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.
Sam Farhi’s novel The Sapsuckers is an impressive debut, a book as inventive as it is moving and intense.
Laura Sims wrote of the book:
“Intense, raw, and haunting, The Sapsuckers takes on a young man’s obsessive search for the truth about his brother’s mysterious death. We travel down dark corridors and into the unexpected depths of a family’s history in this gripping and beautifully written debut novel.”
In his own words, here is Sam Farhi’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Sapsuckers:
Gym Class Heroes – “Za Intro”/ “Papercuts”
My man, Travie. First off, Upstate New York people rock together and you’re going to get that vibe throughout this playlist. We all came from those same woods where no one could see us.
These two songs – this is how hip hop Upstate really sounded. You might’ve known a band and were rapping super lyrical and spoken wordish and you put those two together.
You found each other… which also doesn’t sound right. In a small town, no one’s that hard to find. You were stuck with each other, but you didn’t know that. You jammed for hours, the band would do its improvvy stoner rock and say they hated the Grateful Dead, and you would freestyle. And sometimes, the band is grooving so hard you’re not even saying words and it doesn’t matter. You rhyme the same thing a few times. Then, in that din, your rap becomes personal, and deep, and meant for one person. Voila, literature is born. The only person you want to hear this song is the person you’re rapping about. You wish they were standing right in front of you in that basement or garage.
Travie did something very different in his music; he brought his humor, his personal shortcomings, all of that into the fold (and his flow is so unique). There’s another song on the album where Travie goes, “Thank god for Walkmans” – yeah, that’s the alienated Upstate youth.
Side note: We battled each other on the phone once and he smoked my boots; this guy can rap (I thought I could). We have a texting relationship now as he reads The Sapsuckers where he hits me with “BARS EVERYWHERE.” Stuff like that means so much to me. So yeah, tracks one and two.
El-P – “Stepfather Factory”
The album Fantastic Damage, for me, was frightening when it came out. There really was NOTHING like it. At the time that was still possible. From track one, this was some very scary unknown shit. The song is basically about an evil corporation providing the fatherless folks of the world with robot stepfathers. Pure capitalism, seeing a need in the vulnerable and filling it for profit and control (“Yeah, man!”).
In The Sapsuckers, Peg brings Oscar around the kids. He looks good on paper, he is fulfilling a need and then infects the family. So similar vibes.
Portishead – “Numb”
There’s the music critic version of this song where hey, it is trip hoppy and they made their drums like an SP or MPC and wow look at that… That’s cool.
But I think if you hear this song, and you’re a certain age, this is the make out joint. This is the hip-rocker. It just has that slow sexy vibe. I imagine this would be Rem’s fantasy, he puts this in his headphones and thinks about his crush.
X Ambassadors – “Follow the Sound of My Voice”
Sam Harris is ONE OF my best friends (Danny, did you see the modifier?). We made a little rap group together in high school and I taught him what a bar was (that’s true, don’t deny that).
Years later we wrote a movie together about starting a band in Ithaca and he came up with this beautiful title. When he brought the song in and played it for me, I wept. It’s about guiding his blind brother, Casey, through one of those dark crowded venues they’re always playing, and saying repeatedly, “Follow the sound of my voice.” Brothers. Can’t not put it here.
Maïa Vidal – “Poison”
Maïa Vidal taught me how to be an artist. We were in her basement Upstate, way back in the day, and she busts out her laptop and pulls up GarageBand. And hey, I’m from the world (as I saw myself) of MPCs and Fruity Loops (version 1) and you can’t sample certain things and no way would you use stock sounds.
But she was just having fun. She typed notes on the laptop keyboard, even a little drumbeat, all using instruments in GarageBand and made it sound completely unique. She’d delete parts with abandon, play them again with the same amount of ease. We wrote a song about robots in love and put that funny effect on our voices.
She taught me that being an artist can be (and perhaps should be) playing in a sandbox.
Of course, she also had her accordion, who didn’t? (joke). She made this Rancid cover with permission, I believe, which was already so cool and out of the ordinary. I mean rock stars and anybody even remotely ‘famous’ were so far away from all of us. (Side note: She was in a band called Kieven Rus with Sylvie and Taylor Quan (super shout-out to Taylor who’s so funny on IG and in life)). But I would listen to this song a million times a day. And if you know The Sapsuckers, you know Oscar, you know some people are poison.
Eels – Your Lucky Day in Hell
There’s a part in The Sapsuckers where this plays on the radio. We used to call into WICB, the Ithaca College station, and request stuff like this. I mean this was also on the Scream 2 soundtrack with “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave, which is a good pairing, high rec. I still remember the ICB request line. Watch this: 274 321 (censoring last digit).
Perfect Pussy – “Driver”
I didn’t discover this until recently when I did the Offal Salon with Meredith Graves (the singer here) at Public Records in Brooklyn. I overheard her espousing the charms of Kingston, NY and I just had to add, “They have a great bookstore” (Rough Draft, shout out to you). We figured out we were both from Upstate pretty early. Needless to say, she slayed. She was heartfelt and a natural performer.
This song sounds like a really really really good version of the scene I remember. When I was in high school there were so many of these shows at internet cafes, teen centers, art galleries, rec rooms, basements and any empty space. Sometimes bars and restaurants, but that was really for old people. These were young spaces where we made our own fliers, charged five bucks, screamed and made our lives.
Nina Simone – “Sinnerman”
There’s so much said about this song that there’s not so much to say. I want to put it here for the feeling of being small, for running away, but there’s a comeuppance here that does not happen in The Sapsuckers. So don’t think too hard about this one, just feel it.
London Symphony Orchestra – “The Planets, Op. 32: VII. Neptune, the Mystic”
Writer/poet/rapper Malik Crumpler put me on to this song. We were roommates while I was working on this book and we’d put this song on repeat for hours and hours. It just became background ambience after a while and would cleanse the room for us. Later, when I write with other people on projects, I put this on because it helps the flow. If I just need to calm down, or go to sleep, it works for that as well.
In The Sapsuckers, there’s a chapter called “Downtown” where Pete and Audrey’s journey is marked by the points in the Sagan Planet Walk in Ithaca, New York (they basically built monuments to each planet and then spread them out all over Ithaca in the same ratio of distance from each other as our solar system). So hey, you could read it like that too.
Also, it’s good to end here as a palate cleanser, right?
Sam Farhi is a novelist and screenwriter, originally from Ithaca, New York and now based in Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Opiate, PACKET Biweekly, ThoseThatThis, Vogue Italia Online, HBO’s New York Latino Film Festival, Yale’s Paprika! and The Wall. His zines have been sold at OHWOW Bookclub and aNYthing in downtown Manhattan. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University. He is currently working on his next novel.