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December 1, 2020
Eugen Bacon's Playlist for Her Story Collection "The Road to Woop Woop"
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.
Eugen Bacon's collection The Road to Woop Woop is filled with diverse stories, and every one will haunt you for days.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Bacon (Claiming T-Mo) delivers a commanding and visionary collection of speculative shorts, encompassing surrealism, fantasy, science fiction, and gorgeous, painterly literary fiction. It would be a disservice to call any of these 24 stories the standout, as each is impressive and beautifully rendered in Bacon’s distinct, poetic voice."
In her words, here is Eugen Bacon's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection The Road to Woop Woop:
In his foreword to my collection, Seb Doubinsky used an exotic metaphor of free-flowing jazz by Sam Rivers. A blend of melodies rife with deconstruction, improvisation, fragmentation. Textures moving away and toward each other in a patchworked synchrony. Doubinsky captured in his words the soul, rhythm and playfulness of my writing in a manner that was both enlightening and enriching.
The jazz I’d read the collection to is more the Alma Zygier kind. She’s a rising Australian singer from musical vintage—the child of Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier. She’s young and soulful, bohemian, bewitching! Lusty-vocals full of Jezebel… I went to her live performance once, came back and wrote ‘Her Bitch Dress’, now published in my chapbook Her Bitch Dress (2020):
That long weekend, the jazz singer and her snippet of song full of scatting. The band with its clarinet and a guitar and a piano, and the man with a crimson shirt and an ebony bowtie behind the double bass shaped like a rowboat. She commanded the audience, so young—she’s only twenty—really captured you, my love, when she sang in that dress, her flowing, strapless dress the colour of burnt orange, “I’m so lucky to have loved you.” You clutched my hand at her croon and gave her your soul.
Alma Zygier would perfectly croon and moan, swoon and belt out each story in The Road to Woop Woop, her intensity shaking you in ecstasy as you read.
If I were to pick a different beat to each story, these are the songs—some obscure, almost unknown.
The Road to Woop Woop—Shallow / Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper
This song about a searching for more, a longing for transformation, captures the tenseness of a road trip that grows more and more surreal with each disconnect between the narrator and her partner River, in a drive to an impossible place.
Swimming with Daddy—You’re My #1 / Enrique Iglesias
You kiss the moon a million times, as you witness from the highest mountain the protagonist’s strong connection with her father. He’s undoubtedly her number one, sailing her to a perfect dream. Only he can vanish her pain in the throes of melancholy.
A Nursery Rhyme—Youngblood / 5 Seconds of Summer
This song about pulling away, dead men walking, captures well the youth and deadliness of a strange-eyed child full of omen.
The One Who Sees—Papa Plus / Koffi Olomide
There’s sweetness and dignity to the rhythm of Koffi Olomide’s Papa Plus that aligns with Solo’s yearning for his father’s affection, and the boy’s own nobility in the animal spirit he possesses.
Beatitudes— Súbeme La Radio / Enrique Iglesias
It doesn’t matter that you don’t get the words in Súbeme la Radio—the lightness and playfulness in this song about moving on, about something happening you might not fully understand, despite being an integral partner to the literary act, is enough. You float with the young siren, croak with the toad on the aquatic weed, forever floating to someplace or noplace.
Snow Metal—Didn’t I / OneRepublic
This pop melody about fading in, fading out of love, flying without saying goodbye, carries you along the story of Torvill and Snow Metal—their relationship, as each tries to take over and fade out the other. Does anything have to die?
A Maji Maji Chronicle—Come with Me Now / Kongos
The harmonica in this alternative music mirrors a witchdoctor’s lure—come with me now, walk with me now, don’t delay. As he leads the unsuspecting Ngoni people with a bait of spell to a faraway place where magic may not turn the white man’s bullets into water.
A Good Ball—Cannonball / Lea Michele
Darkness and play in this pop music reassures you that you’re not losing your mind; just entering a portal illuminated with unorthodox prose and body shimmers to experimental storytelling.
A Case of Seeing—Beneath Your Beautiful / Labrinth (feat. Emeli Sandé)
The electronic earthiness in this number is a charmer for Detective Chief Inspector Lawfer McDaniel who has built her wall so high, no one can climb it. Will she let you, the reader, see beneath her beautiful, her perfect / imperfect? Will she let you touch the softness inside, as she works to solve an extraordinary murder?
The Enduring—Elastic Heart / rendition by La’Porsha Renae (original song by Sia)
She remembers landscapes, the history of silence… Highly imaginative, playful, sad. Her heart is not elastic—she feels every cut. She remembers the enduring.
Five-Second Button—1. Mood Ring / Britney Spears 2. Lasting Lover / Sigala & James Arthur
There’s only one bitch, the real one—she’s been here before. What will you do with fate in your hands, one push of the button? Don’t’ let go, or you’ll be lost without a trace. Find that lasting lover n this story of longing.
Diminy: Conception, Articulation and Subsequent Development—The Greatest Show / Hugh Jackman, Keala Settle, Zac Efron and Zendaya
Don’t fight it, Professor Bates. It’s coming at you. It’s taking over you. It’s the greatest show outside your making. It has a name: Freudo.
Mahuika—1. Rewrite the Stars / Zac Effron & Zendaya 2. Tomorrow / Brandy
What keeps two people, each meant to be the one, apart? Rewriting the stars for one who fell from the sky, the daughter of the sun, might wake you with a melt. And perhaps it’s goodbye, so long to all your pain. One last cry.
Being Marcus—Zombie / Bad Wolves
Metal, inner battle. He is a shadow of the hero he once was, now only a Brutus like the dog that bit the hand off its adoring master.
Scars of Grief—Jerusalema / Master KG (feat. Nomcebo Zikode)
Soothing beats in the heart of a catastrophe that brings together, then tears apart, two families in this metafictional narrative. Isn’t it cathartic for Ralph Patton to learn the viral rhythms of the Jerusalema dance?
The Animal I Am—Tcha Tcho du Sorcier / Koffi Olomide
The deep African drone and melodious play in Koffi Olomide’s music speaks to the playfulness of this self-reflexive tale between two reminiscing Black women.
Ace Zone— What’s Love Got to Do With It / Tina Turner
That which is physical is only logical: love has nothing and everything to do with Ace Zone’s travels from planet to planet, as she flirts with dusk… and strangers.
A Pining— You Broke Me First / Tate McRae
Every dawn, each dusk, clutching the pillow… Who broke him first?
Dying— Alive / Sia
Bluey’s life is a thunderstorm, and it morphs overnight. He’s not sure anymore that it’s about survival. All he knows is he’s alive.
Wolfmother—Writing’s on The Wall / Sam Smith
I couldn’t think of a better song than this one about fate for a protagonist sitting in a tavern, with his uncanny friends, in a night filled with copper, yellow and red.
Touched—Hallelujah / Pentatonix
Kinda self-explanatory, innit? There’s a girl, a church, three angels, and a preacher spitting serpents and bones in his sermon.
He Refused to Name It— Somebody That I Used to Know / Gotye
Timeless music has a way of gliding into your sentiments, effortlessly finding you, capturing you in an anguish of love’s crumble. Something needy and bare about somebody you used to know, and there’s a child. Calder is figuring things out.
A Man Full of Shadows— Soldier / Samantha Jade
Ralph staggers out of the woods and breaks into a quiet place. Let’s see inside your head, mate. Get you out of this mess. Nothing’s making sense.
Playback, Jury of The Heart—1. Move Your Body / Sia 2. Fight for You / Jason Derulo
Flesh on flesh, sensuality and something more worth fighting for in this love story that transcends time and space. Sia and Derulo get it.
Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is African Australian. A computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing, she studied at Maritime Campus, less than two minutes' walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian. Her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans.
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