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June 19, 2019
Heidi Diehl's Playlist for Her Novel "Lifelines"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Heidi Diehl's debut novel Lifelines is an arresting portrait of the confluence of art and family.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Diehl finds the bittersweet heartache of retrospection, and compassionately explores how art helps heal. This complex, intimate story memorably portrays what it looks like to reckon with one’s choices and to feel both uncertainty and peace."
In her own words, here is Heidi Diehl's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Lifelines:
Music was so important to my writing of Lifelines, and I’ve really enjoyed putting together this playlist. (I love reading the playlists on this website; it’s interesting to think about music’s relationship to narrative and craft.) Lifelines tells the story of an American painter, Louise, who moves from Oregon to Düsseldorf in the early ‘70s to go to art school, and gets together with Dieter, a German drummer who is haunted by Germany’s history. The novel traces their time together and its fallout through the perspectives of five characters; the chapters move back and forth between 2008 and the 1970s, and between Germany and the United States.
These characters include two musicians: Dieter, the German drummer, and Margot, Louise’s American daughter from her second marriage, whose band makes psychedelic drone. While I wrote the novel, I was listening to albums that helped me imagine what Dieter and Margot’s music would sound like. I also sought out music that would give me a feel for the book’s settings—in particular, West Germany and Oregon in the ‘70s.
The initial spark for this book was my interest in the music and art made in 1970s West Germany, particularly the ways this creative work responded to broader cultural shifts. At that time, as the postwar generation came of age and demanded a change to Germany’s silence—and unspoken shame and guilt—about its crimes in the Holocaust. I was listening to “Krautrock” bands—those musicians whose experiments with form and sound intertwined with the call for public atonement and remorse.
Since the book moves between different times and places, it was helpful to have a song as a signpost, a way in to writing a setting or a character’s perspective. This playlist reflects the book’s nonlinear structure; I’m fascinated by the ways that time periods speak to each other, and the ways that memory and history weave their way into present time.
Lifelines playlist
1. Popol Vuh, Morgengruss
I love Popol Vuh’s music, and I love the films that this band scored, working in fruitful tandem with Werner Herzog. These films grapple with history, obsession, landscape, the very personal and slippery nature of truth—all things I was thinking about while writing Lifelines.
2. Neu!, Isi
A Düsseldorf band—their name is a very literal reflection of what was going on culturally in West Germany at the time. I find something optimistic in the music—yet still searching, still finding the way.
3. Pharoah Sanders, Astral Traveling
Dieter, the German drummer, is haunted by his country’s history, and the emotional quality of free jazz gives him a visceral outlet. I imagined him playing the album Thembi for the American painter, Louise, when they’d first met in Dusseldorf, offering connection to her homeland, and with this track, a little dreaminess to their evening together.
4. Kraftwerk, Tanzmusik
An early Kraftwerk song, the sound more delicate and wistful than the band’s later tunes. This sounds to me like the anthem of young Louise’s first days in Düsseldorf, and I used it to get my head into writing that time and place. The song helped me tap the hope and trepidation Louise felt in this unknown space. I visited Düsseldorf while writing the novel, and tracked down the street where Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang studio had once been located. The city street was solidly in the present, busy with a work day, with no trace of its wild history. I peeked into the courtyard, imagining.
5. Grateful Dead, China Cat Sunflower – Live in Paris 1972 Version
I have a complicated relationship with the Grateful Dead, though I’ve come a long way since my teenage days going to punk shows at the local community center. It was actually my time as a noise musician that introduced me to people who understood the Dead in a context beyond the stoned jocks at my high school, which broadened my perspective. And it’s really impossible to write about Oregon in the ‘70s without them. Louise and Dieter go to the Dead’s concert in Düsseldorf in 1972. Listening to the recordings of the Europe ‘72 tour helped me write about the culture clash at the heart of Lifelines—this American watching her hippie compatriots alongside Germans discreetly feeling the music. True Deadheads would tell you that the band peaked later, but here both the crazy sound system and the enormous amounts of LSD ingested by the band on this tour make this song pretty far out.
6. Can, Mother Sky
Joel is Margot the noise musician’s boyfriend, and one of the book’s record freaks; as he says, Mother Sky is probably the greatest song of all time. I imagined this was playing during a pivotal scene on a dance floor in Düsseldorf in 1973.
7. The Doors, Waiting for the Sun
Richard is Louise’s second husband; he is left home alone in Oregon while she returns to Germany and her estranged ex-husband Dieter’s family in 2008. This album is a good one to blast in the car while he drives around Eugene, brooding about his wife and their complicated romantic history.
8. Amon Düül II, Archangel Thunderbird
Another banger. I think this is what Dieter’s band Astral Gruppe sounds like at their best, minus the vocals, which in Astral Gruppe are much less remarkable than Renate Knaup’s transfixing work here in Amon Düül II.
9. The Everly Brothers, I Wonder If I Care as Much
A sweet, sad song from the album Roots—a country departure from the Everlys’ earlier, poppier releases, still making great use of their signature blood harmony. This album came after a difficult period. I’m drawn to these kinds of stories of musicians and bands —the music made to score a time of personal upheaval and change—and I was thinking about that as I developed my characters’ creative work.
10. Don Cherry, Resa
While writing, I was listening to recordings of Don Cherry’s concert with Terry Riley in Cologne in 1975, and I imagined Dieter going to the concert and finding inspiration. This song is from Cherry’s album Organic Music Society, released around the same time as Dieter would have encountered his work.
11. Starving Weirdos, Meditator
Margot is in a drone band in the 2008 chapters. In thinking about what their music would sound like, I mined my memories of making music in the 2000s: private press CD-Rs, cassette labels, mail-order distros. Line-6 pedals and threadbare touring, fleeting acquaintances with people and places, and throughout it all, a sense of possibility that just outweighed my sense that none of it was going to last.
12. Fleetwood Mac, Honey Hi
My favorite Fleetwood Mac song: to my mind, Christine McVie is criminally underappreciated next to the bigger personalities in the band (though they deserve our respect, too). Fleetwood Mac inspired me as I wrote the book—the physical and emotional landscapes of the West Coast in the ‘70s.
13. Ashra, Deep Distance
Much of the time I was writing in silence, but sometimes, especially during the first draft, I needed something wordless and fluid to set a rhythm. This solo work by Manuel Göttsching of Ash Ra Tempel also gave me a window to 1970s West Germany.
14. African Head Charge, Off the Beaten Track
This track inspired another important scene on a dance floor, this time in Berlin in 2008.
15. Cat Stevens, Wild World
Part of the fun of writing this book was getting to think about questions like, what song would be played on an acoustic guitar by the campfire at a clothing-optional hot springs in central Oregon in 1978?
16. GAS, Gas 5
I felt I couldn’t write about Germany without at least a little bit of techno, so I had the characters go dancing at a throbbing nightclub in Berlin in 2008. Techno is central to German culture and has often come up in my visits there. For example, one of my extended cousins put giant speakers and a fog machine on a float pulled by his father’s tractor in the harvest parade in the small town where my grandmother was born.
Or the time when, on tour in Germany, my bandmates and I arrived in Hamburg a day early for our show. We’d heard of a giant techno party, and though we were intrigued in an anthropological sense we mentioned it to our host in cautious terms. He was the promoter at an avant-garde art space, and he’d booked us, a noise band, to play there. We thought he might be disdainful of techno’s mass-market appeal. But he wasn’t. “Techno party? We are all going to the techno party,” he told us matter-of-factly. Like, why were we even asking?
17. Cluster, Ho Renomo
A little more Krautrock to close things out.
Heidi Diehl and Lifelines links:
Kirkus review
Publishers Weekly review
Saratoga Living interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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