In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
M.L. Rio’s Hot Wax is an epic and mesmerizing rock and roll novel.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Rio (If We Were Villains) captures the joy and danger of rock ’n’ roll in her raucous latest…Rio keeps the reader guessing—and turning the pages—while shining a light on Suzanne’s emotional scars. This electrifies.”
In her own words, here is M.L. Rio’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Hot Wax:
Choosing just ten songs from the Hot Wax soundtrack is a pretty tall order. I spent nearly a decade writing and re-writing this book, and in that time I racked up thousands of records and ticket stubs and hours streamed on the six or seven road trips I took all the way across the country and back between 2019 and 2024. There was no other way to write a novel about a cross-country concert tour. By now, with publication right around the corner, the project has not just one playlist but seven different ones: a grand total of 2,751 songs and 175 hours of music. Why so ungodly much? Bringing a fictional rock band to life in black and white is no mean feat either, and this much sonic research was essential. Every member of Gil & the Kills and Babel Mouth, the two groups in the book, brought their own influences into the room and onto the stage. The project playlists reflect that long artistic ancestry as much as they do they central themes of the narrative. I curated a more manageable playlist of 130 songs to share with readers when the book comes out in September, but in the meantime, here’s just a handful to whet your sonic appetite.
Beastie Boys, “The New Style”
Licensed to Ill is the main character’s gateway drug into the world of die-hard record collectors, and it remains a touchpoint throughout her life and throughout the story. When Suzanne first encounters the album on her tenth birthday, it’s unlike anything she’s ever heard before, which was true of almost everyone hearing it for the first time in 1986, two years before the story begins in earnest. It’s a wildly inappropriate record to give a kid her age, but that sets the tone for the rest of the book and the rest of her life. She’s constantly thrown into situations she shouldn’t be in: too adult and too dangerous but full to bursting with music she just can’t resist.
Prince, “Baby I’m Star”
Can you even write a book about the 1980s rock scene without Prince? Though he doesn’t come up by name, I borrowed “Baby I’m a Star” for a chapter title early in the novel where the reader meets some of the band members for the first time. It’s the best of popular music at a rare moment when what was good and what was popular actually overlapped. But the song is also about pop stardom and the blind faith you have to have in yourself to make it against the long odds of the music business. It was the perfect way to introduce the larger-than-life frontman of Gil & the Kills, who’s had his eye on stardom since he was wasn’t much older than Suzanne.
New York Dolls, “Looking for a Kiss”
I wanted to write a book about rock and roll partly because I did a doctoral degree in performance studies, worked as a rock writer for years, and always relished the challenge of “reading” live performance. It’s about style and spectacle and gesture and “stage IQ” as much as it is about the music. One essential element in the rock idiom—especially in the Seventies and Eighties—was gender, which is inherently performative. Nobody did that better than the Dolls, who provided a lot of inspiration for some of the band’s more provocative costumes and choreography.
David Bowie, “D. J.”
Lodger can be a hard sell for casual listeners but is justifiably beloved by Bowie fanatics, including me. “D. J.” also provided a chapter title for Hot Wax, almost as a counterpoint to “Baby I’m a Star.” It projects the same cock-eyed self-confidence, but there’s something a little darker and a little weirder here—something almost desperate in its endless repetitions of “I’ve got believers,” almost as if the singer is trying to persuade himself it’s true.
Fugazi, “Waiting Room”
In an interstitial scene of the book, seventeen-year-old Suzanne steals her mother’s car and drives five states away just to see Fugazi, because Fugazi live was absolutely worth it. They played all-ages shows with all the house lights on, never sold merch, and never charged more than $5 a head if they could help it—a radically democratic approach which came to define the hardcore movement in and around their hometown of Washington, D.C. The raw, wild power of their—often shirtless, always sweaty, never boring—concerts would have appealed to a teenager with a lot of baggage and a lot of anger and nowhere else to vent it. That they get namechecked in a chapter where she also spends a lot of hazardous hours in hospital waiting rooms felt like hardcore kismet.
Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, “I Hate Myself for Loving You”
Joan Jett proved time and again that she could go toe-to-toe with the boys in the business at a time when women weren’t supposed to play guitar or act like rock stars. Up Your Alley was on the turntable a lot while I worked on Hot Wax, not just because I refused to write women off the way so many rock writers do, but also because it’s a perfect snapshot of what Big Bad Rock n Roll sounded like at the end of the Eighties. “I Hate Myself for Loving You” was an undeniable single and something of a leitmotif for a novel where the interpersonal relationships are tricky, sticky, and—in some instances—more than a little sadomasochistic.
The Gories, “Nitroglycerine”
The Gories were one of the best things to come out of the Nineties garage revival (along with Mick Collins’ other band, The Dirtbombs). Strains of punk and blues unavoidably point back to Iggy and the Stooges, Detroit’s first claim to punk rock fame. The crunching riffs and squealing strings more than pull their weight, but the lyrics hit just as hard: “She’s so shy / Then she just blows up / It’s like dropping a stick of dynamite / In a Dixie cup” paints a picture you won’t forget in a hurry. Suffice to say there’s a couple of people in Hot Wax to whom that description might apply.
Rose Tattoo, “Nice Boys”
Best remembered for the blistering cover by Guns ‘N’ Roses, “Nice Boys” gets to the heart of the moral panic around the Eighties rock scene. “Nice boys don’t play rock and roll,” the Australian hard rockers holler, before defiantly declaring “I’m not a nice boy, and I never was.” Gil & the Kills and Babel Mouth are hardly above the kind of legendarily bad behavior which has been endemic to the rock world since time out of mind. If you’ve never given the original a spin, it’s well worth three minutes of your time: something so bad never sounded so good.
Dead Moon, “Sorrow’s Forecast”
Dead Moon comes up a couple of times in Hot Wax. The trio from Portland never achieved mainstream name recognition but cranked out perfectly lo-fi DIY punk records from their formation in 1987 until disbanding in 2006. More than one Dead Moon soon is “etched in [Suzanne’s] subconscious acetate,” but this one speaks to the struggle of staying true to the music and staying alive without a major label record deal. It’s a song crammed with coulda-woulda-shouldas: “I could have kissed the right ass,” Fred Cole mutters, “I could have shook the right hands,” or “played in soft rock bands.” But thank God he didn’t. Dead Moon’s ragged integrity is exactly what some of the members of my own fictional band try to cling to, even as the others are desperate for a chance to hit big, sell out, and cash in.
The Stooges, “Gimme Danger”
The Stooges crop up in the text of Hot Wax more than any other band, not by accident. When I was thinking about the kind of stage presence I wanted my pet rock-n-rollers to have, I kept coming back to the Stooges. Their music is very different, but there was no other frontman like Iggy Pop, the Godfather of Punk. Like Fugazi, who surely learned a little something from the Stooges, live gigs were weird, wild, and heavy as hell. I’m not just talking about the volume, either—there’s a deep, oily darkness to the Stooges’ music, and particularly a track like “Gimme Danger,” which looped through my head as I was working through the novel’s darkest moments. I’ve heard it thousands of times by now, but it can still make my hair stand on end.
also at Largehearted Boy:
M.L. Rio’s music playlist for her novel Graveyard Shift
M.L. Rio has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in English literature. She is the author of the internationally bestselling novel If We Were Villains, the USA TODAY bestselling novella Graveyard Shift, and Hot Wax. She never stays in one place for long, but keeps her books, records, and four-legged sidekick in south Philadelphia.