Sarah McLachlan, “Possession”
The title for this novel was a journey. When I first sold it, it was called The Boys. Given that it was the same title of an Amazon show that I have never watched, but a lot of people have, I sensed I would need to change it. For a while, it was Our Boys. But I knew that the rhythm of the title needed something more. I was at a Sarah McLachlan concert at the Hollywood Bowl with my wife. Our teenage son had won us tickets on the local radio. And at some point in the concert, McLachlan was talking about raising her daughters and referred to them as “my beautiful girls.” And I knew right then that I had found my title. I think she went into “Possession” after that. The song always reminds me of one of my greater reading experiences: A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which I read the summer after I graduated from college. Dramatically, I was sitting in the sand at Stinson Beach when I finished.
Kendrick Lamar, “Swimming Pool”
In an important, early scene in the novel, a bunch of teenagers are partying at a palatial, abandoned house stripped to the studs. There is a lot of beer in red cups and smoke in the air. And music is playing. Kendrick, of course, because of the cool factor he has come to embody. But this track in particular because one part of the scene takes place next to an emptied swimming pool, as a group of kids skate in it. The track itself is about excessive drinking and I thought it would match perfectly the desire of these teenagers to lose themselves in the beer and the cold fall air.
The Eagles, “King of Hollywood”
I was trying to imagine what this house looked like in its heyday. “Once, the Cave House had been the sprawling faux-Italian estate of a movie producer who had made his fortune on B films in the 1970s and liked to say that the Eagles had written ‘King of Hollywood’ after attending one of his parties.” The Long Run was the first cassette tape I bought with my own money when we arrived in California in the early 1980s. Then I was all about the sunniness of California. I didn’t know I was buying an album about California darkness.
Pink Floyd, “Echoes”
The inciting incident of the novel takes place in a dark cave. The second part of the book, called “Echoes,” works through what exactly happened in that cave. There is a lot of talking about what might have happened and all that talk sounds like echoes. When I arrived for my freshman year in college in 1990, I thought hard about what CD I wanted to play when I first set up my stereo in my dorm room. I settled on Meddle, where this song appears. The song is 23 minutes long. Can a song be novelistic while others are more short stories? But there is also something else I discovered many, many years later. The song “Fearless” on the album ends with a recording of Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” These teenage boys are trying to stick to the story they have agreed upon for what happened in the cave. But as the plot tightens, they begin to realize that perhaps they may have to walk alone to save themselves.
Nirvana, “Come as You Are”
I have two teenage sons and I have to say it’s been fun driving them around as they go through various musical phases. They were and so we were in a deep hip hop phase for a long while. They’ve not left that phase, but have added other parallel phases. There has been a lot of nostalgia listening lately, which is hilarious because when I listened to it, it was already nostalgia, or “classic rock.” Pink Floyd, Dylan, Bon Segar. And more recently, Nirvana and Pearl Jam have entered the chat. There is a scene where one of the teenage boys is drowning out all the noise around him. This song is coming out of his headphones.
Olivier Messiaen, “Quartet of the End of Time”
I’ve not had many profound live music moments in my life. But one of them took place at the now defunct Cow Palace in San Francisco in the very early 1990s. A New Year’s Eve concert. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers. I hadn’t heard of the first band, knew one song from the second, and had heard that socks were involved with the third. Right before midnight, the Chili Peppers were playing, wearing helmets that were on fire. The entire audience was counting down to midnight and just then, I passed out. I was completely sober. I woke up in the medical tent. The second profound moment came in a church in Italy where a quartet was playing the French composer Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet of the End of Time.” I had never heard of him and only learned later that it was a piece of chamber music that he wrote while in a German prison camp in World War II. Has the clarinet ever been more melancholy? In my novel, the football coach is playing the piece in his classroom on a crucial morning where some aspects of the truth of what happened in the cave are revealed.
Joni Mitchell, “Free Man in Paris”
Veronica Cruz, one of the characters in the novel, has been carrying around a secret for a long time and after it is finally revealed, she is driving down the 405 in Los Angeles when the song comes on. She is stuck in terrible traffic and so can concentrate on the lyrics. What exactly does her freedom mean? It is both terrifying and liberating. Is it possible that Mitchell is best enjoyed on an LA freeway?
Kate Wolf, “Here in California”