I always listen to music when I write. It helps me focus, it shuts out the noise of the world, and it often puts me in an emotive space so that I can feel deeply for, and with, characters who are going through a lot. While working, I make compilations of songs that best serve the fictive moment I’m wrestling with; some songs migrate from playlist to playlist, persistently essential to my process, and others I only want to hear for a few weeks. What follows is a list of songs I listened to when writing or revising Time’s Mouth, my multi-generational saga about a California family of time travelers. I hope my book is as spooky, poignant, seductive, strange, and appealing as the songs that inspired it.
“Smoke Signals” by Phoebe Bridgers
Since her album
Stranger in the Alps, Phoebe Bridgers has been my most reliable writing companion; I listen to her evocative, moving music all the time when I work. “Smoke Signals,” the opening song on that album, is moody and emotional in the same way I want my book to be, and the lines “The future’s unwritten, the past is a corridor,” feel like they’re speaking directly to the time travel premise of my novel.
“Femenine: No. 1 Prime” by Julius Eastman
Julius Eastman was a twentieth century minimalist composer that I was introduced to in Kyle Chayka’s terrific book
The Longing For Less. In a fun coincidence, an old high school friend, Lewis Pesacov, produced Los Angeles-based Wild Up’s recording of Eastman’s album
Femenine, Vol. 1. This is the first song on the album and its mysterious, beautiful opening gets me every time. (Is that a vibraphone? I have no idea.). I can fall deep into Eastman’s repetition of sounds, and I often reached for this album when writing the Santa Cruz cult sections of my book. Something about it conjures dark forests, a foreboding mansion, and magic.
“Disorder” by Joy Division
I made a 1980s playlist to listen to as I wrote the section when my characters Ray and Cherry escape the Santa Cruz cult for Los Angeles. This song opens the 1979 album
Unknown Pleasures and it plays a key role in the narrative; it actually comes back in a later scene in the book, nearly two decades after the first. I love the song’s opening drum beat and Ian Curtis’s final singing of “feeling feeling feeling feeling...” There’s also an ominous quality to it that helped me write some very ominous scenes.
“Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush
The speaker of Kate Bush’s song is the son of the infamous therapist Wilhelm Reich. My character Ray escapes his mother’s cult in Santa Cruz and settles in LA where he eventually begins Reichian therapy: screaming into a pillow, gagging himself, and even building a sort of energy box called an Orgone Accumulator. The first line of “Cloudbusting” is “I still dream of Orgonon,” which was Reich’s family farm and where the therapist is now buried. The line, “I just know that something good is going to happen... just saying it could even make it happen,” captures (to me) the way people, and especially some of my characters, will try to believe anything into reality. Plus, I love how a song about such an obscure figure of history can be a real banger.
“Prom” by SZA
I have a few songs on my writing mixes that are pure bops. They give me a jolt of energy to write, or they’re signals for me to get up and dance. Oh how I love to dance to SZA.
“This is a Photograph” by Kevin Morby
This song, about our parents and their imagined pasts, feels like it’s in direct conversation with my book and its themes. I like how intense Morby’s voice gets in this song, how forceful, and I love the way he repeats “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” at once elegiac and animated. I listened to this song dozens of times when writing a scene of a character who was really hurt and angry and about to go fuck up some shit.
“Common People” by Pulp
I listened to this song about a hundred times when drafting a scene that takes place in 1999, when Ray and Cherry’s daughter Opal goes to a Brit Pop night at an eastside bar. This, along with a couple of Belle and Sebastian songs, really brought me back to that era. Music is the best time machine we have, isn’t it?
“Good Guy” by Frank Ocean
This song is so torturously short, and so deeply moving. If my work can make anyone feel the way I feel when Frank Ocean sings these words against that pared down keyboard: “I know you don’t need me right now/And to you it’s just a late night out” I would...well, I’d die happy.
“What’s Your Name” by Doechii
Time for more dancing. At about minute 1:28 the beat gets really intense and I can’t help but lose my mind. I let my body go when it happens. Doechii’s cockiness is just irresistible. I have fond memories of dancing hard to this song when I was at a writing retreat doing final edits. I was almost finished! What a thrill!
“Get Started” by Total Heat
Total Heat is the solo project of Ross Wallace Chait, who’s played drums for GirlPool and Will Sheff of Okkervill River. His album
Totally Real is the best album of 2022 that you’ve never heard of, a pleasure bomb that is pure sun-soaked Southern California drawl. I began many final revision sessions by listening to his track “Get Started.” I dig this song’s dreamy sound. It helped me finish my final draft.
÷ ÷ ÷
Edan Lepucki is the
New York Times bestselling author of the novels
California and
Woman No. 17, as well as the editor of
Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them. Her nonfiction has been published in
The New York Times Magazine, the
Los Angeles Times, Esquire Magazine, and
The Cut, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Time’s Mouth is her newest novel.