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December 5, 2022
Janice Obuchowski's Playlist for Her Story Collection "The Woods"
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.
Janice Obuchowski's collection The Woods is a remarkable debut, stories that vividly coalesce to form the portrait of a small town.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Obuchowski’s lucid debut collection digs into the isolation and complexities of her characters’ inner worlds... evocative interior descriptions and subtle revelations about the characters’ relationships to place."
In her own words, here is Janice Obuchowski's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection The Woods:
A few years ago, I moved to a small Vermont college town—as small a place as I’d ever lived, bordered, to the east, by the Green Mountains and national forest. The stories in The Woods came about because the landscape and the people who live here interest me so deeply. It’s pretty and quaint but can quickly turn into something more untrammeled and wild. This is also a town of juxtaposition, where farmers and professors are neighbors.
When I write, I listen to white noise channels—a fire crackling, a staticky hiss, rushing water. Nothing with pitch, lyrics, because the music would capture too much of my attention. But most days, as I’m puttering in the kitchen, cooking or washing dishes, I’m listening to songs (and singing along). Often I hear the music first—or that’s what I’m thinking about the most—then the lyrics. But I love considering how songwriters have constructed their songs—what ideas they’re illustrating sonically and how. The tracks here are a mix of what I was listening to as I wrote my collection, as well as those I believe match the book’s mood.
“I Know the End” from Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers
This song has my heart. It has three acts, a narrative arc, as Bridgers sings about driving around in Texas, ruminating on a breakup and thinking about the end of the world—a lovely, melancholic conflation. The first act is typical of her music: pretty, delicate, sad. There’s just guitar and organ behind her voice and the refrain of “You had to go. I know, I know, I know.” She signals the shift into the second act with an assertion of agency. “I gotta go. I know, I know, I know.” A violin plays alone, lifting us into something more energetic. Drums kick in, the tempo picks up, the lyrics become more preoccupied with chasing things down instead of retreat—a kind of enlivening anger. The orchestration becomes more bright and layered. In a very Sufjan Stevens move, she adds in trumpet that acts as a response to Bridgers’s call. We’re shifting into the final act when Bridgers sings, “No, I’m not afraid to disappear. The billboard said the end is near.” I love the billboard’s symbolic resonance, since a breakup can feel like an impending apocalypse. More cymbals come in and background vocalists chant, “The end is near.” Then Bridgers screams—a jagged yell—and we’re in the song’s closing section. The end has arrived: the song, now in a minor key, becomes cacophonous. I love the emotional shifts and the partnering of an internal state—the turbulence of love ending—with the external: driving around, considering the landscape. The trajectory feels akin to what Carey in “Millstone Hill,” goes through: she’s at first listless, then moving into a more energetic phase only to devolve into emotional disarray.
“Chicago” from Come on Feel the Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens
When I first learned I’d get to write this playlist, I had the thought that the entire thing should be a love note to Carrie & Lowell, Stevens’s 2015 album, which I listen to endlessly. (I love pretty and sad: maybe this is already evident.) But “Chicago,” from his earlier album Come on Feel the Illinoise, both uplifts and comforts me. Stevens pits his thoughts against the world’s broader actions, and it’s gorgeous, resonant. The song is at turns sparse and maximalist. In the verses, it’s just Stevens singing over vibraphone, strings, and keyboard. But the chorus has a heady, ebullient feel, with its repetitive, driving guitar line, drums, background vocals, tambourine, and trumpet. A line from chorus—“All things go, all things go”—depicts the world in its busy movement and drive forward. Then, near the song’s end, Stevens creates contrapuntal moment, entwining these two ideas. In harmony, the backup vocalists are singing, “All things go, all things go” as Stevens sings, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I’ve made a lot of mistakes.” I adore this one voice, an inward refrain of castigation, against this busy countering idea that the world moves forward, carrying us with it. It’s splendid sonic rhetoric. This song aligns, to me, most closely with “The Cat,” in which a woman observes a lot around her while also remaining in a swirl thought.
“Hallelujah” from Live Wide Open by Martin Sexton
“Does Satan wear a suit and tie, or does he work at the Dairy Queen?” “Hallelujah” shakes up our typical notions of good and bad. The lyrics are filled with religious imagery in profane contexts, ones we associate with sin. Jesus hanging out prostitutes, an angel who has gone to Vegas, “holding aces in her hand.” When Sexton performs this live, he often riffs over its chords, singing other famous songs to show how they all use the same progression. (He’ll start singing, for instance, “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey and “With or Without You” by U2.) My theory is he’s made the music simple—easily sung along to—because he wants the lyrics’ complications to be at the forefront. When I write, I often think how characters are blends of their better and worse selves—that simple morality isn’t interesting narratively, nor does it accurately depict most people, who have conflicting impulses and ideas. My character Sylvia in “Sylvia Who Dreams of Dactyls” is smart, sophisticated. And yet her ruminations tend toward her selfish choices. She also doesn’t always understand her own behavior even when she seeks to. Also, very important: Martin Sexton has the most beautiful falsetto in the business. In some other universe, he’s a professional countertenor.
“Out of the Woods” by Nickel Creek from Nickel Creek
Too on the nose? Maybe, but I’m a sucker for Allison Krause-type bluegrass, and the harmonies here are clean and dreamy. As well, the lyrics contain so much longing, articulating a wish for someone to be “out of the woods, and into a picture with me.” The chorus has this circular quality to it, describing how this wish is going to “run, round, in my head,” which beautifully mirrors thought. The song feels like a fairytale—a beckoning, a call to the beloved to leave the woods and join the lover. And it gets at how desire can be a low-thrumming constant in our days. Several of my characters strongly want their lives to be different, and I imagine them responding to this song, hearing in it their own temperaments.
“John My Beloved” by Sufjan Stevens from Carrie & Lowell
More Sufjan, more longing. “John My Beloved” is from Carrie & Lowell, and it’s darker and more spare than “Chicago.” There’s a hiss—almost like wind—layered in over vibraphone. Stevens establishes melody in one line, but in another line he plays one note over and over—a steady heartbeat. Here he’s chasing minimalism in service of intimacy. The song sounds hushed, almost reverent as it tells a story of two people meeting, coming together. “Are we to speak?” the song begins. Later, we hear, “I’m holding my breath, my tongue on your chest. What can be said of my heart?” The song is filled with melancholy and beauty, both in its simple, almost hypnotic orchestration, and its lyrics, which paint someone complicated, conflicted. “I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head.” As well: “I am a man with heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands.” (Note “lonely” in both lines: in a song about emotional intimacy, he continues to discuss loneliness, which I think is perfect.) Stevens has his MFA in creative writing from the New School, and when I listen to him, I often think how he’s interested in storytelling. This song is most akin to “The Chair,” which looks at a long and successful relationship, one spanning decades, but which also has to do with the grace of sometimes having to sublimate what you want for the sake of the other. Quiet love and quiet heartache.
“Black Eyed Dog” from Time of No Reply by Nick Drake
This is a hollow, haunted song. It begins with Drake, on his guitar, playing an open fifth, which becomes the song’s constant. With his thin tenor, he sings, “Black-eyed dog, he called at my door. The black-eyed dog, he called for more. A black-eyed dog, he knew my name.” Later, the lyrics become a lament: “I’m growing old, and I wanna go home.” There’s so much tension: the black-eyed dog at the door, the wish to go home. I hear in them Drake at once being repulsed by and longing for death. Drake also bends time, often just ahead or behind the beat, which creates an off-kilter effect, never letting listeners feel settled. In my story “Self-Preservation,” a woman wanting to mute her past grief finds another character trying to draw those emotions to the fore. When I wrote that story, I was thinking about this song, down to the idea of someone—or something—“calling at the door.”
“My Tears Ricochet” from Folklore by Taylor Swift
This list wouldn’t be complete without at least one mention of T. Swift, since I listened to (and sang along with) Folklore a lot while writing this book. I like Swift as a storyteller. I also like that she isn’t afraid to sing about not getting things right, not behaving the right away. Here, “I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace” is such a great, self-aware line. In “My Tears Ricochet,” Swift is singing at the bottom of her register even as the background vocals are floaty and high. I think the contrast is getting at the “ghostly scene” the song describes: a breakup which is also metaphorically Swift’s death—she haunts this person while he attends her wake. I love when the drums turn insistent, driving, and the chorus swells. It’s dark—filled with this mix of exultation and anger. My collection, at points, dwells on ghosts—how the past can overwhelm and frustrate, so this song also feels especially apt here.
“That’s Where I Am” from Surrender by Maggie Rogers
A friend texted me about this song, suggesting I’d like it, and she’s right: I think it’s a pop gem. The song opens with jagged, syncopated synth horns. Over this syncopation, Rogers’s voice floats in long sinewy lines. She’s singing about being happy in a relationship but also describing their past. “I told you I loved you when we were just friends. You kept me waiting, and I hated you then.” The instrumental adds another layer: fast hand claps. (While there are no hard and fast rules about fiction or pop songs, I’ll say most pop is better for a horn section and some clapping.) Meanwhile her voice soars—a woodwind above the rattling tension. I hear, in this layering, her current happiness being spiked with her awareness of the past, the bite and snap of her memories. It’s as if we’re getting the current story and backstory at once. To me this is breathtaking and smart. And it aligns with my own aims of wanting backstory to infuse the current moment. A happier anthem to close the list, with its charming, clever sonic storytelling.
Janice Obuchowski’s fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse,Alaska Quarterly Review, Story, Conjunctions online, and LitHub. Previously a fiction editor at New England Review, she lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
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