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.
Nicholas Russell richly evokes the haunting Nevada desert in his debut novel Observer.
Lincoln Michel wrote of the book:
“In Observer, Nicholas Russell makes the sun-scorched, desiccated West as haunting as any gloomy Gothic manor on the misty moors. The prose is equal parts page-turning and lyrical, and the plot a satisfying combination of science-fiction mysteries, family drama, and unfathomable horrors. A thrilling and chilling debut.”
In his own words, here is Nicholas Russell’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Observer:
I wrote Observer over the course of several years but turned to music most in the last six months, after the book was sold and I was on a firm deadline to hand in the first draft. Almost always, singing voices distract me when I’m reading and writing though they inspire me when I’m not. My novel takes place in a region of the Nevada wilderness that is both real and composite, informed by my own experiences growing up there but also the received myth of the desert so many people have been exposed to. The frontier is an imaginary place and always has been, a fact that allowed what I listened to while writing Observer to be as wide-ranging as the people in the American West.
“Nites Out” and “Desert”, Other Lives
Other Lives make music that belongs in Westerns. Perhaps an oversimplification, but there is a perennially cinematic, open-sky quality to their sound, which one imagines is heavily influenced by their origins in Oklahoma and the unconventional arrangement of instruments at their disposal. These two songs in particular make me think of dark clouds and rain in the desert, a visceral sense memory of the elements that makes the world feel both enchanted and dangerous.
“She Reminds Me of You,” Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
I’m quite hesitant to turn to film scores when writing, especially because their function in any given film is prescribed to a specific scene and thus tempts the listener, or writer in this case, to mirror the beats and emotional arc of that scene. So much writing now is informed by movies and television, not just dialogue, but the montage-like rush through scenes and contexts. I’ve always appreciated how Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross can’t help but make music that stands on its own, no matter what project it’s a part of. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is perhaps the duo’s most haunting score, but it’s also percussive and exhilarating. It exaggerates the feeling of an investigation under way, which was a crucial element for Observer where a young woman searches for her missing mother through artifacts left behind and unreliable testimony given to her by strangers with their own agendas.
“13 Ghosts II”, NIN
The Ghosts series from Nine Inch Nails foreshadowed Reznor and Ross’s eventual foray into film composition and, during the pandemic, emphasized those cinematic sonic qualities that were always present in the NIN catalog. “13 Ghosts II” is a melancholic song that, in my head, is hummed rather than played on piano. It has that slippery thing that great instrumental/orchestral music has, where it lives in a deep-seated part of your mind such that it plays whenever you’re going through a specific emotional experience. There’s a lot of memory in Observer and this song feels like a memory.
“Hoist That Rag”, Tom Waits
Tom Waits belongs anywhere outcasts, weirdos, and vagrants live and there are plenty of those in McNairy, the fictional town at the center of Observer. In the novel, there’s a bar called the Spyglass that serves as a watering hole for a contingent of astrophysicists up at a mountain top observatory and when I imagined them drinking and fooling around, this song was the only one that came to mind. Funny, rhythmic, but so full of feeling, as so much of Waits’s music is. An earlier draft stated outright that Waits was playing through the speakers but in the end, I took it out. It mattered to me when writing those scenes what the music was, but there is such a thing as unproductive specificity and that was one of them.
“Shadowplay (Royal Albert Hall 2009)”, The Killers
A bit of hometown bias showing through here, but the Killers were channeling something unique and authentically southwestern on their albums Sam’s Town and Day & Age. This live rendition of their cover of the Joy Division song would seem to be a departure from what casual listeners of the Killers might (mistakenly) deem the band’s terminal optimism. But lead singer Brandon Flowers is a desert kid, which means he can’t help but sympathize with and be fascinated by the seedy and uncomfortable pockets of urban life that are never as far away as some people wish. This song felt like a bridge between mother and daughter in Observer, the original and the cover communicating something in both directions.
“The Proposition #1” and “The Rider #2”, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Not all deserts are the same, but I’ve often found the neo-Westerns made in Australia get at something true about the southwestern landscape that their American counterparts don’t. It’s not only about setting but mood. There’s a forgotten, unstable quality to Cave and Ellis’s score for The Proposition. It reminds me so vividly of driving out into the desert on a brutally hot day, alone, aimless, slightly weary, and still managing to find a relieving breeze. Cave and Reznor are also great whisperers and aren’t afraid to use their voices as instruments rather than lyrical vehicles. The sinister back half of “The Rider #2” does more to evoke the violence and peril of the expansionist colonial project than most bloody dramatizations of it (and The Proposition is plenty bloody).
“Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”, Radiohead
I’m not really interested in the type of characterization that tells readers what music or movies certain characters listen to. Often that feels like a vestige of press tours for movies where actors tell you how a director gave them a dossier of their character’s upbringing and favorite food. I did feel strongly though that the missing mother in Observer, Corinne, was someone who listened to Radiohead’s Amnesiac often, not only because it’s a frequently scary and unpleasant album but because Corinne is the kind of person for whom the scary and unpleasant aren’t necessarily negative. Amnesiac is, among many other things, an evocation of a nightmare, but one that becomes more and more legible as you spend time with it. That felt right for Corinne.
“A Gain”, Devendra Banhart
I see a stone well in a darkened chamber with an intermittent but constant drip of water when I listen to this song. For whatever reason, that was useful to me writing this novel. Sometimes it’s about a sound and a feeling and not necessarily the narrative.
“Summer Sickness”, Big Girl
This song became the anthem of Observer so it’s frustrating to me that I can’t remember how I found it. My girlfriend and I kept saying that this would play over a trailer of the movie, which, now that I think about it, would be wrong because the song deserves its build up. The opening lyrics “call it summer sickness/focusing on forgiveness” are thematically apt but more than anything, it’s the energy and pitch this song arrives at by the end, particularly with its final guitar solo and lead singer Kaitlin Pelkey’s ghostly wail, that feels like it captures the restless, searching spirit of the novel. Finding this song was also how I knew Observer was finally finished, how I knew that what it was had solidified and that, for better or worse, I couldn’t take the novel any further.
Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Baffler, No Tokens, Defector, and Hunger Mountain. Observer is his first novel.