Songs for Novels

I often get a song in my head while reading a book. Sometimes, the choice of song is obvious, as when I spent the entire duration that I was living inside David Mitchell's number9dream singing the John Lennon song of the same name. Other times, it's more obscure: for 1Q84, it's Warren Zevon's "They Moved the Moon" off of his criminally underrated Transverse City album. The song, while no great shakes as a poem, has a sense of desolation that's a great fit for the characters of the novel as they look up, mystified, at the two moons in the night sky.

Have any good songs running thru your head as you read?

"They Moved the Moon"
I was counting on you
To stand by me
To see me through
I was counting on you

They moved the moon
While I looked down
When I looked away
They changed the stars around

I'm so confused
Don't know what to do
Don't know which way to turn
I was counting on you

They moved the moon
While I looked down
When I looked away
They changed the stars around

Can't you see me?
Can't you hear me now?
Don't you want a love that's true?
Don't you know my heart belongs to you?

I was counting on you
To stand by me
To see me through
I was counting on you

They moved the moon
While I looked down
When I looked away
They changed the stars around

They moved the moon
I feel so strange
While I looked down
Everything I depended on
When I looked away
Has been rearranged
They changed the stars around

(Bonus fun fact: Zevon composed the album while "woozy from reading the Thomas Pynchon canon at a sitting, so to speak.")

Related posts:
1Q84: Hardcover

Murakami's Boundaries