“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.”
“I love listening to music when I write, and the right piece or album can bring me to a much more inspired, connected, focused place.”
“During the act of writing, I never listen to music. External music is a distraction for me. My ears need to concentrate on an inner music: the music of language, of vowels and consonants which I struggle to fit together in my search for verbal harmonies and creative dissonance.”
“Some of these songs were around while I was writing it. Some feel like the Midwest I know. Some remind me of people I haven’t seen in years. Some just sound like something bad is about to happen.”
“Scott Platt, the narrator of Fail Sons, is an unemployed forty-year-old Brooklynite who spent fifteen years editing the culture section at a glossy magazine before the decline of print journalism ended his career. In other words, he’s a man with opinions about music.”
“Although I didn’t listen to Billie Holiday while writing the novel, her music haunted my imagination throughout the process.”
“Although I made a vibes playlist for the book early in my drafting process, I’m one of those people who can’t write to most songs because I’ll end up choreographing a music video before a single word lands on the page.”