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September 28, 2022
Mallory Smart's Playlist for Her Novel "The Only Living Girl in Chicago"
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.
Mallory Smart's The Only Living Girl in Chicago is a propulsive and incisive coming-of-age novel.
In her own words, here is Mallory Smart's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Only Living Girl in Chicago:
The Only Living Girl in Chicago is about feeling disconnected and useless. The main character, Zoe, is at what seems like the precipice of the end of her life even though she’s only 30. Each day seems like a faded and lesser copy of the previous one. She begins to heavily rethink her choices and why she actually ended up in a city where she feels more isolated than she had ever felt before. She ponders this while messaging her friends on Facebook, she takes notes on her iPhone while riding the train to work, and eventually, she tries to get back to her roots by driving back to the only place she felt at home: Chicago. Once she gets back home, Zoe looks for meaning any and everywhere. She hangs out with new friends, goes back to old ones, and even finds herself dealing with family for the first time in years. Things like the absence of faith in self, longing for something that isn’t there, coffee, communism, weird movies, and bad situations are what make up her life now.
In this novel, she needs to decide whether she’s willing to deal with this or blame her problems on her location again.
The music below doesn’t reflect one sound and doesn’t stick to one genre since the character is intensely inconsistent and has no idea who she is. They also aren’t all the songs that are discussed in the novel because if that were the fact, the soundtrack would be closer to 40 songs long. Instead, this is a playlist that follows the tone of the novel as if it were an actual movie. Each song brings a vibe of derealization and eagerness that one needs to navigate a life like the life lived within this book.
1. Open Road by Roo Panes
This is one of my favorite songs that is actually mentioned in TOLGIC. I wrote the second to last chapter in the novel first. When deciding what kind of music the main character would be listening to while wandering around cities it jumped out at me. I already knew would be a very heavy roadtrip section that comes way before this chapter and that Zoe was a nostalgic person. The folk singer, Roo Panes is almost the same age as her and has a steady voice that a person could listen to on repeat without ever getting sick of it. His music is adventurous and nostalgic at the same time. His first name also isn’t actually Roo. It was a nickname given to him after falling into a river as a kid. This was a fact that Zoe would’ve found intensely amusing and listening to him singing about the sweet release that the road could give is something she’d never want to stop hearing. It was a feeling buried deep within her but she just didn’t have the words proper words to express that need for relief that he had. When she is listening to “Open Road” she is attempting to regain that feeling.
2. The Only Living Boy in New York by Simon & Garfunkel
Simon & Garfunkel aren’t mentioned in the novel at all, but their sound is all over it. The Only Living Girl in Chicago was originally going to be called Hype. Right when I was finishing up the novel Covid hit. You’d think that would have absolutely nothing to do with the story but it changed everything. I got sick with Covid before the lockdowns began so by the time every city had shut down, I had already beaten it and was able to move around the city with almost no fear. I could’ve stayed inside like everyone else did and for the most part, I did, but I spent a lot of days just wandering the city that then looked post-apocalyptic. Totally deserted. You could usually hear the noise of the city for miles but at that moment time it was silent and I found myself feeling alone in a ghost city. Like everyone else, I did find myself getting weirdly into vinyl and doing deep listens to pass the time during the shutdowns. I found this classic song that I used to love but hadn’t heard for a long while and realized it was exactly what I was feeling. So when I finally decided to finish the novel, I found myself rewriting long chapters and editing parts with this song constantly ringing in my ears. It changed the mood of the story and obviously the title.
3. You Are Loved by Defiance, Ohio
Defiance, Ohio is a band that I listened to a lot as a teenager because they did shows in the area I grew up. They are a folk/punk band from Ohio and are known for having very anti-capitalistic themes in their songs. Many authors don’t like to acknowledge that they borrowed aspects of themselves when it comes to writing their main character, but this is one of the few times I will definitely own it. An anti-capitalistic message is felt throughout this entire novel and it’s because Zoe is completely dragged down by all the white-collar jobs she felt she was forced into getting. When she’s trying to regain her footing in Chicago, Zoe reconnects with childhood friends and even lives with her parents for a short time. She finds the things that she loved in her formative and comes across them again. This song isn’t anti-capitalistic though. It’s about being unashamed and loved for whoever you are. A strong point they make in it is how short life is. This song is enough to give her the motivation to keep moving.
4. Such Great Heights by Iron & Wine
The fun part of this song is that it's mentioned in a chapter that is completely based on a true story. I’d rather not say the entire story and urge you to read the book instead. The TLDR; is that my friend and I constantly swapped playlists and one day we for some reason decided to make playlists for each other that made us feel depressed as fuck. I love The Postal Service but Iron & Wine knocks it out of the park with this cover. It suddenly sounds melancholic and pulls out silent desperation that was living buried deep within yourself.
5. Dance Yrself Clean by LCD Soundsystem
This song could almost work as a trailer for the novel. LCD Soundsystem. It’s a 9-minute song that is sung in a mumbling monotone way for 3 minutes until it picks up with a bombastic sound and attitude. Also, like many of the other songs, it randomly discusses weird friendships and Marxism. Both of which are probably the strongest themes in Zoe Clark’s life.
6. death bed (coffee for your head) by Powfu, beabadoobee
This song got really popular on Tiktok after Kobe died for some reason. I’ll never pretend to understand how those trends begin. But the sound and lyrics are similar to the thoughts that Zoe has in the back of her mind the entire time. Powfu and Beabadoobee are both lo-fi, bedroom pop artists. The sound is scratchy like it’s vinyl but is DIY music that most artists are legitimately making in their bedrooms. That aspect and the ethereal backdrop of the song make it almost feel physical. This is the kind of sound that would be probably be playing in the countless chapters where Zoe is up at night, drinking coffee, and pondering death. Especially the times when she’s thinking of her friend who recently died.
7. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Coopex, Nito-Onna, CPX
No one plays this Nirvana better than Nirvana, but this cover is more Zoe’s scene. She loves Nirvana and even has had a very old Kurt Cobain t-shirt that she won’t give up. But her life isn’t loud. It’s faded and sounds like it's going down the drain. There’s something eerie in the way that this version is sung/mixed. It can be played at a club where people are doing designer drugs or it could be played alone on a roof while crying by yourself, and it still works.
8. Millennials in Love by Deadfellow
The entire idea of this novel is that Millennials weren’t able to come of age at the same age as other generations were able to. Zoe is the epitome of what people say Millennials are. She lived with her parents for a weird amount of time, totally acted like a hipster, did some things before they were cool, has no idea what she was doing in life, and can from the outside look entitled. But in the end, she is someone who is just a product of her environment. She did everything she was supposed to but none of it worked out. She never tried to blame it on other people. Instead, she worked as hard as she could until she burned out. This song is mellow but satirical. It’s also by a very underrated musician that I highly recommend. In the novel, our Millennial finds love and they joke about how they’re both a cliche in the same way Deadfellow does.
9. Days Gone By by God’Aryan
Okay, this is a musician very few people know because he is legit just beginning and is a Gen Z local friend of a friend. I usually nod along when my friend of his talks about their music but always would go home to hear if God’Aryan uploaded anything new to Spotify. He was originally part of a sort of Brockhampton-style group until a few years ago when they all went their separate ways. Now he does solo work and this one really resonated with me. It’s Lo-fi hip hop. The song is about watching the days go by, trying to survive, but knowing you can make it on your own even if you don’t know how yet. It’s the kind of message that I can only hope that my book gives.
10. Stay Useless by Cloud Nothings
I hate to admit that I didn't discover this song myself. Bud Smith sent it to me on a Spotify playlist when I was wrapping up the book and the lyrics hit me hard. At its core, it's about feeling useless but it's shockingly motivational. I also found it funny that they are another band from Ohio that I dug. I’m not from Ohio and had no idea there was so much good music being made there. They’re a post-punk revival/ noise rock band that's been around since 2009. As a group, they didn’t almost survive the pandemic because they are heavy into touring but somehow made it out by using different ways to get their music out there. Considering that fact and the actual lyrics, this song mirrored the novel in so many ways. They shout “I need time…” in every line of the chorus of the song and those words were in my head the entire time I was writing. It's also the soul of the novel in general:
I need time to stop moving
I need time to stay useless
I need time to stop moving
I need time to stay useless
I need time to stop moving
I need time to stay useless
I need time
Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer, editor-in-chief of Maudlin House, and doer of many other things.
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