Writing a first draft is a bit of torture. Planning and outlining are intense. Research is fun. Revising is immersive. Copy editing requires chocolate and coffee.

And then there is pure joy—building a Spotify playlist for The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone.

The last time I thought in depth about a playlist for a novel was for The Murderer’s Daughters, which I did with the large-hearted guidance of David Gutowski, now appearing on Substack (with his brilliance of books and music and more.)

With The Widow of Wall Street, touchstone songs ran through the writing (Gloria Gaynor singing“I Will Survive and a host of ‘You Did Me Wrong’ songs played in a loop in my mind), but though I could build a thousand playlists of broken hearts & liars, it seemed as though I’d be forced to include 90% of all songs, broken by gender:

Men singing: Okay, I cheated, lied, walked out, came back, and cheated again..but I loved you!!!

Women singing: You cheated, you lied, walked out, cheated again, so I left you.

But The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone (10/29/24) insisted on a playlist. With a timeline from Freedom Summer in 1964 to the early days of the Pandemic in April 2020, the music of those decades ran through my imagination like a river of songs.

I guess that’s why the playlist for The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone runs over 5 hours. (Don’t worry—Spotify is built for skipping songs.) Joy, sadness, and memories. And love. In other words, music

The many moods of Ivy and Annabel (the mother and daughter, whose points of view carry the book) along with the times (the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, new sexual freedoms, fighting in the streets for justice, Kent State, the murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, welfare rights, the second wave of feminism—and all of it imbued with the personal becoming political and the political becoming personal.

Sounds familiar, yes?

Iconic artists like Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, The Grateful Dead, Santana, Bob Dylan, and Aretha Franklin flew onto my list, along with personal favorites who spoke to me of the times, such as Buffalo Springfield, Ben E. King, Al Green, and Nicolette Larson. If I list them all, this will go on, on, and on. I moved from Lesley Gore to Beyonce, from familiar to more obscure.

I’m already at number 90, and the songs keep coming.

The list reflects my taste, for sure, and the music that brought the world alive for us as we worked hard to make freedom and our newly found rhythm ring.

And, very importantly, which songs did I miss? Let me know—Spotify makes it easy to update. Remember, the times they are a-changing, and may we stay forever young.