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.
Nick Francis’s graphic novel The Tumor in the Clay is a stunning debut.
Shinichi Sakamoto wrote of the book:
“The Tumor in the Clay is an astonishingly immersive experience. My heartbeat quickened, my palms grew damp, and I could not stop turning the pages. I forgot every distraction of the real world and found myself completely drawn into the story.”
In his own words, here is Nick Francis’s Book Notes music playlist for his graphic novel The Tumor in the Clay:
A selection of songs from the writing and drawing process behind this comic.
Contributions by Nick Francis and Yoh Philips.
The Tumor in The Clay was drawn over several years of Covid Isolation, spent sketching panel after panel of surgical utensils, flowers blowing in the wind, buzzing cicada wings, with the pages of the book illuminating the late nights with a cool blue light, all while line after line was soundtracked to endless endless music. This playlist, made in collaboration with Yoh Phillips, captures many of the pockets I found myself in for long periods of time, and hopefully speaks to the mental and emotional state I was in while writing The Tumor in The Clay. I hope you enjoy it.
Mémoire De Forme – Pierre Rousseau
After several months of lockdown, my friend Yoh and I itched for something new to experience – something to share and discuss, from locked in our own doorways three thousand miles away. We gave ourselves challenges to listen to music in very specific parameters for set periods of time. Only Non English Music for 90 Days, Only Music Recorded before 1960 for 60 Days, No Relistening to Music for 30 Days, that sort of thing. The Non English Music challenge was the most fun, we both had grown up with a bit of music influence from across the world, but fairly limited in scope and often without focus. I found myself listening to a lot of French music in particular, electronic and pop records. Synths. Pierre Rousseau felt like a great opener to set the tone of this playlist, capturing the strange etherealness I hope my pen achieved with The Tumor in The Clay.
Walk Thru Water Ft St. Panther – Overmono
Overmono is a quintessential Yoh pick, and very indicative of the sonic landscape that covered the ground when the very first inklings of The Tumor in The Clay began. And what a dog.
Break – Fugazi
Everything Built. Everything Gone. So much of The Tumor in The Clay is built on the grief of loss – and what the fuck do you do when you have lost the tools to repair, when you have lost the ability to imagine(!) how to repair, a new life. There are endless Fugazi records to throw on my playlists to speak to my emotional state when writing or drawing, Break cuts to the point pretty damn fast. Their combination of drums and fast chords clicks something beautiful in the back of my skull, the place hollowed out by years of chronic pain that is now just for good migraine music.
Touch – Daft Punk and Paul Williams
“I need something more, in my mind…” …”I remember touch”… There is a scene of Paul Williams sitting at a counter in a vintage diner, eating I believe soup, or clam chowder, with oyster crackers. Eating very slowly, occasionally glancing around the diner, waiting for someone. I had that scene looped in my QuickTime media player with this song replacing the original audio. I would just leave it on and draw on very dark nights, the rest of the screen illuminating my studio in a deep blue color. I love this song.
Out of Time – The Weeknd
This song is so shameless. It shouldn’t work at all. And yet it is one of the most infectious, perfect, pop records of the last decade. The whole dawn.fm album is very special to me. What a glorious music video. There were a few months where this album and the FKA Twigz, Caprisongs, felt like twins to me and were all I would listen to. Lots and lots of time drawing in the dark, with the sensation that the morning was just around the corner.
Prepare Yourself – Yoshimasa Terui
Terui’s score here is just brilliant, light and charming with a light touch to the changing of currents – mental, physical. Something is coming, just lingering around the corner, just out of sight. Paneling The Tumor in The Clay was a practice in tension, building, cutting, tiny cut-cut-cut, relief, large gashing slices of skin and muscle, flowers. I adore how Terui handled the tension in the Hidden Inventory arc. It felt like a bomb dropped on the comic & animation world watching his, Gege & Mappa’s work come to life. What an astounding moment in time those few months were. I felt more inspired to be making comics than I had in a very long time.
Urantia – Deftones
There have been days I’ve looped Urantia, this whole album on repeat. Go for a run. Draw. Weight Lift. Lay out a blanket and crawl into a cold bathtub for the day. All the same. – On a complete tangent, as much as I like the Ohms album cover, in particular on vinyl, I wish this song had been on Gore – just so I can hear this song and look at those beautiful flamingos, that would be perfect. Gore has my favorite cover of all their work.
Piggy – Nine Inch Nails
Every page of The Tumor in The Clay’s surgical sections is pure The Downward Spiral. Song after song, panel after panel. Just perfect.
Gimme Danger – Iggy & The Stooges
Migraine Lyrics – though the beauty of these songs, these old blues songs remade in every genre and form imaginable, is how mutable they are. My migraine, my Crohn’s, your alcoholism, your loneliness, your cancer, your old emotional wound, your whatever it is that makes you the last man or woman with a guitar, a bottle and a gun on the road. Music of the self myth maker, the navel gazer, the oh woe is me, and hopefully – hopefully, the same one who is all those things and still gets up at the end of the day and makes something of it. Or else the song doesn’t exist, then we’re all fucked.
Shhh / Peaceful – Miles Davis
I don’t entirely know how “Shhh / Peaceful” became the singular song to describe The Tumor in The Clay We have memes about the song and the book together for god’s sake! When working on the book the jazz records I listened to the most were Coltrane tunes, My Favorite Things in particular, so I assumed that would become the singular record for The Tumor in The Clay, but no! Shhh / Peaceful reached out with its long slender fingers of green and blue and black and held tight. An incredibly dark and whimsical song. When I was animating the cicadas flying through the tall blue grass, the flower petals blowing in the wind through old columns, it just fit perfectly.
I didn’t spend much time during the writing/drawing process listening to jazz on my runs, but this last weekend I took a nice long run along the Bronx River Pathway playing Shhh / Peaceful and other Miles tunes and it was a gorgeous time.
The Tinker – Maruja
I think Yoh introduced me to Maruja during one of our Pandemic Music challenges. I have an affinity for songs, scores that rest in a natural space. As if you could walk off your mountaintop bivouac across the notes playing in the sky, walk through the trees, the flora, the snow, the creeks and swamps and rivers. Maruj, FM Forest, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bear McCreary, Imee Ooi. Whimsical and glorious. These scores all touch the same place I reached for in the later arc of The Tumor in The Clay. An unknown mysterious, dangerous, beautiful place. Somewhere we may desire to make home, but shouldn’t linger in too long, a place to be visited, learned from, and left. Two people, one person, reaching across the poles from place to place.
Michi wo Sagase – Hako Yamazaki
Oh Hako Yamazaki. I reconnected with her glorious, haunting voice with the release of the 1975 classic Tobimasu in 2022. I must have spent weeks with just Tobimasu on repeat, and slowly began working my way back until stumbling upon Aruite, and Michi Wo Sagase. To Find a New Path. Ugh. A perfect folk song. To sit and draw, to write, to pull every chord, string, vein from your body onto the page, leave it out for a day’s work, paused to start again tomorrow. Sit down with a song, a drink…. To know for just a second before the doubt returns, that your efforts, your labors have been pure.
Don’t Be So Nice – Chuck Senrick
A touchstone for our Surgeon, our protagonist in The Tumor in The Clay. He is so lost, so desperate, so without cause or reason. But he remembers how beautiful life can be, he remembers the touch of a loved one, of achieving something miraculous with the people around you, your friends, your colleagues, your team. He remembers achieving something greater than your former self. And he mourns it, so earnestly. Now at his wits end, our story of The Tumor in The Clay, he sees one last chance to set a path back – and if he fails, so be it, the current life isn’t worth a damn. He has to try…
Not Okay – Sophie
In the back of The Tumor in The Clay there is an interview with my editor where I discuss how much The Tumor in The Clay was driven by grief, the loss of friends, family, and by others in the creative fields around me. SOPHIE was one of those people. I think every artist in my demographic group with even the slightest interest in music was keenly connected to what SOPHIE was creating in the 2010’s. She created an entire underwater current that shifted so much of what we heard, danced to, and imagined that we are still feeling the repercussions of her work – and her loss today.
I don’t intend to spend a lifetime documenting every gravestone we put down, an illustrated essay for each funeral that only gets fifteen minutes because too many people are dying and the world moves too quickly, but we might need to make it an honorable profession.
Hot Pressed – Mahawam
I had the privilege of illustrating the cover of Mahawam’s album: Hot Pressed, and animating the music video for this song. When you animate a music video, you inevitably have to spend months and months listening to the song, thousands of times. I have had my share where I get sick of the song. I fell in love with Hot Pressed more with each listen, and still do now. My favorite kind of lyrics.
(You Can Watch The Video Here: https://youtu.be/bHsdoDqxpUU?si=5GVUu7Hp6o1eGjbs)
Portrait of My Heart – Spellling
I’m crazy about Spellling. Simple as that, my friend Michael Sneed made the introduction and I have been a huge fan since. I like this new record a lot and am very excited to see what direction they continue to push. I was listening to their album, The Turning Wheel, during the drawing process. Very ethereal, strange, catchy tunes.
Unfinished Sympathy – Massive Attack
God what a voice Shara Nelson has. I would put this record and all its mixes on while I drew blade after blade of grass in The Tumor in The Clay. When inking drawings you often find yourself needing to breathe a certain way, in or out, to achieve the correct one from. The weight, curve, feeling can all come out wrong so easily, a song like Unfinished Sympathy is incredibly helpful for moments where you don’t just have one line or one part of a drawing that is difficult to get right – but pages and pages. Unfinished Sympathy becomes meditative, perfect for placing each grain of colored sand in its proper place in the mandala.
Timid, Intimidating – BADBADNOTGOOD
I like a lot of the BADBADNOTGOOD records, they often exist on that border of easy listening, but not just background music. “Study, Working” music might sound dismissive, it might be dismissive. If it is – I am sorry, but I also have to imagine it must feel pretty nice to know that your music helps thousands and thousands of young scholars, artisans, on their path. I like to imagine a lawyer going through their briefs playing these records late at night, in some higher office. Pretty sexy in its own way.
Movement 3 – Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders
Pharoah Sanders has been a regular repeat on my jazz playlists for fifteen plus years at this point. Not enough time. I just love the simple strangeness of what he made in his final years with Floating Points and the London Symphony. Just remarkable. Lovely music.
Hold on, Hold on – Neko Case
Hold on, Hold on feels like a full circle of The Tumor in The Clay to me, embracing her (his) vices, faults, with an aged wisdom that keeps the faith to continue to try. The humor in the dark that has been lived, knowing one will continue to make mistakes – but hopefully better ones. The song is tonally dark, the chords upbeat, a contemporary blues record. I think most good art is still revisiting the same blues chords over and over, because they are so pure, so honest, so true. We each can add our own flavor of Valium.
Riot! – Earl Sweatshirt
Some Rap Songs is a faultline running below the current Himalayas of contemporary rappers. To me, it all comes back to what Thebe was able to create with this incredible moment in time. It is so heartfelt. Yoh and Myself were privileged to work on marketing copy for the release of the album, and while I can still remember working on it up in the studio house at Sea Ranch it stays beyond my comprehension just how impactful this brilliant little album has been. What a great song, what great production. What an incredible world.
Fuck This World – Rina Sawayama
Writing is a horribly depressing process, drawing is a horribly depressing process. If you don’t draw, write, fast enough then before you know it the pages you’re working on are at such a higher quality than the first that you are obligated to go back and begin again. If you cannot let go, the book will never end. This song, and Rina, always made those days where you have to let go a bit easier. Panels and panels of drawings that you desperately want to change, parts of your life you would give anything to rewrite, but have to move on.
(I must have over a few hundred miles on my feet running to this song on loop just during the production of The Tumor in The Clay)
Delia – Blind Willie McTell
For all the talk of Classic Blues Records, how all our best work is still just retelling them over and over it felt important to include one of my personal favorite piedmont blues classics – Delia. The world keeps spinning on the same chords, same progressions, same yearnings, same love, same pain. How beautiful it is that we continue to find new ways to express it.
My Favorite Things – John Coltrane
I have listened to this song more than any other song, throughout my entire life. It plays in the opening pages of The Tumor in The Clay, and in the last. I hope the same is true for myself.
Dreams – Faye Wong
Recorded the year I was born. The principle message of The Tumor in The Clay is to continue to TRY, regardless of the circumstances, an effort must be made, belief must be had, a dream must be acted upon. In the final pages of the book, we see the Surgeon act on this in his own way, changed, and I can’t help but imagine such a purely earnest song playing out his actions. I need to return to Hong Kong with an extra suitcase just for all her CD’s.
Thank you for listening, thank you for reading!
Nick Francis was born in San Francisco in 1994 and now lives in Oakland, California, with his partner & their three cats: Kiki, Noodle & Blue. Working as a disabled illustrator and storyteller for: Fantastic Negrito’s Grammy Award Winning Album “The Last Days of Oakland”, and PBS & ITVS’ animated documentary “BROTHER”, and for The NYU College of Nursing & The Monterey Jazz Festival.