The Alan Opts Out Mixtape

A musical gift for my brilliant friend, Courtney Maum

When I attended Courtney Maum’s Turning Points writing retreat at a rural New Mexico Ranch in 2024, I brought my backpacking guitar to meet a group full of strangers. I never know when I meet strangers (new friends?) if they will be the kind of people who want to be serenaded by a strange woman or if they will desire that I disappear to play as quietly as possible someplace out of ear shot. I’m not a phenomenal guitarist, but I have a fine voice and I can play along to accompany myself. Playing music and singing is a long time favored hobby - worth preserving through my decade plus training to become a physician and the decade plus I’ve been in practice.

To my relief, the group was solidly pro-serenade.

After the delicious evening meals, I took requests, doing my best to play the songs that each person desired.

Courtney shamelessly thrives on radio edit pop music. By the very first night, I had learned the chords to Shaboozey’s A Bar Song so she could shake her booty to a folkified version out on a patio overlooking the desert chaparral. I have never once desired a Birkin bag, but I sang loudly that night about fancy hand bags and whiskey and dancing on tables. The hostess modeled permission to let loose, being the number one booty shaker. Whatever thin layer of ice left between us in the group defrosted, dripping onto the powdery desert dirt.

Courtney knew what she was doing when she selected the group of writers she admitted to the retreat. She had meticulously selected each person with the intent of building a cohesive group through an intensive application and interview process. We arrived as individual writers, strangers one day and pajama dance partners the next. I had attended writing retreats before with some very lovely people. I am still in touch with very few of them. The Turning Points folks? We became close friends. We have an active group chat. On my non-OR days, I still get out of bed by 5:30am to have a virtual writing session with the East Coast contingent.

Courtney snapped this photo of me between lyrics

While in New Mexico, Courtney read us brief snippets of her then-work-in-progress in a special session on writing loglines. I didn’t know what a logline was before the session, but by the time we were done, I had a new writing skill and a curiosity for the teaser trailer advertising executive living in a playhouse in his Greenwich, Connecticut backyard.

Me and Courtney at the ranch

By the end of the week of writing and creating and eating and laughing, I had done a lot of writing and learning, and in the between times, I built a mixtape of song each of the participants had enjoyed. Sure, it was technically a digital playlist. But I prefer a mixtape - harkening back to an earlier time when we patiently waited for our favorite songs to play on the radio and hit the record button on our boomboxes as soon as we heard the very first note.

I learned this week that several of the writers are still listening to that original mixtape!

Introducing: The Alan Opts Out Mixtape

On June 2, 2026, a year and a half after our logline lesson, Courtney’s book baby was born. Alan Opts Out is a hilarious, satirical story of an ad executive who blows his pitch for American Dairy and undergoes a rapid reorienting of who he wants to be. Opting out of capitalism, Alan decides to live off the land of his Greenwich, Connecticut estate. He moves into the kids’ unnecessarily fancy playhouse. Meanwhile, his social climbing wife is left managing the fallout from this chaotic change in their lives, while desperately manifesting an in-ground pool.

My copy of Alan Opts Out

When she was planning her book tour, Courtney asked me to do a Bay Area event with her. I want it to be special. When you’ve danced in the desert at dusk with someone, boring simply won’t do.

Since music is my love language, I decided to make a custom mixtape inspired by Courtney’s characters and their family comedic drama. I’ll be sharing it with folks who attend the event, and I’m sharing it with you all now.

I enjoyed selecting each song.

The list is fun.

It’s eclectic.

There’s funk and rock, R&B, pop, punk, a few old standards. It’s got both Madonna and Marylin Monroe singing about financial security. It’s got Barrett Strong crooning that love don’t pay the bills. Gil Scott-Heron warning that the revolution will not fight germs that cause bad breath. The B-52’s Rock Lobster is there in honor of Lenny the Lobster. Courtney’s requested song - Eddied Vedder’s Society - is on the list.

Some people say they like all music except country and rap, but I like both, so this list has those songs too.¹ Notorious B.I.G.’s Mo Money Mo Problems and Lil Wayne’s Got Money both appear. I included Justin Moore’s Time’s Ticking - a pop country song that Courtney’s dad enjoyed with the line “Make a memory, not just money.”

Of course, I made sure to include Shaboozey singing about bills and Birkin bags.

If you care to lobby for any additional songs after you check out the book, drop them in the comments. 🦞

Join us at Book Passage on June 26, 2026

This Friday, I’ll be with Courtney at Book Passage in Corte Madera talking about Alan and the family drama that ensues when he opts out of life as he knows it. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, I hope you’ll come see us!

1. The only genre I really can’t get into is death metal…