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.
Devyn Defoe’s novel Burnside is a brilliant surreal and satirical debut.
The Chicago Review of Books wrote of the book:
“This Lynchian nightmare is stitched tightly with the horrors of American life and the numbness it has left us with. Strange, surreal, and inescapably intriguing, reading Burnside brings the ideal level of acidity and satire.”
In her own words, here is Devyn Defoe’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Burnside:
Burnside is a story of suspicion, paranoia, and toxic friendship during a prickly summer of fires and death in the California central valley. My playlists shift a lot through the duration of a project. Some songs were indispensable at the start, when I had only the seed of an idea; I’d listen to them on repeat walking around the Sacramento grid to sink into the right mood for a productive insomnia. Others latched on later, more firmly grounded in scene and environment. I place more importance on instrumentals and the holistic sound than lyrics, though I will go on to contradict myself by pulling out the meatier lines from the following songs as if dissecting evidence to prove a thesis; in truth their real importance is still mostly unconscious and irritatingly indescribable, a confrontation with my own deficiency to pin down with certainty a motivating force beyond reaction to a slippery category of weather. I’ve sketched outlines to the best of my awareness.
“Desire Lines” Deerhunter
I found myself returning to the sound of late aughts indie albums and those strange open chords that always feel sort of baffled, mellow and brooding, something the girls would listen to while sulking around the valley in triple digit July on the cusp of boiling alive or falling asleep. The “When you were young” refrain is a taunt; the present is a nightmare and the future will be worse. I love the stairs at the end, like an accusation with a question mark.
“Apocalypse” Cigarettes After Sex
Resigned to the collapse, but sweet; I love the lyrics, the imagery, hiding lovers (kisses?) in “hollowed out pianos,” the flooding river, an innocent and in all likelihood nonexistent love. This song makes me think of the girls in their childhood, a romanticized vision of their lives to come that can’t exclude the end of the world because it’s too realistic.
“The Suburbs” Arcade Fire
“Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling/In my dreams we’re still screaming” was an earworm throughout. I liked the image of a bored town in a civil war, this mercurial blend of grief and dread. And the chords feel like practical jokes, or slipping on a banana peel.
“Happiness is a Butterfly” Lana del Rey
“If he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” Norman Fucking Rockwell! was the only CD I had in my car at the time I wrote the bulk of the initial draft and I had this album on repeat. I think this is what the narrator is thinking in certain parts of the book.
“The Adults Are Talking” The Strokes
I can only listen to The Strokes in the summer—they scratch a very specific seasonal itch. There’s a real misery in “Same shit, a different life/I’ll get it right sometime/Well maybe not tonight,” the agony of just fucking up over and over again, which I find relatable, and inflicted on many of the characters; if they were real I would apologize.
“Butterfly” Crazy Town
I’m not exactly sure why this song was so important in the early drafting stages, but it was. Maybe a breastaurant connection somewhere in there. I once rang in the new year listening to the beat drop on this on the roof of the Warehouse Artist Lofts and instantly the world plunged into coronavirus; for me it’s forever tinged with disaster.
“I Want You To Love Me” Fiona Apple
“I move with the trees in the breeze/I know that time is elastic” The local environment is so important to the book, and before it was rebranded the “farm to fork capital” Sacramento was the City of Trees; the lyrics speak to the narrator’s enmeshment with her surroundings, the particulars of her visual perspective, as well as her deep desire for connection. A song she would listen to medicinally, ideally to gain a more assured sense of self.
“Suga Suga” Baby Bash
Dirty, disruptively corny, garishly earnest—it’s a breastaurant song. This is on here primarily because I was listening to it a lot for a while.
“Siegfried” Frank Ocean
A song that had thematic and rhythmic importance to certain sections of the text. “Dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought” is marvelous, somehow associated with pregnancy in a short-circuiting part of my brain beyond Frank Ocean’s intentions, probably.
“Road to Joy” Bright Eyes
Conor Oberst wrote many of the great protest songs of the early 2000s; he may be the best lyricist of all time. I could throw a rock at this song and any line hit would strike a chord in Burnside (which is no surprise—Bright Eyes was the soundtrack to my impressionable college years) but if I had to pick one: “So I hope I don’t sound too ungrateful/what history gave modern man/A telephone to talk to strangers/Machine guns and a camera lens.”
“Hahaha” Death Grips
“I think I’m crazy, dog”—the narrator the entire time! As well as the psychic, who’s definitely fainted at the bins.
Devyn Defoe is a writer and bookseller from Sacramento, CA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her work has been published by Socrates on the Beach and The White Review. Burnside is her first novel.