In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip is a surreal and humorous debut.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“A transcendent and dazzlingly weird novel about disconnection and difference . . . The novel’s strangeness comes to seem entirely intentional, and brilliant. Trip captures something of how it might feel to have your brain work differently from everyone else’s, the loneliness and alienation of it. The story’s inscrutable moments even take on a sort of beauty. Like Sandra, the reader is asked to let go of the pinched need to have it all make sense, all the time―to instead open our eyes and simply see what’s there, in all its irreducible mystery.”
In her own words, here is Amie Barrodale’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Trip:
Making this list, I discovered that I had far fewer musical associations with Trip than I expected to have. Three songs came to mind immediately, and then I stalled out for a couple of months. At the last minute, I remembered one more song, making four, the number associated with death here and there, and Trip is a love story set in the bardo, so maybe we can call it here? I started to go and scrounge for more and cooler songs, and then I was like, Jesus, just go with four.
Love Vigilantes, New Order
When the book was finally complete, sometimes alone in my car, picturing Steve Coogan as Trip’s father Vic (but Coogan not as himself, but more as Allen Partridge in the movie Alpha Papa, driving into work in the morning, sort of rocking out to Cuddly Toy by Roachford, a song dedicated to him by his nemesis in mockery…). In my (incorrect) interpretation of the New Order song, the husband is dead but the wife isn’t, and in my car, Steve Coogan as Vic was the wife in the song, and Sandra the dead husband. I understand this makes no sense here now, but none of it was complicated at all when I was in my car.
Alice Coltrane, Lord of Lords
Writing the bardo sections in our garage-slash-office, I would sometimes play this early on to vibe dead-magisterial.
Adele, Hello
This is a song trying to say hello from another realm, which is sort of what the book is about. The song is one my son and I used to like to listen to together in the car when my daughter had just been born, and we were going through a bit of a hard time. In this song, the message gets through (we presume), and I guess I can’t say if Sandra’s message gets through to Trip, because I don’t want to give that away. That’s sort of the question of the book, the long arc, to use Sam Chang’s term. Sidenote: I have a friend, a great academic who was married to another great academic—neither religious in any way, but both intelligent enough to recognize science as the religion of choice for many dullards… They had an agreement: whoever died first would find a way of telling the other one if there was consciousness after death. The husband died suddenly on a flight from Germany, and a week later, a large crack appeared in a plate the couple had bought together on their honeymoon. The plate was mounted on the wall; it hadn’t fallen or been disturbed in any way. My friend took it as a communication from the afterlife, saying, “I’m still here.”
The Cure, Pictures of You
This is a song played on repeat by Anthony toward the very end of the book. By this point, I’d come to understand and even love him. Sitting here it occurs to me that Anthony is my favorite character from a book or story of mine.
Amie Barrodale’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. In 2012 she was awarded The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei.” She is the author of You Are Having a Good Time: Stories.