I fell in love with music before books: emo, punk, and hardcore. Writing Just Want You Here was the moment where the two became mirrored and inextricable. It recalibrated what joy and art mean to me.
I can’t write to music—I have the useless superpower of knowing nearly every word to a song after hearing it three times. But there was a parallel soundtrack constantly running during the moments I wasn’t in my words. I couldn’t help but hear my characters in lyrics; it textured the way I wrote them. These songs shaped my work and got me through the heaviest parts of an admittedly grueling process.
“Formative Age” – Arm’s Length
Put me up on your shoulders, I’ve been standing all day
Crooked, craning my neck at a formative age
This line comes from my single favorite record in recent memory, Never Before Seen, Never Again Found, if not all time. It’s a kind of unofficial epigraph. I think of the book as a second-chance coming-of-age story, and Ari is exhausted from holding the weight of a decade on her—she’s searching for shelter and life in other people, entirely unsure what’s ahead.
“Middle of Nine” – Spanish Love Songs
The boatman came without warning
Except for that black spot in your lungs
In the end we’re all blaming someone
No looking back again
Conspiracies melting your brain
Whatever it takes to make you feel safe
Lost love and a six pack of beer
You lay down and pray for another round
The record this is from, No Joy, wrecked me, but especially this track. The lyrics are both eerily on the nose for a theme in the novel, but it’s also hard to listen to each line and not think about bigger intangibles. The record is about death and existential worries and the mental gymnastics of what you take from life while you’re living and what you leave behind when it ends. Wells wrestles with these questions most, but I think it’s impossible for anyone, fictional or real, to entirely ignore them.
“Burn Pile” – Moving Mountains
But who am I to say?
I miss you all the same
And the blood in your veins
The earth and the debris that I haul
Feel the weight of it all
Moving Mountains’s self-titled record from 2013 is one I return to often—they came out of my local scene, and I spent a lot of time at their shows in my twenties. This is one of my favorite songs of all time. When a formative period in your life ends, it’s so difficult to figure out what you haul from the past and what you do or don’t let weigh you down. Every character is constantly negotiating that balance, trying to let go while understanding the past never vacates entirely.
“OG Bule Sky” – Hot Mulligan
I lost the pictures we had
Left you years ago
I missed your funeral
I was hiding back at home
Each character wrestles with the complications of memory, and often steeps in recollection both to comfort themselves and cause more pain just to feel something. To me, this song touches on both the difficult intangibility of memories and the decisions we make to cope with them.
“Bad Bets” – Equipment
You got used to it
My swift mouth
Guaranteeing that
If you leave me be I’ll work things out
I promised you
I’d grow up soon
But grown ups fuck up big time too
I’m living breathing proof
I love the drumbeat in this song. These lines make me think of Morgan, and the decision he makes at the beginning of the book to blow up his life. It’s impossible to know what’s on the other side of a choice in the long term, let alone a single day, and sometimes we make bad bets. It’s just a question of where you go from there.
“Low Tide” – The Wonder Years
And it’s low tide
At serotonin bay
And for the first time
I’m not sure that everything’ll be okay
Morgan has the fewest pages, but I’ve always felt most comfortable in his head and voice. I think it’s why I see him in lyrics a lot, because I want to spend more time with him. This song is part of Morgan’s story when he’s smacked with the reality of his decision—as badly as you want to go up, sometimes you go down. I saw The Wonder Years tour on this record, The Hum Goes On Forever, right after I’d gone on submission, and just remember this song sounding so big in person. I went to the show alone and lost my shit in the balcony of the venue, and it felt amazing when I was on pins and needles waiting to see if the novel had sold.
“The Tower” – Knuckle Puck
Face the unknown, a future with no throne
Gonna take my time, have a change of mind
Learn to let go just to regrow
Everyone in the book lets go of a life they’ve known, and has to figure out a lot to go forward. It can feel impossible especially if you didn’t choose change and don’t have a template for what’s next. There’s plenty of heavy stuff in the story, but I think one brighter note is that (mostly) everyone mostly figures out what growth means for them.
I also kept a running playlist of songs that just got me in the zone to write or buoyed me: Ben Quad, Free Throw, Good Hangs, Carly Cosgrove, Saturdays at Your Place, Paramore, etc. I can’t articulate how incredibly thankful I am to these bands for throwing me a lifeline during a process that was extraordinary in a lot of ways.