Everyone knows that Kurt Vonnegut loved music. There’s that quote, you know the one. Vonnegut liked to repeat himself, but here’s how it appears in A Man Without a Country:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC.

He goes on to say that he likes “Strauss and Mozart and all that” but what he really loves is “that specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression” also known as the blues. Fair enough.

But here’s the real tea: in a 1991 interview with Hustler (yep), Vonnegut, who would have been 101 this week, was asked about his musical tastes. “We’ll start from the back and work forward,” Vonnegut said. “I hate rap. The Beatles have made a substantial contribution. Bob Dylan, however, is the worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.”

And just like that, a thousand Dylan/Vonnegut megafans fell over in confusion.

Well, at least Vonnegut died before he had to see Dylan win the Nobel Prize in Literature—though I can’t help wondering what he would have said about it. Something delightfully curmudgeonly, no doubt.

By the way, it’s at least possible that Dylan didn’t like Vonnegut much either (or perhaps he can just hold a grudge). After all, his lists of his favorite books seem like they should have Vonnegut on them (just based on vibes, really), but they never do. Curious.

Either way, I wonder what they talked about at dinner that one time…

The wooded slopes of the Ettersberg stand in the center of Germany, a few miles north of Weimar. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the area served as the playground of dukes, who went there for hunting, and later as the preserve of poets, who traversed its rugged hills while contemplating the wonders of nature. No less an eminence than Goethe, the greatest of all German poets, traveled often to the forests of the Ettersberg, and over the years he grew particularly fond of one large oak tree near a clearing with expansive views of the countryside. On a bright autumn morning in 1827, a banquet-like breakfast was laid out in the shade of this grand oak. Leaning back against its regal trunk, Goethe feasted on roast partridges, drank wine from a gold cup, and gazed out at the rolling landscape. “Here,” he declared, “a person feels great and free…the way he should always be.”

After Goethe’s death, as a cult of reverence formed around him as the standard-bearer of both German genius and European humanism, the legend of his favorite local tree evidently survived—all the way down to one summer day more than a century later. That day in 1937, a group of prisoners was led into the same high forests of the Ettersberg, stopping at a limestone ridge just six miles north of Weimar. Under harsh conditions and with minimal equipment, these men cleared away the trees to make room for a concentration camp.

As the prisoners labored day after day, building their own future prison, their guards identified one particular oak that would not be felled. This oak, it was determined, must be the mythic Goethe’s oak. And so the anointed tree was left standing, and in the years that followed, the concentration camp of Buchenwald rose up around it on all sides.

To the Nazis who created Buchenwald, Goethe’s oak represented a tangible link to German history at its most illustrious, a history that proved the German people’s cultural superiority while pointing toward the thousand-year empire of their dreams. To the inmates of Buchenwald, the tree took on different meanings, as an incongruous vestige of the older Germany, a potent reminder of European culture’s utopian promise, and a silent witness to unspeakable crime. Over the course of the next seven years, the men and women in the surrounding camp were enslaved, murdered, and worked to death. Some of Hitler’s victims, according to one account, were hanged from the branches of Goethe’s tree. The oak itself eventually stopped producing leaves. In one photograph taken by a prisoner with a stolen camera, its branches appear bare and skeletal, reaching up into the empty sky.

Some prisoners linked the tree’s fate with that of Nazi Germany, which by the summer of 1944 was careening toward its own downfall. At approximately noon on August 24, 1944, 129 American aircraft converged over the camp and rained down their fury, dropping one thousand bombs and incendiaries and successfully destroying a munitions factory attached to the Buchenwald complex. That factory had been their prime target, but there were additional casualties: one hundred SS men, nearly four hundred camp inmates—and the old oak tree, which had been scorched by flames. The camp leadership had it felled and sawed for firewood, but one resourceful inmate named Bruno Apitz—a Communist prisoner who had survived in the camp since the year it opened—managed to smuggle back to his barracks an entire block of the tree’s heartwood. With his fellow prisoners standing guard, Apitz risked his life to carve from the wood a bas-relief in the form of a death mask. He called it Das letzte Gesicht (The Last Face).

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Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler has been shortlisted for the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

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This simple, rough-hewn sculpture—later smuggled from the camp and now owned by the German Historical Museum—individualizes the enormity of Nazi violence through the prism of a single face. It can be thought of as among the early memorials to the Second World War and to the events that, years later, would be called the Shoah or the Holocaust. The grief that lines this last face is grief for all that died at Buchenwald: for the inmates but also perhaps for what the oak represented—that is, the grand European promise of a high culture of poetry, music, and literature, and the very idea of a humanism that might one day unite all people as equals.

Sculpture by Bruno Apitz, Das letzte Gesicht (The Last Face), 1944 Bpk Bildagentur, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Arne Psille, Art Resource, New York.

While Apitz was at work, chisel in hand, another memorial inspired by the heartwood of German culture was taking shape some three hundred miles away. In Richard Strauss’s villa in the mountain-ringed town of Garmisch, the eighty-year-old composer wrote out two short poems by Goethe, the first one opening with the lines “Niemand wird sich selber kennen, / Sich von seinem Selbst-Ich trennen” (No one will ever know himself / Separate himself from his inner being). The second poem begins “What happens in the world / No one actually understands.” These reflections on the limits of self-knowledge must have resonated with Strauss, a composer who had spectacularly failed to understand his own actions and the world in which he found himself in 1933. During the years of the Third Reich, he had severely misjudged his surroundings, remained in Germany, and forever tainted his reputation by working with the Nazis in the area of cultural policy. He also witnessed the suffering of his Jewish family members (which included his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren) and the wartime destruction of his true spiritual homes, the opera houses of Munich, Dresden, and Vienna.

Now, in August 1944, the world-weary Strauss began work on a choral setting of the first of the Goethe poems, but never completed it. Instead, he swept the musical ideas, which still bore the ghosted impressions of Goethe’s language, into a new composition—a spiraling work of mournful grandeur titled Metamorphosen. It would become an elegy to German culture, a death mask in sound, and one of Strauss’s most moving musical utterances, speaking forcefully to the emotions while sealing its secrets behind the music’s veil of wordless beauty. On the score’s final page, Strauss inlaid a quotation from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and below it he inscribed a single lapidary phrase: “IN MEMORIAM!”

Unlike the artist of the sculpture carved at Buchenwald, however, Strauss did not specify what precisely his music was attempting to remember. To this day, whenever the piece is performed, the question reappears. It is no longer his to answer.

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From Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler. Copyright © 2023. Available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

The Beatles’ first stay in Hamburg, between August and November 1960, is the most romanticized episode in their career. Irresistible that vision of brash boy troubadours in their cracked black leathers, blasting out raw rock ’n’ roll among the strip clubs and sex shows…fumbling amateurs forging themselves into hardened professionals…the apprenticeship in the underworld without which their later flight through the Heavens could never have been.

From a twenty-first-century perspective of health and safety and employee-protection, it reads more like people-trafficking, with guitars. Hamburg had a historic affinity with Liverpool, both located in the far north-west of their respective countries and both seaports, thronging with each other’s shipping like neighbors who could walk in without knocking. The difference was that Hamburg had a red-light district called the Reeperbahn whose name even the bawdiest Liverpool sailors spoke with awe.

A large part of the Reeperbahn’s business came from West Germany’s military bases, both American and British, on standby to counter the expected nuclear attack from the Communist East. The clientele were mostly young men whose idea of a good time, as much as getting drunk and laid, was live rock ‘n ‘roll. Hamburg’s porn merchants therefore began importing music groups from its mercantile soulmate, and for a time the sole exporter was Allan Williams.

Earlier in 1960, Williams had contracted to supply one of the bands he—sort of—managed to a Reeperbahn club-owner named Bruno Koschmider. He sent Derry and the Seniors, acknowledged to be Liverpool’s most dynamic live act with their Afro-Caribbean vocalist Derry Wilkie.

They went down so well at Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller club that he requested another band exactly like them. Williams’s first choice, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, were already committed to a residency at a Butlin’s holiday camp; his second, Gerry and the Pacemakers, turned him down flat, so in desperation he turned to the Beatles. When the news reached Derry and the Seniors in Hamburg, their sax-player, Howie Casey, wrote to Williams, protesting that such a “bum group” would be a severe embarrassment to them.

But the Beatles couldn’t take the job without a drummer, nor could Paul continue in the role since Koschmider wanted a five-piece line-up like the Seniors. John briefly considered making Royston Ellis the fifth member as a “poet-compère” as if he expected their Hamburg audience to resemble some earnestly attentive students’ debating society.

This time, no long, dispiriting search was necessary, for the ideal candidate materialized at Mona Best’s Casbah Club in West Derby, where George had saved the Quarrymen from disintegrating a year earlier.

It was during their Casbah residency that Mrs. Best’s good-looking son, Pete, had first become interested in rock ’n’ roll, and after their petulant exit he’d formed a group named the Blackjacks, with himself on drums, to fill the gap they’d left. Now John, Paul, and George came back looking for a drummer just when Pete’s adoring mum had bought him a sumptuous new kit in a blue mother-of-pearl finish from the Blacklers department store.

So, one could say that George and his old-apprentice-masters were jointly responsible for Pete Best becoming a Beatle—an experience that was to leave Pete with the saddest eyes in rock.

Allan Williams smuggled the new quintet into West Germany by road, without work-permits or any kind of official documentation but their passports. If challenged, Williams said, they were to pretend to be students on vacation. To compound the illegality, George was seven months shy of eighteen, the minimum age for entry to the Hamburg clubs where they’d be performing. And alone among the five traffickees, and constantly teased about it, he was still a virgin.

The city’s St. Pauli district, of which the Reeperbahn is the main thoroughfare, came as a profound shock after Liverpool’s general nocturnal blackout and quiet. Continuous neon lights shimmered and winked in gold, silver, and every suggestive color of the rainbow, their voluptuous script—bar monika, mambo schankey, gretel & alphons, roxy bar—making the entertainments on offer seem even more untranslatably wicked. This was a place with no distinction between day and night, which would turn the Beatles’ body-clocks upside down forever.

Their new employer, Bruno Koschmider, proved to be a tiny man of indeterminate age with the face of a carved wooden puppet, a femininely frothy coiffure, and a limp supposedly acquired during wartime service with Hitler’s Wehrmacht. But if Koschmider seemed to have stepped straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, his Kaiserkeller club was spectacular, a subterranean barn decorated on a nautical theme with booths shaped like rowing-boats, lifebelts, brass binnacles, and ornamental rope-work.

Only now did they learn they weren’t to play here at the heart of the Reeperbahn but in a run-down strip club called the Indra that Koschmider owned in Grosse Freiheit, meaning “Great Freedom,” a much less buzzy side-street. Their job was to turn the Indra into as big a crowd-puller as Derry and the Seniors had made the Kaiserkeller.

Worse was to follow when Koschmider took them to the living quarters he was contracted to provide. Around the corner in Paul-Roosen- Strasse, he owned a small cinema called the Bambi, showing a mixture of porn flicks and old Hollywood gangster movies and Westerns. The Beatles’ quarters were behind its screen; one dingy concrete room and two glorified broom-cupboards with camp-beds and naked overhead light-bulbs, exactly the kind of hell-hole regularly uncovered nowadays, packed with desperate illegal immigrants.

The only washing facilities were the adjacent cinema toilets. George would later say this hadn’t been as hard on him as on the others “because I used to live in a house without a toilet.”

In all its various incarnations back in Liverpool, the band had never been on any stage for longer than about twenty minutes. At the Indra Club, they found they were expected to play for four and a half hours each weeknight in sets of an hour and a half with only three thirty-minute breaks. On Saturdays and Sundays, it increased to six hours.

Unlike the Kaiserkeller, the Indra wasn’t a dance-hall; its few customers sat at tables and watched an act, previously a stripper named Conchita. And on the Beatles’ opening night, in matching lavender- colored jackets tailored by Paul’s next-door neighbor, it was made plain that they had to do more than just stand there.

Bruno Koschmider and Allan Williams acted as warm-up men, in this case to warm up the performers rather than the audience. “Mach Schau!” Koschmider shouted in peremptory German fashion, clapping his hands. “Come on, lads, make it show!” Williams translated.

In Liverpool, to “make a show” of someone means to mock or humiliate them. John, characteristically, took it that way with a take-off of Gene Vincent as he’d appeared at Liverpool’s boxing stadium only days after the Eddie Cochran death-crash, stomping around the stage and rolling on the floor in heartless mimicry of Vincent’s calipered left leg. One night, he appeared onstage in shorts and, halfway through a song, pulled them down and showed the audience his bare bottom; not just in a “flash” but an extended view. Blissfully unaware they were being made a show of, the audience loved it.

To fill the daunting ninety-minute sets, George recalled, they needed “millions of songs,” going far outside rock ‘n’ roll to Country, folk, blues, even Broadway show tunes and the current pop hits. Every one would be padded out to around twenty minutes and have about four instrumental breaks, either by him or Paul on the house piano; Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” could be stretched like a piece of chewing-gum to almost an hour in itself.

Their great standby was the prolific Chuck Berry, whose elegies to American high school life seemed not in the least weird from a beady-eyed man with a golf-club mustache in his mid-thirties, and whose framing guitar riffs were the most seductive since Buddy Holly’s. George could soon reproduce them all, even the finger-tangling solos like two players dueling in “Johnny B. Goode.”

During the few hungover hours between shows, they’d try to grab some sleep in their ratty beds at the Bambi Kino or wash their clothes in the toilets they shared with a constant stream of cinema patrons. Even the fastidious George soon gave up the struggle to keep clean. “I never used to shower,” he remembered. “There was a washbasin in the lavatory…but there was a limit to how much of yourself you could wash in it. We could clean our teeth or have a shave. I remember once going to the public baths, but they were quite a long way away.”

There were already tensions within the band, magnified by the stress of being in a strange country and worked half to death. John’s leadership remained unchallenged, but Paul was ever his zealous adjutant; convinced that they could be spotted by some talent scout at any moment, he called for maximum effort, however late the hour or sparse the audience. And Stu Sutcliffe’s bass playing, though now reasonably competent, was clearly never going to satisfy Paul.

Then, Pete Best was no longer regarded as the eleventh-hour lucky break without whose sparkly blue drums they wouldn’t be here at all. Pete was a thoroughly amiable character who endured the hours he had to work and the conditions at the Bambi Kino with unfailing cheerfulness—yet something about him somehow didn’t fit. The problem would later be said to be his playing, but he produced a pounding rock beat more than adequate for a noisy club and a solid underlay to George’s lead guitar. Only recently, George had written to a friend in Liverpool that “Pete is drumming good.”

More tellingly, he was the best-looking member of the group, his crisp-cut hair and brooding expression giving him a look of the Hollywood matinee idol Jeff Chandler. He was the only one to have a stripper as a girlfriend, so spent most of the band’s meager time off with her instead of sharing in their adventures and misadventures. The German word for him was “reserviert” and it had already started to be his undoing.

The most famous Reeperbahn story, told and retold in Liverpool dockside pubs, was of women being mounted by donkeys with washers around their penises to limit penetration. Although this new definition of donkey-work proved a myth, there were other sights to awe a seventeen-year-old whose experience of erotica had been limited to British “tit” magazines like Razzle with all the nipples blacked out.

In some clubs, George could see men and women of every race and color have sex in twos, threes, or even fours, in every possible and improbable configuration; in others, he could watch nude women wrestling in a pit of mud, cheered on by plump businessmen tied into a communal bib to protect their suits from the splashes. At Bar Monika or the Roxy Bar, he could meet trans men as beautiful and elegant as Parisian models; around the corner in the Herbertstrasse, he could find shop windows displaying sex workers as living merchandise complete with price tickets.

Sex was the Reeperbahn’s main recreation as well as business and to its female population, jaded by years of drunken sailors and furtive businessmen, a young and relatively inexperienced young Liverpool rocker was the tastiest of novelties. As the Beatles built a following at the Indra Club, they found themselves repeatedly propositioned both by women customers and their fellow employees.

It was done in a forthright manner that might be said to have antedated Women’s Lib by a decade. Someone who fancied a bit of boy Liverpudlian would make her choice while the band was playing, either by pointing him out like a restaurant customer selecting a live lobster or, if stage-side, reaching up to fondle his leg. Many dispensed with even these slight formalities, going straight to their slum quarters at the Bambi Kino and waiting in one or other bed until their entrée arrived.

There George finally lost his virginity, the total lack of privacy turning it into a formal initiation. “My first shag was…with Paul and John and Pete Best all watching,” he would recall. “We were in bunk beds. They couldn’t really see anything because I was under the covers but after I’d finished they applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet while I was doing it.”

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George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman is available via Scribner.

Featured image: Bob Dylan, Gramercy Park, NYC, 1963. Photograph by Ralph Baxter.

It’s a small black imitation-leather dimestore notebook, about the size of a cell phone, like an address book or a day planner or a diary, but a bit more vague. “A Daily Reminder of Important Matters,” it says on the title page, and the inner pages are ruled. The calendar up front is for 1963, although the book seems to have been used in 1964. Its spine has been repaired, crookedly, with packing tape. Clusters of addresses and references suggest its owner might have been in Mississippi, New Orleans, Texas, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and San Francisco during the term of its use. It is about three-quarters filled, with spurts and sequences of writing appearing in various sizes and permutations of the owner’s script, inscribed with different implements and with varying observance of the ruling and the page orientation. It was written on the move, in short bursts, on trains and airplanes and in hotel rooms and the backs of cars.

I was drawn to the book because I’m more inclined to be a detective than a literary scholar. I liked the fact that it was a three-dimensional object that got carried around in a pocket and collected all kinds of stray marginal items in addition to bits of songs caught on the fly. And I liked it, too, because of its place in the chronology. It documents the time when Dylan was turning away from the expectations of the folk-protest crowd. He was writing pop songs, although he was employing the free-associative methods and collage use of the folk-lyric that had marked his work since the beginning. (He was writing pop songs back then, too, although “Baby, I’m in the Mood for You” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” for example, waited decades before being officially released.) Dylan was reinventing himself yet again, as his circumstances changed and the Western world experienced a wildcat surge of creativity and release from social constraints. Dylan was becoming a star in an arena that stretched far beyond the world of coffeehouses and folklore centers. At the very same time, the Beatles appeared out of nowhere on television, launching a thousand ships. Muhammad Ali knocked out Sonny Liston; the New York World’s Fair was on; Pop Art dominated the art world. It was the year of Dr. Strangelove and Band of Outsiders, of Goldfinger and The Naked Kiss. It was the moment of a brash new contract between high and low.

Bruce Langhorne’s tambourine, the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Courtesy of the Bob Dylan Center.

The 1964 notebook begins with a verse:

On the banks
of leaf river on
route 11
from Meridian
high roads

According to Clinton Heylin’s dogged Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments (1996), the author was indeed in Meridian, Mississippi, on February 9, 1964, and he traveled on by way of New Orleans, Dallas, and Denver to San Francisco and Los Angeles. In May he was off to London, Paris, and Berlin for a month. On these trips he met people, and their phone numbers and such accrue here and there along the course of the notebook. There’s Lenny Bruce (“OL7 4384 / 8825 Hollywood Boulevard”); Nico, then a model, two years before the Velvet Underground (“TRO 7746 / 69 rue de la Pompe”); Mason Hoffenberg, hangout artist and co-author of Candy; Al Aronowitz, the journalist who introduced Dylan to the Beatles that summer (when Dylan introduced the Beatles to cannabis); the English folk singer Martin Carthy; the San Francisco music critic Ralph J. Gleason; and City Lights Books, which had Dylan signed up to write a chapbook for their Pocket Poets series—a book that, many years and several publishers later, appeared as Tarantula.

The first thing in the notebook to catch my eye seemed to be a sort of Top Ten list:

0. lonely American
1. Zacherie song
2. Beach Boys (T bird)
3. Sally’s a Good ol gal
4. Send you back t Georgia
5. Dusty Springfield
6. Tommy Tucker
7. Bed Bugs X
8. Major Lance (2)
9. Lonely Avenue
10. Isley Bros (Twist an Shout)

And it does turn out to be a playlist, of mostly then-current pop, country, and R&B. “Zacherie sing” might refer to the Draculaesque New York television host John Zacherley, who put out an array of 45s around then, such as “Eighty-Two Tombstones” and “I Was a Teenage Caveman”; “Bed Bugs X” might be his jab at the Beatles (Don Adams, later the star of Get Smart, appeared then in a television skit as manager of the singing group the Bedbugs, perhaps on The Jimmy Dean Show). The others are, in order: the Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun” (1964); Hank Cochran’s “Sally Was a Good Old Girl” (1962); Timmy Shaw’s “Gonna Send You Back to Georgia” (1962); most likely Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be With You” (1963); Tommy Tucker’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers” (1964); most likely Major Lance’s “The Monkey Time” (1963, written by Curtis Mayfield) and “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um” (1964); Ray Charles’s “Lonely Avenue” (1956, written by Doc Pomus); and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” (1963). At first glance the genres are all over the map, from the Beach Boys’ apple-cheeked blend of Chuck Berry and the Four Preps to Timmy Shaw’s uncompromisingly specific gutbucket R&B, and from Dusty Springfield’s Mod London wall-of-sound anthem of joy to Ray Charles’s noir-tinged call-and-response shuffle. But that was the very time when Black and white pop musics were just beginning to sound more like each other, and Dylan was clearly setting out to explore that field of intersection. All of the songs are absolutely sincere; all of them are tough; all of them pack bright hooks in their choruses; you could do the Frug to pretty much every one; you could imagine Dylan covering all of them (except maybe “I Only Want to Be With You”), maybe at Big Pink with the Hawks.

And then the songs begin to emerge. Lines and riffs accrue and intersect and combine, take solid form, wait for words and phrases to fall into the empty slots. Sometimes a song will arrive as an airmail delivery—if not exactly whole then at least balanced on three legs and unlikely to tip over. Thus when three lines appear, “Maybe it’s the color of the sun cut flat / An floatin / perhaps it’s the weather or something like that,” you hear the song immediately. Dylan is within striking distance of

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

And then he spends a few pages worrying at the rest of the verses. “When you wake up in the mornin’, baby, look inside your mirror,” from the fifth verse, is given three varied initial stabs, and “you just been on my mind” appears in a cloud of attempts: “You aint been on my breath / nor thought”; “you’re in my dreams [that word crossed out] but then again [that phrase crossed out] you’re not.” He presumably worked out the rest on a typewriter, but in any case “Mama, You Been on My Mind” was recorded on June 9 and first performed in public on August 8 at Forest Hills Stadium in New York. And then he inexplicably omitted it from Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Within a page of the foregoing, three words sit by themselves: “go away from.” Once again that is the only prompt the inner jukebox requires. If you are aged and scholarly you might possibly hear John Jacob Niles’s keening “Go ‘Way From My Window,” but more likely you will at once be treated to the entirety of “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Those words are followed by “A crimson skyline / climbs it’s throne,” which might be a first go at “My Back Pages” (“Crimson flames tied through my ears”), but it isn’t developed. A dozen pages later, though, he picks up the original scent:

You say you are looking
for someone strong
it aint
Please go away from my window baby
             you’ll only in time turn around
without using vulgar words
             Please go from my doorway
You’ll only be let down
You say you are looking
for someone who stands strong
To protect you or defend you
Constantly thru right or wrong

Which requires only minor tweaking before it can become

Go ’way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I’m not the one you want, babe
I’m not the one you need
You say you’re looking for someone
Never weak but always strong
To protect you an’ defend you
Whether you are right or wrong

Bob Dylan in performance, Europe, 1966. Film still from 1966 European Tour footage, by D. A. Pennebaker. Courtesy of The Bob Dylan Center.

He knows he has hit a jackpot (one of many, to be sure), and he celebrates the occasion by following the draft verse above with a bit of doggerel:

Instead of following the rule
of going to school
                  I used to sit on the stool
                  with drool
An on the seventh day
I sat down
an said
   “oh let me write a song”
An the song was wrote
It is

He first performed “It Ain’t Me, Babe” on July 24 at the Newport Folk Festival.

A second, similar notebook from about a year later in 1965 collects all kinds of stray bits of verse and a single diaryish item: “I once said to the German press that i called the music tractor music and one of them said ‘oh you mean working class music.’” It is impossible to read that or the verse fragments without hearing them in Dylan’s voice, from “cigarette ashes they cover the grass / the street it smells of broken glass” to “20 zebras with riders each wearing” to “Bodyguard is on the floor his head is in the pail.” Now and then a song will seem like it’s lurking right around the corner:

An death doesn’t exist
not owning but moaning
not moaning but mourning
not morning but evening
not evening but ?

What might be an early glimmer of “Like a Rolling Stone” (or “She’s Your Lover Now”) puts in an appearance:

She’s been raised in the castle yet her
mind’s in the gutter, she borrows
people’s heads promising tomorrow
she’s convinced every body except herself

But then the songs do start coming. All by itself appears “She aint no woman / she’s a man,” which will eventually become the chorus of the fragmentary “Jet Pilot.” (Also on this page is reference to Bob Kaufman, San Francisco poet and the first African American member of the Beat crowd.) A few pages later a quatrain ends with the line “death will not come, it’s not poison” and then a three-line sequence goes “see themselves in the funnel swallow their pride / life is hard / they do not die, it’s not poison.” Two lines further: “worthless knowledge.” A bit further still: “I wish I could write you a melody so plain / that would [illegible] you dear lady that would consel your pain / for [something blacked out] useless knowledge.” And so Dylan has in hand two bits from what will become “Tombstone Blues”:

Now the medicine man comes and he shuffles inside
He walks with a swagger and he says to the bride
“Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride
You will not die, it’s not poison”

and

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

In the middle of all this appears a trio of lines—“my sinful mama, you know she moves / like a mountain lion / she’s a junkyard princess”—that suggest both “From a Buick 6” and “Lunatic Princess Revisited.”

Watching the process as you turn the pages is like seeing a photograph slowly materialize in the developing bath, or maybe a statue freeing itself from the marble block. The two notebooks serve up Bob Dylan live and in color in various hectic portions of 1964 and 1965. You see him in cars, in bars, in airports and gas stations and people’s porches and living rooms, maybe with his shades on, smoking cigarettes, meeting interesting people, hearing the radio in the car or the kitchen, turning words and phrases loose from the accumulation in his subconscious and letting them fly around until they find a thermal and float home. The experience is as good as a movie.

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“A Daily Reminder of Important Matters” by Lucy Sante is excerpted from Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, written and edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, published by Callaway Arts & Entertainment.

Before I became a journalist, I was an academic cultural theorist. If you want to construct a scholarly argument, you cite other people. In journalism, it’s basically the same. But whatever academics or journalists claim, no matter how many times we do it, no matter how committed we are to sticking to the facts, absolute certainty does not exist.

When I was transitioning out of teaching at Yale en route to my current vocation, I took a brief detour through a journalism graduate program. There was this one professor we used to call “Sarge,” who was always blathering on about how the number-one rule of journalism was that you had to “get everything on record.” As my classmates scribbled away in their notebooks, I interrupted him. “What does that mean—get it on record?”

Sarge was flummoxed. “It means pull out your goddamn notebook, McCabe, and write down everything the subject says. That way when they say later that they never said it, you can pull out that notebook and say, ‘Yes, you did!’ When they threaten to sue you, you can pull out that notebook and say, ‘Go ahead, make my day!'”

Everyone nodded and laughed, scooping up Sarge’s pearls of wisdom. “But who’s to say they didn’t just make up what they told you? Or that you didn’t just make it up or distort what they said when you wrote it down?” I asked. “Then you get other people to talk to you,” Sarge replied, clearly exasperated, “and get them on the goddamn record, too!”

Everything in my lived experience up to that moment led me to reject this position as stubbornly naive, or absurd, the idea that THE TRUTH can be established through the steady accumulation of testimony, transcribed by a disinterested hand acting as judge and jury. Anyone who’s ever done an interview knows it isn’t a witness statement, and a memoir is even less so. Famous or not, people say the things they think other people want to hear and revise or hold back what they don’t. Contradictions and omissions aren’t simply a consequence of dissemblance or forgetting.

They’re the residue of feelings, not entirely erased, only obscured. Those who can “read” this half-hidden ink aren’t superhuman empaths who conceal their identities behind a mild-mannered facade to serve the noble cause of truth and justice. They’re just better at understanding that the truth appears as much in what’s not said as in what is, and in how it’s said, and when and where, and to whom, and why. Tuning your ear is totally different than sharpening your pencil. It starts with being in touch with yourself and being willing to risk exposing your own vulnerability to see or hear what someone else is trying to tell you.

This may be especially true for musicians, music journalists, and ardent music fans—all of us searchers. Thankfully for us, the celestial jukebox is a limitless lost and found. Think about your favorite songs, especially the sad ones, and why they resonate for you so strongly. It’s not necessarily the specific circumstances being described in the lyrics or the precise way the notes are arranged on the staff. Instead, it’s in the imaginary conversation you’re having with the artist, and how it helps you to connect in some way with your own experience.

That experience often indexes something you’ve lost, whether consciously or not. Songs can help us bring it back, recollect it, make sense of it, or at least learn how to live with its absence. Even though memory is never identical to the thing that’s been lost, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to remember. It means we should try harder. As time goes by, we may find ourselves further removed from one kind of truth (what it was) but edging ever closer to another (what it means).

Going into my interview with Sinéad O’Connor, I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as the interviews I’ve done before with artists such as Laurie Anderson, John Cale, or Thurston Moore—all big names and big talents, but not people I personally related to on the same level, not people whose music has made me weep so much or so deeply. I knew that O’Connor’s story wouldn’t be easy for me to tell, but that’s why it felt especially important for me to try.

Although my profile would be built on my interview with O’Connor, to bring context to her story I also interviewed feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna and music critic Jessica Hopper. When I started putting all of the tape together, I assumed that the hardest part was going to be packing everything I wanted to cover into five minutes of airtime.

Changing the narrative about O’Connor proved far more difficult. The main point of contention was over using tape from her 1992 SNL appearance. Rather than leading with it, or bringing it in at all, I wanted the show host to refer to it only briefly in their introduction—something along the lines of:

“Sinéad O’Connor rose to the top of the charts with an unforgettable song [Clip of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’]. Two years later a controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live dimmed the limelight. But O’Connor is out now with a new memoir, and she says that moment re-railed—rather than derailed—her career.” Allyson McCabe has the story.

Then, rather than reminding the audience that O’Connor was canceled, I wanted to show how and why she was canceled. That meant bringing in tape from Joe Pesci’s appearance on SNL the week after hers. Pesci goes after O’Connor aggressively in his three-plus minute monologue, at first referring to what happened fairly neutrally, as “an incident.” He then tells the audience he thought tearing up the photo was wrong, and explains that he asked someone to paste it back together. He holds up the reassembled photo and the audience applauds wildly. “Case closed,” Pesci says. But it wasn’t.

Pesci went on to implicitly blame Tim Robbins, who had hosted the episode, for “the incident,” for letting O’Connor get away with it. Then he remarked that she was lucky, “because if it was my show, I would have gave her such a smack.” Pesci held his hand to demonstrate the smack, and, again, the crowd broke out in applause—accompanied by cheers. Pesci took it in, smiling from ear to ear. “I would have grabbed her by her…by her….”

This is where I wanted to abruptly cut the tape. The word Pesci says next is “eyebrows,” a crack about O’Connor being bald, but of course the audience would hear the cut and think what he said was “pussy,” and think of Donald Trump. And that is exactly what I wanted them to think.

My point wasn’t that Pesci = Trump. I know that Pesci was reciting lines he probably didn’t write and expressing wiseguy viewpoints he may or may not have actually felt. (Pesci’s wiseguy character Vincent LaGuardia Gambini from the 1992 comedy film My Cousin Vinny was reprised in 1998, when he put out an album called Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You. It includes “Wise Guy,” a misogynistic gangsta rap song in which Pesci brags, in character, about how to treat “bitches.”)

What I wanted to show with my tape cut was that Pesci’s lines landed because the audience felt them. The point was not that he was a misogynist. It was that the audience, and by extension the larger culture, was misogynist.

In using that tape cut, I hoped to pose an implicit question: To what extent did misogyny mediate the way we saw O’Connor in 1992? And to what extent is it still woven—consciously and unconsciously—into our cultural scaffolding? This isn’t just a matter of perspective, male versus female. As a journalist, I’ve worked with men who acknowledge misogyny as a problem, and women who don’t. When it seeps into reporting it’s rarely overt—which is what makes it so powerful, and so hard to fight.

In this case, my editor (at that time) was a middle-aged cisgender heterosexual white man who would certainly identify himself as feminist. Nevertheless, he used words and phrases like “too suggestive” and “overkill” to urge me to dial Pesci down and bring more of O’Connor’s “incident” in for “balance.” Which one of us was right?

On the one hand, journalists are supposed to be neutral: just the facts, ma’am. That’s what we’re taught and how we’re trained. But deciding what tape to use and where to cut it are intentional choices with powerful ramifications. They deeply influence how we frame a story and give it context and meaning—and how you as the public see and hear it.

Therefore, our clash was more than a trivial difference of opinion. It was, on the contrary, a fundamental though unspoken disagreement. My editor wanted to include O’Connor’s performance to remind listeners about the controversy that she invited or even provoked. I wanted to include Pesci’s monologue to show how O’Connor was reprimanded and why.

Better, I think, for journalists to be transparent about these positions and to own them, rather than to pretend that one is objective and the other is biased. But deadlines are deadlines, especially in daily news, so rather than argue, I agreed to include brief clips from both tapes for “balance.”

However, I pushed for a new title, so it was “Sinéad O’Connor Has a New Memoir…and No Regrets” rather than the one the editor had floated, in which she “proclaimed” that she has no regrets. I also landed on the point that what O’Connor won’t do is apologize for surviving—which was far more suggestive than anything I would have been able to show with the tape cut.

In the end, I think my title reflected the main point of the story, but it wasn’t the whole story. Even if I had five years instead of five minutes, it would have been impossible to present a comprehensive biography. O’Connor explicitly denounced several unauthorized attempts in the early 1990s. (There are a couple of pre-SNL Sinéad O’Connor biographies floating around, such as Jimmy Guterman’s Sinéad: Her Life and Music [New York: Warner Books, 1991] and Dermott Hayes’s Sinéad O’Connor: So Different [London: Omnibus Press, 1991]). In 2012, she pulled out of a biography project that she had officially sanctioned after only six months.

Even in her own 2021 memoir, O’Connor acknowledged that there are significant challenges in telling her own story, namely, that her recollections are riddled with inconsistencies, gaps in her memory that she attributes to not being present for large chunks of her life. She says other memories are private, or concern matters she would prefer to forget. In the foreword, she tells readers that she hopes her book will nevertheless make sense. If not, she advises us to “try singing it and see if that helps.”

I want to take that advice and honor it, to accept the inevitable gaps and inconsistencies, the difficulty of getting it right, and the impossibility of pure neutrality. I therefore plan not simply to recite O’Connor’s story, but to “sing” it bel canto, which, as she explains in her memoir, has nothing to do with mastering scales, breathing, or any other formal technique. Instead, it’s about singing in your own voice, allowing your emotions to take you to the notes, and allowing the notes to take you to the truest expression of the song.

Such an approach entails not only close reading but telling O’Connor’s story intimately, feeling the feelings myself, and letting the notes that are inside of me spill out onto the page from time to time, a bit like Fiona Apple’s duet with O’Connor in the “Mandinka” YouTube video. My goal, simultaneously easier and more difficult than conventional biography, is to illustrate why O’Connor matters, and to ground that assessment in the circumstances of her life and work and in mine.

As you read, I invite you to hold up a lighter, or a mirror, and sing along with us too, all of us piercing through the darkness together…journeying toward the kind of catharsis that only music can bring. Where better for us to begin than at the beginning?

______________________________

Excerpted from Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters, by Allyson McCabe, © 2023, published with permission from the University of Texas Press

But Will You Love Me Tomorrow is an oral history of the girl groups of the ’60. The songs that the girl groups created and sang are timeless, and have become embedded in American culture. Songs like “Mr. Postman,” “Be My Baby,” “Chapel of Love,” and “Where did our love go? ” As these songs rose to the top of the charts, girl groups cornered the burgeoning post-war market of teenage rock and roll fans, indelibly shaping the trajectory of pop music in the process. However, no matter how essential these songs are to the American music canon, many of the artists remain all but anonymous to most listeners. We interviewed over 100 people for this project, including women from acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, as well as the songwriters, to their agents, managers, and sound engineers—and even to the present-day celebrities inspired by their lasting influence.

Our book gives particular insight into the experiences of the female singers and songwriters who created the movement, but we didn’t want to speak for the women; we wanted them, as much as possible, to tell their own story. This oral history is a compilation of the stories we have access to and people shared only what they felt comfortable disclosing, constructed from what was told to us as the people we are, by the people who lived it, and it represents only a small portion of those people’s lives. These women’s contributions to society and culture have been neglected for so long, and continue to be so, and we wanted to honor the women in the project by letting their voices lead.  We have been attending doo-wop shows for years and wrote this book not only because we love this music but also because we think this history is important and necessary.

Below, The Marvelettes, the girl group that introduced Motown to the nation.

*

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: We lived in the projects then, and Georgeanna and Wyanetta lived on the street opposite mine. And so we would always sit up and play cards and music and stuff like that. I think Gladys’s thing was, “What else do we have to do? So let’s do this.”

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I already had in mind to ask Georgia Dobbins to be a part of my group. She was not only smart, but she was very kind. All the girls looked up to her, wanting to be just like her. I wanted her to be in the group, so I saved a spot for her.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: Gladys needed another girl. She just came over to the house and asked me to sing background with her.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I heard on the loudspeaker about the talent show.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: If we did win, we had a chance to go to Motown and do the song.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I said, “Well, I’m going to get some girls.” I approached Georgeanna, and she brought Wyanetta and Katherine along.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: We came in fourth. Some of the teachers thought that we were exceptionally good and should have won and our teacher told us—Mrs. Shirley Sharpley—she told us that we were really good, and so she and several other teachers said that maybe we could go to Motown and sing.

Shirley Sharpley, The Marvelettes’ teacher: I thought they should have won. When I complimented them and told them that they should have won, they asked me if I would take them for the audition down at Motown.   The kids had the telephone number and I followed through. I just called. It was Gladys who gave me the number. I called and got an appointment.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Oh, honey, oh, honey, please  yes, we were country girls—they didn’t want us to do anything. They didn’t want to be bothered with those country girls, because Inkster was a small community—Detroit is much larger.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: They looked at us like we were dumb. To them, we were little young, country, dumb-looking chicks. We were square, we weren’t glamorous at all. We were country kids coming to the big city.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Berry [Gordy] was the one who told us to come up with an original song. Berry said, “These girls are good, but do they have their original material? You can come back when you have your own original material.” You always get that “but” in there.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I thought it would be a month or two before Georgia finished the song, but in just two or three days, she was at my front door singing it.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: I was standing by the window. I was waiting for the postman to bring me a letter from this guy who was in the Navy. That’s how I came up with the lyrics. Then I made up the tune.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: That’s the reason the song came out. You know when you’re eighteen, nineteen years old—you have a problem. [laughing]

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: I just hummed it over and over and changed it to the way it should be. I improvised.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: When we went to Motown with “Please Mr. Postman,” they were excited because we had brought them original material. Here again, Motown was growing, it was building. So bringing in new material was like bringing in new blood.

The few people there when we came, they were not necessarily of the magnitude you may expect them to be because you’re a new company. You can’t have everybody be perfect. You had a couple of writers, but you really didn’t have a stable of writers. Therefore, it was vitally important to get original material. At that point Robert Bateman was there, Brian was there.

Brian Holland, songwriter: She came to Motown, to Robert Bateman and I, with the idea of “Postman.” We said, “Oh, that sounds great, that sounds great. Let us go and finish it—write this song.”

Marc Taylor, music writer: Holland and Bateman made some adjustments to “Please Mr. Postman” in order to fit it to Gladys’s voice and also arranged the background vocals; thus, they took part in the writing credits.

Brian Holland, songwriter: It was really Robert Bateman and I and Georgia Dobbins that did the song. Then Freddie Gorman came in.

Mickey Stevenson, Motown A&R: And Freddie Gorman was a postman. You know, he was originally a postman.

Marc Taylor, music writer: Gorman, who was actually a mail carrier, also offered a few suggestions and became one of the five official writers of the song: William Garrett, an Inkster classmate who provided the title; Georgia Dobbins; Robert Bateman; Freddie Gorman; and Brian Holland.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: A lot of people are on that disc, but, see, if you can find one of the discs that came out earlier—you would only see the three names, which was Brianbert [Brian Holland and Robert Bateman’s production team] and Georgia Dobbins.

Brian Holland, songwriter: No, no, no…I don’t really know that. I can’t answer that because I don’t really recall that—I know she had a part of a song, but we had to finish a lot of that song—period. She didn’t have a complete song—she had the idea of “Please Mr. Postman.”

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: We were going through rehearsals for about a week or so before they brought out the contracts. When it came time for the contract, I presented it to my dad and he hit the roof. He asked my mother, “How long has this girl been singing?” My dad did not know I could sing. My brothers and I were raised in the church and grew up a little strict. My mom would let me out. She knew I was having little rehearsals in the basement.

I’m not knocking my parents, but they thought that when they signed the contract, that if we didn’t make it, they’d have to pay that money back. That was their understanding. They didn’t know anything but going to work and going to church on Sunday morning. And by them being Christian, entertainment and nightclub life was out of the question. That was ununacceptable. Back then they’d call you “fast,” “no good,” “won’t amount to anything.”

My mother’s illness was also the reason why they wouldn’t sign for me. I’m the oldest child in the family with six brothers and my family depended on me totally. My mother was ill all of my life.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Georgia’s mother was sick with a bad back, and Georgia made it clear that she was not going to leave her mother if we had to tour. Georgia wanted me to sing lead, so she taught me the song.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: When my dad wouldn’t sign the contract, it was just like somebody had snatched the rug from up under me. It’s like wanting something and somebody just takes it away from you. You want to go, you’ve got your outfit ready, but Daddy says no. That’s the way it was for me. You’ve got your little dress and your shoes laid out, and you’re ready to go to the party, but Daddy said, “No, you ain’t going.”

I stayed in seclusion for about a year. I didn’t even come outside. I was so hurt. I felt…robbed. I wouldn’t listen to the radio or anything. It wasn’t until 1978 before I sang again.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Well, you know what? Yes—she was sad, but after you have plenty of time to think, after everything is all over, back in the day, we didn’t think that much about it because we were busy performing. But then, after a while, you begin to think about it, and you say, “Georgia, who wrote ‘Please Mr. Postman,’ that was her claim to fame was ‘Please Mr. Postman,’ because none of us could write anything like that.” But she didn’t understand that for a while.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: Gladys had a lead voice and the rest of them didn’t. When my dad refused to sign for me, I got Gladys and told her, “You’ve got to sing lead on this song.”

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: I do remember that the session was long and then, on top of that, Gladys had to sing the lead because Georgia wasn’t any longer there. Then the background—Wyanetta, Georgeanna, and myself…we, and Wanda—because when Georgia left, Gladys took and recruited Wanda Young—so that means the four of us would be back there singing the background and Gladys would be singing the lead. Marvin Gaye played the drums. It was a long, long day.

Martha Reeves, The Vandellas: I think Gladys Horton gave her heart and soul, saying, “There must be some word today / from my boyfriend who’s so far away / please, Mister Postman, look and see / if there’s a letter in your bag for me.”

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Then the rest of it almost was history.

Brian Holland, songwriter: Let me tell you something—I was so elated when I first heard it on the radio. The Black station first started playing it. Then it became so popular, on CKLW—that was a big fifty-watt station at that time; it was the biggest station—they started playing it. That’s when it erupted. It became huge. I mean, that was the most exciting time for me as a songwriter to hear that song on the radio. Can you imagine? I mean, Jesus, it was like a miracle. It was a miracle. I mean, for me, as a songwriter, to hear that?

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: The next thing that we knew “Please Mr. Postman” was number one on the Billboard chart.

Billy Vera, musician: Don’t forget—the audience for rock and roll had now grown up to the point where they were out of high school. Even though there was no war on yet, a lot of boys went off to the draft. And so there were a lot of songs about soldiers—soldiers going away and the girl waiting at home for them.

Brian Holland, songwriter: Motown’s first big record was “Please Mr. Postman.”

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Really to be truthful. . . when our record hit number one, they were not ready. They went and began to scurry around, trying to find people to do this and do that, and all of a sudden they made it seem like it was really, really big. But Motown was not as big as they wanted people to believe it was.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Everything happened so fast. It was like one-two-three-four. The talent show, the recording of the record, the release date of the song, the date it hit the number one spot on Billboard—all in the same year of 1961.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: But then they had five little Black girls from the suburbs of Detroit that took them there a little bit faster than they were ready for.

Marc Taylor, music writer: Motown needed to milk “Please Mr. Postman” as much as it could in order to generate some much-needed cash for the company.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Motown had a tour that went out and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were the head-liners, and Mary Wells was on it. People began to start chanting—they wanted The Marvelettes. They caused so much noise, Berry called back and talked to Mrs. Edwards, which was his sister, to get us out there. Because if we didn’t come out there, there would be five other girls that they would take and announce them as The Marvelettes. Mrs. Edwards told us that.

The album had a picture of a mailman, but our picture wasn’t anywhere on it, because during that time, Black people weren’t allowed to put their pictures on it, because the prejudices of some white people. We couldn’t have our pictures on the front cover, I knew that.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Berry Gordy wanted The Marvelettes to quit school because we had a hot record out, people wanted to see us, and at the time, Motown was able to sell more records when people could see us.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: All of us began to start thinking that we need to get it together and go out there. Because if we didn’t go out there to sing the song that we made, Berry would get somebody who would. We definitely didn’t want anybody else going out there to be singing any song that we had made, so we all got together and began to pack our little rags and then we left. We went to Washington, DC; that’s where our first major gig was.

Romeo Phillips, The Marvelettes’ principal: George Edwards, who was married to Berry Gordy’s sister Esther, came to the school right after the girls, on their own, made “Please Mr. Postman,” and he was encouraging them to drop out of school. In fact, I got on him because he did not stop by the office first. He just came into the building and walked straight back to the music room. He was talking to the girls, and they were expressing some ambivalence about drop- ping out of school. I think this was near the time they were about to graduate.

My experience in show business. One hit does not a career make, and I was raising hell with Edwards. We belonged to the same fraternity. He was saying, “You have to strike while the iron’s hot.” And I remember very vividly telling him, “You can strike while the iron’s hot, but unless the iron’s plugged in, it’s going to get cool.”

I know they faced pressure from George Edwards and he went to the parents and the guardians of the girls and told them this is a chance of a lifetime, that they could always go back to school but they couldn’t always have the chance. Once the record is out, they’ll promote it…the usual things that a promoter says.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Mrs. Edwards and her husband became legal guardians of me. I was an orphan so early in my life, that it wasn’t until I met her that I found out my real birth date, my middle name, my mother’s and father’s names, and place of birth. I had to send off for my birth certificate for the courts to acknowledge and sign the Edwards on as my legal guardians over my business and money affairs. That knowledge opened up a brand-new door for me. I discovered part of my roots and where I came from, the West Indies.

Katherine Anderson The Marvelettes: Because Gladys was in foster care, and George Edwards was in the House, or something [Michigan state legislator]. They took Gladys and made her a ward of the court. That means that they would have to care for her and watch after her. But anyway, they made sure that the money and stuff was right, or whatever they did, and—because I was only sixteen years old then—all I can do is speculate.

Romeo Phillips, The Marvelettes’ principal: I tried to get the girls to stay in school. We did not want the girls to be caught out there with no marketable skill. But then George Edwards went by their homes and talked about striking while the iron’s hot. I will never for- give him for that—he’s dead now. I’m very disappointed in him and I’m sure that fate would have taken a different turn for those young ladies had they stayed in school and graduated. That would’ve served as a platform for them to move on to something else if show business didn’t pan out.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Unfortunately, that was the choice we had. We had a choice of staying in school or going out there and doing our record. So, why, if you were so family-oriented, would you think in terms of sending five other girls out there? Because the public doesn’t know what The Marvelettes look like anyway.

At sixteen years old, how could I know? How could any of us? Georgeanna was sixteen, Wyanetta was sixteen. We had the choice of going out there or staying in school, and all of us ended up making the choice—we made the record, we made it popular, and we were going out there and representing ourselves.

______________________________

Excerpted from But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

When I first encountered Andrew Chan’s work nearly a decade ago, my response was akin to that of hearing a great new recording artist: Who is this?! He was writing about Jazmine Sullivan’s 2014 album Reality Show, and clearly listening to women artists with what James Baldwin, quoting Henry James, might have called “perception at the pitch of passion.” Since then, we’ve had a chance to talk about our love of pop divas, academic training in race and culture, and something more basic that I might call a sheer appetite for performance: as critics, we are trying to explain but also to generate a felt sense of what makes singers so moving.

Chan exercises this skill across Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023). Whether he is describing the “leathery lows” of Carey’s voice, the “sly insouciance” of a track like “Fantasy,” or the nuanced meaning of “Candy Bling”—a song “poised precisely between bitterness and sweetness” that “acknowledges that some losses can never be restored”—he is explaining why Mariah matters to pop history and, more specifically, to her fans. In a sense, the book tells a story about contemporary fandom by tracking Carey’s spectacular survival of the transition from the analog to the digital age. Chan shows how fans have analyzed, emulated, and obsessed over her music in online forums, while also finding comfort and salvation in more private, intimate encounters with her voice: “I can’t separate my love from Mariah from the belief that her voice has saved lives, including gay ones like mine,” he writes.

In the following conversation, we delve into the nature of these encounters—including the gifts and techniques through which Carey creates them.

*

Emily Lordi: I want to begin by saying frankly that I love this book—that as I was reading it, I just kept annotating it with exclamations of surprise and appreciation. I know you started writing it in the wake of the publication of Mariah’s memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and I’m interested in the fact that you included less biographical background in your book than some readers might expect. What you’ve written is the story of why her musicianship matters. I wanted to ask you about this choice to keep her at arm’s length.

Andrew Chan: I’m glad you picked up on this. I did have some initial hesitation about doing this project because of how recently her autobiography had come out. But I realized that what I wanted to do was very different. My book is primarily a work of criticism, and I was looking to fill a void that I felt existed in writing about Mariah. There weren’t any books that went into sufficient depth about her music, what it does, and how it does it. I knew early on that I wasn’t interested in focusing on her celebrity persona or picking through the details of her personal life—except in the instances where those details could help illuminate something about how the music achieves its effects and how we respond to it.

Maybe this is rigid or old-fashioned, but I tend to think that, while it’s important to consider an artist’s intentions and her biography, that information should never crowd out the sensory, textural, emotional qualities of the aesthetic experience. At a certain point, the art has to be given space to stand on its own. And maybe this is what led me to begin the book with an anecdote about me stumbling on YouTube videos that analyze Mariah’s vocal style and skills. Those videos are incredibly, almost hilariously granular—and nerdy!—in the attentiveness of their listening. And I think, like them, this book expresses a desire to get close to the music, to put our ears up to it.

EL: I love that you emphasize, in the book, that this sound is not just the result of Mariah being born with a great voice, but that she arrived at it through experimentation and innovation. You also make a point to not privilege her songwriting and production over her vocal genius.

AC: Mariah is incredibly deliberate in how she creates her sonic world. I think it’s interesting that there’s been an effort among some Mariah superfans, particularly those who want to see her receive her flowers, to accentuate her songwriting above her other skills. Mariah has even said a few times that she thinks of herself primarily as a songwriter. I understand this impulse. It’s partly a way of addressing the fact that many people don’t know Mariah has cowritten almost all of her songs. It’s also a response to what is considered important and worthy of respect in music culture—whether it’s Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Prince, the musicians who have been most revered in the rock era are singer-songwriters who operate at a kind of auteurist level, who sort of style themselves as lone wolves. That’s a dominant model of artistic greatness.

But I didn’t want to just take that framework as a given. Yes, Mariah is a brilliant songwriter; she’s got a distinctive sense of humor, an uncanny ear for catchy melodies, and a gift for creating sonic pleasure. But what’s crucial is that she’s writing for her own voice—her writing and her production are often driven by the marvel that is her instrument. That’s why I think it’s more interesting to talk about how these different skills work together and bolster one another.

EL: Within African American literary studies, which is my first point of entry, I think of the work of Farah Jasmine Griffin, who talks about the practice of trying to legitimate Black artists through a Western-civ framework—Ralph Ellison gets compared to Herman Melville, for instance. There’s this impulse to identify a white male analog as a way of authorizing Black genius.

AC: Right. And in the case of Mariah, that problem is compounded by a historical lack of representation and valorization of Black women singer-songwriter-producers, at least in the context of pop and R&B. Now, I certainly don’t want to give short shrift to the work of women like Valerie Simpson, Patrice Rushen, Angela Winbush—female R&B pioneers who preceded Mariah. But in the era that Mariah came up in, audiences hadn’t been exposed to a lot of images of Black women artists calling the shots and practicing their studio wizardry.

But if you listen to Mariah’s music across the decades, it’s hard not to notice her attention to detail, how all the elements—from her lead vocals to the backgrounds to the ad-libs to the instrumentation—click into place, in a delicious way, regardless of who she’s working with. And this level of attention is evident in the way she talks about her music in interviews.

Another thing about Mariah that doesn’t conform to prevailing narratives of musical genius: she’s a heavily, openly quotational artist. In this way, she is fundamentally hip-hop. That’s not to say that all or even most of her songs incorporate elements of other people’s work. But, like many of the iconic hip-hop artists of her time, she does get a lot of her creative, compositional fuel from the quotation of preexisting music. Interpolation and allusion are generative forces in African American music, from jazz to R&B to hip-hop. So if you’re fixated on pure originality—which, of course, doesn’t exist—as a prerequisite for genius, then you’re going to miss out on the conversation with music history that Mariah has sustained throughout her career. She’s a great practitioner of sampling, and she knows how to use the inspiration of preexisting music to create something that’s her own.

EL: What do you think are her greatest sampling achievements?

AC: I could go on and on about this! Of course, I have to mention her use of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” which serves as the foundation for “Fantasy.” Mariah brought “Genius of Love” to coproducer Dave “Jam” Hall, and because it was a song that had inspired several hip-hop riffs and remakes in the 1980s, it allows for a dense layering of music-historical associations.

In the book, I talk about how I’m fascinated with the fact that Mariah often chooses source material from the ’80s, the decade she grew up in, rather than canonical old-school soul and funk samples. That’s part of what makes her taste in samples so distinctive. For her, sampling is connoisseurship; it’s tied to her experience of R&B in the era of her youth. And she’s often highlighting R&B artists who didn’t have huge crossover success on the mainstream pop charts, people like Stacy Lattisaw and Loose Ends and DeBarge.

EL: I love that—this idea that she’s using sampling as a way of promoting artists who didn’t benefit from the major institutional support she had right out of the gate…

AC: Yes, exactly. There’s a fierce attachment to R&B history in her music that I find really moving.

I will also add that, if I had to name my favorite instance of sampling in Mariah’s music, I’d have to go with something that’s more of an interpolation—as in, the source material has been reperformed and rerecorded, rather than being directly lifted and looped. It’s in her hip-hop remix of “I Still Believe,” from 1998, which interpolates the song “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s one of her wackiest and funniest choices of a musical reference, but she isn’t exactly playing it for laughs; it’s seductive and beautiful while also being utterly absurd and even a little creepy.

But can I ask you quickly about the Whitney Houston book you’re writing now, which I’m so excited about? I assume these questions about authorship are also relevant to what you’re writing, because Whitney was a genius vocalist who did not write her own songs. How are you handling that, with regard to these dominant narratives we’ve just talked about?

EL: Yes, all of this is definitely relevant. I’ve been thinking about the cultural narrative that people with great voices are just born that way. You say in the book that flaunting this kind of voice is almost like a supreme act of vanity, like preening. But I love this idea of just letting your light shine, not hiding it. And there’s an undervaluation of the amount of work that goes into cultivating a naturally beautiful voice. Whitney talks about this in interviews, that her singing is “more than a notion.” You have to practice and rehearse, and she certainly trained for years with her mother, Cissy Houston.

People do talk about Whitney’s instincts—which is an idea that makes me nervous, because of its proximity to the idea that Black art is just a primitive, spontaneous expression of natural abilities. At the same time, I do think some people get to a place where they just know what to do! They weren’t born knowing, but they have a particular capacity to learn very quickly and integrate musical information from different sources and then use it in the service of their own art. So, I guess this is all to say, I am trying to mediate between the discourse of “naturalness” and the idea of rigorous study when discussing Whitney’s art.

AC: I love that we’re talking about this. There is something that I note in a section of my book that focuses on the influence of gospel music on Mariah’s singing: I say that she has an intuitive sense of how to fill and decorate musical space. And though their vocal styles are quite different, this intuition, which is obviously the result of years of study, is true of Whitney as well. Both of these women are masters of the art of ad-libbing, which you examine so magnificently in your book The Meaning of Soul. I mean, listen to a Whitney song like “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” and you realize that all the choruses are basically built out of ad-libs!

EL: OK, as a last question, I want to ask you about Mariah and the sublime.

AC: Well, you’ve hit on something in the book that I’m a little insecure and self-doubting about. I was worried about the invocation of the sublime and the ecstatic being a turnoff to some readers. This kind of talk felt like it could easily get overwrought or overblown. I was nervous that people just wouldn’t take me seriously if I brought the language of spirituality into my analysis. You can’t prove that something is sublime.

But at the end of the day, I had to just be honest about my experience of Mariah’s music. The words “transcendent” and “sublime”—these have a long history and tradition behind them. If we’re going the literary route, we could talk about Edmund Burke, or Emily Dickinson’s idea that poetry is the thing that takes the top of your head off; if we’re going the cinema route, which is my main professional background, we can talk about directors like Carl Dreyer or Andrei Tarkovsky or Kenji Mizoguchi.

This might sound silly to some people, but I believe Mariah, in her way, belongs in this tradition. I was thinking about my young self listening to Mariah, getting head-to-toe body chills. What is sublimity if not that? Whether it’s Dickinson or Tarkovsky or Mariah Carey, these artists operate at the edge of what’s possible, and they use our capacity for awe to usher us into another reality.

The only thing I could do to help prop up this claim was to break down the elements that help Mariah achieve these effects. In the book, I talk about a pivotal moment in a deep cut from 1997, called “Outside”; she performs most of that song in a very wispy, fragile, breathy tone, but at the climax, all of a sudden her voice explodes into a powerful belt, with almost no warning. It’s a shock to the ears, but it comes from a place of raw emotion; this is an autobiographical song about her experience growing up as a mixed-race girl.

That stylistic choice is strategic; she knows that she is creating a rupture and asking the listener to dive into it with her. In neuroscience, there’s the concept of mirror neurons—when we witness someone doing something, we are simultaneously imagining and sensing ourselves doing it too. When we hear Mariah singing, those neurons are firing away in our brains. When her voice moves, we can’t help but move with it.

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Andrew Chan writes regularly about music, film, and books for 4Columns. His work has also been published by the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, NPR, the New Yorker, and Reverse Shot.

Emily Lordi is a writer and critic who has published three books on Black music and culture: Black Resonance (2013), Donny Hathaway Live (33 1/3 series, 2016), and The Meaning of Soul (2020). She is currently writing a biography of Whitney Houston (forthcoming in 2025) that reassesses her genius and impact. Her essays and profiles have appeared in several venues, most frequently the New Yorker online and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she is a writer at large. She is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and lives in Nashville.

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Andrew Chan’s Why Mariah Carey Matters is available now from University of Texas Press.

In the winter of 2000, my college roommates and I were on a mission. Originally shepherded together as three athletes—two of us track, one soccer—we were soon united by a common cause: we wanted to download as much music as possible. Our weapon of choice was Napster. We would initiate hundreds of downloads before heading to breakfast, class, practice, or going to sleep, and the songs would cascade onto our hard drives. A fraction of our actual musical bounty would reach Winamp, where the neon green song titles glowed against the black background.

Both of my roommates were named Matt. Soccer Matt focused on techno and classic rock; Track Matt handled rap, and I hunted for anything from merenhouse to deep cut R&B. By some divine intervention, I downloaded a song titled “Sundown” by Gordon Lightfoot.

The song entranced me from the start: the hypnotizing, almost eerie opening, Lightfoot’s rich voice, and the dramatic lyrics. Back then I was an undergraduate philosophy and English double major, and had just started taking fiction writing courses. I had found that a playlist helped me to push through other coursework, but for creative writing, I liked the continuity of a single song on repeat. “Sundown” became that song.

When you play a single song on repeat for hours, at some point the song becomes a mystical companion. You less hear it and are more clothed in it. It is an act, however minor, of transfiguration.

I’d play the song on repeat while writing a short story set in the New Mexico desert. Although there’s some dissonance between writing a story in the American southwest and the work of a Canadian folk singer, the song’s spirit matched the story I was trying to tell. A young middle-distance runner named Spader sprints in the Jornada del Muerto, running in squares and circles. When not training, Spader listens to his cantankerous grandfather, Blake, tell stories of how he built Trinity: the atomic bomb that was tested in the desert. Wracked by guilt, Blake is convinced the bomb is still there, its heart beating 50 years later.

“Sundown” got me to that place. The haunting feel; the sense of dread. The love and lust and fear. The way the song pointed toward an unspoken world that extended beyond its end. Isn’t that also what a great short story does—compress the tension of a life into a tense, revealing scene?

I wrote many stories while in undergraduate writing workshops—ones based on my family in Newark and the Bronx, or thinly veiled attempts at the Faulknerian South—but my desert story kept reeling through my mind. I’d think about it while running. I revised it again and again. I met with my professor, who cut word after word, but told me the story was absolutely alive (a generous professor’s encouragement to a young writer is priceless).

Although the story’s setting entranced me, I now realize the story symbolizes something else for me: the world-expanding power of imagination. The story was a microcosm of storytelling writ large; an ardent attempt to live another life, to empathize with another’s existence. It was my story; not mine in autobiography (except for the running), but mine in devotion. I had worked it into existence, and I was working to discover its center. “Sundown” was a companion, a conduit.

After college, I expanded the story into a novel. I wrote, revised, shared it with my graduate school professors (bless them), my wife (doubly bless her). I submitted the manuscript to agents, got partial and full reads, but no representation. Some notes were incredibly pleasant: “It’s clear you’re a very talented writer, and I really like the premise – the idea of a nuclear scientist returning to New Mexico and considering what he had done had me very intrigued. You also have an extremely good flair for details and your prose is impressive. That said, I’m afraid I just didn’t find myself investing in the narrative as I would have liked.” Others were more direct: “No thank you.”

Years of rejections later, I trimmed the story down to a novella. That version was published in the lit mag StorySouth, and in my second story collection, Ember Days. But because the full novel version was never published, the story feels unfinished. For years, I held on to the various printed drafts of the story. Those paper drafts are now gone, but I sometimes search for the files in old emails. I open the message, and then close it, as if I’m worried that I’ll release a curse.

Everyone is susceptible to the call of nostalgia, but writers are especially so. Our old manuscripts—however trite and embarrassing they might be—are records of our formation. We had to write them in order to find our own route.

Whenever I hear the opening notes of “Sundown,” I’m brought back to those years—optimistic, ambitious, frustrating—that were spent writing that novel. A manuscript and a song are alike in that way; they can transport us back to a potent moment in time: a powerful and dangerous alchemy. I lived within that song in the same way that I lived within that story, and their simultaneity created a dependency.

The nostalgia that pulls me back to “Sundown” and that manuscript is a temptation that I need to avoid. I’m a different writer now; I’m a different person. I had to write that story then, but returning to it now—living among those words in the earnest attempt to revise it further—would be akin to reliving those years again. It is one thing to read a published story of our past; to look upon a finished work with a mixture of amusement and appreciation. But it is dangerous to rekindle an unfinished work. I’ll let that manuscript rest; I’ll let that song end.

For nearly two decades, Taylor Swift has gifted us with music for every moment and feeling. There’s the heartbreak and angst she’s most famous for, but true Swifties also know the joy, ambition, wisdom, rage, sincerity, humor, obsession, growth, sense of possibility, and resilience throughout her ten-album discography (not to mention the re-records with tracks from the vault).

A truly magical part of being a Swiftie, especially these days, is the communal appreciation of her work, so I asked 10 Swiftie authors if they would each choose one of her albums—also referred to as eras—and recommend a book to match. Their selections span centuries, from the mid-1800s to 2023. Some of the connections between books and albums are immediately apparent, while others are quieter. These more surprising pairings go beyond plot and character similarities and into tone, emotion, vibes, and the authors’ personal memories.

So many of these authors came of age alongside Swift and have the stories to prove it. I, too, remember where I first listened to each album: sashaying across my college campus to Speak Now, driving through the canyons of Los Angeles in my mid-20s blasting 1989, taking walks alone in the woods (appropriately) in my early 30s, a few months after the pandemic outbreak, humming folklore. You will see in these responses not only the way Swift’s music has changed and developed, but the way we have all grown with it—with her—as people, writers, and readers.

TAYLOR SWIFT: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Chosen by Umang Kalra, author of fig

I think I was nine when I first read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and then maybe 12 when I watched it come to life on a crackly television screen, suddenly possessed with the need to sell my hair and save my family from fictional financial ruin, to be proposed to with desperation that I did not yet know how to even properly imagine, to write and write and write and have that be my life.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard (or rather absorbed by osmosis) Taylor Swift’s debut album, Taylor Swift. I remember being huddled around a screen in the computer room at a friend’s house, watching Taylor’s blonde ringlets and startling features as she danced around fire and screamed that she really really hates that stupid old pickup truck she wasn’t allowed to drive! The rest, of course, is history.

Both Taylor Swift and Little Women live in my head as memories of disjointed attempts at being way more grown up than I had any business being. On some level, both of these works are about children trying to be older in fantastical, misguided ways—ways that make the grownups laugh a bit, whether it’s Mrs. March being so fully entertained by the girls’ plays or it’s us, now, looking back at our younger selves sobbing to songs like “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “Invisible.” There is so much idealism in childishness, so much pristine, untouched ambition for a perfect world: “Wouldn’t it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?” asks Jo, while everyone around her is slightly amused by her seemingly deluded optimism. Taylor, more than a century later, feeling the same kind of complicated, prismatic love and having nowhere to put it, seems to agree: “We could be a beautiful miracle, unbelievable.”

FEARLESS: The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld
Chosen by Caitlin Barasch, author of A Novel Obsession

I was an angsty teenager when I first listened to Fearless. It was 2008, and at 15 years old, I had just experienced my very first kiss with a boy I’d met on vacation who, regrettably, lived three thousand miles away. I spent that winter bereft and dreaming of California, where he lived, from the depths of a dark, cold November in New York. (Even remembering that period of my life, and its accompanying soundtrack, makes my prose angstier.) As we sent each other flirty messages on AOL Instant Messenger, “Fifteen” played on repeat: “‘Cause when you’re fifteen / Somebody tells you they love you / You’re gonna believe them / And when you’re fifteen / And your first kiss makes your head spin around / But in your life you’ll do things / Greater than dating the boy on the football team / But I didn’t know it at fifteen.”

Another queen of adolescent angst? Curtis Sittenfeld. Her second novel, The Man of My Dreams, follows a teenager named Hannah as she slowly, painfully grows up to realize the “man of her dreams” is a fiction. Sittenfeld’s deadpan humor and savage social observations, which manage to simultaneously honor and vilify the urge to obsess over boys who don’t deserve us, offers the same knowing wink and nod to a triumphant future as Taylor Swift provides in “Fifteen,” and also in “White Horse” with the lyrics: “‘Cause I’m not your princess, this ain’t our fairytale / I’m gonna find someone someday who might actually treat me well / This is a big world, that was a small town / There in my rear view mirror disappearing now.” I can even picture Hannah pretending to listen to Swift’s album ironically, while secretly feeling incredibly seen and validated by it! 

SPEAK NOW: The Adult by Bronwyn Fisher
Chosen by Marissa Higgins, author of A Good Happy Girl

Speak Now is the literary new adult of Taylor Swift’s albums, the emotional and lyrical little sister to Red, and eventually, evermore. Smart, moody, and sincere, Speak Now is a command, an imperative. Just tell me. Just set me free. Just rescue me. Writing this album between ages 18 and 20, Swift apparently suffered the same disarming vulnerability that swept not-famous high school grads across the country. Some, like Bronwyn Fischer’s protagonist, Natalie, find themselves living the future Swift describes in “Mean,” a PG fuck you to the townies: “Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city, and all you’re ever gonna be is mean.” For Natalie, the tender college freshman at the heart of Fischer’s debut novel, The Adult, the big old city is Toronto.

Natalie meets Nora, a lesbian in her thirties, by chance at a park near her college campus. The sheer serendipity of the meeting is amplified for shy, insecure Natalie because Nora expresses so much interest in her. “Who was I,” Natalie wonders, “If she was curious about me? Not the person I’d expected myself to be.” That sentiment fits all too well (sorry) with the unfortunately familiar age-gap power dynamics of “Dear John,” and the subsequent big emotions (even returning a text is not without an internal hero’s journey for Fisher’s lesbians) are in spirit with the pleading “come on, come on, don’t leave me like this, I thought I had you figured out” of “Haunted.”

Speak Now embodies the singular focus of loving someone we want to define us; if Natalie wants anything, it’s for Nora to consume her whole and spit her back out, fully formed, as the perfect partner. Both works are claustrophobic, healing returns to the years we spent making other people our identities.  

RED: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Chosen by Laura Sims, author of How Can I Help You 

It may seem like an odd pairing at first: Emily Bronte and Taylor Swift? But bear with me. Though its setting is late winter, I first read Wuthering Heights in autumn; now the season always brings to mind those stormy, shrouded moors, the backdrop to Heathcliff and Catherine’s exquisitely tormented love. I often find myself listening to Kate Bush keening the lines to her “Wuthering Heights” around that time… and similarly, the season draws me to Taylor Swift’s Red. Though it’s true that some key tracks are set in autumn, it’s more the album’s autumnal tone—like the novel’s—that stirs me: both works glow with an intensity of emotion like the last burst of color in the trees, and both brim with longing for what’s lost or in the past.

I can hear Heathcliff, post-Catherine, in the lines of “All Too Well,” a by turns mournful and fierce breakup ballad, singing, “Time won’t fly, it’s like I’m paralyzed by it;” and I hear Catherine, in spectral form, telling Heathcliff, “I’ll follow you, follow you home,” in “Treacherous.” I hear her again in “The Last Time,” singing, “Found myself at your door / Just like all those times before.” But it may be the title track, “Red,” that best expresses the synchronicity between these two works separated by hundreds of years. Everything has a color: the blue of “losing him,” the dark gray of “missing him,” but most of all, “loving him was red / Oh, red / Burning red.”

It’s true that the album and novel couldn’t come from more disparate worlds; you won’t find the class conflict, crippling illness, and frequent premature deaths of the 1800s in Red, just as you won’t see signs of our contemporary urban landscape or hear strains of pop music’s ferocious positivity in Wuthering Heights. But it’s their shared core that matters, one that holds obsessive, troubled love, haunted and haunting lovers, and, most of all, the “burning red” of all-consuming feeling.

1989: Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth
Chosen by Gina Chung, author of Sea Change

Released in 2014, 1989 marked Taylor Swift’s official crossover from country-pop star to pop star juggernaut. As a fellow Sagittarius born during that momentous year, I was instantly seduced by the big, juicy synth hooks and supercharged anthems of 1989. While reviews of the time noted that the album seemed to take a more lighthearted, arch tone to love and relationships (who can forget the brilliance of “But I’ve got a blank space, baby / And I’ll write your name”), the album is also full of softer emotional moments, including “Clean,” a gentle yet searing ballad about healing and moving on from a toxic, addictive relationship. 1989 is, for me, Taylor’s coming-of-age album, with many of the songs charting the awkward, exhilarating, and sometimes painful process of growing up.

1989 pairs brilliantly with the darkly hilarious and incredibly visceral Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth (which coincidentally was also published in 2014). Animals is about a codependent friendship between two young women—a bit like Broad City if it were set in London and a whole lot darker. Protagonist Laura is a flailing call center worker and aspiring writer, and for the last ten years, she’s been best friends with Tyler, an American whose wealth and easy, entitled charisma scaffold their hard-partying social life. But at 32, Laura finds herself engaged to the more stable Jim, a classical pianist who wants her to give up drinking and disapproves of her friendship with Tyler. Pulled between Tyler and Jim, Laura has to decide for herself what kind of future she wants and who she wants to become.

In between, there are lots of hijinks, dick jokes, meditations on drug and alcohol use, and memorable lines like “Was I, as I had long suspected, one part optimism two parts masochism, like all the best cocktails?” (Which could also describe how I feel about the emotional highs and lows of 1989.) And while I won’t spoil the ending of the book, let’s just say that “Clean” being the closer on the standard edition of 1989 is appropriate for the way Laura’s story unfolds, in more ways than one.

REPUTATION: For Her Consideration by Amy Spalding
Chosen by Pyae Moe Thet War, author of You’ve Changed

For Her Consideration by Amy Spalding swept me off my feet with its electric blend of Hollywood glamor, wonderful, dynamic characters that you want to grab brunch with, and a heavy dose of good old fashioned swoon. The story follows Nina Rice who, after a devastating breakup several years prior, has put up capital-W Walls around her heart, living on her own in the suburbs and focusing on her talent agency job. Enter Ari Fox, a young up-and-coming actress whose email account Nina is tasked with managing. Feelings emerge, and so on and so forth, until they fall for each other hard.

I’ve always loved Reputation because it sounds precisely like it was written by someone who was falling in real, true love (RIP Jaylor) after a period of fully believing that it just wasn’t for them—which is exactly what Nina does. When I hear Reputation lyrics like “Do the girls back home touch you like I do?” or “Is this the end of all the endings? / My broken bones are mending / With all these nights we’re spending” or “I’ll be there if you’re the toast of the town, babe / Or if you strike out and you’re crawling home,” I immediately picture Nina listening to this album on repeat in bed at night while daydreaming about Ari. And Ari’s point of view, that of a celebrity who is hesitant to bring a partner unfamiliar with the pitfalls of Hollywood fame into the spotlight, overlaps with songs like “Delicate” and “New Year’s Day.” Finally, although it goes without further explanation: “Dress” (IYKYK).

LOVER: You Should Feel Bad by Laura Cresté
Chosen by Kate Doyle, author of I Meant It Once

Lover is one of my favorite albums, and I turn to You Should Feel Bad—Laura Cresté’s poetry chapbook—for the same tender humor, biting intelligence, and wisdom wrung from one’s early twenties. Take, for example, Cresté’s poem “Mike.” The mid-twenties narrator finds herself in love with someone kinder than her past boyfriends, and we get this wry, sweet moment: “The way he loves me: wakes me with egg sandwiches / and says hey that poem / you wrote about your ex / is really good.” It’s a similar energy to the catchy jubilance of Lover’s “Paper Rings,” an upbeat track that goes rifling through good memories and laughs off fleeting arguments in a relationship that’s surprised both parties: “I hate accidents / Except when we went from friends to this.”

These unexpected moments we couldn’t have imagined when we were just a little younger is what Lover is all about: after the adolescent hope and longing of the early Taylor eras, after the break-up-shake-it-off-big-city energy of 1989, after whatever happened on Reputation, the Lover era is an entry into the greater complications of adulthood, but also its sweeter possibilities. There’s the romance of shared domesticity (“Lover”) and the sobering first experience of a loved one’s illness (“Soon You’ll Get Better”). There’s finally naming some bullshit you were too uncertain to speak of before now (“The Man”) and letting yourself be outright snarky where it’s called for (“I Forgot That You Existed”).

Cresté’s chapbook gets to the heart of these same difficulties and delights, the necessities and possibilities of early adulthood. In “A Fox’s Wedding,” she gives us this beautiful moment among friends, a life made for oneself: “Gemini birthday for Mike on the roof, overlooking the river. / Scraped-dry cheese plate and salad bowls, ice cream sandwiches / melting vanilla down our wrists, in the late-day light / that makes everyone beautiful.” Yet in the wider world, everything is broken: there’s the specter of climate change, there’s news of a woman randomly attacked in New Jersey. Meanwhile on Lover’s track “The Man,” rage seeps in around the album’s moments of joy. It’s so much easier to be a man: “When everyone believes you / What’s that like?” Or, as Cresté writes, “Women apologize for accidental touches— / pocketbook swinging widely, hand sliding down the subway pole. / A chorus of sorrys. Maybe it’s weak, but I love it / when we’re careful, because the world is not careful with us.”  

FOLKLORE: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Chosen by Samantha Fain and Téa Franco, editors of Kiss Your Darlings: A Taylor Swift Anthology

When Taylor Swift wrote folklore, Aimee Bender’s novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, must have been on the top of her Pinterest inspo board. As Rose, the protagonist, bites into a slice of her homemade birthday cake, she realizes she has developed a mysterious ability: she can taste her mother’s emotions within it, and the flavor is frighteningly hollow. Fearful of her discovery and its consequences, Rose goes on a journey to understand her family’s emotions: their origins, their impact, and her place within their tangle.

We noticed the similarities between Bender and Swift’s writing immediately in this narrative.  Bender matches folklore’s lyrical precision through her own lyrical prose, with sentences like “you get so used to the subtleties of beige and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear.” Both authors’ rich imagery and metaphor bring the growing pains of girlhood alive, making the audience want to lay on the floor and cry. Just as the characters in folklore feel melancholic, isolated, and overwhelmed, Rose feels a similar grief as she navigates her ability to feel her family’s pain without fully understanding the reasoning behind their pain. An outsider in her own story, she interprets every detail of her life into a remedy for her family’s conflict. Rose is a bit of a mirrorball herself when it comes to her relationship with her family, or, as she says, “I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.”

EVERMORE: Weyward by Emilia Hart
Chosen by Jinwoo Chong, author of Flux

It’s impossible not to group the evermore era, Taylor’s ninth studio album, with its sister project, folklore; both were released in the same year, marked a stylistic tangent from the radio pop of Lover, and ended just as quickly with the dawn of the Midnights era shortly after. But that’s how best to describe evermore: contained, self-sufficient, a respite within Taylor’s larger body of work that relies on previously underrepresented themes in her music: magic, fidelity, the allure and soul of the natural world.

Emilia Hart’s Weyward feels at home in this kind of world. The novel follows the stories of three women centuries apart in 2019, 1619, and 1942, who each learn a form of resilience and agency among secrets, madness, murder, and war. The aesthetics are fine-tuned and pitch perfect: ancient woods, crumbling manors and cottages, and powerful witchcraft. And still, both the album and novel contain a kind of grief, patched over and scarred but still there, nurtured and weathered by women who go elsewhere to heal, to the woods.

MIDNIGHTS: Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Chosen by Alisson Wood, author of Being Lolita

Taylor Swift introduced Midnights to the world as a sonic uncoiling around “the stories of 13 sleepless nights,” a reflective project at its core. The cohesion of Midnights both in its aural “vibe” and dark narrative focus brought me straight to Bluets by Maggie Nelson, a similarly circling project—part memoir, part essay, part poem—around the color blue. (Dare I say that midnight is a shade of blue?) Both hold a similar subject in their crosshairs: love, or the loss of it, and how color can shape an understanding of grief. The internet has suggested that Swift might have synesthesia, a blending of the senses. Bluets is in many ways an exercise in synesthesia, merging color with philosophy, art, and the personal. Nelson writes: “What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began.” And Swift, in “Snow on the Beach”: “This scene feels like what I once saw on a screen / I searched ‘aurora borealis green’ / I’ve never seen someone lit from within.” This tight blend of emotion and color bleeds through, leaving traces of intimacy everywhere.

These writers feel the pressure to produce even in the midst of personal loss: In Bluets, Nelson writes, “‘I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough,’ one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan? That is to say, I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache.” Swift similarly recounts in “Sweet Nothing,” “And the voices that implore, ‘You should be doing more’ / To you, I can admit that I’m just too soft for all of it.” While these expectations are rooted in familiar capitalism, we see a vulnerability among these works that is new.

Further, Nelson and Swift trace similar fears in their works, even the anxiety around having anxiety, writing lines that are a gentle fuck you to the expectation of emotional perfection. Nelson asks, “But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?” and Swift echoing in “Anti-Hero”: “It’s me, hi / I’m the problem, it’s me.”

Bluets and Midnights stand as stunning examples of their respective genres—voices that are somehow moody and luscious, cutting and bloody, soft and sharp. When Swift sings “Talk your talk and go viral / I just need this love spiral” in “Lavender Haze,” it’s only pop speak for Maggie Nelson’s lyrical prose: “This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.” Each medium tells an intensely personal story, overlapping and splitting and coming back together, which transforms memory and emotion into something that can be swallowed whole by another person. Midnights and Bluets prove that art-making is a kind of magic.

Harry Smith grudgingly realized that Lionel Ziprin might be right: there was only so long that he could get by sleeping on people’s sofas, cadging meals, and stashing his records, books, films, and paintings wherever he could. The records he shipped from California were his only liquid asset, something he was sure he could sell, but selling them was a slow process, and he hated the idea of his most prized records being scattered among collectors who would hoard them for themselves. He had justified his own collecting as creating a carefully curated selection of the best of American folk recordings, which he hoped would one day be placed in a library or museum, but who would pay for that?

Pete Kaufman suggested that he might be able to sell them in bulk to Folkways Records, a small new company at the center of what was becoming a folk music revival that was beginning to reissue old recordings. Harry had no idea that his records had any monetary value beyond a few collectors, though he thought that if they could somehow reach a larger audience, they might alter the way people thought about music. He was fond of quoting Plato on music having the power to change society.

The owner of Folkways was Moses Asch, a pioneer in boutique recordings of jazz and folk artists with his Disc and Asch record labels, and now with his new Folkways project he was on a mission to record, issue, and reissue seemingly everything—Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, and other folk singers, but also poetry readings, the sounds of junkyards, instructions on how to learn Morse code, cantorial chants, the drumming and singing of boys’ gangs, political speeches, and avant-garde, ethnic, and old-time music. Knowing there was no way for him to compete with the established recording companies, Asch’s plan was to do what they wouldn’t: record what they didn’t record, aim at sales to libraries and schools, and keep everything available from sale forever. It was this openness to all forms of music and his promise to keep all the records in his catalog that quickly gained him respect among musicians and singers.

Moe Asch was the son of Sholem Asch, then the leading Yiddish novelist and playwright. Though Moe was born in Poland and had lived in Paris, studied engineering in Berlin, and grown up among theater people and Jewish intellectuals (it was Albert Einstein who encouraged him to record folk music), Asch said he had never met anyone like Harry—the closest was Woody Guthrie, that self-made, organic intellectual who arrived in New York disguised as a hick. “Woody would come to the studio or fall down on the floor…wild hair and everything…and pull off jokes…Get him in front of a microphone he’d croon and he’d cry…but his presentation was formal. You knew that the man had a statement to make and he made it.”

Moe was one of the few people in New York who knew something of the full range of Harry’s work in the arts, yet even he was astonished to find out how large Smith’s collection of commercially recorded country, blues, and religious records was, and how much he knew about them. “He understood the content of the records. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English literature, and their relationship to the world,” he said.

Harry offered to sell some of his collection to Folkways when Asch began putting together a five-volume set titled Music of the World’s Peoples, selected by the composer Henry Cowell, and an eleven-volume set of long-playing 33 1/3-rpm records on the history of jazz made up of older, hard-to-find 78-rpm records selected by Frederic Ramsey, Asch, and Harry. The new long-playing format seemed perfect for anthologies. For the first time it was possible to listen to one song after another without changing the record or turning it over. Six or seven pieces of music could be put on each side of an LP, and the music could be sequenced creatively. Moe bought some of Harry’s 78-rpm records for anywhere from 35 cents to $2 each, and used a few of them as part of several of his reissue projects. “I began selling off Bukka White, Champion Jack Dupree, and other stuff that I considered to be of a sort of second rate,” Harry said, “and anyhow easily replaceable. [Asch] was astounded by the stuff!” Moe then proposed that they both could make more money if Harry put together a collection of these old records for reissue, something the big recording companies were slow to do. The idea of treating it as an anthology with extensive notes on the performers and the background of the music was Harry’s idea, and it made the record sets appear as serious as books. If Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s widely used 1938 textbook Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students could contain the texts of songs like “The Daemon Lover” or “Frankie and Johnnie” and declare them literature, then Harry could include commercial recordings of the same songs in his record anthology and claim their equal importance.

On May 15, 1952, Harry signed an agreement with Folkways Records for a $200 advance ($1,900 today) with royalties of 20 cents ($1.87) per record sold. They also agreed that Asch could create new albums by using any recordings Harry had, but Harry would be allowed to sell them to collectors before Folkways reissued them.

Moe was excited by the idea despite some initial doubts about Harry’s reliability, but he found him easy to work with, and often pointed to his anthology as an example of how record reissues should be done:

Harry Smith is an authority. He not only is the collector, he knows the record, he knows what he wants to say in what form he wants to do it and he has a concept of the complete package. He comes to me and we discuss it. And I say, “Harry, I love it. You just give me the finished manuscripts and give me the form that you want it and I’ll issue it exactly the way you want it.”…Everything is Harry Smith.

Asch told the folk music collector and musician Ralph Rinzler that he had provided Harry with a room in which to work, a typewriter, the books he needed, and every so often he’d give him a button of peyote. Rinzer doubted that Asch was serious about the drug, but admitted that there was a “dreamlike, visionary quality” to Harry’s album notes.

The transfer of the 78-rpm records to the 33 1/3-rpm long-playing format was done by Peter Bartók, who was familiar with folk music and the problems of recording it, having already remastered the field recordings of his father, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, for Folkways.

In 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was released, a set of six LP records divided into three sets of two LPs, titled “Ballads,” “Social Music” (both sacred and secular), and “Songs,” each accompanied by an elaborately conceived booklet of notes. The music was a selection of white country music (“hillbilly”) and African American (“race”) records that were made between 1927, when, Harry said, “electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales. During this five-year period, American music still retained some of the regional qualities evident in the days before phonograph, radio, and talking pictures had tended to integrate local types.” Harry’s record notes indicated that he had plans to do three more sets of records and that they would be “devoted to examples of rhythm changes between 1890 and 1950.”

The models for this project were several compilations of previously issued commercial folk recordings that Alan Lomax produced in the 1940s: Smoky Mountain Ballads for RCA in 1941, and Mountain Frolic and Listen to Our Story—A Panorama of American Balladry for Brunswick Records, both of which first appeared in 1947 as 78-rpm recordings and were later reissued in 1950 among the first recordings produced on long-playing records. Another of Harry’s sources was Lomax’s “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” that was put together in 1940 for the Library of Congress and made available to the public. After listening to some 3,000 recordings, Lomax had chosen 350 as especially important, and 60 of these as the best. Twelve of those 60 were included in Harry’s Anthology, and many of the others were by performers who were also on Lomax’s list. Smith urged other collectors he knew to write to the Library of Congress for a copy of the list.

Because Harry was unknown to most folk music enthusiasts, many assumed that the Anthology had been compiled by Lomax under a pseudonym to avoid legal problems. But Lomax’s self-exile to Europe in the face of a congressional hunt for leftist folklorists and singers rendered his work largely forgotten by the public.

Smith said he had chosen the records for the Anthology not because they were the best he could find, but rather because they were “odd,” or “exotic in relation to what was considered to be the world culture of high-class music.” They were “selected to be ones that would be popular among musicologists or possibly with people who would want to sing them and maybe would improve the version.”

Intuition is employed in determining in what category, information can be got out of. I intuitively decided I wanted to collect records. After that had been determined, what was then decided to be good or bad was based on a comparison of that record to other records. Or the perfection of the performance. To a great degree, it seems like a conditioned reflex. What is considered good? Practically anything can be good. Consciousness can only take in so much. You can only think of something as so good. When you get up among, say, top musicians or top painters—which one is the best? Either things are enjoyable or they are unenjoyable. I determined what the norms were. You can tell if you hear a few fiddle records, when one is the most removed [exceptional] violin playing of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. If that seemed to be consistent within itself, that would be the good record; if it was a good performance of what it was. Now, it was merely my interest in looking for exotic music. The things that were most exotic—whether it happened to be the words or melodies or timbre of the instruments—that really was what selected those things.

Yet he also said that some of them, like “Brilliancy Medley,” by Eck Robertson, were picked simply because he liked them or because they were important versions of a well-known song. His criteria for choosing commercial recordings were not far from what Lomax said was behind his selections for his Library of Congress list:

The choices have been personal and have been made for all sorts of reasons. Some of the records are interesting for their complete authenticity of performance; some for the melodies; some because they included texts of important or representative songs; some because they represented typical contemporary deviations from rural singing and playing styles of fifty years ago; some to make the list as nearly as possible typical of the material examined.

The order in which Smith placed the records was apparently carefully thought out. His categories of “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs” follow the groupings of songs from Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, and Lomax’s songbooks. “Henry Lee” by Dick Justice was the first track on the “Ballad” set of records because it was the lowest number of the five ballads in his set that were also in Child’s classic collection of ballads in the English language. But his reasoning was not always obvious, most notably with “The Moonshiner’s Dance, Part 1” by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Café Orchestra, a medley of songs, most of which would never be called a folk song: “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “How Dry I Am,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “At the Cross,” “Jenny Lind Polka,” and “When You Wore a Tulip.” This was the only recording from the Northern states in the Anthology, and it appears to be part of a stage review set in the Victoria Café in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a list of vaudevillian jokes and Prohibition humor tossed in between songs.

*

Though it would still be a few years before economic inequality and the civil rights movement became dominant topics of American life, poverty and race had long been subjects of American conversation. But when Smith’s recordings from out of the past appeared, with their messages from people whose voices had not been heard so directly, so vividly, or at all, it was shocking. These songs were evidence of ways of living and performing not found in history books or even among the urban folk revivalist singers themselves. “You didn’t see at the time how preachy the mainstream Folk Movement was,” John Cohen said,

because everybody was becoming a preacher. It was more like a pyramid club; every folk singer became his own preacher. People had this attitude of “I will now speak for Black People.” Rather than listening to what blacks in this country might have to say for themselves. The voices on the Anthology are of complaint and suffering and humor and caustic comments on the world. And documentary depictions rather than moralistic statements…And in a strange way, the Anthology was also a tremendous foundation for the counter-culture.

*

Even though the sons had been recorded only some twenty years earlier, technology and tastes in music had changed so radically by 1952 that the recordings chosen by Smith were often referred to as if they were archeological finds, the sonic equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta stone. That year the pop hits were the usual mix of love songs of longing and emotional insecurity (“Cry,” “Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart,” “Half as Much,” “Wish You Were Here,” “I’ll Walk Alone”). But faux versions of songs from outside the mainstream of pop were also finding their way onto the hit lists: Latin (“Kiss of Fire,” “Blue Tango,” “Delicado”), the American West (“High Noon”), Cajun (“Jambalaya”), and blues (“Blacksmith Blues”). Before the Anthology, most people in urban areas thought folk songs were the Weavers’ spirited, jukebox-aimed tunes with Gordon Jenkins’s pop arrangements; the earnest, uplifting, and mildly political messages of Pete Seeger; or Burl Ives’s easy-listening Americana. Folk singers and scholars of folk song alike were suspicious of what was then being called country and western music. Neither they nor the public were aware there were other kinds of working-class commercial recordings. The Anthology made it possible for anyone to hear a stunning variety of musical genres, content, singing styles, and emotions montaged together as old-time music: ballads, work songs, blues, parlor tunes, raw banjo pieces by Dock Boggs, the dark jeremiads of Blind Willie Johnson, hymns from the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers calling from the deep past. For the first time Cajun songs in French could be heard outside their territories (“Pete Seeger couldn’t understand why I was issuing those things, ‘cause he felt they were out of tune,” Harry said. “But once he went to Louisiana, he got back here, rushed up and said, ‘Hey, Harry, you were right! They do sing like that!’”) Dave Van Ronk said that the Anthology was a response to those who sang folk songs as if they were art songs, as a kind of classical music from the lower end of society. Though few noticed it then (or now, for that matter), the performers were not what people would have thought of as folk: Smith’s choices included a Hollywood movie cowboy, an Appalachian lawyer, and city factory workers.

There was also something of a perverse authenticity in knowing that the songs in Harry’s Anthology were not recorded by a folklorist for historical or academic reasons, but by record companies who intended to please diverse buying publics out in the hinterlands of America. In a time in which high-fidelity recordings had just appeared, promising “living sound,” the scratching thinness of these old records seemed like the sound of history, the voices of the dead. But at the same time, their sonic crudeness was a reminder of how challenging they were to record and thus bought with them an aura similar to early photographs of Abraham Lincoln or Civil War soldiers.

The reissue of this music may have come as a shock to the companies whose recordings were made for profit alone, not for presenting it seriously as music. In 1952, they would have been reminded of a part of their own forgotten corporate history as they remade their image, broadening sales by merging country and western music with pop trends like crooners, the use of professional songwriters, and the development of high-fidelity recording.

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Excerpted from Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.