Michael Deagler’s novel Early Sobrieties is one of the strongest debuts I have read in years, a book as wise as it is compelling.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“A moving, comic meditation on the impossibility of imposing narrative structure on our lives — which, despite our best efforts, tend to be baggy things, marred by loose ends, tedious repetitions and harrowing codas. […] Early Sobrieties is such a wise and piercing book.”
In his own words, here is Michael Deagler’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Early Sobrieties:
I first heard of Largehearted Boy and his playlists in 2012. I was in Paul Lisicky’s innovative prose forms class at Rutgers-Camden, where I was pursuing my fiction MFA. Paul asked us all to make our own Book Notes-style lists for the stories we were working on. I was 23 and petulant and not yet sober, and I composed my list exclusively of songs by Philadelphia-area punk bands, even though I knew no one else in the class would likely have heard of them and therefore the list would not be much fun to present. I was still in that period of life when the music you listened to, like the neighborhood you lived in or the politics you espoused, was a telling and significant marker of identity, a reason to respect or date or dismiss somebody. A year out of college and caught in the increasingly unnavigable currents of my alcoholism, I was starting to feel some of those identifiers get slippery, and I so clung that much tighter to all of them, and to punk music especially.
That was twelve years ago. I’ve since gotten sober and mellowed out and moved to Los Angeles, and my musical tastes have become wider and kinder. (When Spotify handed out “Sound Towns” at the end of last year, I was slightly horrified to find that mine was Asheville, North Carolina.) There are plenty of world-weary, nimble-tongued, and large-hearted musicians whose work informs me and, sometimes, my writing: Joe Pug and Samantha Crane, Julie Byrne and Jake Xerxes Fussell, Pigeon Pit and Frontier Ruckus. I could make a Book Notes playlist of songs just by the Hold Steady, or another just by the Pogues.
But EARLY SOBRIETIES is about a certain time and place and psychological state, and a young man caught, like I was, in a moment of slipping and clinging. Dennis Monk is recently sober and not quite sure what to do with himself. He wanders around South Philadelphia imposing himself on friends and acquaintances in the hopes of finding a place in a city he no longer fully recognizes. Were I to glance at his playlist as he fumbled along, I’m sure I would find mostly comfort food: songs that reminded him of when he felt more himself.
And so, for Monk and for that earlier version of me, I now to compose my Book Notes list entirely of songs from Philadelphia-area punk (and punk-adjacent) bands. It’s admittedly white and dude-heavy, and the gravitational center is fixed firmly in the vicinity of 2007. Some of these are songs I listened to endlessly when I was drinking, some when I was newly sober. Some I discovered years later and found that they tapped into something from those earlier times.
1. “Came Out Swinging” by The Wonder Years, 2011
For all its pop-punk excesses, this one strikes something deep in me, as it does, I’m sure, any Millennial with a heart and Phillies hat. Frontman Soupy Campbell (of Lansdale, PA) writes about the embarrassment of moving home after a humbling and exhausting attempt at real life. He’s talking about touring and writing music at the expense of a normal job and a stable relationship, but the lyrics—and the emotion that underlies them—graph neatly onto the protagonist of my novel, whose new sobriety forces him to move in with his parents and then couch surf with his shrinking list of friends. The song builds to an anthemic, cymbal-clashing crescendo: “I came out swinging from a South Philly basement / Caked in stale beer and sweat under half-lit fluorescents / And I spent the winter writing songs about getting better / And if I’m being honest, I’m getting there.” If I had to boil my novel down to four lines, they would sound pretty close to that.
2. “Coffee, God, And Cigarettes” by Mischief Brew, 2006
The multiple false starts as Erik Petersen finds his fingering on this track evoke the hesitant nature of early sobriety—a hesitancy contradicted by the arrogance of the lyrics: “Coffee, god, and cigarettes are all that you need / It’s all that you need just to be as free as me.” The song takes aim at twelve-step devotees who think they’ve got it all figured out, those who “used to worship whiskey” but now “only drink the Lord” and loiter with their oversweetened coffee at AA meetings, “swappin’ one addiction for another.” I don’t think Petersen is drawing a false equivalency or dismissing twelve-steppers as hypocrites. (Self-righteously swigging coffee is surely better than “dreaming about bourbon in the trauma ward.”) Rather, the song pokes fun at the idea that addiction can be settled so simply and without any deeper examination of the self. Petersen understands, too, that every drunk is something of an anarcho-folk punk troubadour, at least in his own head.
3. “Glutton For Distance” by Worriers, 2015
Plenty of bands started in Philadelphia before moving to New York and greater success, but Worriers bucked the trend by secretly moving to Philadelphia for the cheaper rent while still claiming Brooklyn. (It took me a long time to realize they had relocated, though it did explain why they played at Kung Fu Necktie so often.) Singer/songwriter Lauren Denitzio is one of the great chroniclers of Millennial anxiety, and “Glutton For Distance” is an angsty yowl about the pitfalls of long-distance relationships (and short-distance ones), of gentrification and the impossibility of setting down roots: “Get used to the grid and you’ll learn to look left / In time to get priced out of here.” The guitars arc like telephone wires across an empty continent, and the lyrics could easily be about Brooklyn or Philadelphia, or Minneapolis, where I saw them play one time while driving around the Midwest, or even Los Angeles, where I’ve heard Denitzio, too, now resides. Plenty of great art is inspired by the fact that sometimes (maybe even most of the time) you don’t get to live where you want to.
4. “Cheap Shot Youth Anthem” by Kid Dynamite, 2000
Kid Dynamite is Philadelphia’s essential punk band: earworm riffs, hardcore snarl, an ADD-addled irreverence that embodies the city’s anarchic charm. A Kid Dynamite song is always a good time, and almost always clocks in at less than two minutes. This track celebrates the hardcore scene’s tradition of all-ages shows, held in youth centers and VFW halls rather than bars or clubs so that minors with nothing else to do on a Friday night had somewhere to go without getting carded. A song insisting shows should be all-ages might sound like a pander to the youth (as the title wryly admits) but there is real sincerity in the way Jason Shevcuk delivers the lines: “Just because you’re not 21 / That’s not supposed to mean you can’t have any fun / So come out and raise your fists high, stage dive / And dance the night away.” The sentiment certainly appealed to me as a teen going to shows at the Plumsteadville Fire Hall, and the idea of a show as something to be experienced soberly and bodily (as opposed to an excuse to guzzle beers, which is how a lot of my peers continue to treat shows) is one that resonates with me still.
5. “104 Degrees” by Slaughter Beach, Dog, 2017
This one technically came too late for the novel’s 2015 setting, but I feel like I have to include this literary offering, which references both Murakami and West Philly’s Bindlestiff Books. Jake Ewald captures as well as anyone my particular cohort’s boring trudge toward middle age: “Details for a new protest / Adorn white printer paper flyers / She says, ‘I feel so old admitting / Counter-culture makes me tired.’” The song imagines an entire relationship in the span of a single date, from meet-cute to “settl[ing] down for good” in Fishtown, which, as the love interest’s “old neighborhood,” already has the glow of simpler times. It’s autofiction boiled down to pop-song length, capturing the simultaneity of city life, the way nostalgia and exhaustion and promise seem to coexist on every block. I saw the band play it live at Boot and Saddle once, and they stretched the outro on and on and on until all our pulses in the audiences were synced up with it.
6. “Paper-Hanger” by mewithYou, 2004
This Fishtown band always puts me right back onto the streets of Kensington, where you meet just the sort of hermits and castaways that populate their songs. (For instance, the “prettiest bag lady I ever met” in the opening line.) Aaron Weiss’s ranting vocal style and brimstone imagery could well be that of a street preacher, and his performances would make as much sense under the El at K&A as on stage at the Trocadero or Union Transfer. “I was dead, then alive. / She was like wine turned to water and turned back to wine. / You can pour us out, we won’t mind. / A scratch around the mouth of the glass, / My life is no longer mine.” The song isn’t about addiction—or if it is, it’s about Weiss’s addiction to Jesus—but there’s something in those lines that captures the complete, zealot-like submission of the addict before his preferred gods, and the perverse relief that comes from total surrender.
7. “Fine Is Fine” by Peasant, 2009
This wasn’t my usual taste, but I include Peasant, aka Damien DeRose, in part because a chapter of my novel is structured around the death of a singer-songwriter closely modeled on him. He, like me, was from central Bucks County, and his minor celebrity was much discussed in our corner of the world. His career was derailed by his heroin addiction and the crimes he resorted to in order to sustain it, but the music is sincere and gentle in a way that highlights the baffling duality of the addict. I may be imagining it, but I hear someone pretty close to burned out in this one, struggling to imagine what might be next: “So you’re looking for a ride? / Say ‘I’m boiling up inside’ / But if you’re going / Then come on and choose a side / Cause it’s getting tired.” Like Mischief Brew’s Erik Petersen, Peasant serves as a bruising reminder that the art doesn’t always save you in the end.
8. “Atticus Finch” by Paint It Black, 2003
Alright, I have to put some actual hardcore on here. After Kid Dynamite, guitarist Dan Yemin (already a veteran of New Jersey’s melodic hardcore godfathers, Lifetime) set his ax aside and picked up the microphone to front Paint It Black (which is, you have to admit, one of the more hardcore Rolling Stones songs). I used to listen to this all the time stomping around Temple University, hungover, inspecting fire extinguishers as part of my campus job with the fire marshall’s office. (Though I wore Vans, not Chuck Taylors.) Early sobriety requires a couple of fuck you songs, and this one gets extra points for the To Kill A Mockingbird reference: “Don’t talk / Til you take a walk / In my Chucks / (What the fuck?) / I guess you’re shit out of luck.”
9. “Plays Pretty for Baby” by Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer, 2002
I was a teen during peak emo, which means that a lot of things I loved in middle school don’t really hold up super well twenty years on. Zolof’s spunk rock does, however, even this tear-stained early cut featuring Circa Survive’s (and Doylestown, PA’s) Anthony Green on vocals. Is there another lyric in all of pop this myopically devastating? “I need the song started over / Your crying made me miss my favorite part.” There’s a lo-fi magic that reminds me so much of the emotionally repressed pre-alcoholic lunatic I was at fifteen (completely different than the emotionally repressed alcoholic lunatic I was at twenty or the emotionally repressed post-alcoholic lunatic I was at twenty-five). The band reworked the song as “Super OK” for their next album, with a faster tempo, new lyrics, and Rachel Minton on lead vocals. It’s catchy, but it doesn’t quite match the original for pathos.
10. “Sister Cities” by Hop Along, 2015
This song has always reminded me of driving out of town, which was where I was usually trying to drive in 2015, and where my protagonist Monk is often trying to get at various points in his own journey. Quakertown, PA’s Frances Quinlan sings, “How long it took to reach the sister cities / And then somehow make it back / Just to tell me ‘Yeah, I guess I’m still pretty mad…’” I mentioned their voice, and this album, in the novel, in part because I hear something like a challenge in it, a harangue to get up and out into the world, to be a part of life and America and the landscape beyond Philadelphia and its fiefdoms, its scenes and pathologies and arguments about bands. There are so many cities, I’ve learned, and you can kind of be a different person in each of them, but back home, for better or for worse, you’re still you. (And still, probably, a little mad.)
11. “Long Time” by the Roots, 2006
Just to prove the rule with an exception, I’ll leave behind my punk-adjacent songs and end on one by the legendary Roots crew. It echoes, locationally, the Wonder Years song from up top, with Black Thought providing his own origin story: “My name Black Thought, the definition of raw / I was born in South Philly on a cement floor…” North Philly gets its say, too, with Peedi Peedi repping the city’s bleaker half, where I used to listen to this album, Game Theory, on repeat while going to Temple. It’s an aspirational track, a song about rising above your circumstances, but, like my novel, it’s also a lament for worlds left behind. (“It’s been a long time since I was back around the way…”) In the third verse, Black Thought gets swept up in memories of his childhood, when The Sound of Philadelphia (including Bunny Sigler, who contributes vocals to the track) made Philadelphia the soul-center of the universe: “Clap something but whatever you clap / Clap to the record spinning while I’m taking you back / To the Top paper era, baby dig on that / Picture the pool room where the money getters was at / And street people with the feathers in the cap of their Borsalino / Pulling paper in as if it’s a small casino…” It’s a nostalgic song, and it gets you wherever your own nostalgia resides. For me, it’s North Philly in the 2000s; it’s South Philly in the 2010s; it’s certain murals, some of them demolished or covered over; it’s certain drinks I’ll never taste again, and certain people I’ll probably never see, because they moved or because I did, or because they died or just lost touch; it’s the radio hits of certain summers, the ones that seemed inescapable until one day they weren’t playing anymore.
Michael Deagler’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s, McSweeneys’ Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City.