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September 9, 2019
David Leo Rice's Playlist for His Novel "Angel House"
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.
David Leo Rice's novel Angel House is fantastic in many ways, a book that will continue to haunt you weeks after you finish the last page.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn wrote of the book:
"Rice has created something here that conjures up memories of the works of Julio Cortazár and Michael Cisco: it’s primally unsettling and unnervingly compelling."
In his own words, here is David Leo Rice's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Angel House:
The bulk of the songs on this list are culled from what I was listening to in the year before, during, and after writing the first draft of Angel House—in other words, my senior year of college, the year just after, when I lived in Berlin and wrote the bulk of it, and the year after that, when I was back in Boston, beginning the long task of editing it, which turned out to be the hardest part. This would’ve been 2009, ‘10, and ’11, so it was a transitional era in the consumption of music—long gone was the CD collection I’d cherished as a teenager, but I hadn’t yet conceded to Spotify and total non-ownership of the music I listened to. It was the era of bootlegs, torrents, and swapping massive hard drives full of songs, a time of great excitement, but also guilt, since my friends and I knew we were making it harder for artists to get paid, and fear, since no one was sure what the repercussions for this kind of downloading might prove to be.
As a hyper-verbal child, I initially hated music so much that I’d wear headphones and listen to books on tape on the rare occasions that my parents took me to concerts. It wasn’t until a camping trip when I was ten or eleven that I discovered their fanny-pack full of audiocassettes like Paul Simon’s Graceland, Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut, and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and realized that, if I paid enough attention to the lyrics, the right music could be even more immersive than any book on tape. From here until I left for college, I bought CDs at my local used record store (or from good ol’ Columbia House), and ritualistically crawled into bed with the liner notes, to parse the lyrics line by line as I listened on the combined tape/CD player I’d bought with my allowance money.
Nowadays, I listen to music almost only while writing, at a low volume (I listen to podcasts when I’m out walking, or driving—in a sense, a return to books on tape), and thus I barely register the lyrics. I mention this because the songs listed here are from a transitional phase in a personal as well as a cultural sense, a time when I still listened closely enough—perhaps because my music library was still meaningfully non-infinite—to know and care what was being sung. Sad as it is to say, Angel House is probably the last book for which I could make a list like this, as no new music has affected me (at least not consciously) as much as this batch of songs did, back when I was 22, 23, and 24.
1. Sparklehorse, More Yellow Birds
Sparklehorse is ground-zero for me. It’s the musical act that comes closest to encapsulating my aesthetic, which is to say that it’s the one that had the most formative effect on me. Mark Linkous, the band’s late leader and often sole member, creates a wistful, nostalgic, sometimes menacing aura of forgotten rustic beauty deep in the North Carolina mountains, witchy and haunted, like a psychological island of lost toys.
This song in particular evokes the special feeling of what Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America,” a sense that this is both a land of newness, youth, and childhood, but also a primeval land, one home to ancient beauty and—as Lovecraft knew all too well—ancient evil. In my fiction, I often use familiar American landscapes as a portal into something otherworldly, and if I’ve ever succeeded at this, I learned how to do it from Sparklehorse.
2. Vic Chesnutt, Concord Country Jubilee
Chesnutt belongs to a similar category of “almost outsider artist” as Sparklehorse—and, sadly, he committed suicide a few months after Mark Linkous did, in 2010, just as I was starting the book—but he’s haunted in a slightly different way, more wry and ironic, and more dialed into the life of small southern towns, rather than impressionistic natural landscapes. His persona is thus less that of a Romantic loner, and more that of a barroom raconteur. This song features a small-town funfair, and the queasy/sweet image of an adult riding “the kiddie train”—an image that could be on the cover of Angel House.
3. Bill Callahan, Jim Cain
I discovered (and saw) Bill Callahan when I lived in Berlin in 2010-11, where the bulk of the first draft was written. Maybe because I was homesick for a certain kind of Americana, he really clicked with me there—the combination of resilience and despair in this song is potent and admirable: a sort of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” attitude that we should all aspire to. He also sings with a haziness about the borders between waking and dreaming that informed every narrative choice in the book.
4. My Brightest Diamond, Something of an End
I discovered this band in my last year of high school, and got very into it. Singer Shara Nova conveys an apocalyptic grandeur in her voice that I found—and still find—compelling, like the end of the world could be both terrifying and elegant. Most of the characters in Angel House know that their world is slated for destruction, so the headspace of awaiting inevitable apocalypse was very important to the book’s conceit.
Also, I listened to this song a lot when I was volunteering at the Northampton Independent Film Festival, and the whole Christopher-Guest-ish milieu of small-town film festivals figured heavily into the first draft of Angel House, though it eventually got cut and moved to my forthcoming A Room in Dodge City: Vol. 2
5. Augie March, There Is No Such Place
I spent a year before college traveling around the world and working odd jobs. For the first six months, I lived in Sydney. This was very formative for me as a nineteen-year-old, and impacted the construction of the nineteen-year-old characters in the book, as well as my overall sense of what it’s like to live in big cities. Augie March is an Australian art rock band that became an obsession for me there—the mismatch of their hyper-literary and rarefied style within this very macho, brutal, frontier culture resonated with me in a poignant way (probably because that was also how I felt being there), and informed my love of similarly out-of-place Australian authors like Patrick White and Gerald Murnane.
This particular song evokes, as the title suggests, an impossible place, some dream location we can long for, but never reach. The town in Angel House is exactly such a (non) place.
6. TV on the Radio, Family Tree
This song was a favorite of mine in college, and remained so during my time in Berlin. It just has such grandeur and scope, and a true dramatic escalation in the chorus. I wouldn’t say the verses are boring, but the degree to which the energy rises when the chorus kicks in is so profound that it gives me chills every time I hear it. I don’t know if this principle can be applied to literature in a direct sense, but I always try to find moments of extreme escalation, where the stakes rise steeply in a short time.
7. Pavement, Here
This song was another favorite during high school, and informed my sensibility of trying to imbue absurdism with genuine pathos. Much of Pavement’s work is too silly, sarcastic, or coolly intellectual to be moving, but this song is the exception. It commits to its concept and, even though the lyrics don’t make semantic sense, they convey something with real dramatic weight. That’s always been my goal in creating weird art.
8. Bob Dylan, Desolation Row
After steeping myself in his better-known songs as a child, I got into his longer, more rambling ones later on (Idiot Wind and the Sam Shepard collaboration Brownsville Girl are other favorites in this vein). Something about the expansiveness and mythic scope of this song, with all its T.S. Eliot references and medieval carnival madness grounded in a down-home American setting, spoke to me in a profound way.
Dylan also offered me a model of American Jewishness that I’ve always aspired to: a sense of being neither religious in a traditional sense, nor assimilated in an entirely secular sense, but rather dialed into some desert-based fantastical realm that feels both modern and ancient, and is an eternal part of the Jewish imagination, going all the way back to the biblical prophets.
9. Wilco, Sunken Treasure
Wilco is one of the first bands that I got into when they were in their heyday, rather than years later (God knows what they’ve become now). I remember being in 10th grade and getting in bed with the liner notes for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the first song, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, came on. The first line was “I am an American,” and I was like, ‘oh no, this is going to be some country rock bullshit.’ But then the next line was, “Aquarium drinker,” and I was like… ‘wait a second, there’s something stranger going on here.’
I got more and more into them, working back through their catalogue until I reached Being There, their second album, which was the least polished, but it resonated with me the most. I’d walk to high school listening to it every day (once I’d moved on from Radiohead and Nirvana), and feel this very wintery, spectral sense of what it must be like to be in your twenties, dealing with breakups and hangovers and paying rent—a chapter that still seemed impossibly distant, but that I was beginning to long for. Angel House has many characters who are obsessed with imagining themselves at different points in their lives, so this kind of bittersweet ideation was an ongoing aspect of the writing process.
10. The Hold Steady, First Night
In college, I got really into studying Christian theology, mainly in terms of twentieth century German thought, in an effort to “understand” the Holocaust (in whatever extremely limited sense that’s possible), and also in an effort to understand my own upbringing as a Jew in Northampton, MA, site of Jonathan Edwards’ famous fire and brimstone speeches in the 1700s, and generally a bastion of deep American Puritanism.
During this time, I discovered the Hold Steady, whose mix of Midwestern punk nihilism and unironic Christian uplift spoke to me. There was something so dirty about the stories they told, all about drugs and crime and suicide, and yet there was also such a yearning for grace and forgiveness, a bit in the mode of Dostoevsky. Even if (or perhaps because) I couldn’t share that sensibility, I found it tantalizing, never more so than in this song, which is all about a drugged-out woman crying while telling strangers in a bar about Jesus.
11. Tom Waits, Long Way Home
After my year in Berlin, I spent some time in the republic of Georgia, traveling with friends, and then writing on my own. I ended up in a village in the Caucasus Mountains, near the Russian border, where the woman who ran the hostel I was staying at let me use an empty office above a farm supplies store. Every day for a month or so, I’d wake up, walk along the dirt road to this office, gathering a few snacks on the way, and set up my crappy travel laptop in the empty room, to work on Angel House.
Every evening, I’d walk back to the hostel listening to this song. I remember doing so one day, feeling pretty proud of what I’d accomplished, and, as I looked off into the mountains in the dusk, I slipped into a fantasy of being Tom Waits. My mind recoiled at the enormity of the fantasy, as if it were the dirtiest, most shameful thing I’d ever imagined. I’m not quite sure why—I guess Tom Waits is just such a singular figure, so much cooler than I could ever hope to be—but this moment of fantasy left me with a sharp pang, perhaps akin to the Catholic notion of “Impure Thoughts.”
12. The Mountain Goats, Distant Stations
Any number of Mountain Goats songs could fit the bill here. They’re the kind of band that’s so lyrics-focused that they would immediately have gotten through to my childhood self, if I’d found their tapes in my parents’ collection back then. I chose this one because it’s about someone trying to tune into distant, even secret radio stations, seeking a message. One of the main characters in the book is a late-night radio host who broadcasts at a frequency that only children can hear, so the occult nature of radio was very germane to the process.
13. The National, Karen
The National is a band that I’ve somewhat parted ways with over the years, but I went to see them in Northampton when I was in high school, with ten or twelve people in the audience. The singer was so drunk and angry he stormed off stage, and never returned. Ever since then, I’ve felt a kinship with them, especially this song, which includes the wonderfully menacing line, “I wouldn’t go out alone… into America.” Neither would I!
Also, the novel deals a lot with people in a small town imagining the big city. In high school, The National (like The Strokes) conjured an impossibly cool fantasy of NYC, a fantasy I’ve tried to hold onto throughout my years of living in the real NYC.
14. Roy Orbison, She’s a Mystery to Me
I don’t know if Blue Velvet inspired many teenagers of my generation to get into Roy Orbison, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. His rendition of "In Dreams" in that film is so atmospheric that it’s tempting to give the credit to Lynch, but of course it’s Orbison who deserves it. His voice conjures the secret dread lurking within the seemingly perfect American suburbs of the 50s, which, even though I wasn’t around then, is a feeling I can instantly relate to, and one that I seek to conjure when I write about towns.
Also, I’ve always wanted to write a story with a character named Roy Orb… just looking for the right venue.
15. Lambchop, My Blue Wave
One important aspect of Angel House is the intersection of loneliness and masculinity: many of the characters ask themselves how, as men, can we be lonely in a way that’s both dignified and decent? I don’t know anything about the personal life of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, but his voice communicates this exact state: he seems to be singing at a cozy remove from the rest of the world, melancholy but at peace with it, neither asking for nor trying to say anything, but rather emoting a state of pure calm. It’s the voice of a man who’s beyond help, yet who, luckily, doesn’t need any.
None of the characters in the book achieve this, but Kurt’s songs kept me company on many lonely nights of writing about them.
16. Iron & Wine, Sodom, South Georgia
In my sophomore year of college, I fell extremely hard for the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, among others. For a New Englander like me, the deep south seemed so spooky and fraught and full of literary meaning. By extension, the magical realism of Garcia Marquez fit into this phase as well, a sense that all time in the deep south and the tropics was myth-time, all deeds sinking straight into eternity. I know this is a stereotype, or at least an archetype, but as a literary construct, it was immensely seductive, and had a big influence on the “town that contains the universe” where Angel House is set.
I’ve always loved Iron & Wine, but this song in particular conjures that deep south feeling I was so hungry for in my early 20s. Even the title evokes it: the very notion that something with as much biblical potency as “Sodom” could be found in such a down-home, gritty locale as “South Georgia” was enough to make me swoon.
17. The Grateful Dead, Ripple / The Flaming Lips, Brainville
Another important aspect of my upbringing in Northampton was the lingering remnants of hippie culture. My teenage experiences with psychedelics influenced my drive to write hallucinatory prose, and also seeded my personal and academic interest in mysticism, centered on the idea that transcendental illumination can be found in the most ordinary places, like towns, houses, and woods, not only in monasteries and cathedrals.
The two sides of psychedelia, for me, are the warm, shaggy, wistful tones of the Grateful Dead, and the more puckish, freaky, anarchic tones of the Flaming Lips, so I’m bundling the two together here.
18. Okkervil River, Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe
Angel House centers on a very lonely man’s insane quest to commission a massive movie that will retell his entire childhood and adolescence in real-time, so the title of this song says it all.
19. Sigur Ros, Staralfur
I’m certainly not picking this one for the lyrics, but because it epitomizes “driving around town at night” music. Those long drives, especially in winter, where the snowbanks would turn the road into a tunnel and you could see the pitch-black sky full of stars that also looked icy, with bands like Sigur Ros, Portishead, and Mogwai playing on the car stereo, gave me a sense both of the abstract immensity of the universe, and of our absolute tininess as human beings within it.
20. Frightened Rabbit, Acts of Man
After my year in Berlin and another year and a half working as an animation TA in Boston, I spent a semester back in my childhood home with my folks, while my then-girlfriend/now-wife finished law school. I was immersed in what seemed like the never-ending process of editing Angel House, and fell into a sort of depression where I feared that it had been hubristic to even attempt such a book. For the first time, I felt ashamed of having done work, rather than of not having done it.
During this time, Frightened Rabbit was my constant soundtrack, especially their album Pedestrian Verse, which had just come out. Since the novel deals with characters who have returned to their hometown in defeat, after a wasted decade in the big city, my feelings during these months ended up being crucial to the story.
21. Arcade Fire, City With No Children
I remember listening to this song at the gym in Berlin and then, when I was sitting in the steam room afterwards, the image of an actual city with no children in it came back to me, and I decided that would be an element in the book: partway through, all the children are lured away by a Pied Piper figure, and everything that happens next is partly a result of this.
David Leo Rice and Angel House links:
the author's website
excerpt
excerpt
Believer interview with the author
Vol. 1 Brooklyn interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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