In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Natalie Adler’s Book Notes debut novel Waiting on a Friend is an inventive and poignant take on the ghost story.
The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote of the book:
“[A] brilliant twist on the supernatural genre . . . Waiting on a Friend is a horror story where all the monsters are real—but so are the heroes. Even as they’ve disappeared, Renata keeps the memory of her lost friends, of their lost world, alive. In an era obsessed with optimization and monetization, Natalie Adler reminds us that living as your authentic self, in community with others . . . is a triumphant and deeply pleasurable form of resistance”
In her own words, here is Natalie Adler’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Waiting on a Friend:
There is no Waiting on a Friend without the music. The novel takes place in the East Village of 1984, the denouement of an underground era. Renata knows something is coming to an end, but doesn’t yet know the tragic extent. Big money real estate has set its sights on her neighborhood, and AIDS is beginning to scythe its way through her community. Renata, the main character, and her friends spend a lot of time going out dancing. Here’s Renata’s assessment of the scene:
“The last four or five years, the nightlife downtown was getting looser and more fun. It used to be, you went to a disco or you went to a show. But the styles had started to merge so you could bop around and get angry or dance to a droning beat and feel sad but in a nice way. There were clubs where the dancing was hypnotic, fluid, and then there were the nouveau gay clubs, kitschier clubs, where the dancing was more ironic and less sensual. Julie liked the clubs that were a little bit dancy, a little bit art- punk theatrics, where it felt like everything was in quotation marks but the fun was real. We went to luaus and proms, sleepover parties with acid and Mystery Date, drag ballet and camp renditions of Shakespeare, and once, thanks to Tanya, who was in with the art crowd, a Factory- themed costume party out in Queens with a Velvet Underground cover band. All the artists spent more time in punk bands than making art, which was great as far as I was concerned. For a while our favorite clubs had dueling Soviet- themed parties, spinning ‘The Internationale,’ which I thought was funny because dancing together was probably the closest to full communism we’d get.”
To write this novel, I built out a four-hour-long playlist that tracked the plot, beat for beat. Musical cues helped me escalate tension, or keep the energy at a simmer, or feel the longing my characters felt for their lost loved ones. As I added songs, I would realize, oh, Mark died before he got to hear Purple Rain. To this day, I hear a song and think to myself, “RIP Mark, you would have loved ‘How Soon Is Now?’”
“Is It All Over My Face/Tower of Meaning,” Blood Orange
This song is the time portal that brought me from my present moment into the world of my novel. The sax duet feels like an opening call to magic, an invocation of whatever ghosts wanted to show up and breathe life into the work—and then the beat drops and the dancing starts. Blood Orange is a contemporary singer/songwriter/producer, covering two songs by Arthur Russell, genius singer/songwriter/producer/cellist/chameleon. Some might call him overlooked during his time, though he influenced and collaborated with so many artists in his heydey. His songs could be fun and jangly, or vulnerable and simple, or mystical and transportive.
Russell died of AIDS-related complications in 1992 at age 40.
“Ghost Rider,” Suicide
Renata is 29 in 1984, which means that her early twenties stomping ground was peak New York cool. Suicide is punk origins and proto-no wave. The song is dissonant, electric noise: “America America is killin’ its youth.”
“Waiting on a Friend,” The Rolling Stones
In the video, the band hangs around the East Village, all easy camaraderie on tenement stoops. I wonder, though, if Renata would have thought the Stones were past their prime here. I do know she loved Sticky Fingers, because she lost her virginity to that album.
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” The Slits
The Slits are extremely Renata coded: pissed off punk and a lot of fun. This song is the soundtrack for the shiva scene in the novel, where all the friends (minus the titular friend, though it’s his shiva) are together, gossiping, arguing, slowly revealing the novel’s B-plot: Manhattan Remediation, the shadowy new business promising to rid downtown apartments of any supernatural residue.
“Too Many Creeps,” Bush Tetras
A song for the East Village as the yuppies begin to creep in. I imagine Renata meditating on the refrain “it’s the worst, it’s the worst, it’s the worst,” as she serves her arriviste customers at the vintage shop where she works. Bush Tetras are peak No Wave, a downtown New York music scene that grew from punk and served as a noisy, transgressive counterpoint to the more commercially friendly new wave.
“I Need Somebody to Love Tonight,” Sylvester
“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” is now a gay anthem, but don’t sleep on Sylvester’s slower songs. “I Need Somebody to Love Tonight” is diegetic to the novel. Leon, one of Renata’s friends who is also in mourning, plays it on repeat. It reminds him of the night he first met his lover, François, on the dancefloor of the Paradise Garage during “Saturday Mass,” the nickname for legendary DJ Larry Levan’s set. The Garage seems, to me, the platonic ideal of a club: a democratic scene, not about the door or the drugs (except for the punch), all about the dancing.
Sylvester died of AIDS in 1988. Larry Levan died of heart failure in 1992.
“Never Say Never,” Romeo Void
Another song I listened to on repeat while writing. Renata hears it at Danceteria when she’s out with her friend Julie. She notes that the lead singer of the band is “hot and fat and smart,” which is rare—girl frontrunners tend to be either pinup babes or androgynous gamines (and both mean skinny).
“Moody,” ESG
Mark sings this Paradise Garage classic to Renata when she’s in a mood, which is often. Minimal, funky, hissy hi-hats, continuous dub: this is what a humid New York City summer sounds like.
“I Never Get Lonesome,” Arthur Russell
A heartbreaking little ditty, and our second Arthur Russell track on the playlist. The song belies the fact that he does, in fact, get lonesome, “especially in the night, and you are gone.” A plaintive song for Renata in the quiet moments she’s alone in the home she shared with Mark.
“People,” Barbara Streisand
A thesis for the novel: people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Though these characters aren’t exactly Babs fans, they all grew up with her. Star, a performance artist and one of Renata’s friends, pays homage to Barbara by writing, acting, and directing a Pyramid Club production of Yentl, which she calls “the consummate transsexual film.”
“Heaven (Live),” Talking Heads
Stop Making Sense comes out as the long summer of mourning Mark is wrapping up, and it makes Renata nostalgic for her earlier twenties, when all her friends were alive and hanging around. The thing about writing a 29-year-old is that they’re just starting to feel melancholy about aging. She says: “I thought that little art nerd was right that heaven was a bar where everyone hung out and nothing ever happened.”
“Ghost Town,” The Specials
Drum kick, ambient siren, escalating synth wail. It’s political and it’s creepy. This song is the soundtrack for one of the Remediators paying Renata an unwanted house call. They have a disagreement about whether or not it is a good thing for your town to become a ghost town.
“Love Come Set Me Free,” Patrick Cowley
I listened to this whole album, Afternooners, on repeat while writing. It’s driving but dreamy, mid-tempo but the excitement builds and soars. I don’t want to say the title is a spoiler, so I won’t say it.
Patrick Cowley was one of the first famous men to die of AIDS, in 1982.
“Lucky Star,” Madonna
In Waiting on a Friend lore, Madonna writes this sparkly synth song about Star. Renata and friends know Madonna from when she was the coat check girl at Dancetaria. She describes the song as “a moody nursery rhyme.” The glissando that opens the song heralds the emotional conclusion of the novel.
“Halloween Parade,” Lou Reed
I built the novel around this song. I knew from the start that I wanted the novel to end with a spirit of everything, with all the living and the dead hanging out at the Village Halloween Parade. Lou’s song lists all the characters you might meet at the parade, but it’s 1989, and things have gotten worse downtown. My novel ends with a wish for all our lost loved ones to show up one more time, when else? On gay Christmas—Halloween.
Natalie Adler has an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She was a Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction and is an editor at Lux magazine. She is from New Jersey and lives in New York City.