“I’ve spent countless hours listening to the songs below in my car on the way to work or while mowing the yard, zoning out to enter the right mind-state where ideas bubble up.”
“Sometimes, a song itself can be the impetus for a story.”
“Music was so important to me in composing How to Make Your Mother Cry that I actually included a soundtrack / playlist at the beginning of the book.”
“Sometimes it starts with the song. I’m listening to the Pixies, or Nina Simone, or Sleater-Kinney, and I get an idea for a story or essay. “
“The songs below were constant companions in my Ohio years (don’t worry, I’m not in Ohio anymore!). A lot of them are dark, and not a few of them have hope woven into that darkness like a silver thread. That’s kinda a theme for me.”
“In knowing her, and living, these many years, with the stories she helped shape, her own words, and my memories of her, Judith emboldened me to claim my own hungers and appetites unabashedly.”
“Why is it so fucking true that the minute you make a playlist for an idea, it becomes a book? I was in denial for a long time that I was writing a novel, the novel that would become Housemates, but then I added a song and then a second and then a third to a playlist that I was calling at the time just “Bernie and Leah,” the names of my main characters, and the novel was, irrefutably, real.”
“Here are some of the songs that helped me slip out of my obtuse consciousness while I worked on Mood Swings.”
“As I listened to old murder ballads and stories of love lost, I discovered features like irony, understatement, and rising action.”
“Other than in all the ways, I can’t really say I’ve changed that much from when I was thirteen. I still collect comics and lurid old paperbacks, I still watch anime, I still write weird-ass novels, and I still make soundtrack playlists for those novels.”