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.
Nikki Ervice’s novel Roadshow is empathetic and bold and one of the year’s best debuts.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Evocative . . . rich . . . Full of verisimilitude, financial precarity, and wildfire, this debut takes a long road toward unexpected kindness.”
In her own words, here is Nikki Ervice’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Roadshow:
As a dancer, music has always been incredibly affecting to me, almost to an obsessive degree. I started my dance “career” bopping around to Bonnie Raitt in the living room, possessed. A neighbor told my parents, hey, maybe you should put that kid in dance classes, and once technique was introduced, I found it impossible to quit.
My debut novel, Roadshow, deals a lot with that passion and drive. The protagonist, Annie, is a highly trained but burned-out dancer who tends bar and performs burlesque in New York City circa 2015. She sets out on a journey in a borrowed Buick LeSabre back to Alaska, where she was born and raised, after receiving an imploring letter from her estranged and dying mother. Annie tries to dance in clubs along the way to make money, to somewhat disastrous results. I had a lot of questions and doubts in mind while I was writing this book. A lot of inquiry about passion and inheritance, and what it means to be consumed by forms of art and hospitality that are bastardized, industrialized by our cultural and economic preoccupations.
In college, where I studied dance, professors would problematize the relationship between music and movement. How do we separate the two, not give into the desire to let music be the engine for our work? It was a question that felt almost borne of jealousy of a perceived-superior artform. In dance, I’ve always failed at the task of musical divorce. I am a flunky for music. But while I was writing Roadshow, I often needed an annoying and near-ascetic form of silence. I found music too powerful to write beneath. It took over. That’s part of why it was so fun to retrofit the waypoints of Annie’s Roadshow journey with music. Some of them are the songs I imagine were literally playing at the time, some she dances to. Some simply capture the right vibe of a scene. I wanted the music to have been around, available, in the summer of 2015. I hope you enjoy.
- Club X: Nightcall, Kavinsky (A total 2010s banger. It’s a sexy, dangerous-sounding song. Clubby but searching. I debated whether I should include this since it’s so obvious and also completely adhered to the opening of the cult classic film Drive, but Kavinsky just passed away, plus this was my prototype for the imaginary score that Annie dances to at Club X as her burlesque act, Dog-Faced Girl, so…)
- The Restaurant: Eyes Without A Face, Billy Idol (This was my absolute favorite song to play when I was on aux bartending in NYC. It’s the right vibe for the restaurant where she works in the city.)
- Ohio/The Motel: Uncle ACE, Blood Orange (This song is pleading but also propulsive and a little bit treacherous-sounding. Dev Hynes wrote this song about young people sheltering on the ACE trains as a form of unstable protection, and this section is all about the frangibility of youth and youthful dreams. Annie is at once protective of and a hazard to a teenaged boy she meets at the motel in Ohio)
- The Midwest/The Plains: Can’t Do Without You, Caribou (I mean, is there a better driving song? It’s lush and expansive. She’s driving through rolling fields. It’s very of the time in which the novel is set. It’s also repetitive, and this book deals with repetition a lot: what it means to repeat an act again and again, to be a perpetual motion machine)
- Border Crossing/Agent Sam: Missionary Man, The Eurythmics (I adore Annie Lennox. And what’s more authoritarian and campy than this song. It goes so hard but it’s very tongue-in-cheek. It’s ridiculous but harrowing, like Agent Sam, who gives her a a little bit of a hard time at the border crossing into Canada. It’s all about being imbued, ordained, with arbitrary power just because you signed up for it.)
- Edmonton Club: ZZ Top, Legs (This is the song that Annie chooses to dance to along the road. It’s a silly but endearing song! I think it’s funny to imagine her dancing with a dog mask on to a song with the line “she never begs.”)
- Edmonton Club, part II: Erotic City-Let’s Go Crazy 7” B-Side, Prince. (This is what I imagine is playing at the club in Edmonton after she dances. I just say it’s a Prince song in the book, but it’s definitely this song. One time I came home to my apartment building at 3AM, a little drunk after a long shift, and there was nobody on the street or in the lobby. This song was pumping from a hidden source, so loud, as if it was coming from everywhere, the air itself. It was incredible: uncanny and sinister, and that’s exactly how I imagine the atmosphere at that club. But you’ve gotta really turn the bass up)
- Alberta: Knee 5 from Einstein on the Beach, The Philip Glass Ensemble (At this point she’s driving through thick, choking wildfire smoke, stealing gas. Things are not going well. As a contemporary dancer I have a little bit of a Philip Glass crush. It can’t be helped. This song feels completely right to me: incantation-like, lonely and yearning, a divine transmission. The repetition of “these are the days, my friend” as a direct address to the listener makes me cry for reasons I can’t quite understand. But you have to listen to the exact right recording because some of them suck.)
- Bachelor Party: Porno, Arcade Fire (There’s some literalism here but this song is completely right for this scene. She’s dancing alone in a remote lodge full of drunk men. What could possibly go wrong? It’s creepy, it’s a little tremulous, a little stupid and pleading, but with that backbone beat. It’s one of those songs that feels very human, gross and obtuse in certain respects, but with an ethereal quality, as if it’s probing a veil between worlds)
- Liard Hot Springs: Doses & Mimosas, Cherub (She’s throwing up in front of tourists. She has survived a harrowing ordeal. I imagine she’s slightly euphoric before the comedown.This song is 2010s insouciance, but is also kind of melancholic and combative. She’s feeling churlish, tired of being watched.)
- Destruction Bay/Tok: Knockin On Heaven’s Door, Bob Dylan (At this point she’s growing weary. She’d like to be carried by someone else. Destruction Bay is also incredibly beautiful. It affects me deeply every time I drive through, and this song is, in my opinion and simply put, one of the most beautiful songs of all time. There’s something so alluring about the idea of complete surrender, probably because it’s antithetical to who I am. Could I have chosen a deeper Dylan cut? Sure. But this is the right one)
- Anchorage: This is How We Walk on the Moon, Arthur Rusell (This song sounds like a very dignified toddler learning to walk. Annie wants to please her mother. She wants to relearn where she’s from, which has inevitably changed)
- Kenai Peninsula/The Art Shack: Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand), Irma Thomas (This is my “you can’t go home again” song. It’s looking back on the decisions you made for love, of a person, of a practice, trying to justify yourself, but also knowing you can only be vindicated in the eyes of those who are equally possessed. And Annie and Vera are equally possessed)
- The Island: Come in From the Cold, Joni Mitchell (I fear I’m getting a little cheesy here at the end of this playlist. If this was a dance piece they would say I was “Mickey-Mousing”. BUT, this song reminds me of my own mother. She would play this album, Night Ride Home, a lot when I was a kid. I love it. Joni Mitchell has lost that super high-toned, ethereal quality to her voice. She’s been smoking cigarettes her whole life, she’s wizened. And isn’t it true that all we ever want is just to come in from the cold.)
- Bonus track: Diet Pepsi, Addison Rae (For better or for worse, if I wanted music, this is the only song I could listen to while I was writing Roadshow. I have no other commentary other than it very obviously breaks the self-imposed temporal rule of this playlist)
Nikki Ervice is the winner of the VQR Emily Clark Balch Prize for fiction. Her work has appeared in The VQR, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is a professional dancer and writer from Alaska and holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College.