In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Anna Dorn’s novel American Spirits is smart and entertaining and filled with characters that will haunt you long after finishing the book.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“The music writing in this book is outstanding, including intriguing real-world references and annotated playlists that will make you grateful for your streaming service. Dorn has a profound understanding of the relationship between an artist and her work . . . Nuanced characters, lively writing, and a heaping helping of bad behavior make the pages fly.”
In her own words, here is Anna Dorn’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel American Spirits:
I am so happy to be making my fifth Largehearted Boy playlist! I was looking back at old playlists to make sure I don’t have any repeats, because I have a tendency to listen to the same five songs over and over (and there is one repeat on this list, sorry). But more importantly, I found this description below Lana Del Rey’s “Old Money” in my Vagablonde playlist: “This is perhaps a cocky thing to say but I’ve always related to Lana as a sad East Coast girl who adopted California as her home state. This track embodies that sense of Southern California Gothic I’ve always wanted my writing to capture.” This sentiment remains true, and in fact American Spirits is directly inspired by Lana Del Rey. I see my first novel Vagablonde as a younger sister to American Spirits, as both books are music-obsessed and about star musicians. Vagablonde is messier, rawer, and features an aspiring musician; American Spirits is more mature, more polished, and stars a very famous musician. Vagablonde contains a lot of music writing—fake Pitchfork reviews, academic theses, gushing fan analyses, and I loved every second of writing it. I think most artists fantasize about being another type of artist. Lana Del Rey is a musician who wants to be a poet. And I’m a novelist who wants to be a musician. This is obvious from all my books but this one in particular. Here are some of the songs that inspired the music-drenched American Spirits.
“Shades of Cool” – Lana Del Rey
“My baby lives in shades of blue. Blue eyes and jazz and attitude.” This is the first epigraph in American Spirits. I named the main character Blue Velour in part inspired by Lana’s obsession with blue—the word appears in 43 of her released songs—and also the fact that she covered “Blue Velvet” on Born to Die (Blue Velour is the trashier version). In Lana’s music, the word blue symbolizes melancholy, darkness, jazz, the ocean, and eventually triumph—moving, as she puts it on Lust For Life, “out of the black, into the blue.” I think my heroine makes a similar progression from black to blue.
“Back to Black”- Amy Winehouse
“You go back to her, and I go back to us” is another epigraph in this novel and one of the most heartbreaking lines of music ever delivered. As in all my novels, there are many love triangles in this one, lots of going back to her and going back to us. Amy is a precursor to Lana Del Rey in her poetic excavation of doomed romance, and a member of the 27 Club, which Blue Velour takes great lengths to avoid joining. Lana goes to the blue, but Amy keeps going back to black.
“Unusual You” – Britney Spears
Spoiler alert: the superfan character in this book goes viral for covering this extremely underrated Britney Spears song. Vulnerable admission: I am a late-in-life Britney fan. When I was younger, I avoided her mostly due to contrarianism. But then “Unusual You” came on a playlist a few years ago, and something about this peculiar electropop ballad converted me. “Didn’t anyone tell you you’re supposed to break my heart?” is another epigraph in the book. And I’ve now listened to every song Brit has ever recorded.
“American Spirits” – Cassandra Jenkins
I stole the title of my last novel Perfume & Pain from an out-of-print lesbian pulp novel. I stole the title for this novel—I’m admitting this here for the very first time—from this lush, aching Cassandra Jenkins song inspired by “the poetic ambiguity that can arise from the struggle of searching for the words to tell someone we love exactly what has happened.” And isn’t that what all novels are about?
“Percocet & Stripper Joint” – Future
I warned you there was a repeat track, and of course it’s a Future one. American Spirits is an older sister to Vagablonde, so it only makes sense they share a track. In Vagablonde, this track spoke to the main character’s druggy dissociation. In American Spirits, it’s what I imagine the production of Blue Velour’s pandemic album Mood Onyx to sound like: droning 808s, gothic synths, negative space swallowing everything.
“Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” – Nancy Sinatra
In the novel, Blue Velour’s first album is called Spirit of Sinatra as an ode to Nancy. I am not the first to make the Nancy Sinatra–Lana Del Rey connection: both wear their daddy issues on their sleeves and make love sound spooky as hell (cue “White Feather Hawk Deer Tail Hunter”). “Bang Bang” is a song about being shot dead that somehow feels like a dream. I kind of wanted this novel to feel like that, too.
“Love Buzz” – Nirvana
In the novel, Blue Velour first captures the attention of her longtime producer by covering “Love Buzz.” The two of them later use lyrics from the song to title a future album. Lana is a huge fan of Kurt Cobain, another member of the 27 Club, and Blue Velour is too. “Love Buzz” happens to be my favorite Nirvana song as well—quelle surprise given I wrote the book!
“Mirrorball” – Taylor Swift
Another confession: I’m a late-in-life Taylor Swift fan. I was listening to her a lot when I was writing this book, and the Folklore cabin inspired my decision to have Blue Velour make a pandemic album while holed up in the redwoods—although it sounds less like Folklore and more like Dirty Sprite 2. Blue Velour despises Taylor Swift, but her producer secretly likes her. “Mirrorball” captures how Taylor can be whatever people need her to be, and Blue needs a foil.
“Blue Motel Room” – Joni Mitchell
Like Lana Del Rey, Joni Mitchell is obsessed with the color blue. Beyond her most beloved album, Blue, the color is also in a great number of her song titles, like this blue-toned jazz track from the critical darling Hejira. She wrote most of the album while driving across the U.S. in the mid-70s, reminiscent of Blue Velour’s manic drive across the country in American Spirits. Missing her lover in L.A. on a stop in Georgia, Joni has blue on her mind: “I’ve got a blue motel room / With a blue bedspread / I’ve got the blues inside and outside my head / Will you still love me / When I get back to town?”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Perfume and Pain
Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Exalted
Anna Dorn’s playlist for her memoir Bad Lawyer
Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Vagablonde
Anna Dorn is the author of the novels Perfume and Pain, Exalted, Vagablonde, and American Spirits. She was a Lambda Literary Fellow and Exalted was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.