“I love the difference between authors who have favorite songs on deep background, giving them the feeling of their life, and authors who play particular songs in their head while they write, or the difference between authors who cite songs in their writing, and authors who hide them.”
“Without music, this book wouldn’t exist. I’d just have a volcano, but with no place to put it.”
“One of my favorite scenes in the book shows Tom being so heartbroken by listening to this song that his wife realizes he is in love with someone else—the person who bought him the record.”
“Short stories and songs, especially pop songs, are very similar forms. Both are capable of structural perfection (unlike the novel, an essentially imperfectible form).”
“What’s reflected here is the music that first shaped me into a poet and songs that have specifically been in conversation with my six poetry collections as I was writing them.”
“I like a playlist that has a narrative shape.”
“What is the sound of longing? Of taking a leap, which may look more like a fall? The music gathered here was playing in the background at some point when I wrote Blue Sunset.”
“In the months following my mother’s death in the fall of 2022, I assigned myself the task of writing a story every day.”
“…if I’m writing about a particular era, as I have done for both of my books so far, music is vital to accurately capturing the mood of that particular time.”
“It’s a novel interested in exploring Henry’s radical interiority, his non-sequitur imagination, through an intensely subjective first-person point of view. At its heartbeat questions about for whom we really create at the end of the day; about reading as problem; about the importance of serious art as a hospital for soothing hurt rather than a business privileging quantity over quality.”