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June 30, 2020
Sophie Mackintosh's Playlist for Her Novel "Blue Ticket"
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, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Sophie Mackintosh's new novel Blue Ticket is a timely dystopian masterpiece.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"In her thought-provoking novel about fate, control, and biology, Mackintosh keeps the reader turning pages as Calla’s due date approaches. A must for Handmaid’s Tale aficionados."
In her own words, here is Sophie Mackintosh's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Blue Ticket:
I first discovered the power of a writing playlist whilst writing my first novel, The Water Cure. I was working full-time and my commute to work was an hour each way, so a playlist became a way for me to use that time - keeping me locked into the energy of the story, imagining scenes and untangling plot points even as I was pressed into the armpits of strangers on the tube, or walking around aimlessly on my lunchbreak. I’ve always connected music to books from my teen years, when I wasn’t sure if the job of “inventor of the perfect soundtrack for a film adaptation” existed, but I practised for it a lot anyway, and found in it a way to my own images and words.
If the playlist I made for The Water Cure functioned like my dream trailer soundtrack for the imaginary film adaptation, the playlist for Blue Ticket was more embedded in the narrative from the start. Set in a place where the rules and the stakes are quite different, particularly for women, but the landscape and things populating it are largely recognisable, I describe the novel to people as mostly a weird road trip - a journey through somewhere that isn’t quite what we know, something off-kilter - and so the songs below are the ones playing as she drives along the strange mountain roads, stays in seedy hotels, washes furtively in service station bathrooms, getting closer to something, and also further away from everything she’s familiar with.
The Partisan - Leonard Cohen
The most haunting song in the world! It feels self-indulgent to put this song on my playlist - I am not equating the journey of my protagonist, Calla, to that of fighting in the French Resistance! - but so much of writing for me is tapping into a Feeling, and this song has the feeling I’m striving for in the whole book: bitter, determined, beautiful. It’s also about leaving your home and everything behind and going into certain danger, and the heartbreak of that, of which Blue Ticket has plenty. I kind of imagine this as the trailer, and as I listened to it obsessively over the months and years of writing the book images came up unbidden, some of which became scenes: two women in a rusted mirror in greenish light, one with her arm around the other’s throat, staring at their reflections. A woman submerged in an unfamiliar bathtub, staring up through the water. The same woman stretched out on a hotel bed, a synthetic bedspread under her palms, the distant lights of a city outside the window.
Third Uncle - Brian Eno
This is a song to rev your car to, a song to white-knuckle your hands onto the steering wheel to, slamming your foot down on the pedal and not looking back. A song to light a cigarette to and smoke it while driving (allowed in my fictional world, as anything is), tapping the ash out of the unwound sliver at the top of the window. Harsh but full of possibility; eyes on the road.
St Ides Heaven - Elliott Smith
This to me is a song that belongs to the earlier part of the protagonist’s life, where she is still completely full of the possibilities that come when you spend your time ricocheting around the city like a shooting star. It also makes me think about my first summer in London, where I slept on a sofa and worked an array of jobs for terrible money, and somehow managed an adventure six nights out of seven, and walked around a lot in the soupy air, dizzyingly in love with everything around me.
Here Sometimes - Blonde Redhead
Anther woozy, dreamy, mournful one. Do you see a theme yet? This song makes me feel like I’m lying in a bathtub like a soluble aspirin, dissolving, or walking through a wall of smoke. It’s a song I loved as a teenager too, a song I used to listen to while walking through silent Welsh lanes on cold grey evenings, cold early mornings. It always felt so familiar to me, like I had heard it in a film or television show, like I already knew the words all along. Another theme is that these seem to often be songs that I listened to earlier in my life, and it’s nice to me to think that I’ve been carrying them with me the whole time and that they’ve been there, patient, waiting for the right moment.
I Haven’t Got Time To Cry - Irma Thomas
When I hear this song I see Calla picking herself up from another disappointment, another decision that hasn’t worked out as she expected (I am leery of calling them bad decisions, for every one of them takes her somewhere), gritting her teeth, taking a second to put her head between her knees and collect her breath, and continuing.
French Disko - Stereolab
Slight frantic interlude - philosophical soul-searching fused with a catchy wall of sound. There’s always something so arch about Stereolab, and this self-awareness I think is something that plays into Calla’s personality, and also her idea of who she is. She’s leaning against a wall outside a bar, drunk, surveying the world and finding it lacking. She operates on a layer of irony, even when in deep emotional pain, maybe even especially so.
Help I’m Alive - Metric
And I feel like the counterpoint to French Disko is this song, which feels more raw emotionally even if more polished musically, more sincere in a way that sometimes we shy away from in songs, I think, unless we’re in a certain mood. The words go “Help I’m alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer”, which floors me with the simplicity, and with the size of this admittance of vulnerability. This is Calla when she’s trying to pretend but cannot, in the later stages of the journey, her pregnancy progressing and her fear too.
Vitamin C - Can
The wry jauntiness! I love Can so much. The songs on this playlist separate quite neatly into ‘feeling’ songs, and ‘soundtrack’ songs. This is a ‘soundtrack’ song, the type you can imagine things happening to - a montage perhaps, Calla checking into more motels, walking along badly-lit corridors, washing her hands in public bathrooms. Running through woods, looking over her shoulder at all times. (Sorry for the vagueness! No spoilers!)
Ashes to Ashes - Warpaint
I can’t truly prefer this version to the original, but for the purposes of the playlist it’s perfect. Even the lyrics - “I never did anything out of the blue”. There is something beautiful I think in covers, in the refiguring and adapting, turning a beloved song into something else. Sometimes less beloved, admittedly, but here it works, because the original has too much in it already, too many other works and too many other associations, and so I can take this one and make it mine.
Fade Into You - Mazzy Star
This is a song that seems to evoke infinite embracing dances. Like two people dancing at a school prom - not one I ever went to, but the platonic ideal of it, lights dimmed and the room full of people, tinsel or glitter overhead - and first dances at weddings, and private moments, holding each other for the first or middle or last time. But it’s also not that sad, it’s happy-mournful, so I can enjoy it even if I’m drunk and am crying a tiny bit, thinking about the beauty in the world, and about how good it is to love someone, sometimes. It’s the song I associate with the parts when Calla allows herself to connect to someone else.
Corporeal - Broadcast
The problem was deciding what Broadcast song I would put on the playlist, being one of my favourite bands in the world. But this one both gave me the sensation of dissociating from a body while also being very much in it, and the lyrics back it up. You could dance to it at an indie nightclub while eyeing up someone across the room, or grimly smoke a cigarette in the dark, contemplating.
Cherry-coloured Funk - Cocteau Twins
This is another one along with The Partisan that I think really encapsulates the mood of the book. I truly love that feeling, when you come across a song or piece of art or film that feels so deeply in communion, even obtusely, with what you’re doing; that cosmic sense of being in some sort of conversation. Maybe I’m over-romanticising the process! But also I feel deeply plugged into something that I can’t explain when I listen to this song. It gives me billowing pinks, surreal drifting through room after rooms that are different, and yet the same things happen and the same thoughts repeat. There’s a deep softness at the centre of the Calla’s hard world that is revealed, a secret opened up to her. This song soundtracked a whole scene near the end which I cut for being too weird - through surreal and absurd and into the deeply psychedelic, a scene of heavily pregnant women, tequila, luxuriant fabrics, brass bands, evening gowns - but the textures of that scene never really left the novel, or left me.
The Passenger - Iggy Pop
This one I put in just for fun - ironic, self-referential. Calla is the passenger! It’s just a great song also. Though Blue Ticket is a fairly dark book, there are moments of humour throughout, and of self-awareness, and so this felt like the right note to end on. She looks to camera, makes eye contact with you one last time - and then the credits roll, this playing over them.
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