My father was born into a family of musicians, and would’ve hit puberty—I’ve timed this—not long before the Beatles hit North America. His parents expected he would play in an orchestra, but unfortunately, Dennis was a spiritual rock n’ roller who wielded an uncanny, polymathic ability that allowed him to perform basically any instrument and musical style. When, in adulthood, he was eventually forced to abandon his public-facing aspirations for a more practical living, he continued playing wherever he could: as a session musician, at private parties, as the pianist for a local dinner theater.
Years after his death his brother, my uncle, would lament how my father had occupied much of his adult life playing with amateurs of no comparable talent. This was a man who never learned how to formally read sheet music, yet could mimic and master any song through ear and practice alone—reduced, if you want to call it that, to plunking out “It’s De-Lovely” at cocktail hour for the local trade association. Perhaps true, though I always believed my father conceived of his abilities as a public resource. Denied the ego-burnishing triumphs of stardom, and never capable of making a full-time living from his art, he would instead maintain his craft for anyone who might make use of it. As a child, I received a first-class secondhand education in what he believed constituted “good music”—the pleasures of melody, the versatility of a well-written song, the receptivity to new sounds. (He once politely listened through my attempt to show him the virtues of Incubus.)
Around my teenage years, as I was exploring my own musical taste, I realized that a closet within my parents’ home contained hundreds of records, set aside for storage—a discovery as simple as opening a door. For Christmas, I requested a record player so I could make use of this sudden bounty: The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Talking Heads, Bob Dylan, and of course the Beatles. But these records were not the personal reserves of my father, the lifelong performer. As a wandering hippie, he’d divested himself of all physical possessions, whereas my mother, a daughter of working-class immigrants who’d carved out a sturdy Chicago life totally on her own, had accumulated this expansive archive of popular music circa 1965-1990. She had never said a single word about art, but here was proof she shared my father’s interests—possibly why she rarely complained when his side job kept him out late, away from holiday celebrations and family dinners.
When I started writing about music, first as a teenage amateur and then more professionally as an adult, I presumed that my motivations were similar to many of my millennial generation. We’d seen Almost Famous, where Philip Seymour Hoffman played legendary critic Lester Bangs as a perfect combination of wise, stoned, and aspirationally hip. We’d read Pitchfork, Spin, Blender—publications that peaked right as the internet was becoming the preferred delivery system for music, allowing us to easily jack right into the discourse. Later, I considered my father’s influence. On some basic obvious level, I was writing about music in order to connect with him—of course I knew that. That music itself might be the locus of our connection, as opposed to drinking or football, was different. He’d never pushed his records on me, and I suppose there’s nothing unique about a dad who likes the Beatles, but growing up around someone who appreciates music signals that it’s alright and perhaps even important to appreciate music—not a quality to take for granted.
And then there was my mother, who actually bought the records, and held onto them because they mattered. She was not trained in aesthetics; she had never debated critical placements or artistic breakthroughs; her curiosity about music was casual and observational. But measure that against other adults who, lacking context, retreat into their comfort zone for the rest of their lives. She retained a non-professional interest that was completely divorced from any consideration of relevance or originality, factors that drive dogged consumers—and picking up her commentary on artists like Charli XCX (who she watched at the Pitchfork Music Festival, to great delight) and Andrew Bird reminded me that every “conversation” about a particular artist was by nature limited to those comfortable with doing the talking. As a critic, I’d always been uncomfortable writing in a particular tone, endemic to criticism, that insisted upon my absolute authority in all things taste—partly, I believed upon examination, because I was always thinking about how music might reach someone like my mother, an eager listener who just didn’t have the time or life required to remain 100% up-to-date.
See Friendship, my novel, is partly set in the Chicago of my teenage and college years, when the city was experiencing a dual revival in its rap (Kanye West, Common, Cool Kids, etc.) and indie (Smith Westerns, Salem, etc.) scenes. But this was not the music that I channeled, when I was writing and revising my text. (Although, you will see, I included one Smith Westerns song.) Instead, I was drawn more to songs that replicated, at the level of tone and sound, the feeling of my book. The resulting playlist is more rock-heavy that my typical listening habits—I do feel motivated to say that I listen to a lot of rap, pop, R&B, and electronic music—but these are the songs that I returned to, when I was trying to pay extra close attention to the “vibe” that I wanted to conjure and maintain. That great writing is often musical is not an ordinary insight, but I’d like to think that my lifetime of thinking about music helped put that sensitivity in my head.
Amen Dunes — “Miki Dora”
The instigating incident of See Friendship is when Jacob, my narrator, discovers the “true” circumstances behind the mysterious death of an old high school friend, and becomes obsessed with reconstituting the context and texture of those formative years, in order to understand something deeper about how everything went down. Spoiler: It’s not that easy. That wistful, nostalgic tone of Sebald novels feels less world-historic when applied to one’s teenage years, especially when Jacob is confronted with people who seem to have processed all that a lot better than him. As he approaches a series of more bittersweet truths about “what really happened,” I often thought about the rolling rhythms of “Miki Dora,” in which the singer Damon McMahon explores the legendary surfer’s ego and inability to get along in normal society. “He could not suffer existence / It wasn’t meant to be,” McMahon sings, and this incapacity to sit still within conventional currents is something that, I think, Jacob can relate to.
Blondie — “Dreaming”
There’s no shortage of great songs about dreaming, many of which have popped up in David Lynch’s movies and TV shows. I love the rush of Blondie’s take, that keening keyboard line, the swell and dispersal of the drums; it’s a dream of images and sensations, one that leaves you slightly exhilarated and confused upon waking up. The lyrics take place in the real world, though, and it’s the way Debbie Harry grapples with reality, weighing her hard-won cynicism against her more earnest hopes and desires, that had me looping this one during edits. Jacob is a funny person, but he’s a little bit full of shit in the way that all funny people are, and there’s a push-and-pull between the way he shrewdly appraises how things are, and the way he deeply wants things to be.
Jens Lekman — “Black Cab”
This one is more literal: Jacob has a lot of revelations when he’s drunk and/or stoned, and feeling kind of sorry for himself, which is the subject of Lekman’s all-time mopey classic “Black Cab.” There’s such glamour in leaving a party because you’re a little twisted, and in a sad state—like Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, when he’s called into action right after arguing with his wife. The ballast of Lekman’s melodrama makes these experiences feel like the end of the world, when he’s just describing being kind of fucked up in the back of a car. But I’ve been there, so who am I to judge?
Fleetwood Mac — “Say You Love Me”
Music is the soundtrack of our lives, yet there’s something self-serving about the capacity to choose that soundtrack; I may feel empowered and keyed-up as I march down the street listening to a Ramones live album, but I’ve also picked that experience for myself. What I miss most, in this economy of consumer choice, are the random connections. Relatedly, I prefer public karaoke to private karaoke because of the odds that your evening will be impacted by what a stranger chooses to sing. On the other hand, a song can just leave you totally dry and there’s no purpose in paying attention. There’s a scene in See Friendship that takes place at a karaoke bar, and while I didn’t do anything as obvious as “‘Single Ladies’ comes on at the exact moment a character talks about breaking up with their boyfriend,” I wanted to evoke that feeling of expecting something good and/or meaningful to score your experience, but instead it’s just some drunken asshole singing the Doors. That said: “Say You Love Me” is one of the songs I do at karaoke, and my narcissistic hope is that it convinces strangers at the bar to smooch.
Sufjan Stevens — “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!”
As a half-white elder millennial who attended a Chicago public high school between the years of 2002 and 2006, a random bystander might assume I was obsessed with the Sufjan Stevens album Illinois. Wrong! I hated it, actually. One of my ugly teenage biases was a suspicion of anything coded as “pretentious,” which the song titles alone qualified this record for my refusal. It wasn’t until years later, when I was deeply affected by Sufjan’s stripped-down Carrie and Lowell, that I revisited Illinois. This time, I loved it. There’s a moment halfway through this song when the elaborate instrumentation and high-concept lyricism suddenly stops, and the music recedes to a gentler, unguarded reflection that somewhat repudiates the intellectualism of the first half. That’s another push-and-pull of See Friendship, I think: Jacob’s attempt to intelligently diagram everything going on in his life, and the more unadorned perspective that comes right from the heart.
Lou Reed — “Coney Island Baby”
Lou Reed was younger than I am now when he penned this song about appraising your life from the present, but he already sounded so at peace—a peace that was certainly inconsistent over the following decades, but no less real whenever he accessed it. Another tension of See Friendship is this drive to understand, when there’s a lot of things you just have to let drift in and out, like the tide. Permit the lengthy quotation, but here’s a verse that I think most adults can relate to: “When you’re all alone and lonely / In your midnight hour / And you find that your soul / It has been up for sale/ And you’re getting to think about / All the things that you done / And you’re getting to hate / Just about everything.” Unlike Lou, Jacob is not redeemed by love—settling the turmoil of his soul must come from a more internal place. Whether he gets there is up to the reader, I suppose.
Rest of playlist:
Cymbals Eat Guitars — “Jackson”
Belle and Sebastian — “Piazza, New York Catcher”
The Beach Boys — “Sloop John B”
Waxahatchee — “Can’t Do Much”
Destroyer — “Kaputt”
The War on Drugs — “An Ocean Between the Waves”
New Order — “Blue Monday”
Yo La Tengo — “You Tore Me Down”
Smith Westerns — “Girl In Love”
Daft Punk — “Get Lucky”
Okkervil River — “Okkervil River Song”
Vampire Weekend — “Hannah Hunt”
Nilüfer Yanya — “Midnight Sun”