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January 24, 2023
Gabrielle Bates's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Judas Goat"
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.
Gabrielle Bates's poetry collection is both precise and filled with humanity. This is an auspicious debut.
Vulture wrote of the book:
"These poems are both generous and spare, full of unconventional portraits of longing―for safety, for love, for a motherhood one doesn’t truly desire. Bates is a wise, tender witness to the parts of ourselves we rarely expose."
In her own words, here is Gabrielle Bates's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Judas Goat:
My poetry collection Judas Goat is interested in the harrowing undercurrents of intimate relationships. The book is haunted by many things—the Deep South, the Bible, domesticated animals, death—but while the characters are alert to violence and risk, they are also driven by desire and longing: for meaningful connection, spiritual wisdom, and a wildness of abandon.
The thirteen songs collected here speak to these intersections and influences.
Wild Sweet Orange - “Ten Dead Dogs” - We Have Cause to Be Uneasy
My book opens with a very intense poem called “The Dog,” so this song feels appropriately macabre to kick us off. Also, Preston Lovinggood, the lead singer of Wild Sweet Orange, is from my hometown in Alabama, and I used to listen to the Wild Sweet Orange EP while driving around angstily in my first car, so the songs are imprinted on my heart forever. Writing Judas Goat, I was often reaching back towards coming-of-age memories for inspiration, and WSO songs definitely feel like the soundtrack of that era. If you were ever a Garden State Soundtrack Person TM and/or you grew up melancholic in a churchy suburb, this is for your ear snails.
[Also, in very exciting news, Wild Sweet Orange has written a song specifically inspired by Judas Goat poems (!!!). It’s in production now and should drop on Spotify in early 2023, to coincide with the book’s release, which is just… so fucking wild and amazing.]
Sharon Van Etten - “Seventeen” - Remind Me Tomorrow
First of all, Sharon Van Etten’s voice is sexy af. Secondly, this song always makes me want to jump into the front seat of the old truck (I don’t own a vehicle of any kind, but this song makes me forget that, such is its power) and hit the road, windows down. Thirdly, seventeen is one of those ages. It feels emblematic of a major cusp. The characters who speak in Judas Goat are often fueled by a seventeen-year-old kind of restlessness, the twinned desire and fear for more agency.
S. G. Goodman - “Space and Time” - Old Time Feeling
The opening lyrics of this song, “I never want to leave this world / without saying I love you,” hit me in the gut every time I hear them. The ache. The longing. There are several poems in Judas Goat that feel like they are yearning in a similar way, but my poem “The Bridge,” which I wrote in the midst of depression, while trying to write myself back into love with the world, comes particularly to mind.
Waxahatchee - “Rose, 1956” - American Weekend
I am a sucker for lofi sadcore Southern white woman music (Cat Power, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, etc), and the early Waxahatchee album American Weekend does IT for ME. I love the gruff bedroom hangover texture of the whole album, but this song feels especially Judas Goat-y in its Alabama angst, winter setting, and attention to haunting along matrilineal lines.
Max Richter - “Elena & Lila” - My Brilliant Friend Soundtrack
Max Richter’s cinematic instrumentals are so dreamy and moving, and I especially love this piece he made for the HBO adaptation of the Ferrante books. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (four books: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave, and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child, which function together as one long novel) is one of my favorite works of literature of all time, and I include a reference to its central characters, Elena and Lila, in my poem “And Even After All That, No Epiphany.” This song has such a trancy build; even as it repeats, I feel like I’m moving forward in time, like a spiral, moving closer to depth, resonance, meaning—
Ethel Cain - “Family Tree” - Preacher’s Daughter
Ethel Cain’s vibe in this song is sort of “twisted Southern Gothic Lana del Ray.” The feminine spookiness and the Christian-haunted lyrics remind me of several poems in Judas Goat, primarily “How Judas Died” and “Conversation with Mary.” The lyric “I’m just a child but I’m not above violence” …? WHEW.
FKA Twigs - “holy terrain” - Magdalene
I got to see FKA Twigs perform live in Seattle when Magdalene came out, and: wow. One of the most gorgeous visual and auditory spectacles I’ve ever experienced. This song speaks to an intwining of the sexual and the sacred that feels very in keeping with my book’s obsessions.
Frank Ocean - “Thinkin Bout You” - Channel Orange
Frank Ocean is Southern introvert bisexual scorpio artistic excellence. “Thinkin Bout You” as a love song feels almost painfully tender and earnest, but it also has little tongue-in-cheek moments, which somehow only makes the song as a whole feel more earnest and vulnerable? Amazing. The song’s central questions are about early love in relation to time and the inability to know what’s truly going on in another person’s mind, which is very Judas Goat.
Remi Wolf - “Sexy Villain” - Juno
When writing Judas Goat, it felt important to give myself permission to write poems from the perspective of women who aren’t perfect, pleasing, generous, and chaste all the time. To give voice, in other words, to a more “villainous” side. This is such a groovy, vibey track, and it came into my life via another poet, Taneum Bambrick, whose work I adore; you should listen to the playlist she made to accompany her wonderful collection, Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon, 2022), which also includes this track.
James Blake - “Limit to Your Love” - James Blake
God, I love the piano in this song. And in the lyrics, the references to “slow motion,” “maps,” and the limits of love—All of this feels very Judas Goat.
I remember listening to an interview with James Blake years ago, and the way he described his process—generating material, then sampling himself, arranging and re-arranging pieces—reminds me of how I started writing at the end of Judas Goat. My usual methods weren’t working, so I started leaning into more of a self-sampling collage approach, like the one Blake described. My long poems “Mothers” and “Eastern Washington Diptych” came out of this mode.
Lucy Dacus - “Christine” - Home Video
This song (and Lucy Dacus generally: shoutout to Southern sadcore again) reminds me of my poem “Intro to Theater,” which braids taboo sexual attraction to other girls with Southeastern flora and Biblical imagery. Dacus studied film when she was in school, and I feel like that shows in the cinematic situations and vivid worldbuilding of her lyrics; because I think of several of my poems in Judas Goat as short films in language, I feel a kinship.
The Civil Wars - “C’est La Mort” - Barton Hollow
Romantic and morbid: my brand! The final poem in Judas Goat is called “Anniversary,” and this gentle, romantic death song feels like the soundtrack to that poem. Back when the Civil Wars (Joy Williams and John Paul White) were a touring duo, I saw them perform in a small concert near my university’s campus: outdoors at dusk, late spring, newly in love. That memory hums in the background of Judas Goat, especially in poems like “Anniversary” and “In the Dream in Which I am a Widow.”
Alabama Shakes - “I Found You” - Boys & Girls
I adore Alabama Shakes, and not just because I’m from Alabama (though, sure, that helps). Brittney Howard is such a badass vocalist and songwriter, and she’s an electric performer live. This song exhibits a high-energy and soulful profession of love that the end of Judas Goat reaches for. I like to think this is the kind of song that rushes in to fill the space when readers finish the final poem and close the book.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other publications. A writer, visual artist, and cohost of The Poet Salon podcast, Bates is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and now lives in Seattle, Washington.
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