Maybe it’s the poet in me, but when it comes to music, I’m a lyrics queen. I have trouble writing when a song I know is playing, because I find myself tuning into the words of the song instead of my own. Sure, the instrumentals are important, but the lyrics are what determine whether a song hits like a banger for me.
When I was working on my debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, I had a mental moodboard of songs that captured the vibe of the book. “Hot, sad, sapphic weirdos” was a recurring theme. Lots of St. Vincent, Lucy Dacus, and Jenny Lewis. Songs about partying too hard (or not hard enough?). Songs about self-medication, seeking ecstasy, and growing around our traumas. About doing whatever it takes to find ourselves and our people. The nine songs I’ve chosen here represent a scene-scape of my narrator’s desires — some reasonable and many unruly. But who could blame her for that?
“Billions” by Caroline Polachek
This “hallucinogenic epic” captures the vibe of
All-Night Pharmacy’s first sentence: “Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus.” Imagery like “sexting sonnets” and “headless angel” reflect the sense of holy degradation our narrator finds at her go-to seedy dive bar, Salvation. And, of course, the “pearl of the oyster” line feels deliciously queer.
“4am” by Sadie
I love a melancholic bop. The repeated refrains “We’ll just ride around, yeah” and “Can we just fade out everything” reflect the vicious cycle our narrator finds herself in. She’s addicted to her chaotic older sister, Debbie, who drags her into risky and sensual late-night encounters that often end in blackouts and, in the narrator’s words, “the deforestation of my remaining dopamine.”
“SAGA” by Hurray for the Riff Raff
This haunting song seems to be about the aftermath of sexual assault and not wanting that act of violence to define you. “I don’t want this to be the saga of my life” and “nobody believed me” repeat throughout the song. The narrator and her sister, Debbie, were both assaulted as children/young adults, though neither accepted that reality. “We both thought what happened was fine, but it wasn’t fine, and only the other immediately recognized that,” our narrator says. “That was the tragedy of our sisterhood. As soon as we came close to a mutual understanding, one of us changed, or both.”
“Working for the Knife” by Mitski
“I was tired of being a knife block. I wanted to be a knife,” my narrator says early on. A pawned knife kicks off a major turn in the novel. The knife is an oppressor in Mitski’s song, a symbol of what she’s constantly up against. The narrator of my novel doesn’t see the knife as such in her own life, but let’s just say it doesn’t bring her the freedom she expected.
“Pills” by St. Vincent
I listened to St. Vincent a ton while working on
All-Night Pharmacy, and so many of her songs vibe with my novel. “Pills” feels especially right since they’re my narrator’s survival mechanism. St. Vincent’s lyric, “From the bath to the drain, and the plane to the stage, to the bed, to give head, to the money I made,” captures the mania and relentlessness of my narrator’s life at the lowest points of her dependence on opioids and benzodiazepines. She becomes terrified of drains (which keep making eye contact with her), engages in degrading sexual encounters through a cursed bar game called The Wealthy Patron, and sells fraudulent prescription pills to support her own habit. The apocalyptic turn at the end of the song reflects the threat that the narrator’s lifestyle poses. I briefly considered calling the novel “Come All You Wretched” from the line “come all you wretched, wasted, and scorned,” which describes the narrator’s fucked-up pseudo-family at Salvation, the bar they call home.
“Dancing in the Dark” by Lucy Dacus
I can’t resist a gender-swapped cover, and I like the Lucy Dacus version better than the Springsteen. This song captures the narrator’s restlessness after her sister disappears — that toxic need to “play Debbie’s understudy.” “She’d left behind all this potential energy,” the narrator of
All-Night Pharmacy explains. “It had to be released somehow.”
“Head Underwater” by Jenny Lewis
I adore Jenny Lewis and her lush LA-based lyrics. This song, to me, feels like an ode to seeking recovery. I love the occult element here, how Lewis sings about getting hypnotized in the valley and the “little bit of magic” we all have access to. This song vibes nicely with the narrator’s foray into Jewish mysticism and psychic healing (both symbolically and literally through the help of Sasha, an alleged psychic from the former Soviet Union).
“Silk Chiffon” by MUNA
The song lyric, “I'm high and I'm feeling anxious inside of the CVS when she turns 'round halfway down the aisle with that 'you're on camera' smile like she wants to try me on,” encapsulates the narrator and Sasha’s first meeting perfectly. This sapphic feel-good anthem parallels how the narrator feels when Sasha enters her life. The power dynamics of their relationship are certainly ambiguous, but Sasha helps the narrator accept that she’s worthy of love.
“Spaceship” by Kesha
This song about feeling like an alien always waiting for her people to come back for her feels both melancholic and hopeful to me. Throughout
All-Night Pharmacy, our narrator struggles with how a person should be and suspects that she’s doing it wrong. I won’t spoil how her arc concludes, except to say that the last line of “Spaceship” — “love is everything, and I know nothing” — is one element of where she lands.
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Ruth Madievsky is the author of a bestselling poetry collection,
Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her work appears in
Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Cheburashka Collective, a community of women and nonbinary writers from the former Soviet Union. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary care pharmacist.
All-Night Pharmacy is her debut novel.