A playlist for Everything Here Is Under Control
“Children of Children” Jason Isbell
“‘How did you do this?’ I snap. ‘How did you take care of a baby by yourself? You were a teenager, for fuck’s sake.’”
“My Sweet Lord” George Harrison
“I’d put the song on a playlist for Gabe when I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and he’d fallen into the habit of listening to it every day on his way home from work, imagining, he told me, that the lyrics referred not to George Harrison’s infatuation with a Hindu god but to our own unborn son.”
“Ain’t That Fine” I’m With Her
“And now he’s looking at me the way he did in Carrie’s truck that hazy September nearly fourteen years ago.”
“Babies” Tracey Thorn
“All I know is that I cannot un-have him, and I have never, for a single moment, wished I could.”
“Round Here” Counting Crows
“I sang ‘Round Here’ by Counting Crows because it was the only song I knew by heart, and it happened to include the line: ’round here we stay up very, very, very, very late.”
“Silent All These Years” Tori Amos
“I remember etching, in deranged capital letters, a line from a Tori Amos song: Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon.”
“Twined & Twisted” Valerie June
“Did I assume her number had stayed the same, as mine had, or did I imagine I was shooting a plea out into the void?”
“Ohio” Patty Griffin
“I miss the whitewashed houses sharing sprawling backyards without defined property lines. The stacks of firewood, the faded hammocks, the Weber grills. The way every residential neighborhood yields to an open expanse of grass—fields that belong to the county but are quietly tended by old men astride their John Deeres.”
“‘Til It’s Over” Anderson .Paak
“We were drunk on a futon in Nashville. It was New Year’s, and we had driven down to Tennessee after spending Christmas in Deerling. The conversation was the kind you can only have hundreds of miles from home, as if words unheard by the artifacts of your everyday life are somehow off the record.”
“Red Dirt Girl” Emmylou Harris
“Truly, Nina does not belong here. But it’s equally true that she belongs wherever she wants. Wherever she is.”
“Moon River” Frank Ocean
“She says, ‘You were ready to Moon River it all over America. And I just needed something else. At least, I needed to need something else.’”
“Bloodbuzz Ohio” The National
“‘I love Ohio,’ I say, buckling my seatbelt.
‘You hate Ohio,’ Carrie reminds me.”