In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Luke Kennard’s novel Black Bag is a clever and funny book.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“[A] delightful and dark picaresque . . . Kennard entertainingly pokes and prods at conceptions of identity, whether in sexual relationships or online personae”
In his own words, here is Luke Kennard’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Black Bag:
I go through months where I don’t listen to much music at all and then I remember that I love it more than anything else, and what was I thinking? Maybe I’m someone who needs fallow periods. I can’t listen to anything with lyrics when I write because I just start singing along and spinning in my chair. But weird modulations of lines I love sometimes find their way into my writing anyway, and I have to bury them a little deeper so it’s not too much of a lift. At one point the narrator in Black Bag tells someone he’s “contractually obliged not to share” why he’s dressed in the black bag, and that’s almost a line from the chorus of Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ ‘Chartjunk’. So the issue is maybe that I love music so much that sometimes I can’t cope with it. I am, like a lot of elder millennials, arrested in the ’90s indie scene I first fell in love with.
‘Mastercontrol’ (Graeme Downes)
Graeme Downes fronted The Verlaines in the ’80s/’90s and later became a music professor. His first solo album is one of those records I go back to a lot because I love his voice and his inspired, show-tune rhymes (“We stayed at the garden of Eden / We can’t pay the bill so we’re leavin’”). It’s this sweet, lounge-y melody with lyrics that express a kind of utter despair at the state of things, the world, love, ourselves – and the hint of a raised eyebrow somehow makes it all the more heartfelt. I think that’s the vibe I’m usually trying to hit in writing.
‘All Downhill From Here’ (Jim O’Rourke)
A lot of Jim O’Rourke’s lyrics are like withering artist’s statements from an artist who just wants everyone to leave him alone. And then the songs address that directly, almost goadingly – ‘You think you understand the first thing about me?’ I’ve loved this song since the early 2000s and I think some of that spirit informs the narrator of Black Bag – a kind of desperation to communicate and for an audience for his work that he ultimately feels antipathy towards because they don’t get it. It’s a deconstructed classic rock song with the percussion so high in the mix it takes over at times. The incongruous piano and brass acoustic bridges, the emotionless woohoos; nobody else can make being past-caring go so hard. If the last song I hear before I die is a Jim O’Rourke song I’ll be happy with that, and most of them seem to be written with pretty much that in mind.
‘Bliss’ (Tori Amos)
Obviously the first three Tori Amos records are timeless classics, but people tend to sleep on the post-Boys for Pele stuff. ‘Bliss’ is this sweet/sour light-industrial track about sex and technology which somehow feels perfect for Justine Pearce (a professor of posthumanism who my narrator falls in love with). I love the way she pronounces “steady” in the chorus, also the elegant expression of sexuality in “Maybe we’re a bliss of another kind.”
‘Loud Cloud Crowd’ (Stephen Malkmus)
It’s taken me months to narrow it down to one Stephen Malkmus song. He’s so often the only singer and lyricist I want to hear, and I love that his writing incorporates oblique images and goofy references with the most profound shit I’ve ever heard in the history of writing. This isn’t my favourite song, but the line “Front and center, we all sit / In stadia of our own devising” is never off my mind. The narrator is an actor, anyway, but one of the reasons I left out any punctuation in formatting direct speech in Black Bag is that I’d like it to feasibly just be an extended monologue, a maladaptive daydream; when in reality he’s just sitting in a chair in his apartment and the whole thing… I mean actually that’s true, isn’t it? I made the whole thing up.
‘Köln, January 24, 1975, Pt 2 C’ (Keith Jarrett)
I remember house-sitting with a friend in the small-town nowheresville we grew up (he was an actual talented musician) and lying in a double bed, exactly the right level of high on cheap 90s weed, listening to this while a beautiful grey Burmese cat made eye contact with us one after the other and thinking ‘this is about as good as life gets’. I love Jarrett’s involuntary expressions of delight as he improvises – like FUCK YEAH I did that. My narrator is kind of a dick, as am I, but I think what he really wants is for something like this to be possible. For someone – anyone! for the conditions to exist! – to be able to get so transcendently good at something as Keith Jarrett is at playing the piano.
‘Emp. Man’s Blues’ (The For Carnation)
This song is really sinister and filmic, partly thanks to the string section and partly thanks to Brian MacMahan’s wonderful delivery. And it speaks to some of the themes of solipsism, masculinity, hubris. So it’s an inner monologue that channels maybe the worst parts of us… I remember reading an interview with the lead-singer of Mogwai once and he talked about how he hates singing, hates being a lead-singer, because it’s an awful, psychopathic thing to want to do, so he deliberately sings quietly. For me the character in this song manifests the worst parts of being a performer or an artist – the narcissism that threatens to permanently flood the better parts of you and turn you into either a successful monster or a failed monster, but a monster either way, something my narrator is always angsting about. “I like to hear applause.” What do you want, really? It’s not what you think it is.
‘Disarray’ (Low)
Not just because the cover looks like black bag or because I live half my life in the t-shirt I got on the Double Negative tour. I just think there’s something really remarkable about Sparhawk’s lyrics – concise and allusive, devastatingly specific in a way that always implies a novel’s worth of story you can enter into or not. One of my characters is obsessed with rare hallucinogens, and I like/hate the idea that you can sort of cross over, that we can always do something irreversible without really thinking about it, so “They say you let it in when you took the drugs” haunts me.
‘Flowers to My Demons’ (NNAMDï)
I’m in awe of NNAMDï and this feels like another theme song that was floating around in my mind while I was writing. It’s uneasy and painfully self-conscious and it’s also just like walking around a city and trying to keep yourself in check; there’s something so generous in the vulnerability. I seem to be leaning towards a lot of references to demons in these songs. “After I cast them out, I turn back and invite them”
‘Monomania’ (Deerhunter)
Monomania is an obsessive enthusiasm for one thing, and that’s kind of where my narrator ends up with his relationship to the black bag (although it’s debatable what that “one thing” exactly is). And this song is like the musical equivalent to Simone Weil’s concept of Decreation. It’s an annihilation of the ego, but the voice just rails at God, rails at whoever, rails at himself. I love the three minute coda. A recent psychological study proved that there’s no such thing as catharsis, we just really like the idea of it, so all those 5th century Athenian tragedies actually just made people feel worse. But I think if the study had involved screaming “MONO MONO MANIA” over and over again in a Ford Fiesta on the M40 the results would have been different.
‘Wine Song’ (Robbie Basho)
My partner has better and broader taste than I do and put me onto this guy. Stunningly good guitarist with a gorgeous, warbly voice. This song feels timeless and drunk and in love. I think Black Bag is partly about trying to escape yourself and those are some of the most effective ways of achieving that, maybe. But you’re always still waiting for yourself, in the end. You pick yourself up again at the station. Really love is helping each other negotiate that. I find the ending really moving.
Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. His collection, Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as “the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year,” and Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. The Transition, his first novel, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Book of Jonah, his new poetry collection, will be published by Picador in 2025. Luke Kennard lives in Birmingham, UK, where he teaches Creative Writing at Birmingham University.