthews Band
I could easily add a dozen DMB songs to this playlist. One of my favorite albums to listen to while writing is “Live At Radio City” by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds. But I’ll limit myself to this one tune, the lyrics of which are spot on. “Is it not enough, this blessed sip of life?”
“River” by Leon Bridges
A friend of mine once sent me a postcard with nothing written on the back but the following quote from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse: “And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s presence?” Take me to your river, indeed.
“Dreams” by Josh Ritter
I love it when a song tells a story, and this one is exquisite, if rueful. I can almost see its narrator sitting with Elliot, Sasha, and Bannor in the circle of chairs when they first meet. Maybe he even sings his tale to them, as he does here. “I like to think the room was meant for music.”
“There Will Be Time” by Mumford & Sons and Baaba Maal
I dare to imagine this tune playing over the closing credits of a screen version of the novel. The song feels like painful exultation to me, in a way that is not at all contradictory.
“Before You Go” by Lewis Capaldi
Bonus track! Perhaps surprisingly, this song was not related in any way to the novel or the writing of it, and actually dropped long after the book was finished. But I like the song, and it’s almost uncanny how apt the tone and lyrics are when set alongside the novel, so that a friend instantly thought of it as a sort of theme song, which I hope Mr. Capaldi takes as a compliment (since he might regard the novel—were he to regard it at all—as a “theme book” to his song).
Tommy Butler was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, and has since called many places home, including New Hampshire, San Diego, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, he was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and is an alumnus of the Screen-writers Colony. His feature screenplay, Etopia, was the winner of the Showtime Tony Cox Screenplay Competition at the Nantucket Film Festival.
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