In celebration of This Must Be the Place‘s first week in the world (it will be at your favorite local bookseller tomorrow!), I’m going to be posting a book soundtrack, one or two tracks a day, to give my early readers an accompanying score. I listen to music when I wake up, before I go to bed, while I cook, on the T (subway, to non-Bostonians), walking down the street, at the grocery store–and while I write (I’m probably going deaf, but ever so happily). My characters really didn’t have a choice: they were going to exist in a place soaked with sound (in this book, mostly popular songs), and music was going to be just as world-defining to them as it is to me.
First up! Pixies. Here Comes Your Man. This is nearly a perfect song: short, sweet and poppy, catchy as all get out, and damn near inscrutable. The album this track is from, Doolittle, is hugely influential to one of my main characters (his personal favorite is actually Debaser, the kickiest song ever written about Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel); and it is really, truly, and absolutely awesome, the kind of album you can listen to when you’re in all different kinds of moods, that will always say something new to you. It’s excellent for dancing, dreaming, and thrashing about like a little punk.
Which explains why the character of Eugene “Wendy” Wendell digs it so much. Writing Wendy was a fantastic excuse to listen to all my favorite exuberantly snot-nosed, teenage anarchy now! music (more to come in the next few days)–not that anyone ever needs an excuse to listen to the Pixies.
1 comment