PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

I started work on this book of essays right after Trump was elected, so the theme of the book quickly went from “What’s wrong with our culture?” to the much more desperate “How did we land here?” and “How do we navigate this poisonous world?” The music I listened to while writing was often angry and sad, but it also tended to hint at some way to survive in a world gone mad.

"Should Have Known Better" by Sufjan Stevens
I could listen to the outro of this song on an endless loop. The melancholy of the first half of the song segues into a fragile acceptance: Nothing can be changed, so focus on the present moment...

We Sold Our Souls is my heavy metal horror novel, and while I’m not a natural metal head, I learned to love metal while writing it. This is probably the darkest book I’ve written, and it was a huge stretch that took me down a rabbit hole and out the other side. This is a list of the key songs that took me down, and lifted me up, while writing it, and I hope it does the same thing for you.

“Iron Man” by Black Sabbath
Everything starts with Sabbath, the original riffs heard round the world, played by a bunch of lunkheads from Birmingham who by all rights shouldn’t have gone anywhere except to their next shifts at the factory. In We Sold Our Souls, “Iron Man” is the first metal song Kris Pulaski, my main character, teaches herself on the guitar, and it’s probably being woodshedded by kids around the world right this minute, all of them bent over their guitars, fingering out the chords, picking their ways towards freedom, trying to be heard...

Read More»

I’m always looking for music I can work to during long days in the studio, music that won’t break my focus, won’t pull me this way and that, won’t grab me by the shirtfront and tell me what to think or feel. This quest has, during work hours, landed me squarely in the camp of the Minimalists, but I am also not immune to having my emotions ripped up by selected works of another nature altogether. Here, I’ve mixed them together. As for explanations, I'm no good at rendering accounts of why I love something or someone, so I won't even try. Suffice it to say, if a composer appears on this list, chances are I own everything recorded by that person that I can find...

The governing principle of my list is expertise. All of these artists have worked long and hard to produce their music at the highest level of accomplishment. They have all studied both academically and in the real world. No one starts out this good. Their knowledge had to be won through sustained effort. 

Some faced and overcame terrible disadvantages and persevered in a world that asked them, Just who do you think you are? Each of these artists has found an original voice. They all tell their stories in unique and unpredictable ways with humor and compassion for the human condition; these are skills perfected over a lifetime. It’s a fitting metaphor for anything of value we may acquire in our lives...

Many of these voices and strange sounds guided me through writing the Vorrh trilogy and gave me the energy to get to The Cloven, its final part. 

I can’t listen to the words while writing, but they work through the filter of my paintings, and whisper into the forest for me to hear.

“Missa Luba” by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin
A sublime fervor of the joy in faith. A magnificent clash of cultures that weds grace to power in a celebratory mass of voice and drum. I have this with me all the time. I use it to wake myself up and power up any slumps of doubt. There is possession and piety here, a very rare combination; it also runs an artery directly into The Vorrh...

Read More»

Road trips and good tunes go together like rubber and asphalt. Great music not only helps the miles breeze by a little faster, it provides a soundtrack to the adventure. It anchors the experience in our memories, taking us back to a very specific and vivid place and time. 

For every road trip I've taken (and I've taken many over the years), I'll bet I can name at least one song that somehow figured into the journey, and I can see, in my mind's eye, everything around me in that moment: who was with me, where they were sitting, the color and feel of the car's upholstery. I can probably even smell someone's stinky feet. But that's mostly because on every road trip I've ever been on...

David Lynch loves music and he refers to specific musicians and songs throughout this book. I thought of making a playlist that simply name-checked the music that’s mentioned in the book, but such a playlist would’ve been all over the place in terms of mood. So, I decided instead to go for a sustained mood, and the mood I chose is dreamy. The book is called Room to Dream, after all, and David gravitates towards music that casts a spell. That’s what this playlist is about.
 
"Moonglow/Theme From Picnic" by Morris Stoloff
I picked this to be the first song because I know that David loves it and because, for me, it embodies the subtle sexiness of the 1950s. The song, by Morris Stoloff, is featured in Joshua Logan’s film of 1956, Picnic, in a scene where the characters played by William Holden and Kim Novak dance outdoors on a hot summer night...

"All Tomorrow’s Parties" by The Velvet Underground and Nico
“And what costumes shall the poor girls wear / to all tomorrow’s parties?” What better way to open this novel — a story in which two women use costume, social media, and parties alike to bolster their uneven sense of identity — than with these words? Dark and mournful, this is the perfect theme song for this very dark book.

"A Marvelous Party" by Noel Coward
Louise’s first experience at the MacIntyre Hotel — her first New York party — is as beautiful and effervescent as this light comic Noel Coward patter song about all the delightful eccentric parties he’s been to over the years.

"She’s in Parties" by Bauhaus
Fun fact: the original working title of Social Creature was She’s in Parties, because of this song....

Some sci-fi-themed songs feel like outer space; others come right out and sing about it. I tackled this dichotomy while writing Strange Stars, my book about science fiction’s influence on the music of the ’70s. In doing so, I discovered some of the most stunning sci-fi lyrics of the era — and rediscovered some old favorites. Here are a few examples of sci-fi songs from the ’70s that contain my favorite, most cosmically evocative lines.

“Big Brother” by David Bowie
David Bowie’s 1974 album, Diamond Dogs, was originally intended to be a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell’s estate put the kibosh on that. Instead, Bowie borrowed a handful of elements from the novel and worked them into tracks like “Big Brother,” which contains the lovely lyric, “Give me pulsars unreal,” a sentiment that might as well have been Bowie’s mission statement...

So Lucky is about a woman, Mara, realizing that she needs a community — other disabled people — that doesn't exist yet. It's about how she finds her people and then begins to discover and shape a new culture.

"I need it, so I'll have to build it" is where the queer community began in the ’60s and the feminist community in the ’70s. Both accelerated in the ’80s. The HIV+ community did it in the ’80s and ’90s. The disabled community is doing it right now.

Having no established community to lean on in times of need is terrible; it is alienating, Othering, and enraging. Finally finding your people and beginning to create a life, a history, a path, plan, and sense of purpose together, though? That is blazing joy...