So I wrote another novel
and it comes out tomorrow in Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s called Nailing Down the Saint and it’s about Hollywood, fatherhood and levitation. Here’s 70
minutes of music of special relevance to the project, and a bunch of words about that
music (and other things).
1. Patient Zero – Aimee Mann
If Nailing Down the Saint was Season Two of
a TV show,
this song that might play over the “Previously, on” recap: A young man arrives
in Hollywood. The world lays at his feet. But things don’t go as planned.
There’s this point, two and half minutes into the
song, just after Mann sings, “You paid your respects like a ransom / To a
moment that was doomed from the start”, and there’s this low, ominous piano
note. The song continues, but that note once struck can’t be unstruck. Things
have turned to shit, even if you aren’t ready to admit it yet.
Welcome to Duncan Blake’s life in LA.
2. Bedtime – Gord Downie
This song, the 3rd track on Introduce
Yerself, kicked me in the guts so friggin’ hard when I first heard it,
still reeling from Downie’s death,
knowing he wrote it as his days with his family were numbered, and have young
kids myself. The song recounts the struggle to get a young child to sleep, laying
them down, pulling your hands away, “as
if from a bomb”, and getting out of the room, only to be called back in and for
it to “start all over again”.
In the midst of this routine, it can seem a trial.
Interminable. But what goes unsaid here is this eminently and imminently mortal
father would give anything to go through it again. What might sound like a
lullaby to someone not paying attention is actually an ode to fatherhood and a
goodbye.
In NDTS, the protagonist, Duncan, has a
nearly four-year-old son, Zeb, and thoughts of time passing and not being there
for Zeb fuck him up. If he heard ‘Bedtime’, he’d be reduced to a puddle of
gloop like *that*.
3. Tinseltown in the Rain – The Blue Nile
So Duncan has moved to LA to continue his meteoric rise in the world of
filmmaking, but was fucked over, then fucked up by fatherhood, and finds
himself working in a chain restaurant in West Hollywood.
The penultimate chapter of the first section lifts its title directly
from The Blue Nile’s song. With its synth-heavy, questioning mood – “Why did we
ever come so far? / I knew I'd seen it all before / Do I love you ? Yes I love
you / Will we always be happy go lucky?” – it feels like the mopey section of a
John Hughes movie, which is absolutely something Duncan Blake might think in
the moment before he gets his second chance handed to him by Frank Motta.
4. Horizon – Aldous Harding
These next three songs are dedicated to Felicity “Mack” MacKinnon,
Duncan’s best friend from high school, who, after a period of estrangement,
joins him on his Italian quest to scout locations for Frank Motta’s biopic of
Saint Joseph of Copertino (more on him in a bit).
When I first heard this song in 2017, I thought: that’s Mack. Here’s
something I’d already written about her (and that’s in the final novel):
‘Come on, babe, play nice.’ She’d called him ‘babe’ since forever. Had
shown up at his high school calling everyone that, like some Hollywood producer
posing as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, only she seemed to be doing it
ironically. As if she’d ever turn Hollywood! She was real, belonged to the
world of cellulite, not celluloid, could bend old language around new corners.
It was as if every ‘babe’ had an implied, parenthetical retort, like the title
of an unlikely pop hit.
(You’re no picture yourself) Babe.
(Nothing you
can do can get to me) Babe.
5. It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back) – Eurythmics
The only thing is: Aldous Harding is more Duncan’s kind of music than
Mack’s.
On the road trip, she’s the master of the in-car playlist, leaning much
more toward the nostalgic (or what counts as nostalgia for a child of the 80’s
and 90’s).
There was A LOT more banter about music while Duncan and Mack travelled
around Italy in the first draft of NDTS, but this had to (HAD TO!!) be pared
back. Examples of riffs that ended on the cutting room floor: how OK
Computer-era Radiohead sounds like a piss-take of 90’s po-faced seriousness;
on nostalgia and wistfulness; how Lennox and Stewart are a better songwriting
duo than Lennon and McCartney… That’s not a hill I’m willing to die on, but I
will sit at the summit until some vinyl-smelling boor comes to chase me off.
6. I Will Wait – Hootie & the Blowfish
One thing I couldn’t cut was Mack and Duncan arguing about this song.
I was very much in Duncan’s camp (i.e. it is unconscionable to enjoy,
yet alone publicly endorse Hootie & the Blowfish) for most of my life.
But I’m now Team Mack on this particular track. Add it twice to your next road trip
playlist: once to get over the hump of your fellow travellers’ prejudice and a
second time for the singalong.
7. Can’t Keep Checking My Phone – Unknown Mortal Orchestra
I saw UMO live in Wellington in December 2015, when progress on the novel was stymied.
I’d written about 10,000 words the year before, then got very sick for a
fortnight and couldn’t get clear of family and work commitments to get the ball
rolling again. But I could still faff around on my phone and go to concerts and
have transcendent experiences listening to Ruban Neilson do Prince via T-Rex
through one of those tin-can-and-string telephone getups.
When I got back into NDTS the next year, UMO’s Multi Love was
still on high rotate and Duncan’s cellphone became one of the major characters –
a know-it-all who sucks the mystery out of tipsy wonderings but can’t help get
you out of the tangle it has led you into in the medieval centre of Assisi.
Then there’s Duncan’s female friend from work in LA
who’s What’s App-ing him, desperate to know how his road trip is going…
8. Sitting in my Hotel – The Kinks
‘Celluloid Heroes’ might be the more obvious Kinks
song here, but that song sucks.
This one, however, is up there with ‘Sweet Lady
Genevieve’ as the underappreciated Kinks masterpiece.
It has that classic, fame-is-a-downer vibe that can
translate even when you’re not famous (which is, let’s face it, most of us),
just simply alone in a hotel room, or, right next to your best friend in a room
in Pietrarubbaia and you realise that you’ve been criminally incurious about
her life and motivations.
9. A Private Understanding – Protomartyr
The best track from my favourite album of 2017 (Relatives in Descent),
the most important year in the creation of NDTS.
You can read a lot of things into the lyrics, so of course I see
connections with my novel, but in 2018 I learnt another thing I love about
Protomartyr while preparing to see them live:
that the frontman, Joe Casey, didn’t join a band until he was 35 (my age at the
time), couldn’t play an instrument (like me, despite those three terms of
classical guitar tuition at Intermediate) and struggled with stage-fright
(hence the dark glasses and static stage presence). There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to journalist’s
overwrought descriptions of him.
And yet here he is, singing songs about the Flint water crisis, the plague
of toxic masculinity and the mysterious hum that can be heard in Windsor, Ontario.
A hero for our times!
10. My Body – David Bazan
This was my favourite song of 2018. If 2017 was all about the first
draft, 2018 was about actually writing an ending (!) and rolling through the manuscript
again and again until it was fit for someone else to read (the editing process
took me through to mid-2019).
Bazan solo and in all his other projects is amazing. Everything is shot
through with the anxiety that comes as another mediocre (or not) white dude
with a microphone.
‘My Body’ speaks directly to the concerns of NDTS.
Or just start from the beginning: “This feels like a disproportionate
amount of longing / More confirmation I was never meant to live alone”
(I mean, who write lyrics like that?)
As Duncan gets further and further into his location scouting gig, his
native scepticism about the feats of Saint Joseph of Copertino, a seventeenth century
Franciscan friar who is purported to have levitated hundreds of times and performed
countless other miracles during and after his time on earth, is eaten away. To
the point he might admit, as Bazan does in his chorus: “My body doesn’t believe
what my mind believes”. Might.
11. Mind Games – John Lennon
I’d never really listened to, or thought about, the lyrics here until I
was writing this book. I’d just assumed it was about the mind games two people
in a relationship play, but it’s a much more positive type of mind game Lennon
is talking about – inspired by the book Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space by Robert
Masters and Jean Houston – and totally in keeping with Lennon in
1973.
For a while I wanted to call the novel Absolute Elsewhere, after a lyric in this song.
Instead it’s just a chapter title (along with another lyric, ‘Out of the Now’)
and I let someone in sweatpants mangle it on guitar to a pizzeria full of cult
members.
12. Strange Torpedo – Lucy Dacus
Another chapter title.
Dacus has
explained that she was inspired by a line in Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas, but I still can’t avoid the phallic associations of a ‘strange
torpedo on the loose’ – which fits in with the theme of Hollywood enabling the unchecked
masculine gaze…
Having said that. the strange torpedo in NDTS is a dead blackbird
a young girl is trying to bring back to life in a convent carpark.
13. Stay Lost (acoustic) / Tinseltown Swimming in Blood – Destroyer
This double shot from the deluxe edition of Destroyer’s Ken (2017)
rounds out the Italian portion of the novel. Not gonna divulge any spoilers,
but from the song titles themselves you can begin to surmise how things round
out for Duncan with Mack and Motta.
14. The French Inhaler – Warren Zevon
Early in the novel, there’s a discussion of Frank
Motta’s oeuvre, including a film called French Inhaler, about “the ultimate
kiss-off song [i.e. Zevon’s]. A cross between a talking heads documentary
and crime scene re-enactment.”
Thematically, this track and the way it crosses the
line for both misogyny and self-loathing fits much better at the tail end of
this playlist and the moment for Duncan “when the lights came up at two”.
15. Mariners Apartment Complex – Lana Del Rey
16. Green Light – Lorde
It’s important to finish this playlist with some
younger, female voices for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who gets to
the end of NDTS.
I’ve long been a sucker for the overtness of Del
Rey’s façade and the performativeness of her songs, but ‘Mariners Apartment
Complex’ appears to mark a more personal turn in her song writing. When she
sings, ‘I’m your man’, in the chorus, it’s about self-empowerment and
reclaiming gendered language and everything you want to surround your kids – female,
male or otherwise - with.
Then there’s Lorde.
Melodrama came out in
2017 and was on high rotate as I wrote NDTS. But I was also in the US in
2013 when ‘Royals’ started to blow up (and Ellie Catton won the Booker Prize)
and it was this amazing moment for young Kiwi women and I was struggling to
start something new after my novel, The Mannequin Makers, had come out
and would struggle for another four years…
So when Lorde kicked off her sophomore album with ‘Green
Light’, a perfectly complex dancefloor jam about almost having the
licence to just let go, it struck a chord with this thirty-something, who, like Duncan
Blake, had “skin the colour of old lace, a penis and a second chance.”
If you get to the end of NDTS, or if
you’re like me and you read the acknowledgements page first, you’ll see that I
dedicate the book to the memory of Gord Downie, the Canadian musician, writer
and humanitarian best known as the frontman of The Tragically Hip. Downie
recorded his final solo album, Introduce Yerself, while in the late stage of
his battle with brain cancer. It was released 10 days after his death in
October 2017, when I was in the midst of writing the first draft of NDTS. I’d
been a rabid fan of The Hip and Downie’s solo work for more than a decade, and
had shared a brief email exchange with him in the early 2010s which included me
sending him my first book, but it felt to personal, too chummy, to have the
dedication open the book. So that’s why it’s tucked away in back.
