In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Tod Goldberg’s novel Only Way Out is noir infused with complex characters and dark humor.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“[Goldberg] does an uncanny job of keeping multiple plot elements in the air, shifting among unholy alliances of mobsters and do-gooders turned bad with cutting humor…Internecine noir, done just right.“
In his own words, here is Tod Goldberg’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Only Way Out:
I listen to music constantly when I’m writing, which can be annoying to my wife, since I tend to play the same songs over and over again if I believe they possess some magical ability to get me in the mood for the writing I’m set to do. At some point, it’s all just white noise, which my wife contends I could listen to through the series of expensive headphones and AirPods she’s purchased for me over the years. So I’ve tried in recent years to add music to my retinue that doesn’t make Wendy want to leave me for one of those writers who must work in pure silence, and since this new book of mine – Only Way Out – is supposed to be a little less, uhm, dark and filled with gangsters murdering each other, I did try to keep my work playlist a little more light…but, alas…
These are the dozen songs I obsessed about and/or inspired me when I wrote Only Way Out:
“Fast Ones” by Codefendants
This ended up being a sort of theme song for one of my three main characters, Mitch Diamond, an ex-con who isn’t really much of an ex-anything. He’s a guy whose been pulling a fast one every day for most of his life. “I’ve seen many intelligent beings act dumb,” Ceschi raps in the second verse, and that’s about the score in this entire book.
“Boomerang Town” by Jaimee Harris
My mom grew up in a boomerang town (Walla Walla) and then moved me to one – Palm Springs – which is the first place I heard that term. I always said I’d never come back to Palm Springs, that I wouldn’t be one of those people who bounced right on back…only to find myself here, by choice, for the last twenty-five years. I’ll probably die here, happily! Turns out I like a small town with an insidious underbelly. And it turns out, in all the books I’ve written, there’s a person pining for a boomerang town of their own.
“Welcome to the Boomtown” by David & David
This is one of those songs that, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, they would have optioned and turned into a TV series. It’s the perfect song about Los Angeles, which has nothing to do with my book, but it always puts me in the mood of great expectations lost and that, 100%, is relevant to this book. It’s a song about beautiful losers, after all, and that’s very deeply my shit.
“Rescue Blues” by Craig Finn
Any song about a sketchy dude hiding out in an apartment, reading tattoo magazines and watching crime shows with a woman who works doing the books at a supermarket is catnip for a guy like me. I’ve been trying to write this book for a long-ass time, only to find out it’s better as a 4-minute song by Craig Finn.
“When The Circus Comes” by Los Lobos
Turns out there’s a lot of weird small-town songs on this playlist. Huh. Well, in this case, this song always reminds me of the heartbreaking loneliness you can feel when the amusement park lights go out. This is a song about heartbreak, but I found this song playing in my mind when I’d write scenes in the dying old resort town of Granite Shores.
“Ceremony” by Joy Division/New Order
For reasons not yet clear to me – and as the next pick will also attest – I found myself listening to a fair amount of shoegaze-ish music while I wrote this book, including all iterations of this song, which I briefly became obsessed over (briefly: about six months) and had to find every existing mix currently available, going back to old Joy Division demos and such.
“Darklands” by the Jesus and Mary Chain
There’s a version of this book that is pure blackness colored, only by brooding nihilism, and it’s called “Darklands,” which I had to remind myself not to write.
“Blue Jeans and White T-Shirts” by the Gaslight Anthem
I found myself listening to a lot of songs that evoked the sense of a beach town at night, when bad things can happen, and where people fall in love, and where you get into fights, and where you make core memories of waking up with sand in the wrong places after a night watching fireworks. So. Songs like this one.
“Shelter” by Lone Justice
In my little brain, this song was the theme song for the character of Penny Green, the kind of song she would have played on repeat in her bedroom as a kid. In the book, I made that old Cure songs, only because not enough people know the catalogue of Lone Justice.
“Me & Magdalena” by the Monkees
This is a very sweet song about a long-lost father, a winding drive along the coast, and the ache of memory. If there were a shootout, it would be my life’s work, but alas.
“Room at the Top” by Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
I know, this is actually a Tom Petty song – and in fact, it’s my favorite Tom Petty song – but this live version by Jason Isbell kills me every time. It’s such a painful, song, but it’s also the kind of song that gets me in the mood to write about people with nothing left to lose. Plus, Isbell says at the end that it’s his favorite Petty song, too, which makes me think we could probably be best friends.
“Man with a Gun” by Jerry Harrison
I think the last time I did one of these lists “Man with a Gun” also made the final cut…because the reality is, I listen to this song all the time to remind myself of a core reality of the kind of noir that I write, exemplified by Harrison’s simple, yet profound, lyric:
Pretty girl young man old man
Man with a gun
Two people in love
The rules do not apply
also at Largehearted Boy:
Tod Goldberg’s playlist for his novel Gangster Nation
Tod Goldberg’s playlist for his novel Gangsterland
Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen novels, including the Gangsterland quartet: Gangsterland, a finalist for the Hammett Prize; Gangster Nation; The Low Desert, a Southwest Book of the Year; and Gangsters Don’t Die, an Amazon Best Book of 2023 and a Southwest Book of the Year. Other works include The House of Secrets, coauthored with Brad Meltzer; Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the Burn Notice series. His short fiction and essays have been anthologized in Best American Mystery and Suspense and Best American Essays and appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Alta. Tod is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where he founded and directs the low-residency MFA program in creative writing and writing for the performing arts. For more information, visit www.todgoldberg.com.