Issue #169 Mixtape
Welcome to the soundtrack for Issue #169! These songs have been hand-selected by our contributors to serve as the soundscape for our new issue. The playlist is available to listen on Spotify here.
“Coloratura” by Coldplay was selected by Katerina Sutton for her short story “Waxing Nostalgic.” On her selection, Sutton wrote, “‘Coloratura’ is a sprawling, spiritual song that creates an untethered sense of drifting awe: a saturation of color and sensation. Just as Coloratura leans into larger-than-life imagery–vibrant colors, brightness, and grand allusions–to describe a potential utopian future, Waxing Nostalgic uses similar excess to convey the narrator's spiraling grief. The song’s saturation and repetition create a sense of being trapped inside beauty; the vibrancy ultimately underscores distance rather than joy. This is the same tension I strove to express through the narrator's unraveling in my story. Listening to Coloratura can help attune readers to the loneliness produced by the narrator’s larger-than-life experience with crayons.”
Gustav Holst’s first and second movements of his symphony suite The Planets were selected by Scott Hunter for his short story “It Stinks in Here, a Love Story.” On his selection, Hunter wrote, “Mars (Bringer of War) and Venus (Bringer of Peace) are roiling with portent, sudden heat, and quiet solitude. ‘It Stinks in Here, a Love Story,’ captures a few minutes in the orbit of a long-married couple, how they find their synchronicity and prevent any inadvertent quark from sending them careening into the vast loneliness. The Planets reminds us there are things bigger than us. And that even planets are short-lived compared to love.”
“The Old Religion” by Florence & The Machine was selected by Kara Crawford for her short story “Trimming.” Crawford wrote, “The song references an ‘animal instinct’ felt in one's veins, which I think resonates very much with my protagonist's situation and feelings. Also, the lines "Freedom from the body / Freedom from the pain" resonate nicely as well, since part of Harper's whole deal is wanting to literally strip away her flesh to find something underneath. The song contends with the idea of being trapped by stillness and carefulness and expresses a desire for release, which, again, nicely mirrors Harper's feelings.”
“Grace” by Luca D’Alberto was selected by Joyce Dehli for her essay “Reprieve.”
"Poison Oak" by Bright Eyes was selected by Harrison Hamm for his poem “Shortstop.” Hamm wrote, “My poem ‘Shortstop’ directly quotes the lyrics ‘I was young enough, I still believed in war’ from this song, in sync with the poem's retrospective glance at boyhood innocence lost to a burgeoning, more adult or sobered awareness that mourns, learning of shame, violence, confusion and loneliness. Written for Conor Oberst's gay cousin who took his life, ‘Poison Oak’ reckons queerly with loss, not only due to the painful reality of LGBTQ+ suicide, but because the song commits to tenderness and remembrance as queer methods of survival, which echo in my poem.”
“Feel like Makin’ Love” by Bad Company was selected by Lindsay Hunter for her short story “The Nudists.” On her selection, Hunter wrote, “It's the song I imagine is playing in the final scene, when Jerry is with the nudists, and his self finally unlocks. And it's a song I imagine the narrator finding absurd.”
"You Got to Die" by Blind WIllie McTell was selected by Jacob Sunderlin for his poem “AMENDMENT TO THE PLEDGE I SIGNED PROMISING TO NOT PROMOTE RADICAL THEORIES ABOUT THE OVERTHROW OF THE STATE WHILE TEACHING FOR THE STATE.” Sunderlin wrote, “The poem refers to the disinterment of slavery-era remains from the campus of UGA, which is built on and surrounded by graveyards, and where I taught from 2015-2020. Here's some information by the university about the situation: https://ethics.uga.edu/sites/default/files/Buried_History_Chronicle_2017.pdf. The great ATL/Georgia artist McTell meditates on mortality theological resignation in this composition.”
"I'm a song" by Stephen Wilson Jr. was selected by Craig Foster for his short story “Right 10, Left 11, Right 12.”
“Temptation” by New Order was selected by P.Q.R. Anderson for his poem “A Hare’s Ear.” Anderson wrote that, while there was no song that felt fitting for the poem itself, this was the song he was listening to “while driving the drive that brought the poem.”
“Words” by Missing Personas was selected by Jody Hobbs Hesler for her short story “Do You Read Me?” On her selection, Hobbs Hesler shared that the song matches “the kids' failures to connect and the mom and her ex's parallel failures.”