Nobody needs a playlist that doesn’t cast a weather in the air. So the one I offer here is meant to do that: to make it rain, or snow, or shimmer, wherever it is you’re sitting. It’s inspired by my new book Do You Remember Being Born?, which follows the story of a famous 75-year-old poet, named Marian Ffarmer. She is sitting at home in her Manhattan apartment when she gets a letter from a Big Tech company. Come here to California, they say, and write a poem with our machine. What they’re proposing is a collaboration: they’d like Marian to work with their brand new poetry AI, a piece of software called Charlotte. And they’re offering a lot of money if Marian says yes.
So she does. She wants the money to give to her middle-aged son, who dreams of owning his own house. Marian goes to Silicon Valley and spends seven days collaborating with Charlotte; along the way, the book meditates on parenthood, inspiration, labor, genius, and sacrifice. Marian goes for a swim. She goes on late-night TV.
I started writing the book way back in 2019, long before ChatGPT. But from the start, I was interested in ways that my novel — like Marian’s poem — could be “infiltrated” by AI. So Do You Remember Being Born? also incorporates some AI-generated poetry and prose, created with precursor technologies to what we have now.
With this playlist, I wanted to capture some of the “weather” — the energy, the atmosphere — of Do You Remember Being Born?, but also some of the questions it raises. And I wanted it to sound good in strangers’ ears, no matter what day of the week you’re listening.
Thank you so much to Powell’s — a palace to words that inspires me even across the continent, in Montreal.
“The Homeless Wanderer” by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
I imagined a book that was short. A novel that was thoughtful, funny, deep, but that was light as a ribbon: that could be carried on a breeze. The story of a woman who goes to California and spends seven days there, writing a poem (with a computer). Something you could pack in a suitcase and carry with you without regret. A novel that felt like this song.
For a long time, the music of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru was one of those secrets passed from person to person, on playlists and mix CDs and turntables in the afternoon. Happily, before she died this year, that secret had spread: authorities like Kate Molleson, in her spectacular book
Sound Within Sound, recognized the unique sound she was inventing — this Ethiopian nun residing in Jerusalem. Pieces like “The Homeless Warrior” lift into an illuminated space between Fats Waller and Johann Sebastian Bach, at once noble and quotidian, cherished as a homecoming.
“Cross Bones Style” by Cat Power
One of the only songs to be mentioned by name in
Do You Remember Being Born? is this treasure from 1998. Upon hearing it, Marian writes, “It felt as if my whole skeleton were tingling.” I don’t know how anyone could properly describe or dream-up “Cross Bones Style,” a song that feels uncanny, intimate, and also indescribably cool. And this is one of my favourite qualities of art: when it conjures a feeling we don’t quite have words for, but recognize. There are many scenes in
Do You Remember Being Born? when I am fumbling toward such a property; hoping to find within my paints a color I haven’t used before.
“Music Life (ft. Jeff Parker and Money Mark)” by Mia Doi Todd
Thus far, I’ve let this be abstract. “Music Life” is much more straightforward: a thrilling, wide-roaming tune by one of Los Angeles’s most distinctive voices. One of the first albums I ever reviewed included a track by Mia Doi Todd; more than twenty years later, she pays tribute to this “life of music.” It’s a song like a stump speech, a manifesto: one of the best cases I’ve ever heard for living the artist’s life. One of the themes at the heart of
Do You Remember Being Born? is the examination of just such a set of choices, with all its risks, rewards, and plausible mistakes; this song — which came out as I was writing — is almost good enough to make my novel redundant.
“Little Things” by Big Thief
And then this song, a song about who-knows-what, love and loss and New York City, but suffused with so much luscious, relentless living that it could render a whole lifetime redundant, just a smear of sense-experience. At times,
Do You Remember Being Born? is a meditation on AI: here’s a track that seems to capture everything a piece of software could never understand.
“Andromeda Memories” by Kyle Gann
At first, this track by composer Kyle Gann feels a little like Gebru’s “The Homeless Wanderer” — generous, rambling piano in a pensive mood. But the trick of the tune hides inside its composition: Gann uses an impossible, unconventional piano: a piano with too many keys. Whereas the traditional keyboard has 36 ebonies and 52 ivories, Gann’s weird scheme gives him 243 keys. These microtones allow him to find a sonic vocabulary unlike anything else I know — surprising, nearly limitless, faintly “wrong” — and he plays with these aspects, like the song is a diamond that changes as you tilt it in the light. As I used technology in
Do You Remember Being Born?, I hoped to exploit a similar set of qualities: finding a voice (with Charlotte) that seems both “too good” and “too amiss” to be true.
“Hockets for Two Voices (IV)” by Meara O’Reilly
Do You Remember Being Born? is often a “two-hander”: the story of two people in conversation. While writing, I was smitten by this set of music by the California composer Meara O’Reilly (recommended via the awesome music substack,
Music Regular). She’s written “hockets” — a Medieval form, where singers or instrumentalists kinda “bounce” off each other, with alternating notes. Thanks to modern tech, O’Reilly could sing both halves of the hocket herself, a one-woman two-hander (just as my book, in truth, is a one-man two-hander) — but, even alone, she infuses the work with playfulness and a constant, refreshing sense of exploration.
“Send Me” by Tirzah
Much of what I’ve chosen here has been pretty, but
Do You Remember Being Born? is also interested in terseness + trouble. Tirzah’s repetitive, unadorned R&B is a portrait of how busted things can cast a spell, the way so much good art’s unfriendly, unfinished, or wounded.
“I Atlanten” by Schneider Kacirek and Sofia Jernberg
Another landscape exploring the overlap between beauty and glitch. The German duo Schneider Kacirek works with Swedish singer Sofia Jernberg to make a song that’s pretty and fragile but also noisy and brusque. Lean your ear against the server generating Charlotte’s high-tech poetry and maybe this is what you hear whirring in the fan.
“Empty Head” by Frankie Cosmos
There was an hour or two where I considered using a line from “Empty Head” as one of
Do You Remember Being Born?’s epigraphs. Frankie Cosmos aka Greta Kline sings about the tension between meaning and meaninglessness, insight and feathermeal, and “Empty Head” could be like an anthem for Large Language Models, a tribute to everything they (don’t) know.
“Summer Girl” by HAIM
Marian doesn’t spend the entirety of this novel in a room with an intelligent machine. She and her driver, Rhoda, spend hours roaming the streets of San Francisco and Silicon Valley — visiting the Zoo, hitting up parties, zooming to and from late-night TV studios. Trapped in COVID-cloistered Montreal, I listened to songs like “Summer Girl” and imagined an unimaginable West Coast sun, where the sun’s so light it gets tossed around by the breeze.
“The Leanover” by Life Without Buildings
If
Do You Remember Being Born? has a theme-song it is this: the chaotic, embodied, extraordinary TikTok hit by Glasgow’s Life Without Buildings, who released their only album in the year 2001. Working on the book, thinking about AI, I spent whole seasons wondering what the difference was between algorithms spitting out poetry and a human mind unspooling it one word at a time.
Is it intention? I wondered.
Is it lived experience? The lyrics of “The Leanover,” plucked from the nether by Sue Tompkins, seem random (almost), seem meaningless (almost), but taken together — taken ecstatically, nostalgically, breathlessly, as Tompkins sings them — they achieve a quality like grace. What can that teach us? What could that teach me? Something about listening, I guess. About listening, reading, meaning-making. But also something about the spirit, and the invisible passages through which it swoops.
÷ ÷ ÷
Sean Michaels (
website/
twitter) is the author of the novels
Us Conductors and
The Wagers, and founder of the pioneering music blog
Said the Gramophone. His non-fiction has appeared in the
Guardian, McSweeney’s, Pitchfork and the
New Yorker. Sean is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Grand Prix Numix, the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he has been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Peabody Awards, and the Prix des libraires du Quebec. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal, Canada.
Do You Remember Being Born? is his newest novel.