Starfish Playlist
- 40 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Good stories conjure up images, but sometimes they’re even better with a soundtrack. Here’s a short playlist that pairs well with Starfish.
(Chapter: Bed Time)
One Night Stands
Gwen Levey and the Breakdown
Nashville knows how to build a track that holds softness and power simultaneously — strings underneath, an anthemic vocal on top, and a pulse that doesn’t quit. And Gwen Levey knows exactly what she’s doing with both. This is the Elaine Ionello the Directorate never reached: the woman who dreams, who wants, who moves through the world on her own terms. She was always in there. This is what she sounds like.
(Chapter: New Trainee)
Follow the Unknown
Christy Altomare
Altomare is a Broadway lead with the range to prove it — her voice glides between registers with a stage singer's versatility, silky and sweet one moment, low and controlled the next. Underneath her, tom-toms and timpani strike in dark, compelling staccato — the same kind of dominant, propulsive percussion Kitaro and Zimmer favor when a track needs to feel larger than the room it's playing in. It's the sound that walks with Magnolia's hostesses — through the corridors, into the bedrooms, wherever the job requires them to go.
(Chapter: The Diner)
Cat Fight
Laura Bell Bundy
Laura Bell Bundy works the space between Broadway and country with a string of music videos that show off a real performer's instincts. Her lyrics have an arch, knowing quality — a line about master's degrees turns up in a song ostensibly about a catfight, and suddenly the whole thing is about something else entirely. That's the tone the Diner chapter wanted: after-shift breakfast, eggs and coffee, the guard finally down. The hostesses turn out to have whole lives underneath the job. So does the song.
(Chapter: Amy, Improved)
Sticks
Ginger Minj
Ginger Minj is a Season 7 finalist and All Stars competitor on RuPaul's Drag Race, billed as "The Comedy Queen of the South." Double Wide Diva was her official country music debut — self-described as tapping into her own life story to reveal a side of herself audiences hadn't seen yet. Amy Taggart flagged this track, and she wasn't wrong. It's less a dominatrix song than it first sounds — the lyric runs through an entire résumé of odd jobs a woman takes on with zero qualifications and total nerve, one of which happens to be exactly the joke Amy was making. The song's real subject is the attitude underneath all of it: total willingness, no credentials required, figure it out once you're already in the room. That's not a bad description of what it takes to survive as a Hostess. You don't get trained for the job. You get thrown at the wall and see what sticks.
(Chapter: Magnolia at Work)
Hey Big Spender
(Various artists)
This is one of those late-evening rabbit holes I love — plug a song into the search bar and click through every version that comes up. "Big Spender" was written by Cy Coleman with lyrics by Dorothy Fields for Sweet Charity in 1966, sung by dance hall hostesses sizing up the men walking through the door. Sixty years later, it's still the best song ever written about a woman working a room.
Gwen Verdon originated it on Broadway — sharp, brassy, danced as much as sung, all elbows and attitude.
Shirley Bassey's 1967 recording is the one most people know: an edgy purr with claws underneath it, a voice that could cut glass if it wanted to.
Peggy Lee got there first, in late 1965, and owns the song in a different way — cooler, more knowing, less performance and more threat.
Dorothy Fields herself turns up on a 1998 archival release, An Evening With Dorothy Fields — a "never before released" Lyrics & Lyricists concert recording, produced and hosted by Maurice Levine, with Fields herself narrating her own catalog alongside a small vocal ensemble. Hearing the woman who wrote the words sit inside her own songbook is its own kind of chill.
Tatiana Okupnik took it somewhere none of the above would recognize — synths, hip-hop rhythm, and somehow it still works. Proof the song's bones are strong enough to survive anything.
And then there's Queen. Yes, that Queen. Freddie Mercury took a run at it too. Nobody expects it. It earns its place anyway.
Play all six back to back and you get a steadicam walkthrough of the Magnolia mansion itself — every hallway, every room, a different woman working the same room the same way, and none of them wrong about how to do it.
(Chapter: Nothing to Hold)
What Did I Have That I Don’t Have
Seth MacFarlane
Finally, an excuse to include a MacFarlane vocal. He's a genuine throwback — smooth, unhurried phrasing over studio arrangements that sit squarely in the Nelson Riddle and Billy May tradition, the sound of vintage 40s and 50s crooners rebuilt with modern fidelity. The singer steps back from the mic mid-song and lets the band surge forward, a rich wall of harmonic sound carrying the weight the voice just set down. This one comes from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, a slow, swinging, bluesy lament sung by a man wondering what he's lost that he can't get back. It finds GW on the other side of his own life, being discussed by three women in an office who understand exactly what he had — and maybe what he doesn't anymore — in ways he never will.