Daniel Pope’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Go Help Yourself – Largehearted Boy
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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Daniel Pope’s novel Go Help Yourself is an endearing debut, the Pacific Northwest slacker novel of the year!
John Keene wrote of the book:
“Corbin Taylor Moore, the Seattle-based anti-hero narrator of Daniel Pope’s rollicking debut, is a weed-smoking, pill-popping, self-critiquing twenty-something experiencing something of a mid-life crisis. It doesn’t help that his mother, a famous self-help author, barely understands him, that he struggles to connect with his coworkers or soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, or that a crow hauntingly appears the day of his crash-out, followed by a murder of crows as events progress. A brilliant send-up of our contemporary late neoliberal moment, Go Help Yourself captures the vicissitudes of Millennial life today and brings a vibrant new literary voice to readers.”
In his own words, here is Daniel Pope’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Go Help Yourself:
Life Signs by Water From Your Eyes
Rachel Brown’s deadpan delivery combined with Nate Amos’s chaotic and unrelenting guitar lines in the verse mirrors the contrast of ironic distance/inner emotional volatility that characterizes my protagonist, Corbin. Corbin hates his body; he thinks he’s too fat, ugly, etc.; he thinks that if he were beautiful, it would solve all his problems. He keeps all these torrential feelings at an ironic distance, and that’s why he can’t see himself clearly. But he can’t avoid himself. Nor can he avoid the murder of angry crows, which keeps returning at random points to attack him. Why? I like a book that keeps you guessing, and a song that does the same. It makes the moments of clarity so beautiful. Like in the chorus, when the chaotic patchwork clicks into a startling sudden order, and the song just soars. And that guitar solo! If someday someone decided to produce a TV show out of my novel I’d beg the reptilian TV execs to get Water From Your Eyes to write the theme song.
Ugly by Sugar High
Corbin could have written the lyrics for this song. There couldn’t be a more direct way of defining his problem, or what he thinks his problem is: I’m so ugly. I think this is universal: everyone must have felt it at some point. No matter how many inspirational Instagram posts you read, when you feel you’re not in the club, it’s difficult to convince yourself that the “true beauty” is “within.” But in the examination of these ugly feelings, this song shows in them the pattern of something far more profound. As Corbin says, “I had wanted to be a writer because I’d thought that if I could put the right words in the right order, everyone would realize that I was beautiful inside. But I wasn’t beautiful inside.” The beauty of this song proves its singer wrong, and I hope my novel does the same.
Drunk II by Mannequin Pussy
The first draft of Go Help Yourself was written in a period of converging crises: on the one hand, I was going through a breakup; on the other, the whole world was going through a pandemic. While the novel lampoons the self-help genre—Corbin’s mother is a famous self-help guru, and he hates her—of course I couldn’t have survived these crises without some kind of healthy self-helping of my own. So I started running. And whenever this song, “Drunk II,” came up on my running playlist, it made me fly. It’s got that blurry, drunken, “fuck everything,” “let’s point this rocket ship into the fucking sun” mentality, that loving embrace of your own brokenness that feels, for some reason, so, so good. Which might be a very bad and immature thing, but it’s a feeling that Go Help Yourself’s protagonist, Corbin, knows all too well. And these lyrics! And do you remember the nights I called you up? / I was so fucked up, I forgot we were broken up / I still love you, you stupid fuck. I wish I’d written that.
Between Two Mysteries by Mt. Eerie
My novel is set in Seattle, so I had to get something by Phil Elverum in here, a Pacific Northwest legend. And what better for a PNW novel than a song that directly references Twin Peaks, both sonically (with that keyboard part) and lyrically? The town rests in the valley beneath Twin Peaks / Buried in space / What goes up there in the night / In that dark, blurry place? An ongoing theme of Go Help Yourself is the way that Seattle is changing in ways that are beyond the control of Seattleites, dictated from above by the corporate overlords; and yet, just as the body fights back against the mind, just as crows continue to flourish in the cracks of human society, so too will that essence of the PNW live on: And the songs fade, and the singers die / But my heart will not stop thumping / The shapes in the dark still look convincing / So here I am.
I Don’t Love by Have a Nice Life
I like a playlist that has a narrative shape. So here we are approaching the dark night of the soul: I don’t want to live like this anymore / I don’t want to live at all. Corbin’s masochistic/hedonistic embrace of his own misery—the drugs and the binge eating, on one hand, and the manic exercise/self-help regimen on the other—can only go in one direction, and that is toward oblivion. The haunting muddle of this song reflects a muddled mind seeking refuge in nothingness: the layered and indistinct synthesizers, the crunch and fuzz of the drums and bass, the muffled voices drifting like silhouettes in fog. Until suddenly, everything lines up into clear, soaring octaves and harmonies, and the floating voice sings I don’t love / I don’t feel anything / I don’t feel anything where this love should be. I don’t know about Dan Barrett (who sings these lyrics), but in Corbin’s case, the problem is not that he doesn’t love, but that he thinks he doesn’t deserve it.
Second Son of R. by Oathbreaker
Writing a novel is hard, and it should be. How do you expect to connect to your character’s struggle without struggling through the material? So consider this the crisis point for both Corbin and me: The crashing drums, the roaring guitar, the screaming, and then—in a moment of stillness, when everything dies out except the guitar—a slow moment of grief: Your empty house won’t comfort me. In the novel, Corbin’s anger at his mother is easier to feel than sadness, but the anger keeps the house empty, it keeps the plastic on the furniture; in the writing, my desire to produce a good novel, which is (at least in part) a desire to be known, runs up against my fear of being known and of knowing myself. In another breakdown toward the end of the song, the time signature shifts from 4/4 to 6/4, which means that the guitar has sped up while the song has slowed down. There’s an immense tension in this contradiction, the inner crisis only sharpened and focused by the glassy stillness holding it suspended, until finally comes the immense catharsis of total breakdown. I won’t spoil the novel, but in my case, this is the catharsis that came from finally tapping into the part of myself I was avoiding and putting it on the page and realizing that this was where the story was all along. God, what a relief!
Fishing Bird (Empty Gutted in the Evening Breeze) by Grouper
This song is wreathed in tape hiss, an analog warmth, an acknowledgement of music as a material process that includes both the musician and the listener. This intimacy frames the scene: the fishing bird, the fish in the water, the singer speaking directly to them—How long can you hold your breath? / Flash of silver moving away. There’s an intimation of the interconnectedness of things, but our part in it is ambiguous. So it is with Corbin: what’s going on with these crows? It seems they’re fishing for something. Maybe his eyeballs. But is he projecting? Is it his denial of the reality of the body that prevents him from seeing them clearly? He and the crows are involved in some total process; we are all part of the same web, and we ignore this at our peril.
Camargue by Malibu
Malibu is a favorite artist to write to. Her songs have little structure, only patterns left briefly in the sand before the tide comes in again. The best word to describe it, besides “oceanic,” is “sublime,” with all its beautiful and terrifying valences. The sublime allows us to understand something impossible by aesthetically experiencing the impossibility of understanding it. I believe that every novel aims at a moment like this: an understanding that cannot be represented in language but can be presented as the failure of language. So this is the revelation after the crisis, but it’s a revelation that you can’t approach directly. You have to let it envelop you.
Watchlar by Cocteau Twins
A good ending manages to be both an organic continuation of what came before and the beginning of a new cycle. Here, the dreamy singing, synths, and guitar demonstrate continuity, but the clinical electronic beat is a new vibe.
The best endings are like the ending of a concert where the musicians invite the audience onstage to dance: we’ve been enjoying this thing from a distance, but suddenly, there we are, included within its frame.
You could see my novel as a conflict between the body and the mind. Here, having passed through all the contradictions of the mind, we return to the body, as we always must. Hopefully this time with a bit more love for it and what it does for us.
I hope this song returns you to your body; I hope you feel the love. And I hope you enjoyed my playlist.
Daniel Pope is a writer and musician from Seattle. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in the UK, where he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.
