Museum Nights
Dear All,
This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons around here. On Jeopardy! the contestants who frantically press their clickers are rarely if ever successful. There’s a lesson: Jeopardy! isn’t just about being smart; it’s about reaching a symbiotic state with the clicker they give you. So, before you press the button, you need to meld with the button.
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A Soundtrack for The Curator
My last scheduled event for the hardcover of The Curator is coming up next week — more on that in a moment — so I figured it might be nice to mark the occasion with the creation of a soundtrack. I’ve made ones for some of my other books, because I’m inspired by music and I love sharing the music I love, but The Curator presented a bit of a challenge because it’s essentially a historical novel. While the story is set (SPOILER ALERT) on an alternate version of Earth, it’s a version of Earth that largely mirrors the western world of the late 19th-century as we know it, — i.e. there’s some electricity, but no rock and roll, and that’s almost all that I listen to.
But then I thought about the underrated Brian Helgeland film, A Knight’s Tale, which starred Heath Ledger and was set in 14th-century England and had a roaring contemporary soundtrack that was used to inventive effect. This is particularly the case in a scene where Ledger’s character dances with Shannyn Sossamon’s character and the traditional music of the period bleeds fantastically and wonderfully into Bowie’s immortal “Golden Years.”
(The film also features a brilliantly funny Paul Bettany as Chaucer, who acts as a sort of medieval hype man for Ledger’s knight.)
With the example of A Knight’s Tale in mind, I drew up the following playlist, which is anachronistic but dovetails with the characters and the moods of the novel as I imagined them. Whether or not you’ve read the book, it’ll be a good listen if you pull it together on the streaming app you use for your music. (Official editor of DPTB and all-around MVP Jen has made a Spotify version that you can find here!) If you have read The Curator, I’d be curious to know if it lands with your sense of the novel. I call it
Museum Nights1
“Hoist That Rag,” Tom Waits — The lyrics and the tumult of this song speak to the general milieu of The Curator. The country teetering on collapse, the menace and strangeness. The cracked bell rings and the ghost bird sings, and the gods go begging here… Hoist that rag! Tom Waits is too cool.
“Year of the Cat,” Al Stewart — This one goes out to all the cats in the book.
“Million Miles,” Bob Dylan — D, the novel’s heroine, searches for the truth behind her brother’s death, and even believes that he might, somehow, still be alive. I try to get closer, but I’m still a million miles from you.
“Master of My Craft,” Parquet Courts — Several of the characters in the novel consider themselves masters of their particular crafts. D has to be exceedingly careful of all of them.
“Baby Listen,” Lloyd Cole — For the nights that D spends in the National Museum of the Worker, listening to the terrible sounds from the former embassy next door.
“Midnight Rider,” Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings — The man who lives in the former embassy — whose name is most definitely not Captain Anthony! — is a midnight rider. He’s not going to let himself be caught.
“The Windmills of Your Mind,” Dusty Springfield — There’s an untethered feeling to this song, a sense of unreality. It’s for the place in the book where things go from weird, to really, really weird.
“A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety,” Elvis Costello — A poem by Yeats set to music by Elvis Costello, who has never sounded more like Tom Waits. One of the book’s key locations is a saloon called The Still Crossing and, as Yeats puts it, A drunkard is a dead man, and all dead men are drunk.2
“Impossible Winner,” Dead Weather — I chose this one for the big epic sound; all the rolling desperation of it, thinking of the third section of the novel where D has to take big risks and there’s a lot of action.
“Hoist That Rag,” She Makes War — Laura Kidd’s version of the song is every bit as menacing as Waits’s original, but built up almost entirely from her own voice. The original bangs around in your skull; this version gets into your lungs. The revolution is changing and coming to its conclusion, one way or another.
“Absolute Cadavers,” The Paranoid Style — Hard to explain this one without giving away the, ahem, (Morgue) Ship. I’ll just say, the dead can definitely dance.
“Lady of Situations,” Wooden Wand — I imagined this one playing over the credits, so to speak. There’s a fatality to the lyrics, but something oddly optimistic, too. That fits with the book’s ending. It might be too late to go to sleep, so stay up all night.
And there you have it. Turn it up, man!
The Latest
I do intend to leave my house again — eventually — but this Wednesday, June 28, at the great Newtonville Books at 7pm is the last time I plan to do so specifically for the hardcover of The Curator. I’ll be appearing with Michelle Min Sterling, author of Camp Zero, and it’s going to be fun. I’d love to see you there! If you are not in the area, but would like to order a signed book by either of us to be mailed to you, it looks to me like Newtonville’s website is set up for that.
The book got generous, thoughtful reviews from Locus and Spectrum Culture.
I had the honor of inaugurating a new series on Kirkus’s Fully Booked Podcast: the Fully Booked Takeover. I interviewed Jacqueline Holland about her stellar novel The God of Endings, which takes the idea of the vampire in an exciting new direction. Take a listen; I think you’ll enjoy our chat.
Since we have the long playlist already, I am going to skip the usual recommendations and dismiss class early.
As ever, my thanks for subscribing, and in case you ever have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I might do a newsletter answering reader questions in the not too distant future, so feel free to send any of those that you might have. I’m over on Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.
All Best,
Owen
Please observe the running order as listed.
This song is unfortunately not available on Spotify, so I’m going to ask Jen to swap in Warren Zevon’s stunning cover of “Back in the High Life.” You can find the Elvis Costello on Amazon Streaming, however.