Here is the complete YouTube playlist:
Twin City…
The desert is more than a setting — it is a force.
A horizon that never ends, the eagle lifting into hot air, the long American freeways shimmering toward something half-real.
European impressionists wander in from another world, and the kind of tender, aching jazz that draws old memories to the surface moves just under the skin.A morning star that burns too brightly, and love that makes the ground tremble
“like the heart of a trembling bird.”
Old terminal stations echo with ghosts of departures and returns.
The Kreutzer Sonata slips through the pages the way it always has through literature: dramatic, unruly, irresistible.
Loving someone — and letting that person go just when you’ve found them.
And Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, returning more than once, as if the story keeps circling a secret it isn’t ready to reveal.
And As Time Goes By…
What remains?
Maybe just this: “That I miss you.”
Before you begin, one piece to bring you into the right light — like the slow fade-in of the film’s first frame.
Chapter 1 — The gas station on the road to El Paso
The real land hidden under the American Dream.
The first wide cinematic sweep.
• Wild Mountain Honey
Chapter 6 — On the road together
A road movie inside the novel.
Einaudi’s Fly — Paris sliding past, and two people beginning to travel the same inner route.
• Ludovico Einaudi — Fly
• The Intouchables — Trailer
Chapter 16 — Pavane pour une infante défunte
A moment so still it becomes a tableau.
Ravel’s lines falling like bright dust.
• Ravel — Pavane (Ashkenazy)
Chapter 17 — The Eagle’s Flight
The desert opens.
The sky becomes a road.
• Fly Like an Eagle
Chapter 27 — The Banquet
Play the Pavane again.
The music knows its own way through the story.
Chapter 30 — Autumn music
A tribute to Nomi and her cello.
Maisky — fierce, tender, and entirely truthful.
Chapter 39 — Piano on the street
Plaza Cervantina, Ciudad Juárez.
A street turning into a stage.
John’s fingers telling stories nobody is ever ready for yet.
Debussy and Granados, or In A Sentimental Mood
And the emotional load of Casablanca’s As Time Goes Bye.
Debussy: La soirée en Grenade, played by himself
Hank Jones — In a Sentimental Mood
As Time Goes By — Dooley Wilson
Granados — Danza española No. 5
Duke Ellington — In a Sentimental Mood (solo)
Chapter 45 — Facing Love
It takes courage.
Shallow — Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper
Chapter 46 — Morning Star
Evergreen for the glow around two sleeping lovers.
And The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face — where the world reshapes itself because someone is alive in your arms.
• Evergreen — Barbra Streisand
• The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Chapter 48 — The Ordinaryness Of Mysteries
Train stations.
Old Europe breathing into the scene like a second film layered behind the first.
• Françoise Hardy & Jacques Dutronc — Puisque vous partez en voyage
Chapter 56 — Rosanne’s dream
A dream that feels like falling into music.
• Sarah McLachlan — Angel — [insert link]
Chapter 60 — Kreutzer Sonata
In the novel performed by Shapiro and Carpenter.
Here played by the masters — gravity, fire, precision.
• Beethoven — Kreutzer Sonata (Perlman & Ashkenazy)
Chapter 65 — The Garden of God
A recitative, really — quiet light, quiet sorrow.
John remembers this music like a confession.
And the holiness of a vow.
• Bach — St. Matthew Passion, No. 74 Recitative
• Prokofiev — Friar Laurence (Romeo & Juliet Suite)
Chapter 66 — The letter
A scene weighted by what cannot be said.
Music that circles the unsaid like a veil.
• La Santa Cecilia — Me Verás
Chapter 68 — Rosa Ana
The Pavane again — but changed.
Mythic now.
Like Rosa Ana herself.
• Ravel — Pavane (Ashkenazy)
Epilogue
Rosanne’s laughing eyes.
“That I miss you.”
And John crossing the border, the light opening behind him…
And now?
Will there be a sequel to Twin City?
The music knows before we do.
Something new is already forming in the quiet —
and it might very well grow into the next novel.
Its title might be The Woman in the Pueblo.
Or it might change.
That’s how it is now.Every tale leaves a door ajar. This one does too.
For now:
Enjoy the music
And feel the story.