In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Grady Chambers’s Great Disasters is one of the most moving debut novels I have read in years.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“In stark and subtle prose, [Chambers] flushes out present-day male loneliness from the places it hides: alcoholism, nomadism, and persistent fixations on long-ago romances.”
In his own words, here is Grady Chambers’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Great Disasters:
Great Disasters is set largely in Chicago against the backdrop of 9/11, the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the protests against them. The novel centers around six friends coming of age in that context, and follows them from high school into adulthood as one joins the military, some join the protests, and each of them reckon with a changing relationship to one another and to their shared past.
I was in high school and college during a similar span of years as the book’s characters (roughly 2001 – 2010 for them) and I wanted to choose songs for this playlist that in one way or another define or call back that era for me and that time in one’s life. My parents were in their 20s during the late 1960s and early 1970s, so music from that period found its way onto this playlist as well. Though the book takes on big global issues, the story at its core is an intimate one about love, friendship, protest, and how we might be towards each other and ourselves. At a time in which many people are asking how to make their voices heard in the face of large-scale injustice, I hope that the book’s themes and sensibility will resonate (and that the music included here will, too).
Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta
I recall this song appearing on one of the early Now That’s What I Call Music cds and listening to it again and again on a *portable cd player,* skips and all. It may pre-date the timeframe of the main era of the novel a bit (post 9-11, mid-late 2000s) but its energy and spirit is so representative to me of what it felt like to be in high school in the years described, hoping for plans to materialize, driving around with nowhere really to go.
Neil Young – Out on the Weekend
“Ibid.”, as the academics say, and entirely like the narrator of Great Disasters to employ that abbreviation entirely incorrectly, as I’ve done here.
No Doubt – Sunday Morning
2002, Google tells me! The novel centers around a group of high school friends coming of age in the era described above, and I remember, in my own experience of those years, fleeing school on Fridays for the backseat of the car of our sole friend who already had his license. This one (or it could’ve been “Bathwater,” also great) was on the mix CD we burned and played again and again. We’d get hot dogs at Demon Dogs in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood and eat them in the gravel parking lot under the El tracks with the music playing from the car. Youth! Boredom! Hopefulness! Yearning!
The Shins – New Slang
Great Disasters is full of movies–they’re a way through which the narrator is constantly processing, refracting, and trying to make sense of the world around him and the things that happen to him, and I can’t think of this song without thinking, of course, of Garden State. The movie embodies an aimlessness of early adulthood that one is near enough to in high school to somehow lay claim to, as precocious or premature as that claim might be. It came out when I was sixteen years old, and is probably the first “indie” movie I saw in the theaters. In hindsight it seems like an important part of the bridge from my love of movies as a child to my love of moviegoing as an adult, a love shared by the book’s narrator.
Janis Joplin – Me and Bobby McGee
In the “Sophomore” section of the Great Disasters, the narrator recalls wearing his dad’s old Grateful Dead t-shirt while roaming through Chicago on a freezing day in February on his way to the March against the War in Iraq (there’s a lot going in that sentence). The counterculture and political movements of the 60s and 70s are thought about and talked about in the book, and rather than put a 23 minute version of like, Terrapin Station on here, or something, I thought I’d choose another (favorite) song from that era that’s a little bit briefer.
Handsome Furs – Talking Hotel Arbat Blues
Don’t let the somewhat eye-rollingly indie song title scare you away! This song manages to be both energetic and melancholy, and has a mood of longing or ache to it that I hope the novel embodies a bit of as well. I wanted to include this song because the Handsome Furs’ three albums, all released between 2007 and 2011, are incredible, and I want to spread the gospel, but also because those albums came out in a four-year period that is part of the novel’s timeline as well, and really calls that period back for me: The Bush era ended. President Obama got elected. The economy crashed. There was so much hopefulness and so much suffering. And in the midst of all that the book’s narrator flies off to Europe to wander moody winter cities, etc. You’ll have to read the book to *find out more*, as they say.
Adrienne Lenker – Indiana
This feels like a gateway song like weed is said to be a gateway drug. The Midwest! A feeling of rainy June! And a more gentle entrance to her music than the 21 minute instrumental of hers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JswKBvKtGJo) that I often have on my headphones when transferring writing notes to my computer. If you like the one perhaps you’ll like the other.
Songs: Ohia – Farewell Transmission
I think I first heard this band driving around in college in the passenger seat of my friend Guthrie’s ancient red Volvo. When he told me the band name I heard it as “Songs: Ohio” rather than “Ohia”, whatever Ohia is, and for the longest time went around telling people how much I loved the band Songs: Ohio, and I hope you do too : )
Pink Floyd – The Great Gig in the Sky
Good god Pink Floyd’s music makes my heart ache. It’s so melancholy to me. In the “Remember Sam?” section of Great Disasters, the narrator recalls a former girlfriend visiting him at college, where they drink too much and she regales the crowd in the backyard at the party with her rendition of a Pink Floyd song. This song starts slow and builds beautifully, and was used to such great effect in the trailer for the movie ROMA. Movie trailers are for me an art form in their own right.
The Strokes – Fear of Sleep
The mid 2000s, man. Let’s go listen to this whole album via the jukebox at a bar in Chicago while watching a football game in which it is snowing.
Yo La Tengo – Green Arrow
I love quiet endings. Thank you for making it to the end of this little curation. I so hope you’ll be inspired to seek out Great Disasters, and maybe find that you love that quiet ending, too.
Grady Chambers is the author of the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Grady was born and raised on the north side of Chicago, and lives in Philadelphia. His writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and many other publications. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More info at gradychambers.com.