YELLOW's Playlist

A Space-Time-Sentient Creature Odyssey

I’m loving Artemis II’s “NASA Moon Tunes” playlist—with so many good tracks like “Rocketman,” “Space Oddity,” and “Stars” and even ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.” The Beatles tune “Across the Universe” is one I wish I’d put on Yellow’s Playlist, but then, most of my tracks don’t have words—the better to write with!

Before moving on, let’s finger-snap Artemis II’s amazing crew that showed us true humanity, perspective, and Earth (and earthlings) in their best lights—. Capt. Glover’s comments about looking down at our “spaceship” where all of us all of us are “one thing” felt so needed in these, our shaky times.

I am inspired to share my YELLOW playlist with a few notes on why I chose what I chose.

(This article originally appeared in FreshFiction.com and I thank them for the inspiration!)

My novel probably could not avoid some comparison to the song, Yellow, by Coldplay. And once my main character decides to name the slime mold just that, the song worked its way onto my Yellow playlist, of course. Here are a few others that I found influential, inspirational, or just kept me writing pages.

My main character Eliza discovers Yellow, the slime mold of the title, on a fallen log in her backyard one steamy Louisiana summer in 1973. She’s 12 and as she watches its growth, the organism attracts her in a very mystically moody way (as artistic pre-teens are geared to be). It just so happens that I’d been deep into the music of composer Ludovico Einaudi—having chanced upon his album Time Lapse by way of some algorithm or other–and so three of the albums’ songs “Walk,” “Run,” and “Discovery at Night” (ironic, since this is what happens to Yellow) set the pace as I imagined one fantastical night when Eliza feels an ineffable connection with the slime mold. The orchestral weave of these songs, for me, imitates the prose style of Yellow. Our lives are woven with historical context, our parents’ burdens, lovers’ expectations as well as how we deal with our individual traumas. The album’s climactic song, to me, is the song “Experience” – the acceleration of the tempo mirrors the acceleration through the personal and public events particular to Z’s life through to age of 60 in the book. For me the song has a kind of sonic truth: how do we deal with the traumas that we carry in our bodies? Through isolation, problems with intimacy, substance use? And how do we resolve them (or integrate them) and get back to our own elemental truth?

Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind,” popular when Eliza – now a more disaffected Z – is a teenager, appears in the book almost tongue and cheek. To essentially entertain themselves, she and her Yearbook friends decide to pose all the popular high schoolers at the above-ground tombs at New Orleans’ St. Louis Cemetery and circle their portraits in the lyrics “All we are is dust in the wind.” I won’t lie that one page in my high school yearbook had the same lyrics around photos of cheering students in football stands. Perhaps ill-advised, but then, like Mr. Pageant, our faculty “advisor” found it humorous too. I can’t claim a “Dead Poets Society” moment in Z’s life, but Sarah Brightman’s version evokes the “carpe diem” quality that happens later in life after she comes to “remember” what she understood as a child: the fleeting nature of reality.

The live version of Al Hirt’s song “Man with a Horn” begins slowly but builds into a classic Dixieland jazz tune. Recorded at Hirt’s New Orleans nightclub, the album released in 1965 the same year real-life astronaut Pete Conrad also piloted Gemini 5. The more I dove into Pete’s story and his singular personality as well as listening to transcripts about the first troubled Skylab mission, the more I understood him as the same kind of awkward outlier as Z. Yet he became the third astronaut to walk on the moon as well as bounced off the fuselage when he and Joe Kerwin repaired a faulty solar panel on Skylab and they lost transmission to NASA. Conrad was captain of Skylab when it launched in 1973 – the same year the real intelligent slime mold was “discovered” in a Texas backyard – an interesting coherence that fiction helped me develop! But back in 1965, he and his co-pilot Gordon Cooper listened to Al Hirt music beamed up from NASA when their space capsule – the “size of a garbage can,” according to Conrad – encountered system failures. Nineteen sixty four to 1970 were also the years my family lived in the French Quarter and my stepfather, Bill Newkirk, composed music and played piano on that live album with Al Hirt and his band. I get a thrill every time I hear his fingers on the keys in this song.

When I heard “She Moves Me,” by Savanna in 2020, it reminded me of Z’s absolute devotion to Maude, the beautifully outrageous artist who goes on to great fame, and Z’s first real relationship. Listening more closely, I realized that “she” is the wind in the song, but it also tells the tale of a reciprocal relationship, which isn’t quite what Z experiences. But don’t we think so until we know it isn’t so? I love the line in the song, “fear is courage becoming known” and Z is both in awe and a bit fearful of Maude but ultimately realizes that she’s losing more of herself to Maude and so the relationship must end.

“Nara” by E.S. Posthumus is the one song that influenced the trajectory of my book. In December of 2020 my partner and I drove to New Orleans from Atlanta so I could do research for the book: where would Z live in the French Quarter? What was the lasting mood that Hurricane Katrina left on the city? Did the stairs leading down to Lake Pontchartrain look how I remembered them? The answer to that last question is yes! New Orleans at that time was half-empty and not surprisingly, few people were masked. They’ll don them for Mardi Gras, yet that Nawlins spirit prevented too much worry about a possible contagion! A trolley ride inspired a chapter, but it was our trip home across the Causeway and “Nara” playing that prompted my realization that Z would become curious about the young girls that her attacker had killed and that only through going to the places where they were killed could she begin to resolve her own wounds. I had no idea that “Nara” was the theme song for “Cold Case” the series about unsolved murders! A coherence that made sense when it comes to YELLOW and the book’s themes.

*****

I could go on about my other playlist choices (and maybe I will later, but first: what song(s) do you like on the playlist (mine or Artemis II’s)?