![]() And no matter how you try to ignore it, the past leaps forward into the present to destroy it. (Yet it’s also a rude fuck you song, too.)Ĩ Clearlake– I Hate It that I Got What I WantedĪ sharp shot across the bows, Clearlake specializes in something cold but beautifully non-clinical. ![]() And once you get there, the place is strange and you feel the lingering presence of something now distant that knows you too well. Is this feeling why you fight on?Ī return to the mysterious texture of the Spoon song. The fey infiltrates through the forest canopy and out into the open at night, conducts its experiments, retreats before daybreak, leaving a phosphorescent residue gleaming across dewy grass. Music in the moonlight from a band that earns “ethereal epic.” Something ethereal that evades one’s grasp and yet, for a quivering moment, is revealed in the moonlight, before it escapes. “You may be wary of fallen stars/they’re always poking around in the dark.” ![]() The jangle of the Byrds slowed down and repurposed as a beautiful dirge and warning, with the beat I love still there in the backdrop. When you stop to consider the wonder of it all. The counterpoint to Broncho, the march that of orbit in space, a revolving slow majesty with a human heartbeat at the center of it. We’re writing at a constant clip, to that beat that beat that beat.Ĥ The Long Winters – The Commander Thinks Aloud We haven’t arrived yet, but we’re going somewhere. The march of a mission coalesces, with an insistent hook and obscure lyrics that allow for whatever reading you desire. A portal into a different space and place. One of Spoon’s most haunted tracks, turning the spiraling intensity of their usual stellar guitar work toward epic melancholy. As a result, these are in some cases “misreadings” of the actual intent of the songs.Ī powerful Metrical benediction for the playlist, about perseverance, and containing the underlying beat that carries through in many of these songs. In my descriptions below I’m often trying to convey how I felt listening to them, as I transferred that emotion to the novel. I have thought of this album often during writing all of my novels. Maybe they got too slick later on, but *Red Sails *is a fusion of their punk/post-punk aesthetic with something beautiful, something that’s activism and art. All the songs on this playlist I still respond to even after having listened to them so much.įinally, I should note that as a teenager, I discovered Midnight Oil’s album Red Sails in the Sunset and thought the sound was science fiction. A few, unnamed, I love but have listened to so much I need a break from them. Others, like Hot Snakes, are already given a nod in the book itself. So, for example, I listen to Murder by Death a lot, one major part of that the soundtrack they did for my novel Finch-which conjures up such an atmosphere it has been of use in writing every novel since. Some bands I could’ve included here, I haven’t because in the context of Dead Astronauts they’re too self-referential. (For this reason, the ethereal precision of The Church figures prominently in those 900 songs.) A driving beat or a lovely piano bridge were equally important, but also certain kinds of approaches to guitar. Thus the music I was listening to has at times an operatic feel and at times is stripped down to a post-punk aesthetic. These are big, almost operatic emotions that manifest in the novel in both bold, over-the-top ways and in a minor key, with intricate little eddies and shifts in perspective. Yet pervading everything in Dead Astronauts is a dual sense of anger and defiance mixed with acceptance and loss. In the case of Dead Astronauts, there are ten sections and ten different perspectives and styles. I have to be in the right headspace to stay within the style and voice of the novel. But loving an album isn’t enough-I write very much by feel and music is essential to that. The 23 songs here are either favorites or representative of albums I love. The Dead Astronauts “mix tape” consists of 900 songs, played on shuffle unless I needed to summon a certain emotion for a particular scene.
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