Andrés N. Ordorica’s novel How We Named the Stars is a brilliant debut, a poignant tale of first love.
Music is central to my writing practice. It helps me to understand a character, their ever-shifting mood, charts their growth over time. I use music to get to know them, what they might listen to while going on a run, when drowning out the noise of an overactive mind, when mourning a broken heart.
When I write prose, I often do so to a soundtrack of my own making. I particularly like to do this when working through a first draft, plotting the beats of the narrative arc against song. Almost as if willing my novel to be turned into film, that, perhaps, some Hollywood producer will give me free reign to underscore the film with my very good, very appropriate, very necessary musical tastes.
My characters are so very much born from me, but I don’t write autofiction. Still, I like to think that if I met my characters in real life, we would commune over a coffee or a beer and trade recommendations for bands and pop icons, sending each other on a labyrinthine journey across languages and musical styles. Maybe we would even end up at a gig together, sweaty dancing, euphoric from music’s ability to help us heal our fragile hearts and tender souls.
I think there is such a rich queer heritage of using music as another facet, almost tertiary character, in novels: Dean Atta’s Black Flamingo, Mendez’s Rainbow Milk, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, James Baldwin’s Another Country but to name a few.
In my novel, How We Named the Stars, I mention songs throughout that Daniel listens to or are played in his presence. But some songs, are known only to me as the writer. Here I’d like to share both the named and unnamed music that underscores the unfurling romance and friendship that develops between Daniel and his freshman roommate, Sam.
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Hysteric, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Like I said, my characters are inspired by my life but not written as memoir. And yet, I like to think Daniel’s musical taste would be shaped much like mine was. I imagine him wandering through a bookstore with saved up pocket money, buying the latest copies of Spin or Paste Magazine (remember when they used to give you a whole playlist in CD form?) learning of a life that existed just beyond his small sleepy town in northern California. I remember the June 2004 Spin cover featuring Yeah Yeah Yeahs which was my first introduction to Karen O’s amazing voice and stage presence. In my novel, the only point in which you hear from Sam, Daniel’s love interest, is in the prologue. When Sam mentions watching Daniel dance around the fire, both of them drunk on beer, this is the song I imagine him talking about as he tells Daniel, “You’re singing to yourself now, an almost mantra, and, I kid you not, I see lyrics buzzing around us like the letters I’ve let go of.”
I interpret this as a love song, and knowing the harrowing journey both young men will go on in the novel, it is an almost gift to say this is the first song that will guide them on their journey together, easing them into the bumps and bruises of young love.
amor tonight, Danny Ocean
For as much sadness as my novel holds, I believe there is great joy and moments of genuine lightness and love. The night that Sam and Daniel first kiss, I imagine to be a slightly warm, slightly cool evening in late March. If it were a movie, the moment they look up at the moon bouncing its light off a babbling stream, cutting through one of the many gorges that surrounds Ithaca, this song would be playing. I love Danny Ocean’s tenor, the earnestness in his voice, almost warbling like a bird. I am drawn to how he easily switches between Spanish and English, the tropical beat, the words themselves. It is a song that brings me such happiness, often I will dance to it when alone in my house, without a care in the world. At this crucial point in the novel, I wanted Daniel to have that exact feeling, así que muchas gracias Danny, I know my Daniel is grateful for tus palabras.
Your Body Changes Everything, Perfume Genius (Boy Harsher remix)
I love the echo of this remix. The sped up beat creating a sensual, forlorn urgency made all the more evocative by Perfume Genius’ voice. In the imagined film version of my novel, this song would play at the critical moment in which Daniel and Sam’s relationship shifts from something fraternal to something deeply intimate, at the point in which they cannot turn back. The repeating chorus posed as a question, “Can you feel my love? Do you feel the same?” embodies to me the fear and excitement that many of us experience when we relinquish ourselves to our truths, to our sexual desires, a scary, beautiful rite of passage, especially for queer folk. But even when caught up in the moment, we must know if the feeling is mutual, if our lover feels the same.
Volver, Volver, Vicente Fernández
Daniel arrives to México quite literally with a broken heart. His journey there both emotionally and physically was rushed and his mind spins with both memories of his childhood and his recent dissolution of friendship with Sam. He meanders through his great aunt’s house in Chihuahua in search of his grandfather, and something more intangible, a version of himself that might have been had his family never left Chihuahua. Eventually he exhausts all the rooms and heads outside onto the patio where his grandfather has orchestrated his welcome party. A mariachi band strikes up its instruments as los cantantes loudly sing Chente’s Volver, Volver. The frenetic energy of a party in my very loud, very big Mexican familia was the inspiration for this scene. My childhood was full of countless mariachi bands serenading someone on their birthday, baptism, at a quince, their wedding day, or even someone’s funeral as drunk tías y tíos sang on, but always at the center was my maternal abuelo, Papá Filomeno. When I hear this song I will always think of my grandfather, and I will raise a mezcal to him, knowing how very much music was a love language of his.
We Found Love, Rihanna
“I kept scrolling till I found Rihanna. As the opening notes to “We Found Love” poured through the speakers, I turned the volume up as high as possible. Dancing there in my seat, I was somewhere else entirely—somewhere I believed, at least for a moment, I could live free from the pain rattling through me.”
This song is a very emotionally charged one for me. It followed me throughout my year living in London for grad school. Despite often singing along to it loudly, and three sheets to the wind, it will always make me think of my paternal grandmother. The night that Rihanna headlined Wireless in Hyde Park my Nana Meche passed away. I had been drinking all day with my girlfriends, dancing around in muddy fields to Rizzle Kicks and Jessie J, awaiting the one and only Rihanna, but as the sun disappeared behind the stage and crew quickly tried to put together RiRi’s set, I felt a lucidity wash over me and I turned to H & J and told them I had to leave. Something in the air was off. Something told me I should be by the phone, be ready for the news. I pushed past thousands of people, having made it to the front of the festival stage. That night I did not get to see Rihanna perform this song, a song that had brought me so much unbridled joy at countless gay bars and clubs from Soho to Camden. The thing is I knew my grandmother was in her final days, cancer having ravaged her body, but that night something, some higher power told me it was time, and as I rushed to the tube calling my mom who was five-thousand miles from me, I knew that my grandmother’s soul had passed, that her shadow had crossed over mine. But I was happy she was at peace even as the pain rattled through me. When thinking of a song that could underscore the great pain Daniel was going through in his final days in Chihuahua after learning of Sam’s death, there was only ever one song that I could use.
This House is On Fire, Broken Social Scene
By page three of my novel, you know that Sam is dead. The novel works as a form of mourning and processing of death for Daniel. He in essence narrates the entire book to Sam as he prepares to start sophomore year of college without his best friend and his first love. To me this song is the transition from Daniel writing the last words of their story to preparing to begin his life in the present. Daniel tells Sam that he will no longer be afraid of the light, because the light is where he will find Sam. I imagine for Daniel, he will find comfort in the lyrics of his favourite band as Kevin Drew sings, “And now it burns bright in the night so you can find the way back home.” By the final page, I do believe Daniel and Sam will understand how light and stars can be a way of communicating to each other even after death.
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Like I said, music is so very important to my writing practice. It is another form of storytelling, and I am always in awe of songwriters, their dedication to synthesising human emotions and aurally building the tools that allow us to feel the sheer extent of what it means to be a living, breathing being on this earth. I could write more (I mean my playlist is seventeen songs deep), but instead I invite you to listen to the entire playlist before, while, or after you read my novel. I hope, like me, you get a sense that these indeed are the songs that Daniel would lean on to help him overcome this great loss and find a means of moving forward in his life.