Fiery Playlist

Good stories conjure up images, but sometimes they’re even better with a soundtrack. Here’s a short playlist that pairs well with Fiery.

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Not A Day Goes By

Katie Rose Clark

Merrily We Roll Along

No playlist would be complete without Sondheim. The magic is how forceful his simple lyrics are — affirmation written in a minor key, devotion that sounds like grief. Lucy Bryngelson made her peace with Tali long ago. They’re business partners now. This most recent cast recording is Lucy in three words: sadness, steel, love. How can something so affirming sound so heartbreaking? That’s Sondheim. That’s also Lucy.

Fearless

Malinda

Malinda built her following on YouTube the way Tali Gold built herself — without machinery, on her own terms. Her performance of “Fearless” reaches back before the complicated parts, before the choices and the damage, to something at the root. The girl who was always going to become exactly who she became.

Hurry Sundown

Peter, Paul and Mary

In the mid-60s, while most kids my age followed the Beatles into rock, a smaller group of us went down the folk path — Baez, early Dylan, Judy Collins, and my favorite, Peter, Paul and Mary, all spinning on a portable Zenith with a record changer. Hurry Sundown carries their sharp, braided harmonies, Mary Travers’ piercing vocal, and horn accents that feel almost out of place in folk — and somehow earn it. It’s a song about weary, daily renewal. That’s Meg and Pete Lewis’s ranch on the backside of the Flattops. A small working operation, two girls to raise, an RV park built to keep the cash flow steady. You don’t get rich. You don’t get ahead. You hold your own.

She’s Already Made Up Her Mind

Lyle Lovett

GW sits down at a bar with Jack "Ax" Saxon to hear his story about Tali Gold. It's as if Lyle Lovett is sitting in a quiet corner of the bar — a platform stage, one amber spotlight for mood. Lovett's powerful clarity, rhythmic strum, and evocatively spare lyrics say in two verses what Ax Saxon needs several beers to say. She's Already Made Up Her Mind. He knows it before anyone tells him.

Twin Soliloquies/Some Enchanted Evening

South Pacific Movie Soundtrack

Mitzi Gaynor/Giorgio Tozzi

The Turning Point chapter, with GW and Tali, is an important hinge point in their relationship. South Pacific has been in my ear since childhood — I taught myself "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" on piano, which tells you which song actually stuck, not just musically but morally. Mitzi Gaynor sang her own parts; Rossano Brazzi didn't, and the role went instead to Metropolitan Opera bass Giorgio Tozzi, whose voice offers more chills than Brazzi's handsome looks ever could. The swelling crescendos hit like thundering waves on the beach, then calm into "Some Enchanted Evening" — the moment you see someone across a room and know. GW stands twenty feet from a door, recalculating everything he thought he knew, deciding whether to stay.

But if you’re looking for a newer playlist take, here’s a he sang - she sang pairing.

Iron and Wine

No Way out of Here

(GW’s perspective)

Iron & Wine has a way of sitting inside a silence rather than filling it — which is exactly what this chapter needed. GW stood twenty feet from a door with a decision in front of him, and the song doesn't resolve any faster than he does. No Way Out of Here is the sound of a man recalculating the odds before he requests another card.

Aimee Mann

Wise Up

(Tali’s perspective)

Aimee Mann writes with a precision that never asks for sympathy — which is what made this the song for Tali. She had read every room she'd ever walked into. This was the first one she couldn't. Wise Up is what it sounds like when a woman who has always known the outcome discovers she doesn't.