Track by Track: An All the Shining People Playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5vfA7tDDcCWKC2mfCdi9mz?si=5c61cd9243954de6

I draw a great deal of solace and creative inspiration from popular music. Although I need silence to write and edit my work, I listen to music during nearly every other waking moment: while cooking, eating, showering, sweeping, and emailing.

Here are some of the songs that inspired and, in many cases, appear in, All the Shining People.

1)     FEAR – Kendrick Lamar

If All the Shining People had an epigraph, it would be the lyric, “What happens on earth stays on earth.” To me, the line points to the ways that the past, especially traumatic histories of dispossession, will linger for generations unless we actively work towards accountability and healing. This is certainly the case in post-apartheid South Africa.

 As Lamar suggests in this track’s confessional lyrics, once you’ve been made to feel small and afraid, those feelings may never fade. Anxiety and fear also pervade All the Shining People. There are many reasons for this; perhaps the simplest is that this was my personal experience growing up in an immigrant South African Jewish family.

2)     We Are Growing (Shaka Zulu) – Margaret Singana

The Shaka Zulu miniseries premiered in South Africa in 1986, when I was four years old, and I remember watching it raptly, as Ken and Leora do in the first story, “At the Bottom of the Garden.” The series was a biopic of Shaka, the famous 19th-century king whose warriors repeatedly defeated well-armed British colonizers with spears, shields, and superior military strategy. “We Are Growing (Shaka Zulu)” was the miniseries’ unforgettable theme song. May this song continue to serve as a soundtrack to anti-colonial resistance.

3)     Hava Nagela – Chubby Checker

I really like Chubby Checker’s version of this instantly familiar Jewish folk song. The tune is based on an old Hasidic niggun, or wordless melody, while its Hebrew lyrics were written by an early-20th-century Zionist. Now a staple at Jewish celebrations, Hava Nagela means “Let us rejoice.”

4)     Todos los días sale el sol – Bongo Botrako

This 2010 Spanish hit is referenced in “The Foreign World” when Tim and Tamar are at a campground in Tulum, Mexico. In 2014, I stayed at a similar campground with my best friend Leesa. It was December, and on Christmas morning we hung our hiking socks from a palm tree and stuffed them with little presents for each other. That night, all the hippie campers gathered for a potluck dinner. Someone played “Todos los días sale el sol” on an acoustic guitar (which was missing a string or two) and everyone else seemed to know the lyrics.

 It’s funny to me that Leesa also included a few details from that campground, and some of the larger-than-life characters we met there, in her 2016 collection Waiting for the Cyclone, which was shortlisted for the Trillium award.

5)     Stand By Me – Ben E. King

Purim is my favourite Jewish holiday. I love its carnivalesque spirit, where the subversion of traditional binaries and expectations is encouraged. Dressing in drag, for example, is not only permitted on Purim, it’s considered tradition. In its first few drafts, I called my story about Purim “The Carnival of Forsaken Objects,” after a painting by Paul-Émile Borduas, before I settled on the title “Masada.”

 While the events in “Masada” are all fictional, the synagogue is based on the old Kiever shul in Kensington Market. “Stand By Me” is referenced during the Purim celebration in the synagogue’s basement—right before violence breaks out.

6)     Juicy – Notorious B.I.G.

In the collection’s title story, the album Hypnotize is playing in the car while Marley drives Thomas and his new friends to the ravine. A minor character, Marley is a 1990s pretty-fly-for-a-White-guy type, and the album’s inclusion highlights the contrast between his suburban lifestyle and Biggie’s experiences hustling to survive in Brooklyn, as he describes in this song.

7)     Solidarity Forever – Pete Seeger

I joined the anti-globalization protests held in Québec City in April 2001. I had just finished high school, and it was my first time participating in a public protest. The occasion felt momentous. Like the characters in “Loose End,” I slept in the gym at Université Laval along with hundreds of other student protestors. In the morning, I woke up to many of them singing “Solidarity Forever,” and I included this detail in the story.

 8)     Give Peace A Chance – The Maytals

I’ll confess that I’m not really a John Lennon fan. But when my editor suggested naming the song played by the makeshift punk band in “Loose End,” I chose “Give Peace A Chance.” I imagined it would sound quite good on tuba and accordion. And I really like this cover, by the legendary Maytals.

9)     Jockey Full of Bourbon – Tom Waits

This track is from Rain Dogs, which might be one of my all-time favourite albums. I definitely had this song stuck in my head when I wrote the opening to “The Burn.”

 10)  Houses of Cards – John Orpheus

My pal John Orpheus released this cover in February 2022, when All the Shining People was finished and had gone to print. Still, the smart lyrics, soaring vocals, and tropical sound strike me as so perfectly attuned to Ora’s longing in “The Burn” that I’ve snuck it onto this playlist. The original tune is by Radiohead, a band I admire but don’t love — I prefer the Afropop-tinged warmth of John Orpheus’s sound.

11)  Tiny Dancer – Elton John

Near the end of “Hineni,” Leora is playing the piano when, in the form of an invisible parrot, her father’s spirit swoops in through the kitchen window. Even though I didn’t end up naming the song in the story’s final draft, she’s playing “Tiny Dancer,” which I listened to on repeat while writing the ending. I think it helped.

 12)  You Want It Darker – Leonard Cohen

For a long time, the collection’s final story was called “Mkhumbane.” It focused on Siya, a minor yet crucial character in the final draft. When I rewrote the story to make Kaplan more central, I changed the title to “Hineni.” I took this title from the lyrics of “You Want It Darker,” the last single Leonard Cohen released before his death in 2016. Hineni means “Here I am” in Hebrew.

 Leonard Cohen took the lyric from the Torah, where it’s said by both Moses and Abraham in crucial moments of transformation. Hineni is also the opening of an important prayer recited in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—holidays when Jewish people ask forgiveness for harms we may have caused.