In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Delaney Nolan’s debut Happy Bad is a compelling, hilarious, and moving work of climate fiction.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A self-assured debut that is also a warning.”
In her own words, here is Delaney Nolan’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Happy Bad:
Happy Bad follows the staff and residents at a treatment center in East Texas, when a massive heatwave triggers a blackout, forcing them to evacuate. It’s a hot, windy, hypomanic kind of book, and I spent a lot of time thinking about climate collapse, female rage, and vicarious trauma while writing it. But to write something that speaks on the modern era and/or politics is a horrific proposal – who wants to read about that?—so we’ve got a lot of humor, exciting catastrophe, and various bodily fluids.
Music is something that fuels my writing during the not-writing part. When I’m getting words down, I usually want it pretty silent so that I can hear the sound of the language more clearly – sound, rhythm, and tune really drive the voice of Beatrice in Happy Bad, and getting into that bouncing, despairing-yet-playful voice was always the key that I had to turn before I could continue. But music arranges the landscape into which you put your writing. So hot, bright, red and yellow songs were helpful for the first half, and then more hypnotic stuff as they get further down the road.
Loud Bark – Mannequin Pussy
To be fair, I only started listening to this song after the bookwas already finished and on its way to being published. But it is definitely the anthem for Twin Bridge, the residential treatment center for neglected and/or criminalized teenage girls. The way it starts – “Not a single motherfucker who has tried to lock me up / could get the collar ’round my neck / or find one that’s big enough”- feels like what they’d be screaming in the bathroom mirror at each other after curfew.
But Does It Work? – Drug Church
I listened to this song a lot around the time I was starting what would become the final full draft of Happy Bad. I associate it with a day when I got my ears pierced badly, and went around with blood running down my jaw. It remains an all-time favorite. “Supermarket line / nothing works / getting off a plane / nothing works”: I recognize, and hoped to render, that muted despair for the drudgery of daily life, all this time spent waiting in lines in ugly buildings. “Nothing works” feels like the very refrain that comes to you when you’re burnt out, overexhausted, reeling from chronic vicarious trauma and empathy exhaustion, as the staff of Twin Bridge often are.
Heat Wave – Snail Mail
This one got added for reasons that seem obvious. We needed some heat. But also the abject teenage-sounding pleading of Snail Mail feels appropriate to the age of the Twin Bridge girls.
Outlaw – The Staves
Again, a thematically relevant title, but also the vibes are right. I remember listening to this song as I stepped off a plane to cross the blindingly bright, hot tarmac of an airport in Eastern Morocco, where I’d arrived alone to teach a writing course. I always associate this song with being a woman alone in a hot desert landscape. I imagine this song is playing as they take off into East Texas in the van.
I was Young When I Left Home – Antony and Bryce Dessner
The nearly discordant strings and Dessner’s warbling voice make this better than the original, in my opinion. Sorry Bob. This song charts a feeling that recurs in a few ways in Happy Bad, which I imagine everyone has experienced at some point – yearning to return, but bowled over by the guilt of having ever left.
In a Landscape – John Cage
This is one of my favorite writing songs. I’ve got it on a playlist but sometimes just play it on a loop. It sounds exactly like snow falling outside your window. I did listen to it a lot while I was a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City one winter, which is why the character Frank is from there. Some of the taxidermy in the Frontier Museum in the book was also inspired by Nebraska.
Drunk Walk Home – Mitski
Because sometimes we need screaming! And I wrote a lot of the first draft of this book while unemployed, medium-depressed, and living in Brussels. I would play this song while dogwalking, hoping against hope that I’d manage to pull the book thing off.
Easy – Mesadorm
This song, which feels like women from older and younger generations reassuring one another, embodies the kind of message I’d like Happy Bad to carry. I listened to it a lot walking along the river beside the levees in New Orleans, which is also where I did a lot of my book-planning thinking.
Laveau Dirge No. 1 – Trombone Shorty
A supremely special song, best played at maximum volume while you lie down with the lights off. This song’s hanging around throughout the end of the book, when they’re in the warm and humid world of Houma, Louisiana.
Delaney Nolan received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She has since received a Pushcart Prize, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship in fiction; her fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and has been adapted into a radio play and a short film. Her work has been chosen as a notable for Best American Essays and translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, Italian, and Polish. Based in New Orleans, she has also received recognition for her reporting in The Guardian, The Intercept, BBC, Al Jazeera, Mother Jones, and elsewhere.