In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Lisa Borders’ novel Last Night at the Disco is both hilarious and psychologically insightful, and features one of the year’s most entertaining unlikable protagonists.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Hilarious … Readers will be hooked by this tragicomic romp.”
In her own words, here is Lisa Borders’ Book Notes music playlist for her novel Last Night at the Disco:
Fiction writers always reveal themselves in their work, whether they mean to or not. I’m obsessed with music, and it’s the main way I have shown my hand in all three of my novels: by creating characters who enjoy the music I love, or who are musicians making that kind of music.
My third novel, Last Night at the Disco, is largely set in 1977 – 78. It’s the story of a New Jersey junior high school teacher who spends her weekends at Studio 54, where she discovers two musicians who become among the most influential artists of the 1980s. Decades later, having burned bridges with them both, she tells her story in hopes of securing her rightful place in rock ‘n’ roll history.
When I first started writing this novel, my plan was for the music in the book to be almost entirely disco. The novel’s outrageous narrator, Lynda Boyle, is a Studio 54 regular, so I perused lists I found online of songs that were played at Studio back in the day.
But the other thing happening in New York City at this time was the nascent punk scene, and because I love that music, I couldn’t help but create characters who were drawn to it. I’ll admit there was an element of wish fulfillment here: I grew up in New Jersey not far from the City, just a few years too young to be part of that scene. As I deepened my characters in early drafts, I did research to see which punk pioneers were playing clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City during the time period of the novel, leading to scenes in Last Night at the Disco that feature The Ramones and Devo.
A strange musical footnote of this era is the “Disco sucks!” movement, immortalized in a memorable episode of the brilliant, short-lived series Freaks and Geeks. The anti-disco movement was started by white rock deejays who felt their livelihoods threatened as disco gained popularity, and it’s clear to me today that the war on disco was driven by both racism and homophobia. But I was a teenager in a provincial town during the height of the disco vs. rock wars, young and sheltered enough to not understand the deeper implications. I thought I had to choose, and I chose rock.
Decades later, as I researched disco music for my novel, I learned something that surprised me: I loved it! As I began playing Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor, Chic and the Commodores, I could feel how joyous, uplifting and infectious the music was. And I realized that as a child in the early-to-mid 1970s, my tastes were a lot broader than they became in my teens, because AM radio used to play it all: soul and funk and disco, country and pop and rock. You could hear Stevie Wonder, Three Dog Night, Earth Wind & Fire and Linda Ronstadt back-to-back. I regularly watched both American Bandstand and Soul Train, and almost always knew the artists that appeared on both shows.
The late 1970s were a nexus for many different forms of music: the waning days of glam rock in its earliest form, the heyday of disco, the beginning of punk. My novel features three main characters whose taste in music represents all of those forms. As such, I’ve created three different playlists, one for each of my main characters.
My disco-loving, grandiose narrator Lynda is most interested in the music of seduction: anything with a good beat that she can dance to. As she thrusts herself into the lives of my other two main characters, Johnny and Aura, she doesn’t fully appreciate the new genres of rock music they become increasingly interested in. Her reflection on the Ramones when she sees them with Johnny at CBGB says it all: “Their songs were two-minute assaults, like dodging gunfire. Give me Donna Summer, I thought; give me The Village People. Give me joy and glamour any day over noise and filth.”
This first playlist features a number of songs that reflect both Lynda and Studio 54. “Heart of Glass” by Blondie is at the top of the list because, if I had to choose one song to encapsulate Last Night at the Disco, it would be this song. Straddling the line between disco, punk and pop, sung by a diva who managed to be punk and glam at the same time, it’s a song that all three of my narrators would unequivocally love.
Lynda mentions Donna Summer several times in the novel, and I think both “Bad Girls” and “Last Dance” would really speak to her. Fun fact: I wanted to use a line from “Last Dance” as an epigraph in my novel, but it would have been way too expensive. Suffice it to say that when Lynda is bad, she’s so so bad.
One last footnote: “Le Freak” was written by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards after they were turned away from Studio 54 on New Year’s Eve 1977. The lyrics of the song’s refrain were originally “Fuck off!” instead of “Freak out!” I played this song a lot when writing Studio 54 scenes, thinking about the intersection of celebrities and regular folks in the club, and how it was entirely possible for the members of Chic to be turned away while my character Lynda – beautiful, and friends with one of the bouncers – could almost always get in.
Musician Johnny Engel moves to New York City from Michigan in 1977 to form the ultimate glam rock band, as he tells my novel’s narrator, Lynda, when they first meet. But with the death of glam pioneer Marc Bolan of T. Rex and Johnny’s exposure to early punk rock, he ends up forming a band that’s famously ahead of its time: the fictional Glow Worm, referred to in the novel’s 2019 timeframe as possibly the first post-punk band.
Featured on Johnny’s playlist are a number of glam rock songs he would have loved, songs that evoked him as I wrote. One of the things that bonds Johnny and my third main character, Lynda’s fourteen-year-old student Aura, is a love of the band Queen. “Somebody to Love” reflects, for me, Johnny’s coming to terms with his own sexuality as the book unfolds, but it’s also one of my personal favorites.
“Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex is a song I listened to a lot as I built Johnny’s character, but I also think it speaks to Lynda, and how she tries to dance away darker thoughts that are always surfacing.
I was once asked if Johnny was based on a real-life musician. He wasn’t, but if I had to describe him in those terms, I’d say when the book opens, he’s a younger, scruffier Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie crossed with David Johansen in his New York Dolls period. I have songs on the playlist reflecting both of those bands. But in my head Johnny also looks a bit like a very young (think Murmur or Reckoning-era) Michael Stipe, and the music he eventually makes is described in the book’s later time frame as having influenced R.E.M.
The last three bands on Johnny’s playlist – Elvis Costello, Talking Heads and Devo – reflect Johnny’s changing taste as he’s exposed to the burgeoning New Wave and art-punk scene in 1978.
My youngest character, Aura, is Lynda’s student as well as the daughter of a deceased East Village poet whom Lynda once slept with. A talented guitarist, Aura – who is revealed in the book’s 2019 time frame to have been an early Riot Grrl pioneer – is drawn to the rebellion of punk rock. She both idolizes and identifies with Patti Smith, who straddles the poetry world of Aura’s father and the rock world Aura is drawn to.
Aura references the Queen song “’39” a number of times in the novel as one of her favorites. While the song is overtly about time travel, it is also about a kind of grief. The line “Don’t you hear my call, though you’re many years away,” evokes for me Aura’s lost father, and how a child who loses a parent can feel distance from them so quickly as the child grows and changes.
During the course of the novel, Aura takes to wearing her father’s leather jacket and writing short messages on the back of it in masking tape. Later, she has t-shirts made up in this way. Most of her statements are inspired by songs, including “Away from the Numbers” by The Jam, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours,” by X-Ray Spex, and Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” a song that I think has one of the greatest lines in all of rock music: “She was an American girl, raised on promises.” Aura has learned at a young age that all the promises she was made are empty. That knowledge sets her apart from many of her fellow eighth-graders, but later in life it’s what makes her a great artist.
Because Aura becomes a pioneering feminist artist, she listens to all the female-led bands (or in the case of the Runaways, the rare all-women bands) she can find in the late 1970s. Some of them she discovers through Johnny. “Girls Talk” is included here because Aura becomes famous in the 1990s for an album called Some Girls Talk, a song-by-song repudiation of the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls album, with the title throwing a little jab at the male gaze of “Girls Talk.”
One of the central tensions through Last Night at the Disco comes from Lynda’s desire for closeness with both Johnny and Aura, and how her manipulative nature backfires on her. The characters’ different playlists reflect this divide. Aura is almost exclusively attracted to songs whose lyrics have meaning for her. Johnny is more open to different genres, but the music he creates is also deeply personal. Lynda thinks that what makes her happy is what would make everyone happy, and she doesn’t understand why both Johnny and Aura aren’t more attracted to the glamorous Studio 54 instead of the grungy clubs they favor.
As for me? I love every song on all three of these playlists, and I hope you will too.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Lisa Borders’s playlist for her novel The Fifty-First State
Lisa Borders is the author of the novels Cloud Cuckoo Land, chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award and a Massachusetts Book Awards honoree, and The Fifty-First State. A frequent humor contributor at McSweeney’s, her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Post Road and other journals. She lives in Central Massachusetts with her partner and two rescue cats.