“I do most of my writing in coffee shops, so my playlists are often selected by baristas.”
“The music herein may take you a place you may not want to go: to a graveside perhaps, or a deathbed, or simply to a wasted day. It may remind you what the Navajo believe: that if a sunrise finds you still asleep, God will simply assume you are dead.”
“…I wanted this list to capture something else — something deliberately accessible. Something glossy. Something you’d hear leaking from a car window at night. Something catchy enough to carry a body.”
“I read that Daniel Day-Lewis would listen to Eminem’s ‘The Way I Am’ every day on the set of Gangs of New York to get amped up for his role as Bill the Butcher, which I find almost unbearably cute in a boomer dad kind of way.”
“These songs were routes to the elemental, helping me get down to different scales of existence and see through the lens of a French Bulldog, the parasitic worms inside of her, as well as things like foam and glass and soil.”
“My new collection of short fiction, King the Wonder Dog: and Other Stories…is my love letter to the healing power of animals.”
“As a memoirist excavating my life, I needed a solid pier to anchor the boat. To write incisively about events that happened forty to fifty years ago, finding music to evoke those times was key.”
“People ask me if I ever get writers’ block, and I say ‘Never!’ If you feel like you can’t get anything creative done, throw on ‘Born to Go’ by Hawkwind.”
“When I lived in Sac City, Iowa, in my early twenties, the time in my life that Surety draws from, I was in the habit of starting a new playlist on the first of each month. This practice produced a series of playlists that replicated the subtle shift of seasons: what the light was doing.”
“Miranda Lambert and I might have made quite a team back in the day when I still drank tequila, smoked roll-your-own cigarettes, and danced with strangers. Maybe she gives that back to me, a time in my life when I stupidly loved the rawness of making mistakes and testing boundaries.”