The Official See You Next Tuesday Annotated Playlist （or, a Brief Political Memoir Told Through Song）
You know how you can hear a song and it’ll instantly transport you back to a specific time and place—the work you were doing, the emotions you were experiencing, the people by your side?
For me, there are certain songs that will always represent different political campaigns I’ve worked on: These were the songs I listened to over and over while writing See You Next Tuesday.
In writing this annotated playlist, I had the opportunity to revisit the memories these songs evoked, some fizzy with excitement, others excruciatingly painful.
Those highs and lows are the epitome of campaign life, and those were the emotions I wanted to explore in this novel.
With this playlist, I want to share a peek into some of my real-life experiences that inspired Anya and Gabe’s story.
I hope you enjoy—and maybe feel inspired to get involved in a campaign in your community. There’s absolutely nothing like it.
“The Long Way Around” by The Chicks
“Portions for Foxes” by Rilo Kiley
Yep, this song was on the Grey’s soundtrack, and it’s an all-time banger.
To this day, I can’t hear it without remembering how it felt to cruise the highways in Ohio, all the ridiculous office dramas I was navigating (romantic and otherwise), feeling like a character in my own little political soap opera.
And you’re bad news! I don’t care, I like you!
God, that sums up my entire twenties—probably everyone else’s too. Wasn’t it awful? Wasn’t it great?
“Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles
In the summer of 2003, I interned for John Kerry in the Senate.
I went to college in Amherst, Massachusetts, so I spent much of the fall of 2003 and all of 2004 driving back and forth to volunteer for his presidential campaign in New Hampshire, sleeping on supporters’ couches (and office floors) and knocking on doors in the freezing cold.
Three days before the election in November of 2004, the candidate came to Manchester for a rally, and it was pouring rain.
A miserable day. But a few minutes before then-Senator Kerry arrived, the sun came out, and the rally organizers played “Here Comes the Sun” for the cheering crowd.
We really believed that we were about to win an election, and that brighter days were ahead.
We were wrong, that time: President Bush was reelected, and I was devastated.
That loss galvanized my commitment to work in politics.
Six months later, I graduated from college and moved to Washington, DC.
“Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
I listened to this song all the time on my drives from Amherst to New Hampshire.
It always put me in a great mood, Springsteen’s Americana vibes stretching from my childhood in New Jersey through the backroads of New Hampshire’s forests.
Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.
That was how I felt too—all that possibility and freedom.
“A Mistake” by Fiona Apple
Fiona Apple’s masterpiece of an album, When the pawn…
came out in November 1999. I was a junior in high school, and it became a keystone of my personality.
I loved how unapologetic Fiona was about her rage, how clever she was in reclaiming her power from the men who tried to take it from her.
(The lyric “you fondle my trigger, then you blame my gun” from “Limp” remains one of my most-quoted.) “A Mistake” was probably my most-played song that year; I wore out my CD while stuffing envelopes for Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
The night of the election, I watched results with a bunch of friends, eating pizza and marveling that I finally had a driver’s license.
It didn’t seem like such a big deal that we lost; it felt like things would be fine either way.
We had no idea we were living through one of the most pivotal moments in American history.
“Fake Empire” by The National
This was one of President Obama’s campaign songs in 2008, but I was only vaguely aware of it at the time.
I was living in San Francisco that year, working for a nonprofit and running a national program to recruit and train poll workers.
I had left DC over my disgust with the Bush administration and a weak Congress that rubber-stamped the administration’s cruel policies.
The job in San Francisco was a way station while I applied to graduate school in Los Angeles; I had decided by then that I wanted to leave politics and become a screenwriter.
The next year, I moved to LA to start film school at USC, where I met a classmate named Morgan Matson.
She put this song in one of the playlists of her first novel, Amy she was also the friend I was traveling with when I first had the idea for See You Next Tuesday.
This song reminds me of the 2008 election, but much more important, it will always remind me of Morgan.
“Running” by Jessie Ware
Flash forward to April 2015: I had graduated with my MFA in screenwriting, but I had yet to find any paying work in that field.
I had written my first novel, but it didn’t sell.
I was floundering. I was frustrated. And then an old friend called to ask me if I’d consider being a writer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
At first, I was hesitant. It had been such a big deal for me to leave politics—was I really ready to go back?
Would going back mean that I had failed as a writer?
Or would refusing to go back be passing up one of the biggest opportunities of my life?
Amid all this, I was also going through a personal heartbreak and having a pretty rough time.
One of my dear friends took me to a Jessie Ware concert to cheer me up.
I had never heard her music before, and this was the first song she played; I was instantly transfixed.
When I accepted the job working for Secretary Clinton, this was the song that played in my mind over and over.
Keeps me running, keeps me running. Running for president.
Running from my problems, my heartbreaks, my failures.
Running toward something? A new chapter of my life in Brooklyn, maybe a new chapter for our country?
I didn’t know. It’s amazing to me now, looking back, just how much I didn’t know.
“Lose Yourself” by Eminem
This song is a perennial favorite on campaign playlists.
The relentless beat feels like the punishing pace of the campaign trail, and it’s one of those songs that can always energize you to do just a little more work, even when it’s two a.m. and you haven’t eaten since lunch and you feel like you’re about to die.
Campaign life is brutal, but it’s also exhilarating, with moments so big you can’t humanly believe you’re a part of them.
This is also the song that President Obama listened to backstage at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 to get hyped up before his speech—I was backstage that night too.
I screamed along with the rest of the crowd as Hillary surprised us by walking out onstage and hugging President Obama: her former opponent, her former boss, her dear friend.
I couldn’t believe that I was there, watching history unfold, a part of history myself.
“Pony” by Ginuwine
You know those end-of-quarter fundraising deadline political emails you absolutely hate?
I promise you, they’re even worse for the people tasked with raising the money to keep the campaign running.
I was on that team in 2015, and the day after our very first EOQ, we were all bleary with exhaustion, so our boss let us leave the office at lunchtime—an exceedingly rare treat for a job where we sometimes only had one day off per month.
My friend Nichole and I used our free afternoon to see Magic Mike XXL, and we were obsessed.
(It’s a perfect film and a deeply feminist work of art.
I stand by this.) “Pony” became our team’s anthem, the song we would play anytime we needed a pick-me-up, the first song on our team playlist. Campaigning can be such serious work, but it can also feel just like high school, a dance party with your best friends in the middle of the night—while you try to elect our next president.
“Sparks” by Coldplay
During the 2016 cycle, I had an arsenal of different sleep aids in my nightstand.
I usually had somewhere between four and eight hours when I could actually get some rest, if only I could turn my brain off—except I never could.
Hence the pills. Real sleeping pills if I had eight hours, heavy-duty melatonin if I had six, a lighter dose if I had only four.
The pills usually worked, and I slept however much I could.
But sometimes nothing would knock me out, and I’d be awake at three or four a.m., spiraling about whatever crisis had unfolded at work that day.
In those cases, I’d take out the most serious drug in my nightstand: my For Emergencies Only pack of cigarettes.
Then I’d crack the window of my bedroom in a fourth-floor Brooklyn walk-up and have a smoke while listening to this song.
Something about the combination of the freezing night air, the cigarette, and these chords always calmed me down; afterward, I could usually get to sleep.
When I hear this song now, I still think of the title as referencing the sparks showering from the flicks of my fingers, out of my window and into the quiet night.
“When We Were Young” by Adele