In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Dan Leach’s novel Junah at the End of the World is a mesmerizing debut, an unforgettable coming-of-age tale set against the year 2000 drama.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Junah’s voice is at once wry and hopeful, every vignette more compelling than the last. And while the novel itself is firmly situated in the months leading up to the 21st century, Leach manages to unstick the story from the bounds of a calendar to become something far more prescient. A timely eulogy for anyone who fears the end of the world as they know it.”
In his own words, here is Dan Leach’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Junah at the End of the World:
The Sound of Our Hooves Carries News of Your Demise:
A Mixtape For The End of the World
1. “Revelator” by Gillian Welch
Junah at the End of the World opens with its protagonist caught between conflicting visions of Y2K. On one side, there’s the apocalyptic angst of Junah’s mother, who spends nights curating a survivalist’s stockpile and praying for the souls of the lost. On the other, there’s the airy skepticism of his father, who remains unconvinced that a computer’s inability to carry an extra zero will be the arithmetic that brings on doomsday. Both parents function as “minor prophets,” but because the story is set in the final months of 1999 (and not the early ones of 2000), neither can tell the future. As a result, Junah exists in the subjunctive mood, and he must live with the tension that Gillian Welch encapsulates in this gem (which, fittingly, was written and released at the turn of the millennium): “Every day is getting straighter / Time’s the revelator.” The ominously-plucked acoustic notes braided against Welch’s world-weary, late-nineties croon make this track a natural opener for Junah, and it plays in my head when I read that opening scene where Junah walks into his classroom for the first day of school and sees written on the chalkboard “THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE.”
2. “Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash
Towards the end of the novel, Junah’s scuzzy first crush (Sadie) introduces him to two forms of apocalyptic “medicine”: stolen beer and punk rock. Hiding out from adults in an abandoned drain pipe, they listen to London Calling by The Clash, and she asks him about his favorite song. Junah mentions “Lost in the Supermarket” and quotes the lines which (for me) might be the best possible synopsis of the novel itself: “I wasn’t born so much as I fell out / Nobody seemed to notice me / We had a hedge back home in the suburbs / Over which I never could see.” Joe Strummer strikes something here about what it means to grow up in a suburban ecosystem–mainly that everything (especially the future) seems to exist on the other side of an insurmountable “hedge.” I wrote the novel with this duality in mind, and Junah himself signals it via his constant use of the phrases “in here” and “out there.” His curation of the time capsule is an attempt to collect what’s “out there” and over the hedge (e.g., fat Elvis, his mother’s Jesus, all the strange people of his American South) and to arrange it in the “in here” of his shoebox.
3. “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” by Modest Mouse
I think Junah at the End of the World tackles two apocalypses–the one that never happened (in which computers were supposed to have crashed, and nukes were supposed to have dropped, and societies were supposed to have collapsed), but also the one that absolutely happened (in which the landscapes beloved by kids who were born in the eighties and raised in the nineties died out to make room for a different kind of American childhood). Junah detects this creeping extinction even if he lacks the requisite history to name it. A poet of the local, he witnesses the emptying of the creeks and cul-de-sacs, and he laments the jaundiced regional spaces that will die off with or without a catastrophe. In this sense, he’s constructing a time capsule in the spirit of Modest Mouse’s 1997 album The Lonesome Crowded West. I like to think of dystopian anthems like “Cowboy Dan” and “Shit Luck” as spiritual siblings to the novel, but my favorite song from that album is “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” especially its Junah-esque bridge: “Let’s all have another Orange Julius / Thick syrup, standing in lines / The malls are the soon to be ghost towns / Well so long, farewell, goodbye.” The sweet-sad juxtaposition of “Well so long, farewell, goodbye” is the tension at the heart of the novel, and who doesn’t want to go back to 1996, if only for a day, to get one more Orange Julius?
4. “Constructive Summer” by The Hold Steady
The adults in Junah at the End of the World approach a kind of low-level contradiction. They’re present (as most parents were back in the pre-screen nineties), and they’re well-meaning (especially when it comes to Junah’s need for guidance), but they’re also distant (as all parents from all generations tend to be in relation to the people actually trapped by youth), and they’re uncertain about the future (y2k included). But none of this deters Junah from building. He constructs memories; and, from those, he constructs a time capsule. In this sense, he embodies Craig Finn’s best line from “Constructive Summer”: “Getting older makes it harder to remember / We are our only saviors / We’re gonna build something this summer.” I wanted this novel to feel like some of the movies/books from the nineties that I loved and grew up on in which latchkey kids are essentially saving themselves. (Bonus points for this track: The Clash appear several times throughout the novel, and Sadie, amongst other characters, would echo Finn’s homage to the punk legends: “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer / I think he might have been our only decent teacher.”)
5. “Ruined” by Adrianne Lenker
Junah is an apocalypse story, but it’s also a love story; and there’s not a love song on earth that captures Junah and Sadie’s short-lived romance like “Ruined” by Adrianne Lenker. The early reticence (“I wish I’d waved when I saw you / I just watched you passing by”) is pure Junah. The unblinking resignation of the middle ( “You gave me no answer / Nor asked me to lie”) is pure Sadie. In the novel, Junah adopts a regional idiom (“bit”) to describe the kind of fatalistic condition of his crush; but I think “ruined” works just fine as well.
6. “Misunderstood” by Wilco
It’s tempting to talk about all the ways in which Tweedy’s lyrics correspond with the novel. I mean, the refrain alone (“You’re so misunderstood”) embodies how deeply alienated kids like Junah tend to be, and the tuckered-out denouement (“I’d like to thank you for nothing at all”) captures the resentment nineties kids harbor for well-meaning but misguided parents–but I’m actually more interested in how the music here conjures up childhood melancholy.For me, this song feels like the musical equivalent of some long-suffering child working up the courage to lash out. See the first three-and-a-half minutes, in which Tweedy’s shy-guy, tin-can vocals limp across that lonely piano and the drums which peek out (only to quickly retreat). Listening to the first half of this song, you know shit’s escalating, but you also know (as when you watch the build up of an overdue blow out) that the song must earn its violence. And then there’s the violence: right at the three-and-a-half minute mark, all the instruments come crashing in, and Tweedy erupts into screaming, and the whole beautiful cathartic mess cuts loose. This one belongs on any playlist about growing up in the nineties.
7. “I Need a Teacher” by Hiss Golden Messenger
It’s a book about apocalypses, and it’s a book about love–but, as its central conceit demands, it’s also a book about teachers. Junah spends what could be the final four months of his life seeking out teachers. For writing: Miss Meechum and Coach Mac. For music (and also authenticity): Sadie. For faith: his mother. For everything in between: his father. He’s described as a “seeker” early on, and what he’s searching for (as much as anything else) is what M.C. Taylor puts perfectly here: “Beauty in the broken American moment.” The entire novel is built around an “assignment” (i.e., the time capsule), and I wanted to position Junah in a kind of constellation of teachers, so that he could ask interesting questions about life and receive a diversity of answers. There’s also something of Junah’s hope in this tune: “Love, it ain’t easy / Give it away freely / It’ll come back to you eventually.” That is, he’s packing the capsule with the best material he has, but he’s not burying it to be forgotten–he does hope, however naively, that it will “come back.”
8. “Formula One” by Wednesday
My logic for this track is strange (but not arbitrary). Here goes: Wednesday formed in 2017, but their sound is pure 1990s. That duality–composing one side of the millennium, channeling the other–is what I aimed for with Junah. I wrote the novel during the early stages of the COVID pandemic, and (in many ways) I wrote it to interrogate the anxieties of that historical moment. But I also wrote it because, at least for millennials, COVID wasn’t the first time you felt like the world was ending. There was Y2K, then 9/11, and finally the Great Recession (into which many of us graduated). Wednesday (somehow) embodies this present/past duality. They sound new but also very old, purely contemporary but also deeply nostalgic. They’re also incredibly Southern, like the novel, and saturate their stuff in the particulars of Carolina. Anything of the gems off Twin Plagues or Rat Saw God could’ve found a home on this playlist, but I like “Formula One” for its gritted-teeth tenderness and for Karly Hartzman’s existential lyrics: “Bird flies into the window / everyday at the same time / it’ll never learn / but it also wouldn’t die.”
9. “Accident Prone” by Jawbreaker
The punk (and even some of the post-punk) of the eighties and the nineties is all over Junah at the End of the World, and gets onto the page largely through the character of Sadie, Junah’s crush. The first time we meet Sadie, she’s described as only ever wearing ratty t-shirts of bands like Bad Brains and The Dead Kennedys. Later, after the two form a connection, they kill time in school by writing lyrics on little paper balls and throwing them across the classroom. Junah (predictably) sends Sadie the chorus of “The Milkman of Human Kindness” by Billy Bragg. Sadie volleys with clipped nihilism courtesy of The Descendents and Black Flag. But the lyric she most desperately needs Junah to understand comes from Jawbreaker’s “Accident Prone”: “I cut in line / I bled to death / I got to you / There was nothing left.” Sadie uses this lyric like so many kids in the nineties who grew up without ever being given a vocabulary for their inner life. She uses it to tell Junah an incommunicable truth–that he’s asking for more from someone with “nothing left.”
10. “No One’s Going to Love You” by Band of Horses
Junah at the End of the World is a South Carolina book through and through. It was written while I was living in South Carolina, it’s set in South Carolina (Greenville to be exact), and it’s published by South Carolina’s best press (the wonderful Hub City). As such, I wanted to include at least one song by a band with its roots (and themes) in South Carolina. That band is Band of Horses, and the tune of choice is “No One’s Going to Love You,” which feels connected to the novel’s apocalyptic situation (“Things start splitting at the seams now / It’s tumbling down hard”), its nostalgic take on the past (“You are the ever-living ghost of what once was”), and its speaker’s unblinking romanticism (“No one’s going to love you more than I do”). Ben Bridwell, who grew up just down the road from my hometown, has my vote for the Palmetto State’s best lyricist/vocalist, and it’s my joy to bring this tune in conversation with the book.
11. “We Will Become Silhouettes” by The Postal Service
This one’s for Junah’s mom (and for any parent who went a little crazy during the build up to Y2K). Her survivalist stockpile (“I’ve got a cupboard with cans of food”). Her acceptance of the news narrative (“All the news reports recommended that I stay indoors”). And, finally, her desperate need for security in the face of a strange and nonsensical narrative (“I wanted to walk through the empty streets / And feel something constant under my feet”). Maybe it’s the nostalgia junkie in me, but I think Ben Gibbard’s work with The Postal Service remains his very best stuff, and I like how this song interacts with the survivalist narratives of both Y2K and COVID.
12. “Select All, Delete” by John K. Samson
This haunted opener from Samson’s 2016 solo offering Winter Wheat is sometimes interpreted as a metaphor for suicide, but I’ve always understood it as a song about starting over. Samson’s speaker, who’s easily envisioned as occupying an empty room on a rainy night, trills, “When it gets too complicated / When you can’t get to sleep / When the morning seems impossible / Select all, delete.” Not only does Junah spend the novel considering the implications of reality as he knows it being “deleted,” but (in response to this existential angst) he realizes that the composition of his time capsule (unlike the composition of his reality) allows for constant “deletion,” and that everytime he removes items from the shoebox, he remakes the narrative. This, I think, is Samson’s point: that rearranging one’s life sometimes begins with clearing out what no longer serves you.
Dan Leach has published work in The Massachusetts Review, The Southwest Review, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident, 2022). In 2023, Texas Review Press chose him for the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award and released his collection Stray Latitudes (2024). He lives in the lowcountry of South Carolina and teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.