In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
TJ Fuller’s story collection Some Stupid Glow showcases a brilliant absurdity of language and humor.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Fuller’s prose is punchy, original, and lively, and his tales constantly shift the ground beneath the reader’s feet. Each story is short, dense, and intriguing throughout this consistently excellent, varied, and fascinating collection.”
In his own words, here is TJ Fuller’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Some Stupid Glow:
At the keyboard in the morning, I feel the pressure to perform. To sing. I love a musical sentence. I love a sentence that rejects worn out phrases and obvious metaphors, but those sentences are hard to construct. These sentences are hard to construct. How do I explain how stressful writing can be? Many of you know. You want your images to be gemstone sharp and gemstone rare, and each morning you have to prove to yourself you can create those images.
I can’t participate in word count exercises, like 1000 words a day or National Novel Writing Month, because I write slowly. Instead I use a timer. For an hour, sometimes thirty minutes, I try and forget about work and the state of the world and chisel out some sentences. And then the timer rings and I put on some music to decompress. One of my favorite moments of the day is those first few notes of a song after a tense writing session. This is a playlist of the songs I often listened to after working on my debut short story collection, Some Stupid Glow. If you find writing difficult, they might help you decompress too.
Steal Smoked Fish by The Mountain Goats
The first song I got in the habit of playing at the end of every writing session. I wanted my stories to feel like this song, small and personal and tense. The past hangs around the present, and the narrator of the song is caught between them. This song is also set in Portland, like most of the stories in my collection, and Portland too is caught between the past and the present, leaving behind too many people pressed by its strange future.
The Race is On, The King is Dead by Guided by Voices
“Every single highway is the wrong way home”—that should have been the epigraph for Some Stupid Glow. Nothing satisfies these characters the way they hope it will. Nothing takes the anxious itch from their bodies. I love the sound of Robert Pollard’s voice going up an octave. I love the way he pronounces odometer. I want to live in the last chorus of this song.
Little Fury by The Breeders
“My big drum on your big face”—that’s how all writing should feel.
I’ll Stay by Roy Hargrove featuring D’Angelo
I swear I read once about this recording session, how hard it was to get D’Angelo to commit to a song, and that at one point, Bernard Wright and D’Angelo started playing Sly Stone’s version of Que Sera Sera and all of the men in the studio sang along. I think of that lost session often, the choir of men singing “Whatever will be, will be.” My obsession with D’Angelo as a teenager led me to obsess with whomever he was obsessed with, Prince and James Brown and Miles Davis, the Yodas, he called them, and to find writing Yodas, writers whose every sentence I wanted to glue myself to like D’Angelo glued himself to the rare VHS performances of his favorites. When he died last year, I was in disbelief. Rest in power to one of the artists who taught me to obsess, to embrace creation being difficult.
Unwind by Sonic Youth
The guitars chase each other like children, languid, loose, and even as the distortion enters the chase, the song never gets as far from the melody as other Sonic Youth deconstructions. That’s why I find the screeching so relaxing.
The Freedom by Swan Lake
I love the mix of Dan Bejar’s voice on this song. He sounds a bit more raw, more flip, than a typical Destroyer track, tossing out that strange opening line, “I put a hex on the telephone wire.” One of my favorite reads about Bejar’s work is on the substack tiny mammal kingdom. She writes about irony and his lyrics and the idea that he’s less interested in the “idea of words meaning something as opposed to doing something. As opposed to the effect they create.” “He’s not interested in his words actually meaning anything…He’s interested in what they do — how they sound, but also their effect on the listener.” I am chasing something similar in my writing, metaphors and similes that you feel before you understand. Dan Bejar’s lyrics are inspiration to push beyond the obvious.
Pizza King by Wussy
Lisa Walker’s laugh. Before the thick drums or stomping bass, Lisa Walker’s laugh breaks the tense writing morning. It’s a song about missing your chance. “You’re up in the air. She’s already there.” But I listen to it alone and feel like I still have a few moments left to commit before she completely disappears.
BASQUIAT by Jamila Woods featuring Saba
LEGACY! LEGACY! is one of the more underrated albums of the last ten years. I think we should talk about it like we do Channel Orange or Black Messiah. Each song surprises. Each song is as vulnerable as it is political. On BASQUIAT, even more than the way she says, “I don’t know fucking know,” which is delightfully biting, I love the breakbeat cracking open the song with two minutes left. Without sacrificing any anger, the song downshifts and cruises.
Shadow Man by Noname featuring Phoelix, Smino, & Saba
It’s going to be awkward at my funeral when my wife has to explain why they’re pausing the eulogy to listen to Metro Boomin, but this Smino verse is too good, tiptoeing across the beat while talking about tiptoeing, rhyming booming with Boomin. Noname is another model of an artist in the world, not wasting her time on the empty endorsements other celebrities do, and instead creating her incredible Noname Book Club, focused on uplifting writers of color and radical books.
Chinese Apple by Loose Fur
There are many Jim O’Rourke tracks I could have chosen. I love how he deconstructs through repetition, the most famous being his cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. But this is the one I listen to most often. The fingerpicking circles the same few notes as an otherworldly sound mounts behind the guitars, but then the tension dissipates, like it does for me after writing, and we’re back in Jeff Tweedy’s folk song. But you can only be so comfortable after you’ve heard whatever is pressing in from the other side, and that’s the kind of experience I hope for my debut short story collection, Some Stupid Glow, that these small, personal stories are pressed on by an otherworldly feeling mounting behind them.
TJ Fuller’s stories have been featured in The Columbia Journal, Juked, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other journals. His work has also been included in two anthologies, What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, based on the work of Mitch Hedberg, and And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative.He earned an M.F.A. in fiction from Eastern Washington University, and has been accepted to both Tin House and Sewanee summer workshops. Some Stupid Glow is his first book.
TJ Fuller lives in Portland, OR.