It’s Got A Good Beat And You Can Read To It

From the start I imagined this as a book with a soundtrack. I even considered making an actual soundtrack recording, on a CD included inside the front cover, but think of it: the rights for dozens of songs would be expensive and time-consuming to obtain, unless I pulled a Girltalk. 

I struggled to find the best way to communicate the importance of music to the story. Initially I had the genius brainstorm to make Aaron, our protagonist, constantly reference the music playing in his head, which he pithily referred to as Radio A. In the first draft of Chapter One, I had Radio A breaking in every so often to very self-consciously blast a song or a lyric. I tried different ways of doing it, including using the graphic at the top of this post, but it proved to be a clunky and awkward device, and it was already annoying after the first chapter. 

I gave it up.

I rewrote and cut out all the Radio A references and just got out of the way of the story. But the soundtrack was still there, whether I put it in the book or not. So I made one for myself on iTunes.

I used only songs released on or before the year 2000, the timeframe of the story. Here’s what I came up with for the first several chapters:

“Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand”—Primitive Radio Gods

“Radiohead”—Talking Heads

“Rise”—Public Image Limited

“My Own Worst Enemy”—Lit

“Instant Karma”—John Lennon

“Say My name“—Destiny’s Child

“Girls”—Beastie Boys

“Love Will Tear Us Apart”—Joy Division

“I Try”—Macy Gray

“All The Small Things”—Blink 182

“No Surprises”—Radiohead

“Love Song”—The Cure

“Gett Off”—Prince & The New Power Generation

“Love Buzz”—Nirvana

“One”—U2

“Back In Black”—ACDC

“Sweet Child O’ Mine”—Guns ’N’ Roses

“Right Here, Right Now”—Jesus Jones

“Even Better Than The Real Thing”—U2

“Music”—Madonna

“Take A Picture”—Filter

“Bad Reputation”—Freedy Johnston

“Teardrop”—Massive Attack

“Semi-Charmed Life“—Third Eye Blind

“Here Comes A Regular”—Replacements

“Bohemian Like You”—Dandy Warhols

“Brand New Lover”—Dead Or Alive

“Speechless”—School Of Fish

“Single”—Everything But The Girl

“Perfect”—Smashing Pumpkins

“Swallowed”—Bush

A song notably missing here is the one Aaron writes in Chapter One, “New Orleans Again.” This is in fact an actual song, written by me, and as I get this book done I’m going to try to convince the members of East Is East, my band of twenty years, to do me a solid and record it. 

Maybe I can put it on the audiobook. According to Augusten Burroughs, whose latest audiobook, A Wolf At The Table, is completely over the top, with sound effects and so much drama in Augusten’s voice, the audiobook is the new frontier for modern authors. We shall see.

In the meantime, I tried to make an iMix on iTunes, which would effectively render moot all the rights issues, cuz if you wanted one of the songs in my soundtrack, you’d simply download it and the artist would be paid like always. 

Unfortunately not all the songs I listed above are available on iTunes. 

A bunch of them are, though, so I went ahead and made the mix, and here it is. 

RAWK!