In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Meg Charlton’s novel Voyagers is a debut both compelling and moving as it explores the possibilities of great friendship and extraterrestrial life.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
“In her debut, Charlton writes with the elegant prose, cohesive plotlines, and believable characters of a seasoned author….The feeling of uncertainty and doubt around their experience gives depth to the alien-abduction trope, making this read as a blend of sci-fi and literary fiction… Interrogating the importance of friendship, what friends owe each other, and what makes a narrative true, this novel will appeal to fans of Gabrielle Zevin who enjoy the nuance of conspiracy.”
In her own words, here is Meg Charlton’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Voyagers:
In Voyagers, two six-year-olds, Alex and Ana, mysteriously vanish for two days in the late 1990s. The incident is interpreted as an alien abduction and makes the two kids a) famous and b) inseparable, until their divergent beliefs about the truth of their experience tear them apart as teenagers. Now adults, they reunite when the world seems to be on the verge of actual, global first contact with aliens. Voyagers is about many things — aliens, of course, but also fame and faith. Class and conspiracy. Truth and memory and the nature of reality itself. But above all, it is about friendship, that most durable yet delicate of bonds, and what it takes to maintain that intimacy across vast distances of time and space.
For every project, I make a playlist. I rarely listen to it while I write, but I use it as a towline back into the mood, characters and world of the story. I worked on this project over about five or six years, so the playlist contracted and expanded many times! Some of the songs are literally about UFOs or the fallibility of memory or the fraying of a previously unbreakable bond. (I can be pretty on the nose with my song selections!) But others were selected for more oblique reasons. Hopefully, they capture the mood of both the book itself and the mindset I was in while writing it.
Door of the Cosmos – Sun Ra
I said I never listen to the songs on my playlist while writing, but this is the exception that proves the rule. I listened to a lot of free jazz while writing this book, but Sun Ra was my favorite, for obvious reasons. Sun Ra’s visionary music and Afrofuturist philosophy was born out of an alien encounter, which transported him to Saturn. After the encounter, he dropped out of college and ended up pursuing music, to all our benefit. Sun Ra’s music, for me, is always bursting with freaky joy and wondrous possibility. For Voyagers, I wanted to approach space as a place (to paraphrase the title of Sun Ra’s own film) and alien contact as an event from a mindset of fear but of thrilling, radical transformation.
California – EMA
That opening line — Fuck California / You made me boring — could be a mantra for either one of my main characters, Alex or Ana, who both believe, in their own ways, that their lives were irrevocably altered (for better and for worse) by their childhood experience in the California desert. This song has such an angsty, angry adolescent sound to it that I really love, earnest and plaintive and haunting. It sounds just like how I wanted the teenage sections of Alex and Ana’s lives to read.
Take Me Home – Phil Collins
This song has such a wonderful, shimmery menace to it. Apparently, Phil Collins was inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and it’s interesting to listen to the song through that lens. But I always heard it as a song of incredible yearning for answers, of all kinds, and for the imagined liberation they might bring. For me, it always made me think of Alex and his own desperate belief that “the truth is out there” if only he could find it. That final plea — “take, take me home / ‘cause I don’t remember” — might be a little on the nose for Alex’s situation. But when I wanted to drop into the real ache of his search for answers, I’d listen to this song.
The Passenger – Iggy Pop
Sorry, but I think the multiverse is the most damaging science fiction device since sentient AI! Based as it might be in real theories of quantum mechanics, it often (not always) ends up perpetuating this view of our lives as a form of consumer choice: If I’d just made this one discreet change, then everything would be different. I was interested in exploring the dark side of that multiverse mindset in Voyagers. Alex is obsessed with the idea that his life has been thrown “off course” somehow. But what if we accepted that the life we live is the only course that was ever set for us? What if we surrendered the idea of ever being in the driver’s seat? Alex spends a good chunk of the novel as a literal passenger, but in a bigger sense, he spends his whole life as one. I think we all do. “The Passenger” is a perfect song about letting the world wash over you and the exhilaration that comes with letting go of our need for control.
Hey Moon – John Maus
I listened to a lot of John Maus when I was working on this book. His music makes me feel like I’m driving at night through LA. I don’t have the sonic vocabulary to explain why it gives me that sensation, but it does! (While the majority of the book takes place in New York City or in the Coachella Valley, Los Angeles still felt like the novel’s home city.) But “Hey Moon” also feels, on a more literal level, like such a lovely song about loneliness and looking for companionship among the celestial bodies. So much of this book is about asking whether or not we are alone, in the universe or in our lives. I think this song offers a beautiful, ambiguous answer — maybe there’s no one out there but the moon but that doesn’t mean we need to feel lonely.
Series of Dreams – Bob Dylan
I first heard this song in the trailer for Bombay Beach, a beautiful film about a community living on the Salton Sea in the Sonoran Desert. Because of how I first encountered it, I always associated “Series of Dreams” with the desert and the Southern California desert in particular, where some of the most pivotal sections of Voyagers take place. The extremity of that landscape makes any bit of human civilization feel so alien and dreamlike, which is maybe why this song evokes the desert so well, its sweeping instrumentation under non-sequitor lyrics that feel like snippets of real dreams.
When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky – Lucius
Another Dylan, but a cover! I tried to restrain myself from doing too many on the nose musical cues — which is to say: “songs with space-related keywords in the title” — but I couldn’t resist this one. My husband sent me this version when I was feeling very stuck with the novel and then the writing completely unlocked for me after listening to this song. Something about the way it builds from that mischievous opening guitar to this plaintive, huge final chorus echoed the structure of the story, as did the lyrics: “it won’t matter who loves who / you’ll love me or I’ll love you” felt like a perfect summation of Alex and Ana’s complicated but unbreakable bond. And I liked to imagine that opening line — “look out across the fields / see me returning” — playing over a dark screen at the end of a film version of Voyagers.
After the Gold Rush – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris
I love this version of a Neil Young classic. Saddest song ever written about interplanetary colonization! But really, it’s about the destruction of our own little spaceship Earth, “the only home we’ve ever known” as Carl Sagan put it. Any conversation about aliens is inextricably linked with reconsidering our relationship to our own planet. In films, the invading extraterrestrials usually serve to unite humanity, petty differences cast aside in the name of species-wide unity against a common outside threat. It’s a goofy trope, but there’s something quite profound about it.
I Think UR a Contra – Vampire Weekend
Alex grows up in a very preppy Manhattan milieu, with all of its attendant seductions and snobbery and small cruelties, and who better to evoke that than Vampire Weekend? But I also picked this particular track because it speaks to that awful rug-pull of betrayal when someone you believed you were close with reveals themselves as a stranger. Alex and Ana’s central conflict — over the nature of the truth and of their own moral superiority — could be summed up with the song’s chorus: “ “I think ur a contra / I think that you’ve lied / don’t call me a contra / ‘til you’ve tried.”
It’s All Coming Back to Me Now – Céline Dion
This is the only track in this playlist that is actually featured in the book—Someone plays it on the piano at a pivotal party Alex and Ana attend in the hills of Silverlake as teenagers — in a moment meant to show the nimbleness of Ana’s charisma and Alex’s awe at its power. I love the insane scope of this song — personally, I have a soft spot for both Céline and power ballads — and its instant shot of late 90s nostalgia. Hopefully Voyagers plunges readers back in that era, too.
I Know the End – Phoebe Bridgers
When I was writing this book, I told a friend that I wanted it to feel like listening to Punisher. If I accomplished even a drop of that for someone, I will have done my job. This song in particular mirrors the arc of the book, both lyrically and structurally. But that’s all I’ll say — No spoilers!
Meg Charlton lives in New York City. Voyagers is her first novel.