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June 15, 2022
Ada Calhoun's Playlist for Her Memoir "Also a Poet"
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.
Ada Calhoun's memoir Also a Poet is cleverly told, funny, and intensely moving.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"In this fluidly morphing, magnetically candid chronicle… Calhoun offers an arresting and provocative carousel of family dynamics, creative paradoxes, literary history, unnerving dilemmas, thorny questions of inheritance and legacy, wry humor, and love"
In her own words, here is Ada Calhoun's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Also a Poet:
In the fall of 2018, I was in the basement of my parents’ apartment building in Manhattan and found a box of cassette tapes from the 1970s. I found out they were research my father, the New Yorker art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, had done as the official biographer for the poet Frank O’Hara, his hero. He never finished it.
In addition to writing my own books, I’ve ghostwritten twenty books in the past decade. I’m often brought on as a fixer to make difficult projects happen. More than once, I’ve been called Mr. Wolf—the murder cleanup specialist from Pulp Fiction. So I knew I could knock this one out. I thought it would be fun.
It was not fun.
I thought I’d have a much easier time than my father did with the estate because I’m nicer. That was not the case. I thought it would bring me and my father closer. That also did not exactly happen.
While I was doing the book he was diagnosed with stage four cancer and my parents’ building was destroyed in a freak electrical fire. The book wound up being an odd hybrid of Frank O’Hara biography and father-daughter memoir.
In a way this is a culmination of all my previous books: my East Village history, St. Marks Is Dead; my close-relationships-are-hard book, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and my bestseller about the comically poor timing of Gen X women, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis.
I always listen to music while I write and consider making a mixtape for each book as important as doing the bibliography and endnotes. I’ve put playlists in the back of all my books. The songs for this one are a mix about me, my father, and Frank O’Hara, or just about the ultimate unknowability of even the people we love.
“Canary” — Liz Phair
“I put all your books in an order...” The perfect song about a woman being good and helpful and pleasing as she becomes consumed by rage. Pairs well with Bikini Kill’s “Feels Blind.”
“Daddy Needs a Drink” — Drive-By Truckers
Learning about the enthusiastic drunkenness of the New York School painting and poetry world my father revered helped me understand why he found drinking so glamorous for so long.
“La Vie de Bohème” — Frenchy and the Punk
Looking up this title phrase, used so often to describe O’Hara’s and my father’s (Francophile) cohort, I found this cheerful song about “l’existence New-Yorkaise.”
“Fade Like a Shadow” — KT Tunstall
I’ve loved this song for a long time, and its meaning has changed for me by the year. While I was working on this book it became about my father fading away and our inability to really hear each other, even faced with what we thought was the end: “It’s easy saying nothing when there’s nothing to say.”
“That’s My Job” — Conway Twitty
This song’s got the knife-twist parent-nostalgia of Taylor Swift’s glowy “The Best Day” or Harry Chapin’s sadistic “Cat’s in the Cradle,” but with an added nuance: the relationship goes through all these phases where it’s the dad’s job to take care of his son—and then at the end Conway Twitty has his own job: to write about his father.
“Frank O’Hara” — Sea Wolf
There are a few great indie songs about Frank O’Hara. I just chose two for the playlist. I like this one because of the line about “voices haunting us.” Listening to these tapes, I felt haunted—by all these artists and writers who weren’t around anymore and by the younger version of my father. On the tapes I made an appearance, too, as a chatty toddler. My childhood cat, long dead, meowed into the recorder.
“I Love You, Yes I Do” — Tab Hunter
This is just here because Frank O’Hara had a mad crush on “blonde-with-an-e” movie star Tab Hunter and one time got to show him around the MoMA.
“V.G.I.” — Julie Ruin
This Julie Ruin song isn’t on Spotify, but here it is on YouTube. I love this anthem by my friend Kathleen Hanna about a girl genius: “I’m a masterpiece / I wear a Scrunchie.”
“Ghost!” — Kid Cudi
My father put his art above his family. Now that I’m a mother and a writer, it’s hard for me to believe that I could be a “real” writer and also run the bake sales at my son’s middle school. I also have a day job as a ghostwriter. Even though this song is about disappearing, the vibe of is hopeful: “Things do come around and make sense eventually.”
“We Just Disagree” — Dave Mason
One of the all-time great songs about people not really seeing each other. It’s sort of sad and sort of weirdly soothing: “There ain’t no good guy / There ain’t no bad guy / There’s only you and me / And we just disagree.”
“Your Generation” — Generation X
I love a generational battle cry, and I thought it made sense to include one in a book about three generations of New York City writers trying to find their own ways to write and live.
“Dirty Fingers” — Lindsay Ellyn
Nashville singer Lindsay Ellyn mentioned my book St. Marks Is Dead in American Songwriter magazine. When I saw her interview, I sent her a SMID T-shirt (I had them made for the all-star book party cover band and then sold extras to fund my book tour*). I started listening to her music and really liked it, especially this killer song about human weakness and how “you get what you give and you reap what you sow.”
“Real Friends” — Kanye West
“I hate family reunions.” This reminds me of the great Bridget Everett joke: “I love my family, and I miss them, but I don’t want to see them, you know?”
“Don’t Call” — Desire
The perfect song for when you’re so angry you are just done, so done you “don’t care about winning.” I aspire to this cool resignation.
“By This River” — Brian Eno
Jesus, this song is sad. “You and I underneath the sky that’s ever falling down...” That’s how things felt to me in 2019-20 with one tragedy hitting after another.
“He Didn’t Say” — Mecca Normal
Clearly I can’t get enough of furious songs with whatever’s-whatever lyrics: “I never knew what he thought. He didn’t say.”
“Frank O’Hara Hit” — Chelsea Light Moving
This second indie song about O’Hara refers to his tragic death on Fire Island at the age of forty. He was hit by a dune buggy on the beach while waiting for a taxi with friends late at night.
“That’s Just the Way That I Feel” — Purple Mountains
This song mentions Fargo, North Dakota, where my father’s from, but I feel like I could have added any song by the late David Berman. He sometimes gets referred to as a super smart, super funny heir to the New York School and I totally see it, especially in lines like: “When I try to drown my thoughts in gin / I find my worst ideas know how to swim.”
“More Adventurous” — Rilo Kiley
This song uses a line from the O’Hara poem “Meditations in an Emergency” about how each heartbreak made him more adventurous. She sings, “Let me be loved,” a good prayer for children and for writers.
*I love book tours. Find out about the Summer 2022 tour for Also a Poet here.
Ada Calhoun is the New York Times bestselling author of St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, and Why We Can't Sleep. She has written for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Washington Post.
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