Emma Pattee’s novel Tilt is a captivating and powerful literary debut.
The Washington Post wrote of the book:
“The storytelling in Tilt is brisk [and] as funny as a novel about humanity at its worst can be… Pattee’s ambivalence about human goodness is a powerful thing; it calls into question the assumptions we make about ourselves.”
In her own words, here is Emma Pattee’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Tilt:
Tilt opens with Annie, nine months pregnant, tired and hungry and cranky, at IKEA shopping for a crib she should have bought months ago. This is the moment when the long-anticipated Cascadia Earthquake hits, wreaking havoc and destruction on Portland and the entire Pacific Northwest. Annie has no phone, no car, no water. No choice but to walk.
This book is about a woman facing an unimaginable disaster, but it’s also about feeling stuck in life, it’s about being a millennial, it’s about knowing when to give up on your dreams, it’s about getting old, and it’s about how to love and live as the world ends.
The only music that appears in the book is a shrill lullaby played by an IKEA toy. But each of these songs influenced a major part of the book. I always listen to music while writing, and often I listen to just a few songs on repeat, sometimes for weeks straight. This list is a few of those songs.
Johnny Can’t Decide, Jonathan Larson
Annie, is a prodigy playwright whose early success has turned into…nothing. A boring tech job. The dreams she gave up are eating her alive, while her husband is chasing his dreams almost to the point of insanity. So ambition – the cost of it and the cost of giving it up – is an important theme of the book.
In 2022, I went to a performance of Tick Tick…Boom at Portland Center Stage. As the actor playing Jonathan sang this song, I had full body chills: Ambition eats right through you…how can you soar when you’re nailed to the floor…how do you know when it’s time to let go? This was exactly what I was trying to show in Annie’s story, and I played this song over and over during the next two years as I finished the book.
If the World Was Ending, JP Saxe, Julia Michaels
This song came out during the time that I was writing my book, but I didn’t hear it until years later. But you best believe I pulled over and cried on the side of the highway. And texted my best writer friend: why did I write an entire book to say the same thing this dude says in 3 mins??
I love the idea of the couple in this song, who aren’t meant for each other (whatever that means), but in an earthquake, turn towards each other.
Mad World, Jasmine Thompson
Annie is pregnant, and Annie is a failed artist, but Annie is also a millennial. And this song has such millennial nostalgia for me. First off, the original song is by Tears for Fears, my all-time favorite band when I was 6 or 7. Then as a teenager, I fell in love with this song again after watching Donnie Darko. Oh god, the hours I spent lusting over Jake Gyllenhaal in that fucking hoody. That film – and that song – embodied everything I felt but couldn’t express as a teenager: anxiety about the world, about the future, a fascination with death, a pervasive melancholy.
Fast forward 20 years and I was sitting in a cafe writing when my Spotify suggested this cover by Jasmine Thompson. It was so prescient to everything I was writing about: millennial disenchantment and the emptiness of consumer culture. When people run in circles, it’s a very very mad world.
Chainsmoking Your Love, Jacob Banks
I used to meet a group of Portland writers every week to write all night at Beulahland on NE 28th. One night, I heard this song playing there, and I was so taken with it; the desperation of love. It’s getting harder to breathe, chainsmoking your love. Can’t be good for my sanity, can’t be good for my lungs.
I was especially taken with the cadence of the lyrics, and there are sections of the book where Annie is speaking in time with the rhythm of this song.
Megaton Mile, Local Natives
This is my 5-year-old’s favorite song so it would be impossible for me to write a playlist that didn’t include it…because it plays all day every day in our house. One day my kid asked me to google the lyrics, and I realized the song is describing this dystopian scene in LA:
Abandoned cars on the freeway
A terracotta rush hour
You heard me calling out your name
Holding me close in the ending
In a flashing light
We’re stuck and it’s after dark
On Megaton Mile
What’s even cooler is that Megaton Mile refers to an actual strip of Wilshire Boulevard called The Miracle Mile. I’m a huge sucker for place-based stories that name actual locations. I went to a lot of effort in Tilt to have every street Annie walks be an actual street in Portland, and every building be an actual building. So it feels very fitting to include this song.
I Can Change, Lake Street Dive
Annie is stuck. She’s unhappy with her job but she won’t quit it. Portland is changing in ways that are leaving her behind. She’s stuck in the past; what could have been, what almost was. And most importantly, she feels too defeated to consider that she can change. That she can make different choices and pick a different path.
I have always been fascinated by shock points: moments when you get jolted out of your everyday life and you suddenly see things clearly. I want a divorce. I hate my job. I forgive my father. I want to move to Paris. You also can see what doesn’t matter: the car you drive, your hair, social media bullshit, the fight you’re having with your neighbor.
To Zion, Lauryn Hill
Unsure of what the balance held
I touched my belly overwhelmed
By what I had been chosen to perform
I bought this album right after it came out in the late nineties. I had this lilac discman and I used to walk around the neighborhood listening to this song. It always made me cry; the maternal rapture in her voice. The raw love that she has for her child. This idea that to be pregnant is to choose, and be chosen for, a grand mission. One that is terrifying and unknown and important and world-shaking.
Slow Dance Slow, The Weather Machine
This song is pure Portland nostalgia to me. I have this very vivid memory of standing at Alberta Pub in my twenties listening to the Weather Machine play this song. Whenever I hear it, I feel this incredible grief for Portland the way it was then. There’s a moment that Annie keeps coming back to, a moment when she looked at her husband and turned away from him. After the earthquake, she revisits that moment in her mind and imagines if she had done something different. That ache to go back in time and have one more slow dance with someone we love, right?
Elijah, Matthew and the Atlas
Tell me this isn’t the saddest song you’ve ever heard. There is a pivotal scene in this book that takes place at a school, and I listened to this song on repeat for hours while writing that scene. You’re too young to be lost. It took me ten or eleven tries to get that scene right, and when I finished it for the last time, I listened to this song for the last time, too. I can’t bear to listen to it anymore.
My Heart, My Life, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Michael Brook
This was my mom’s favorite song, and she played it constantly during my childhood. I can’t hear it without thinking of her and my family home, and being a child. The love we have for our mothers is such a rich, intense love. A complicated love. This song is about romantic love, but to me, not speaking Urdu, it’s about maternal love. Love for a mother, love for a child. My heart, my life.
Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and a fiction writer. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. She lives in Portland, Oregon.