In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Meg Richardson’s coming-of-age novel Paradise Pawn is one of the funniest debuts of the year, a book as compassionate as it is hopeful.
Debutiful wrote of the book:
“A fun-as-hell coming-of-age romp. Theft, pawn shops, Florida. What more can you want from a novel that packs so much heart into every laugh? Fans of Kristen Arnett will devour this one.”
In her own words, here is Meg Richardson’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Paradise Pawn:
Paradise Pawn is my debut novel. It’s about two best friends who work at a pawn shop in Florida, based on my own experiences working at a pawn shop. Music played a huge role in my writing process for this book.
Jackie and Kayla, the book’s two protagonists, are on the brink of starting high school, on the brink of their friendship changing, and on the brink of realizing that a plan they have been pouring their hearts into may not work out the way they hoped.
On some days, Jackie and Kayla are aware that everything is changing, and it’s painful for them. They’re overwhelmed by nostalgia and worry. On other days, they love the power they are gaining as they grow up, and they want change to happen faster.
I think that teenagers (and people of all ages) go through life balancing these two feelings—feeling nostalgic and sad about change on some days and feeling excited for change on other days.
Music was my diving board into pools of these two feelings as I wrote Paradise Pawn. Like Jackie and Kayla, I often get overwhelmed by nostalgia. I even feel preemptively nostalgic for nice moments long before they end. But other times, I am filled with a teenage-style belief that everything is going to work out—all my dreams, and the dreams of the people I love, are going to come true, if we are brave enough to let ourselves change.
While I was writing Paradise Pawn, I made a playlist of songs that make me feel emotional about change for various reasons. I would blast this playlist as I walked to whatever coffee shop or library of friend’s apartment I was writing in. The songs fall into two categories—songs that make me feel like change is sad, which I’m calling “Nostalgia Songs” and songs that make me feel like change is exciting, which I’m calling “Pump-Up Songs.” I usually hit “shuffle” on my playlist, to give myself an injection of both of these feelings about change, but here I have separated them out for you. I hope you enjoy these songs as much as I enjoyed writing about them for you!
Nostalgia Songs
Love in this Club by Usher
This song came out when I was fourteen, just like the girls in Paradise Pawn. I remember it playing at the homecoming dance when I was a freshman in high school in Iowa. I thought it was incredibly romantic. I had only the vaguest idea of what a club was, or what making love was. I don’t think I even knew that “making love” meant sex. I just thought it was a poetic phrase that Usher had coined meaning “to create love” or “to get to know each other”. I remember standing in the dark cafeteria in a clump of my friends. We were a month into high school and terrified, watching other people grind, and wondering if anyone would ever want to do that with us. I was deeply moved by “Love in this Club” when it played. I loved the idea of feeling so drawn to someone else that you had to get to know them, even in a busy, crowded place. When I listen to this song now, I feel so much tenderness for me and my friends at fourteen. I wish I could reach back in time and help them through all the grinding and clubs and love that they would one day experience. I hope that people reading Paradise Pawn will get to feel a similar tenderness for their teenage selves.
Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell
This is my dad’s favorite song. It has always reminded me of him and how much I love him. When I started writing the character of Devon, Jackie’s dad, I didn’t intend to make him similar to my real dad. However, now that people are reading the book and talking about how much they love Devon, it’s clear to me that a lot of his character came from my real dad. Both Devon and my dad are incredibly hardworking, almost to a fault, but not quite. They are both remarkably good at helping their daughters through heartbreak and other confusion, in spite of the stoic, hard-nosed front they often put up for the rest of the world. “Wichita Lineman” is about a lineman at work missing a person he loves and wishing for a break, but knowing there is work to be done. There’s a soaring violin part, which sounds like love, and a plodding guitar part, which sounds like work. Devon, the dad in Paradise Pawn has often had to set aside his emotions because there is work to be done. The work he does supports the people he loves, so every time he polishes a chain or mops a floor at the pawn shop, it’s an act of love. To me, “Wichita Lineman” is an ode to hardworking people, and the ways people show love through work. I want Paradise Pawn to be an ode to hardworking people too, especially an ode to my parents.
Big Deal by Lucy Dacus
I’ve gone to over 20 weddings of my dear friends during the course of writing Paradise Pawn. If I was ever writing and felt the need for an injection of emotion about the passage of time and its impact on friendships, all I had to do was wait for the next wedding, and I would be flooded with feelings. In “Big Deal,” Lucy Dacus captures this feeling so brilliantly with the lines, “You’ve got your girl, you’re gonna marry her/And I’ll be watching in a pinstriped suit/ Not even wishing it was me and you/so what changes, if anything?”. When I feel sad about the passage of time and my friendships changing, I sometimes ask myself, “You wouldn’t want everything to stay the same forever, would you?” and “You wouldn’t want to marry every one of your friends, would you?” and “What do you actually want?” Jackie, the narrator in Paradise Pawn is asking herself these same questions. Maybe both Jackie and I just want our friends to know—“You’re a big deal.”
Umbria by Family Consumer Science
This is a song from Will Barker’s first album, London Songs. Will Barker happens to be my younger brother, and one of my best friends and favorite artists in the world. When I was writing about the sibling-like love between Jackie and Kayla, I always thought about Will. I also thought about Will when writing about the pain of being separated from siblings, or people who feel like siblings. Will wrote this song about a trip to Spain with his high school Spanish class, and a conversation he had with his host mom there. When he went on the trip, I was in college. I remember thinking t it was inconceivable that he was having experiences in another country in places I would probably never see with people I would probably never meet. He was on his own and so was I. There were a few years when we didn’t know how to deal with this gulf. How do you go from sharing a bathroom with someone for fifteen years to needing to explain your life to them on the phone? When Jackie starts to have experiences that are different from Kayla’s, it feels inconceivable to her too. Will and I have found ways to become even closer than we were as kids. One of those ways is by sharing art we make about our lives. Though I wasn’t with Will on the trip to Spain, I can listen to the song and understand some of what he was feeling. I love the close harmonies in the song, that remind me of “A Ceremony of Carols,” which he and I sang with the children’s choir we were in every Christmas. I love that the voice singing and the fingers playing guitar belong to my brother. I would like to think that in Jackie and Kayla’s universe they will find ways to stay connected as they grow up too.
Glitter by Eliza McLamb
I dream that Paradise Pawn will give readers the feeling that this song, and its beautiful music video, have given me. If there is ever a movie of Paradise Pawn, I would love for this song to be in it. This song captures the exact feeling of being a teenager and not wanting your friend to abandon you or abandon herself for boyfriends and the grownup world. The chorus of the song goes, “I wanna kill your boyfriend/ He could never know you/he wants to crush you in his hands/ and every time/ That you say he loves me/ I say that’s not what love means.” The narrator of the song has a combination of naivete and certainty. Jackie has a similar naivete and certainty as she narrates Paradise Pawn. I appreciate that the song takes this certainty very seriously, the way I have taken Jackie’s certainty seriously in Paradise Pawn. I think many of teenagers’ convictions about the world are right, and they deserve to be taken seriously in real life and in media.
Pump-Up Songs
Hello by Kes
This song will always remind me of my job at the pawn shop. I had a coworker at the shop from Barbados who loved this song, and because of her, I loved it too. We would play it in the mornings before the store opened as we were taking jewelry out of the safe and setting it up in the cases. The chorus, “Hello, hello, hello, hello” made us laugh, because we said that was what we sounded like saying “hello” to customers over and over.
Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran
This song also reminds me of working at the pawn shop. It would play on the radio constantly, often accompanying the sound of chainsaws and the jewelry cleaner. But it was special for another reason. One of my coworkers at the shop was from the Philippines. Whenever a guitar would come into the shop, he would fix it up and tune it. When the store was empty, he would play this song for us and we would sing along. His son and his wife lived in the Philippines and he hadn’t seen them in years. Once he played “Thinking Out Loud” for them over FaceTime. I got a little teary watching him sing this ubiquitous, but none the less beautiful love song to his loved ones who were so far away. But when the song was over, he wasn’t sad and neither were his wife and son. They missed each other, but this was their life every day, and they were making it work. I thought about this moment often when writing about characters in Paradise Pawn. I did my best to think hard about how my characters would feel about what was happening to them. I tried not to overlay my own emotions onto their lives.
Little Red Corvette by Prince
My mom loves this song, and she used to sing the beginning of it when I was a kid as we merged onto the highway in her Toyota Camry. (When I told her I was writing about her and this song she said, “But it’s so racy! You could pick ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’”). But, I will always associate this song with her, so Mommy, thank you for giving me the okay not to use “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Somewhat like with “Love in This Club,” I didn’t know that “Little Red Corvette” was about sex when I was a kid. I loved the lines, “Baby you’re much too fast,” and “Honey you’ve got to slow down.” I felt like it was a song about being told to be less intense, but going fast and being intense anyway. My mom is incredibly hard-charging and hard-working. She has so much belief in herself and in me. She and I both talk fast and make things happen fast. When I would stay up late as a kid, making labor-intensive valentines, or making puppets for a history project that didn’t require puppets, she would say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” to me, and I was so proud. What she meant by this was that that I was similar to her, and she understood why I had to be so intense. The girls in Paradise Pawn are told implicitly and explicitly not to want to much, not to be too intense, and to slow down. They don’t have someone like my mom to encourage them to keep their feet on the gas pedal, but I am certainly glad that I did. If I hadn’t had my mom, I know Paradise Pawn would not exist.
Diet Pepsi by Addison Rae
To me, this song embodies the joy of summer, the joy of feeling desired and beautiful, and the joy of being connected to someone. This song came out shortly before I sold Paradise Pawn, when I had been working on it for eight years. A lot of the joy and excitement I had felt about the world of Paradise Pawn had faded at this point. After years of rejections, I was starting to think that publishing a book wasn’t in the cards for me. But, part of me still had hope, and still wanted to work on the book. To help fuel that hope, I would blast this song in my car and try to imagine what it would be like to publish the book. And now I’m finding out!
These Are Days by 10,000 Maniacs
I have loved this song since the moment I heard it in the opening montage of Cheaper by the Dozen when I was a kid. In the montage, Steve Martin is jogging through farm fields alone, and then he comes home to his twelve chaotic children.To me, this is a song about recognizing that the moment you are living in is a good one, and the connections you have to the people you love are precious. It’s about knowing that your world is changing, but also knowing that you’re not going to forget how special your world felt before it changed. If the words, “Never before and never since/I promise/ Will the whole world be warm as this” where in a different kind of song, they would make me cry. But in this anthemic, joyful song, it doesn’t feel like a bad thing to feel that the world is the warmest it will ever be. It feels like something to celebrate. I’ve been listening to this song a lot as I work on planning my book tour and getting the word out about preordering my book. This book was partially written out of anxiety about losing friends as our lives changed, but, ironically, publicizing the book has helped me reconnect with so many old friends. I am already preemptively nostalgic about this special time in my life, but this song is helping me remember “to be part of the miracles you see in every hour,” and to keep appreciating the people I love and the music I love while I can.
Meg Richardson is the author of the debut novel Paradise Pawn (Tin House/Zando).