My first novel was set in the eighties and included lots of references to the punk bands that defined my youth. Dream State, which is set mostly in Montana and begins in 2004, is a different beast entirely; I purposely tried to leave my own musical tastes, which skew towards alt-country and noisy post-punk, out of it completely. Most of the bands referenced in the book make music I’m pretty indifferent to (and in some cases actively dislike): Smashing Pumpkins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At one point I had an epigraph from Car Seat Headrest – “We said we hated humans/We wanted to be humans” – but I came to my senses and took it out. I don’t believe in making blanket rules about writing, but I feel okay about saying this: novels shouldn’t wear band T-shirts and brag about how cool they are, especially when the novelist in his fifties. It’s embarrassing. So it’s nice to have an excuse to compile a list of songs I actually love, most of which aren’t in Dream State but rhyme with the novel in interesting ways.
“Alibi” by Hurray for the Riff Raff
Jasper, a character in Dream State, succumbs to addiction, and this is currently my favorite song about what it’s like to care about a person who’s bent on destroying himself. “You don’t have to die if you don’t wanna die,” sings Alynda Segarra, who survived a vagabond youth, dumpster diving and hopping freight trains. I’ve watched close friends from childhood become heroin addicts, though mostly from afar. This song, in a wonderfully unsentimental way, captures the emotional complexity of being the one who can’t help, the endless tug of war between love and frustration.
“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Nina Simone
One the themes of the novel has to do with identity: the ways in which a simple misunderstanding can result in a gulf between the way we perceive ourselves and the way we’re perceived by others (which can in turn unmoor us from ourselves). I love Nina Simone, and her version of this song—the way she sings the chorus—transforms it into an anguished plea. She makes the original sound like an advertising jingle.
“Not” by Big Thief
Dream State is partly about climate change: specifically, the way the American West is being devastated by drought and wildfire. I don’t really know what this song is about—Adrienne Lenker is more of a lyric poet than a storyteller—but the apocalyptic imagery seems to speak of a breach with nature. “It’s not the planet/Not spinning/ Not a ruse/ Not heat/ Not the fire lapping up the creek…Not the vacant wilderness vying.” Fittingly, it ends with an epic, wild, feedback-y guitar solo that’s equal parts Velvet Underground and Crazy Horse.
“Joy” by Nick Cave
The novel is also about grief: two of the main characters, Cece and Garrett, are both dealing with a loss in their past that’s set them adrift. I’ve been a fan of Nick Cave since the eighties, and it’s been very moving, in his last few albums, to see him deal with the tragic death of his fifteen-year-old son, who fell off a cliff in 2015 while tripping on acid. In this song, a kind of echo verse of repeating lines, he wakes up in the middle of the night and is visited by “a ghost in giant sneakers” who speaks “into [his] pain, into [his] yearning sorrow.” The ghost tells him it’s okay to feel joy again. It’s an incantatory performance—more prayer than song—that turns outward at the end to address us all.
“All My Happiness is Gone” by Purple Mountains
We’re big David Berman fans in our house (my daughter was in the top .05% of Silver Jews listeners last year on Spotify). This is a song from Berman’s second band and, tragically, his final album, which has an old-school country vibe. At the heart of Dream State is a troubled friendship that suffers a great betrayal and yet goes on, improbably, to last another fifty years. This song speaks to the indispensability of human connection and to the peril of losing friends as you get older—or perhaps a single friend, the best one you’ve ever had. “Friends are warmer than gold when you’re old/ And keeping them is harder than you might suppose.” (Berman was a wonderful poet too; if you can find it, get your hands on his collection Actual Air.)
“That Summer Feeling” by Jonathan Richman
Dream State centers around a summer house and the way that it represents a kind of mythologized youth for all five of its main characters. (In a literal sense, too, the feeling of summer plays a big role in the book, once it becomes too hot and smoky for the characters to go outside.) There are plenty of songs that mythologize summer—you could argue that this is rock and roll’s principal function—but this track takes it a step further, suggesting that our nostalgia for the summertime of youth can become a kind of curse, an invention that maybe doesn’t even correspond to reality. “That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life.” The lyrics are inspired: poignantly goofy, in that inimitable Richman way.
“Duckworth” by Kendrick Lamar
My fourteen-year-old son turned me on to this song. He’s my hip-hop ambassador. It’s the true story of how Lamar’s father narrowly escaped being killed by Top Dawg, Lamar’s future record producer, because he made sure to give Top Dawg free food whenever he went to the KFC where Lamar’s father worked. Something wonderful happens at the end of the track: the whole thing abruptly plays backward, returning us to the beginning, as if a different outcome could just as easily have happened: Top Dawg behind bars, Lamar fatherless and perhaps meeting a tragic end himself. Kendrick Lamar the famous rapper—and by extension, the track we’ve just listened to—are erased from existence. Dream State, too, is interested in that other life, the ghost life, that but for a twist of fate might have come into being. I was amazed when I heard this song, because I tried do a similar thing at the end of the novel: rewind time, so to speak, and imagine a completely different future for the characters.
“Loud Bark” by Mannequin Pussy
I love this feminist punk manifesto—“I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite!”—which gives me hope for humanity, that we won’t take recent developments lying down. (Also, there are wolverines in my novel. They don’t bark but could easily rip open someone’s throat.)
“Just Like Heaven” by The Cure
Cece and Garrett dance to this song in Chapter Twenty. It’s the one tune in the book that I genuinely love: a perfect pop song. It captures the bliss of infatuation while seeming to acknowledge that it might be an illusion—or at least that the object of desire might be a dream. “I opened up my eyes/And found myself alone, alone/Alone above a raging sea.” (I can’t prove this, but it seems like Robert Smith has maybe spent some time with Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”) Like the character in the song, Dream State is all about someone who says “I’ll run away with you”…then has to live with that decision for the rest of her life, once she’s opened up her eyes.