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.
Emmalea Russo’s novel The Moon Papers is one of the year’s most thought-provoking novels.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“A surprising science fiction novel . . . beguiling.”
In her own words, here is Emmalea Russo’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Moon Papers:
The Moon Papers is a summer novel. It opens in June and closes in late August. As the hot and delirious days pass, we move closer and closer to the launch of a mysterious new luminary into Earth’s atmosphere: Moon2. A kind of momentum builds. Things fall apart. Minds melt. The book moves between the east and west coasts, digital mischief, online forums, conspiracy theories, bat infestations, surveillance mechanisms, varieties of art- and love- making, and neon green trance-inducing driving scenes. Included in this playlist are songs I was listening to while drafting The Moon Papers, as well as some lunar summer tunes the book evokes….
Spinning Away by Brian Eno and John Cale
This song feels space-age-retro, like The Moon Papers. Nauseating and exciting, it’s about drawing the stars—spinning away and getting lost in the image, constellations. At the heart of the novel is Vesta Furio: a painter. She infiltrates a mysterious retro-futurist arts collective in the Mojave Desert, painting what she sees as she spins away.
Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
In the book, you won’t find much of the sort of domestic bliss that this song evokes, but you will find plenty of houses and moments of other sorts of bliss. And a few cats in the yard.
Losing You by Solange
Sad but you can’t help but dance. There’s a particularly complicated marriage at the center of the book—filled with loss, distance, and strangely unshakeable closeness.
Cruel Summer by Ace of Base
A particularly cruel, cruel, cruel summer.
Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil
Sirens are dangerous figures, lady beasts who lure men to their deaths with beautiful voices. There’s a haunting-erotic scene in David Lynch’s incendiary Lost Highway that utilizes this song to great effect. There is a bit of this song in Vesta, I suspect.
Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey
No one makes summertime sadness groovier than Lana. As you will see, The Moon Papers is a book of heatwave sorrows and disappearances and these lyrics could be its tagline: “kiss me hard before you go / summertime sadness.”
Man on the Moon by R.E.M.
I was thinking and reading a lot about the moon landing and the atmosphere of the late 60s while writing the novel, and this song seems to capture it all. If you believe…they put a man on the moon, man on the moon….(spoiler: Lars, from The Moon Papers, does not…)
Wave of Mutilation by The Pixies
I heard The Pixies play while I was working on the book, and this short song is pure magic—oceanic, bizarre, happy, very dark, lunar. In my memory, this song reinvigorated me and provided the burst of editing energy I needed to push the book towards completion.
Broken Road by Kanye West
I remember listening to this song over and over again while revising the book. Finding and losing home, searching for some impossible Source.
Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill
Another one of those songs I listened to on repeat while writing the book. Its vibe must be built into the pages—present, somehow, in Lars’s mystical bus rides into NYC.
The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen
FATE!!!! dreamy, violent, and raucous. This could be the only song on the playlist.
Shape of My Heart by Backstreet Boys
This song came on while I was in an antique store down the shore having a revelation about the antiques that Velour Bellmer, one of the main characters in the book, collects. A catchy and vulnerable little song that I loved as a teen and kinda still do: “Now let me show you the shape of my heart…” Its boyband energy is likely baked into the weird yet innocent relationship between Velour and the youthful and dreamy bat expert, Radko.
Feel Flows by The Beach Boys
Maybe the trippiest song of all time:
“Unbending, never-ending tablets of time
Record all the yearning
Unfearing, all-appearing message divine
Eases the burning”
People record each other in The Moon Papers. I was thinking about surveillance and mystical vision. What is the difference? What kinds of relation do we miss out on when we’re recording ourselves and each other all the time? This song captures another way of registering the moment—tablets of time recording the yearning hours as they dissolve to reveal some divine, untranslatable message.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Emmalea Russo’s music playlist for her novel Vivienne
Emmalea Russo is the author of Vivienne, Confetti, Wave Archive, and G. She lives in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.