The stories in Juliet Escoria’s collection You Are the Snake are unsettling and beautiful in their depiction of young women and their worlds.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Escoria vividly captures her characters’ shared worlds. These charged and often startling stories hit hard.””
In her own words, here is Juliet Escoria’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection You Are the Snake:
For You Are the Snake, I made a series of videos that I think of more as “companion videos,” rather than book trailers. This is the third round of videos I’ve made. The ones I made for my first two books, Black Cloud and Witch Hunt, are here.
I like making videos for a bunch of different reasons, including:
- My long-standing love of music videos. My parents forbid me from watching MTV when I was a child, so of course any time I was home alone, I turned on MTV. I love the music video format of giving a visual to a song. This is something that often runs through my head when listening to music—an imagined music video.
- I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to making videos, and I have limited skills and resources, and this set of constraints is enjoyable to me.
- I like pieces of art that can’t exist as a different medium. As much as I love writing, there are some things that can only be communicated through sound and visuals. Making videos allows me to attach these elements to my stories.
- Certain songs sound like places to me. A sense of place, and place as character, is something I wanted in my book, due to a deep love of the places where the stories are set: mostly in California and West Virginia, and then one each of New York City and Baltimore.
This is a running playlist I kept for video possibilities, now in an order that fits a mixtape, with some songs omitted. It is now 19 songs long, which seems correct because there are 19 stories in the collection.
“Demolición” by Los Saicos
My husband came across this song and shared it with me because it had two qualities he knows I love: scuzzy garage rock and unrestrained insanity. I used this in my first video, and it sounds exactly like San Diego to me, but the San Diego I’m interested in and write about—not the shiny beaches, but the void that lives beneath it.
“There’s a Light” – Shirley Ann Lee
This is a West Virginia song to me, which feels like driving fast through the mountains. There is an old saying about how West Virginia has to “pipe the daylight in” because the mountains and thick forests make it so dark. It’s true! It’ll be a bright sunny day, and then all of a sudden you need to turn on your headlights to see.
“Bad Girl Pt. 1” – Lee Moses
This is a California song—I see golden sunshine and powdery light. This is one of my favorite songs in the whole world and I just can’t get sick of it. Moses’ vocals are just so good and gritty and warm. But I didn’t pick it because it felt too on the nose. Basically my entire book is about Bad Girls.
“Maybe” – The Shangri-Las
I fucking love The Shangri-Las. They’re so good at storytelling, and I love that they positioned themselves as the bad girls of girl groups. A lot of their songs are really melodramatic, which I appreciate. Melodrama is underrated. The applause at the beginning of this song makes me giggle. It seems deranged that somebody was like, “Yes, we need to insert applause here.”
“Debora” – T. Rex
Most of T. Rex is glam but this song feels much scuzzier in a way I find pleasing. I imagine a shaky camera and big boots. This song seems like it could be fitting for both California and West Virginia.
“Time Will Come” – Tol-Puddle Martyrs
I almost used this for my first video but it became clear that my actual choice was much better. I like the way this song builds and then gets quiet.
“Don’t Worry” by Marty Robbins
I guess this is one of the first songs that used on-purpose distortion, a fact I learned from the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. I didn’t want to use the song itself, just the distorted bass lines, but then I realized that part takes up only 20 seconds of the song, which didn’t seem long enough for anything. But that 20 seconds! So good.
“Diamond Day” – Vashti Bunyan
This is a West Virginia song. It sounds like the parts of West Virginia where the mountains are actually rolling hills, and specifically these hills in late summer, when the light is yellower and the goldenrod is blooming.
“Congratulations” – The Chantels
Like the Shangri-Las, this is another iconic girl group. This sounds like California to me, even though the Chantels are a NYC group. Just the warmth and intensity of their vocals.
“Love (from Robin Hood)” – Nancy Adams
I really wanted to use this until I realized how completely fucking stupid it would be to use a Disney song, and a great way to get a video immediately flagged and taken down. Like many young girls of discerning tastes, Robin Hood, a cartoon fox, was my first crush.
“Handy Man” – Jimmy Jones
Objectively, I am pretty sure this is not actually a good song. If I am being honest with myself, I don’t think I added it because I thought it would make a good video selection. I added it because I am strangely obsessed. It sounds like complete insanity to me. Falsetto + whistle = a scratch at the itch in my brain. I made a secret Instagram video of this song but just the falsetto + whistle parts so I could listen to them on repeat like the obsessive-compulsive weirdo I am. My favorite part is “herrrre is the main thing I want to say” from 0:46-0:50. I also like the “come-ah-come-ah-come-ah parts.” I guess Jimmy Jones tried to sue Boy George for “Karma Chameleon” but it turns out you cannot copyright somebody saying “come-uh-come-uh-come-uh.”
“Please Stay” – The Cryin Shames
The Drifters do a cover of this song, but I don’t like it as much because it doesn’t feel quite as unhinged (although on that version, there is a baritone of the line “Please stay” that I am quite fond of). This feels like late summer to me, but the California version of late summer. San Diego is hottest at the end summer, and, growing up, the only time we wanted air conditioning was for like two weeks at the end of August.
“I Knew You’d Remember” – Michael Yonkers
This is very much a West Virginia song to me. It sounds like the summer night to me, which, in West Virginia, is so loud that I find it frightening, just an intensity that seems like it’s going to break through your windows—cicadas, katydids, crickets, frogs, mockingbirds. Sometimes there is a fox behind our house that screams and it sounds like a person.
“I Don’t Like the Man I Am” – Pete Molinari
The sweet sadness in this song just gets to me, in the best way. It sounds like loneliness and self-pity, but the type of loneliness and self-pity that is romantic and pleasurable. The characters in my book don’t like the (wo)men they are. This song makes me think of red lighting, an open window, a blowing gauzy curtain, a swimming pool at night.
“Space Girl” – Shirley Collins
My friends and I shot the footage for what would become my third video at Summersville Lake, a lake that was created in the ‘60s to prevent flooding. It is partially drained in the winter and it causes the lake to take on this alien-like landscape, of abandoned trash and old pieces of wood and fish hooks.
“In a While” – Leonie Evans
I love the contradiction of this song—the dreaminess/yearning of the vocals at odds with the sentiment that “I haven’t thought about you in a while.” Her vocals go off in a weird direction that sounds like she’s imitating a ghost.
“Good Luck Charm” – C.W. Stoneking
I see people shaking their hands, flashes of white dresses, people dancing, and sunshine. I’d need a lot of people to make this video.
“Keep on Runnin’”
This song literally makes me want to run, which I cannot safely do anymore, because I tore my ACL when I was 16 by jumping over a bush, and now my knee is a complete piece of shit. I would need somebody else to do the running so I could get the shaky camera effect I see in this song.
“Spanish Bee” – The Brian Jonestown Massacre
This song is so intense. It makes me want to stomp around. I actually put 3 Brian Jonestown Massacre songs on the original ‘possible video’ playlist. I chose a different BJM video for my fourth video, but only because I realized I needed an instrumental. I like this song more than the one I chose, “Cabin Fever.” When I uploaded my video, YouTube recognized the music as copyrighted material but it was fine because BJM lets people use their music however they want. I would like to thank the Brian Jonestown Massacre for being cooler than Disney.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Juliet Escoria’s playlist for her novel Juliet the Maniac
Juliet Escoria’s playlist for her poetry collection Witch Hunt
Juliet Escoria’s playlist for her story collection Black Cloud
Juliet Escoria is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac (Melville House, May 2019), which was named a “best of” book by Nylon, Elle, Buzzfeed, and others, and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. She also wrote the poetry collection Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press, 2016) and the story collection Black Cloud (CCM/Emily Books, 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Prelude, VICE, The Fader, BOMB, and the New York Times, and has been translated into many languages. She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia, where she teaches English at a community college.