1. The Indelicates, “Le Godemiché Royal”
There’s another book under this one, which is usually the case. In 2013, I wrote a novel about a failed revolution in a moribund city, a far-future place where the only people with political power are decayed figures kept in near-permanent cryosleep, science fiction so distant that it’s basically fantasy. My old agent called it “Les Misérables written by Mervyn Peake.” Change was impossible, and the characters were trapped in cycles of alcoholism and self-destruction interrupted only by a final act of violence. It was less grim than you’d think – it had a love story, and the kind of black humor favored by people in trouble – but I do think I did more justice to the central couple when I wrote this new book on top of it. Parts of the old story are still there, written over again, but now the two of them have a second act. They transition, their art careers go somewhere. They escape to far-future New York, to another genre of book. We catch up with them many years later, when they’ve lived long lives and have an adult kid who’s trying to piece together their story. Death still gets them, but not for a reason.
What does this have to do with “Le Godemiché Royal,” a ballad adaptation of a French Revolutionary pamphlet about Marie Antoinette jerking off? Just that I was listening to it a lot in 2013, and its lush nastiness, its terrible static, seeped into the story’s groundwater. From now on, everyone in the book was drinking that water, some more deeply than others. It has nothing to do with the book, and everything.
2. Big Thief, “Masterpiece”
Let’s switch up the tone! The main characters of the book are mostly artists. Zaffre and Etoine, the couple from the fantasy city, start out the story as a kind of Mozart and Salieri situation (I was influenced by the general idea of Amadeus, which I wouldn’t see for seven more years). Eventually their relationship, initially unstable, learns to encompass the gap in talent between them; it forms a new shape, and from then on it’s complicated but hot. Big Thief’s incredible “Masterpiece” captures the buoyancy of this love, and also its shading of darkness. I love how this song’s surreal imagery encompasses many readings, apparently including “although I’m the less talented two of us, I’ve accidentally created an enduring piece of revolutionary imagery in the form of a painting of a long-vanished heroine for which you’ve modeled. In the process, I predicted your transition, as well as sparking a massive social upheaval, and all while I thought that all I wanted to do was drink and disappear. Life finds a way!”
3. Regina Spektor, “Bleeding Heart”
It’s time to introduce the main narrator of this book, Griffon, who’s Etoine and Zaffre’s son. This is a song that doesn’t have much to do with him on the surface. It’s about an ostracized high school kid, and while we initially meet Griffon when he’s in high school, he’s got other problems (closeted, abusive dad, obsessed with making Etoine and Zaffre his new parents when they’ve seen too much life to open their hearts easily). But it’s such a Griffon song in its attitude. He’s both the song’s narrator – who comes up to a bar in the first verse, announcing “What you got on tap?/I’ll take two of that/I’m chasing a story I’ve heard” – and its subject, the kid. The narrator sounds like an investigative reporter, which the adult Griffon is, but the story they’re chasing is a personal one. It’s about being alone and friendless at the back of the classroom, a victim but also full of self-pity. Spektor’s narrator doesn’t seem to mind that, though, even though the chorus is a dismissive repetition of the buck-up line “Never, never mind your bleeding heart.” She knows she’s not talking to someone who’s ready to take her advice.
Griffon is this person. He’s investigating the story of his own family, and he rails against his own past self-pity while not recognizing that he still has it. Or that you can actually have pity for yourself; you deserve it.
5. Ezra Furman, “Trauma”
It’s hard to pick a Furman song for this; it could just as easily have been any other track on Twelve Nudes, or anything from All Of Us Flames. But “Trauma” has been haunting me for years as a song for Zaffre (the more talented of the two artists), and what drives her to protest and try to build a new world. Of all the characters, she’s the most mentally ill one and the one with the strongest convictions, and I love how Furman captures the interplay of the two in this song – how our illness and our convictions both grow from being failed, and how this isn’t tragic or romantic, just something that happens every day. This is a book about people who live life “at 3 a.m. with the Furies back again” – Furman characters, if I can venture to claim that.
6. Joan Baez, “Farewell, Angelina”
This is Etoine’s revolution, which is something totally different. Unlike his frenemy/rival/lover/wife Zaffre, he doesn’t meet the moment with conviction, and would prefer to stay out of it, except that his best painting tells too much truth and leads to his persecution. Instead he drifts along, aestheticizing his life and his addictions, not realizing he’s losing it.
I’m not much of a Dylan fan, but when he hits, he hits – and Baez’ interpretation is incredible, elegant but subtly febrile. In Baez’ hands, this narrator is drawn away from Angelina by things she doesn’t understand, probably ones that exist only in her head, and that come out in these flurries of metaphor. A lesser performer would act out these extreme images and emotions rather than contrast them with the calm of her voice, but Baez knows that it all comes down to that tension.
7. The Mountain Goats, “John 4:16”
I took it as a personal challenge to pick a Mountain Goats song for this short mix, because the book engages so much with their most common themes – and because it’s still so hard to do. These songs are so concrete, so situated in their own contexts, that it’s really hard to fit them into another story. Sometimes it feels arrogant to try. But “John 4:16” rejects specificity, rejects images, so there are channels it can flow into. This aching set of couplets, about recognizing on your deathbed what the actual happiest day of your life was, makes sense for multiple characters – though perhaps none more than Etoine, imprisoned and alone at the book’s halfway point, convinced that Zaffre is dead and that he’ll die soon, and surprised by what he now knows. They’ll both live for decades more, but he’ll never forget it or change his opinion.
8. Preludes cast album, “Mountains/The Second Piano Concerto”
Preludes is a chamber musical about Sergei Rachmaninoff working through a period of writer’s block with his hypnotherapist. Since it takes place entirely in his mind, the songs are like dreams which play casually with character and time. The final number, “Mountains,” is about the lifting of the writer’s block, and about Rachmaninoff’s fraught relationship with someone who’s influenced him, although whether that’s his therapist, one of the multiple artistic heroes who haunt the musical, or a combination of all of them isn’t clear. Dave Malloy can end the hell out a show, and just as with his Tolstoy adaptation The Great Comet, he gives us a dryly elegiac number about a flash of insight that leaves an afterimage.
In Rachmaninoff’s telling, the other man sings to him about “thunder and gods,” diamonds, marble statues, name-dropping and starfucking. After all of this, he sings back to the man of “nothing at all.” Ultimately, Regicide is about Griffon looking at his parents’ lives, wondering why their lives feel so much bigger than his. What he only partly knows is that history is the opposite of painterly perspective: people only seem bigger because they’re further away.