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April 14, 2021
Jim Lewis's Playlist for His Novel "Ghosts of New York"
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.
Jim Lewis's novel Ghosts of New York is a remarkable portrayal of the city and its inhabitants.
The New York Times Book Review wrote of the book:
"A wondrous novel, with prose that sparkles like certain sidewalks after rain. . . . That’s it, I thought. That’s exactly what it’s like to live in New York."
In his words, here is Jim Lewis's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Ghosts of New York:
I used to be able to listen to music while I wrote, but in time the sound of other people’s voices became too intrusive. I switched to instrumental music for a while – mostly string quartets and compositions for piano – but eventually Bach and Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven were too much for me, too: at some point, when I’m well into a novel, other people’s genius becomes less an inspiration than a distraction.
Nevertheless, this new novel is my first about my hometown, New York, which means it’s about music, and also about New York music, about personal history (though not mine) and regular history, history as music, music as history, and the great love affair that exists between young people and cities, for which there must always be songs. So there was a playlist in my head as I wrote it, one far too long to reproduce here, a playlist, in fact, without end: but here’s a start.
Mahsa Vahdat & Marjan Vahdat, "Lalalala Gohle Laleh"
There’s a song, a fictional song, in Ghosts of New York called ‘Honey and Ashes’ which begins its life as a West African love song, released on a fly-by-night Parisian Afro-pop label, then makes its way to New York, where it eventually gets rerecorded by a young black superstar. The song doesn’t quite drive the story, but it holds it together: every major character in the book comes across it in some way or another, sometimes barely noticed, sometimes as obsession, sometimes as explanation. I had no particular song in mind, but I could hear it, vaguely, in my head, something strange and beautiful. And then one day I came across this, a famous lullaby in Farsi that mothers sang, not just to their babies, but to their dying husbands as they were shipped home from the Iran-Iraq war. (The album I found it on is called ‘Lullabies from the Axis of Evil’). “Please sleep”, she sings, over and over again, and depending on when you listen, it sounds content or grievous, exhausted or attentive. It’s not West African, of course, but it sounds like the song I imagined, and it just breaks my heart.
Dawn Penn, "No, No, No"
This most beautiful of soul/reggae songs also sounds like the song in my head, the one I called “Honey and Ashes”. And like mine, it has an exceedingly odd history. It started with a 1955 Bo Diddley song called “She’s Fine She’s Mine”, which was rewritten in 1955 by Willie Cobb and released as a blues shuffle called “You Don’t Love Me”. Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, John Mayall and the Allman Brothers also recorded it, each rewriting it along the way, and then it made its way to Jamaica, where, at the age of 15, Dawn Penn cut the best version by far, a slow, spare, smoky, rocksteady take, which was released in 1967 on the Studio One label (she cut it again, in a cheesy dancehall style, in 1994: the older one is far superior). I spent a long time trying to capture this feeling in prose.
Sylvain Sylvain, "14th Street Beat"
Syl Sylvain was a Cairene Jew who emigrated to the US when he was ten and, by the time he was twenty, had helped form the New York Dolls. This song, from his first solo album, released in 1979, always struck me as one of the great songs of the city. There are a lot of places in Manhattan that have inspired songs: Broadway, Central Park, the Bowery. But it takes a real city kid to see 14th St. for the crucial stretch it was: the border between downtown and the rest of the city, and an river-to-river corridor lined with off-brand sporting goods stores, pimp outfitters, barbershops, diners, smoke shops, and a bunch of places that seemed to sell whatever had fallen off the truck that week, balloons or Christmas decorations or boxes of cheap incense. Of course, all that’s gone now. And so is Syl: he died earlier this year, just as I was writing this.
Fania All-Stars, "Son, Cuero Y Boogaloo"
Part of the book takes place in the mid-'80s, up in the neighborhood where Columbia bleeds into Spanish Harlem, when every bodega you passed was blasting the Fania All-Stars (Fania was the label that invented, produced, and released modern American salsa). Boogaloo was one of my favorite sub-genres, with Latin rhythms superimposed on a straight 4/4 R&B beat. These days, a tiny group of right-wing extremists have co-opted the word to stand for their cheap and wretched fantasies of a white America. Fuck them. The name and the music is Nuyorican and New York Cuban. This is one of the best songs to bear it.
Michael Fracasso, "Saint Monday"
One reason why it took me so long to finish this book was that I spent a year or so producing and playing (electric guitar and rudimentary piano) with Michael Fracasso, a dear and brilliant Austin friend of mine who, to my great delight, invited me to help him make his 7th and 8th records, and then join his live band, despite the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. This is the title track of the first one, written by Michael off a phrase that popped into my head as I was driving home from a particularly exhausting session. Recorded more or less live with the full band a few weeks later, including one of my oldest friends, George Reiff, on bass – one of the people to whom the book is dedicated in memorium.
Marianne Faithfull, "Times Square"
I have no idea how this song ended up on my phone, but every time it comes up on shuffle I stop what I’m doing and listen.
I sat with Mark Eitzel in a bar on Houston St. one night in the '90s, and he was one of the biggest assholes I'd ever met. But I didn’t care then, and don’t care now, either. This song, about a doomed girl, can make it feel like 1 in the morning on the brightest of spring afternoons, and it’s so intimate it makes me hold my breath. See also Jonathon’s Richmond and the Modern Lovers’ ‘She Cracked’ and ‘Hospital’.
Elaine Stritch, "The Ladies Who Lunch"
I confess I never had much interest in Broadway musicals, and no matter how hard I tried, never understood what everyone saw in Stephen Sondheim -- until I came across this (the video of her recording it, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for a documentary called Company: Original Cast Recording, is on Youtube). I still don’t care about musical theater or understand Stephen Sondheim, but I’m in love with Elaine Stritch, and she’s been dead for 6 years.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message"
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to imagine how important this song was. Not only did it elevate Rap out of its limiting emphasis on braggadocio and party music, it demonstrated that Rock was ending, and Hip-hop was taking over. Without this song, I suspect Rap would have been novelty music forever. With it, the genre conquered the world.
Steven Reich, "Come Out"
Back in 1965, Reich was asked, I think by the NAACP, to make a recording in support of the so-called Harlem Six, who had been arrested for murder and beaten by the police. He went through 70 hours of interview tapes before settling on a 4 second clip of one of the accused, Daniel Hamm, describing his attempt to get the police to allow him to go the hospital. Reich took the clip and played it simultaneously on two synced reel-to-reels. In time, slight variations in the speed of the machines made the spoken words slowly break their unison and fall out of phase. The effect is, in turn, confusing, slightly dreamy, almost catchy, unsettling, distressing, and harrowing; and by the time the piece is over, 18 minutes later, all you hear is relentless madness.
As a high school student in the '70s I was going to punk clubs. As a college student in the early '80s I was going to dance clubs – especially the Roxy, on 18th St. and 11th Avenue, where gay and straight, white and Puerto Rican and black kids danced all night in a cavernous space, to DJs who seemed to know every song ever recorded. For a while, there, this one was played almost every night, and while no one remembers it now, I still listen to it when I want to be reminded of what it was like to be 19 and wanting more, of everything.
The Sex Pistols, "No Feelings" b/w "Pretty Vacant"
I was 14 when this single came out: it was the first record I ever bought with my own money, and listening to it when I got home was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. Every great artist is an emancipator: to me this was the sound of freedom, and it changed my life.
Kate Bush, "Running Up That Hill"
I knew a girl who loved this song, and a guy who loved the girl, but didn’t love her well enough – not as well as he could have, and not as well as she deserved. She died years ago, but every time I hear this I think of her.
Jim Lewis lives in Austin and is the author of three novels, which have been translated into many languages: Sister, Why the Tree Loves the Ax, and The King Is Dead. He has also written criticism, reportage, and essays for the New York Times, Slate, Rolling Stone, Granta, and others, and he collaborated with Larry Clark on the story for the movie Kids.
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