Soundtrack A DAY LIKE A THOUSAND YEARS

The music behind the dunes, the sea, and the story.

Aug 01, 2024

Every chapter has its own light, its own tide; these are the songs that rise and fall with it.

This novel unfolds mostly by the sea — in the dunes, the forests, the ever-changing light.
There’s something timeless about that.
Classical music moves in wide, tidal gestures of ebb and flow. In this book, it’s Rachmaninoff who carries that vastness.
And in the trembling leaves of the deciduous forest, in a warm, languid afternoon, you can hear the impressionist colours of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, with its faintly jazzy pulse.
Because the story takes place in another time, many songs come from that time as well — music that, around 1972, had just appeared on vinyl and was danced to in the dancings of those days.
But where the atmosphere calls for it, you’ll also find anachronisms here: later music woven in because the mood or imagery fits the story.
The characters in the novel never knew those songs — they didn’t exist yet.

How to Listen

You don’t need to play the whole playlist at once.
Let the music drift in when it feels right — during a chapter, before it, or when you’ve just put the book aside and the images are still breathing in your mind.

Some tracks belong to the year the story takes place — the soft, romantic pulse of the early seventies, the songs teenagers danced to in the summer discos of those days.
Others come from much earlier, like Peggy Lee asking for kindness.
And a few pieces didn’t exist yet for the characters — Einaudi’s Primavera, or “The Waters of March” — but they belong to the mood, the way memory belongs to a landscape even before it’s lived.

And then there is the classical music:
the long, yearning movements that rise and fall like tides on a warm coastline,
the impressionistic shimmer of Ravel in a sunlit forest,
the wide orchestral breath of Rachmaninoff that holds both longing and belonging.

Just listen the way you walk through dunes or woods —
following light, warmth, the slow tilt of an afternoon.

There is no right order.
Only resonance.