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January 26, 2021
David Leo Rice's Playlist for His Novel "A Room in Dodge City 2"
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.
David Leo Rice's novel A Room in Dodge City 2 is smart, inventive, and bizarre.
Brian Evenson wrote of the book:
"Dodge City 2 is the Künstlerroman on acid, a heady investigation of creation, originality, and collapse."
In his words, here is David Leo Rice's Book Notes music playlist for his novel A Room in Dodge City 2:
This is a playlist for A Room in Dodge City, Vol. 2: The Blut Branson Era, the sequel to my first novel, A Room in Dodge City, and the middle installment in a developing trilogy. These books take place in an eerie, ominous desert town, a “Dodge City of the mind” located on a map where western Kansas abuts the Hollywood Hills. Vol. 2 concerns the haphazard efforts of the narrator—a nameless drifter—to make a place for himself in the notoriously cultish Dodge City Film Industry, ruled by the legendary director Blut Branson, who may have died generations ago, if he ever lived, though not before possibly creating all of Dodge City as a set for his films.
I’ve often described Dodge City 2 as my “anxiety of influence” novel, in which the narrator has to take on the long shadow of his “primal father” and find out if he has anything of his own to say. The music that informed this project, some of which I listened to while writing it and some of which made an earlier, more indelible impression on me—sadly, whoever said that you hear the music that defines your life between ages 15 and 25 was correct—expresses feelings of being lost in the desert, or on a lonely highway in the dead of night, approaching strange borderlands fraught with excitement, dread, and the feeling of creeping toward the middle of your life with a yawning terror that you’ve become unmoored, having left the safe harbor of your origins with no far shore visible on the horizon.
This playlist follows a three-part trajectory mirroring the emotional and narrative arc of the novel.
Part 1: Drifting Off
Pinback, “Bloods on Fire”: I discovered this band in high school, around 2003 or 2004, in what I now look back on as the “Limewire era,” when people were just beginning to pirate individual songs, and thus my friends and I all burned CDs with a few songs by a few bands, never any full albums, despite our earlier years of haunting record stores with our allowance money. Pinback is one of my favorite finds of this era, expertly conveying half-human and half-cybernetic late-nite vibes—feelings of either losing yourself or drifting into deeper contact with your true self in a land of CB-radios and lost transmissions, after perhaps a few hits of salvia. The fact that these songs emerged from a portal in the then-still-mysterious Internet is audible in the songs themselves.
I remember listening to “Bloods on Fire” on repeat on the beach when I went camping with my family in the Virgin Islands. After walking to the freestanding bathhouse to brush my teeth before bed, I’d stand on the beach with my Discman and listen four or five times, holding my toothbrush and staring at the black waves in the moonlight.
Counting Crows, “Recovering the Satellites”: This was another band that I listened to a lot on that beach in the Virgin Islands. Counting Crows are considered something of a “guilty pleasure” nowadays, though I maintain that Adam Duritz is one of the greatest singers and lyricists in pop music, and that early Counting Crows touched on something just as valid and lasting as the more macho grunge bands of the '90s, by whom they’re now overshadowed. This song, in particular, informed the whole Dodge City project, seeding the notion of someone coming “home, to this faithless town,” and uncovering the fertile junction between rural America and the cosmic space in which, one hopes, the satellites still stand to be recovered.
Califone, “Spider’s House”: I love the clacky, chaotic soundscape that Califone is able to create, the feeling that the song is about to fall apart, and yet it never quite does. Many of my books—Dodge City 2 very much included—are interested in quasi-outsider-artists, people with a local following but also something paranoid and obsessive about them, an allergy toward the wider Art World and an unwillingness or an inability to streamline and “normalize” their work for wider consumption. Califone epitomizes both the strangeness and the deep integrity of this creative orientation.
Scott Walker, “Cossacks Are”: Speaking of cult artists, Scott Walker is at the top of that list, embodying a contradictory merger of genuine, irreducible weirdness and profound international influence, putting him in a rarified category with artists like Alexander McQueen and Hans Bellmer. I love how Walker’s songs take place in a world that only he can inhabit and yet how, as a listener, we can still perceive the legitimacy of that world, and perhaps even pay it a visit. This is what I aspire to with Dodge City and, by extension, with the larger map on which all my books and stories interconnect.
Burial, “Near Dark”: When I was working on this book, in bursts between 2015 and 2020, I was reading a lot of the British theorist and music critic Mark Fisher, who wrote about the sense of longing for a bygone vision of a future that never came. The enigmatic electronic artist Burial was one of his favorite subjects for exploring the sound and feel of a such an “era of lost futures” (as Fisher claimed the 2010s were shaping up to be), so I include this song here because the Dodge City narrator has such a feeling about his own aspirations: he remembers having dreamed of attaining a “Life in Movies” as a great director, but now that dream feels secondhand, almost naïve, though he has no choice but to pursue it anyway, because no new aspiration has emerged to replace it.
Archy Marshall, “Dull Boys”: This song gets at the half-asleep, drifting state of mind which, in a synesthetic sense, is how the Dodge City Outskirts sound to me. It also has a subterranean sense of menace, like something is bubbling up from deep underground, or a dark notion is creeping inward from the edges of your mind—the kind of paranoia I sometimes indulge where I fear that, if I let my mental guard down, I will open myself up to possession by outside forces, or by an otherwise latent part of myself (which I both do and do not want to be possessed by). Insofar as I conceive of the towns in my work as psycho-geographies, mapping states of mind and regions of thought onto various districts and neighborhoods, this song masterfully conveys the slippage between inner and outer terrain.
Orville Peck, “Dead of Night”: This song continues the psycho-geographical voyage of the previous one, but in a more literal sense, telling a story about “strange canyon roads” and a “dead of night” drive to nowhere. The instrumentation combines country, folk, and something spacier and more modern in a way that I try to do in my prose, as well. As I was developing the numinous connections between Dodge City and the Hollywood Hills, this song was my anthem, and it’s the song that I heard playing on the radio in the black limo that the narrator rides in, or imagines riding in, down from his mansion in the Hills to attend the premiere of his films in the center of town, far below.
Chromatics, “Into the Black”: This would be the next song on the radio in that imagined limo ride, picking up on the same mood as Orville Peck, but in a less ragged, smoother, more urbane style, conveying both the glamor and the eeriness of a sultry solo act in a half-empty cocktail lounge just before dawn, perhaps on the outer edges of Las Vegas, far from the tourist traps… the kind of scene that David Lynch is so fond of (it’s no surprise that Chromatics make an appearance in the new season of Twin Peaks). There’s something so elegiac about this song, like a farewell to the land of the living—Ruth Radelet sounds like she’s ushering you out of this life and, as the title suggests, into the black.
Air, “How Does It Make You Feel?”: Now we’re past consciousness altogether, fading into a private netherworld. Whenever I needed to get a cavity filled or undergo another dental procedure during high school and college, I would ask the dentist to let me listen to my headphones, and would play this song as the Novocain and laughing gas were taking effect, the whooshing in the background of the song soundtracking the whooshing of the gas into my brain. In the book, there’s a scene where the narrator believes he’s undergone a lobotomy after having his nerves pulled out of his head during a screening of Dead Ringers 2, an apocryphal David Cronenberg film—needless to say, this is the song I imagine playing during that illicit surgical interlude.
Part 2: Waking Up
The Handsome Family, “Weightless Again”: On the far side of the anesthesia (and whatever was done to us while we were out), this is a “morning song,” an awakening from gauzy abstraction and a return to consciousness, narrative, and the more stable Western setting of the Dodge City novels. This husband-and-wife duo, made famous when one of their songs was used during the opening credits of True Detective S1—but much more than a one-hit wonder—writes noirish tales of drifters at large in the American West, seeking clarity, revenge, or simply relief. I love everything they’ve done, and have seen them with my wife in NYC several times. They deserve immense credit for preserving and extending a vital American tradition of murder ballads and hard-luck drinking songs, while infusing them with a unique blend of eccentricity, self-awareness, and droll humor.
Calexico, “Splitter”: Now the sun’s really rising and we’re moving deeper into the hot desert, just as Dodge City 2 does in its second half, when the true reckoning with the spirit of Blut Branson becomes inevitable. Drawing on my background in Jewish mythology, I’ve always seen the desert as a proving ground, the place where grand dramas play out, and the dead zone that the spirit must cross before (perhaps) reaching resolution and safety on the far side. To that end, Calexico has provided me with a constant soundtrack for the beauty and terror of desert journeys and confrontations.
Meat Puppets, “Up on the Sun”: This marks the turn from desert grandeur to desert delirium. The tangled guitars and psychedelic lyrics of this Arizona band perfectly encapsulate the sense of dehydration and growing confusion that sets in after too long in the desert, the point at which the longed-for oasis on the horizon reveals itself to be just another mirage, and you begin to suspect you’ve been walking or riding in circles. A recurring device in the Dodge City books is an episode where the drifter “escapes” Dodge City to wander in the desert, only to find himself back in Dodge City (or in another Dodge City) on the far side, and the Meat Puppets convey this maddening recurrence better than any other band I know.
Ennio Morricone, “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly”: This is the perfect soundtrack for the ultimate, glaring-sun showdown in the deep desert, the climactic moment when the narrator and Blut Branson (or one of his many stand-ins) finally meet, on an abandoned movie set, and the identity struggle becomes literal for the first time.
Twilight Singers, “Forty Dollars”: This is a gritty, heavy song about fending for yourself in the dirty reality of the adult world, which the narrator awakens to on the far side of the identity struggle, as he sees how finding his identity in the Dodge City Film Industry might also mean losing his identity as an autonomous drifter. The mood of this song is corrupt and jaded (“buy me love for forty dollars”), as if sung from the offices of some fourth-rate production company on the outskirts of LA, staffed by those whose dreams of a legitimate “Life in Movies” are long dead.
Part 3: Looking Back
The Go-Betweens, “Streets of Your Town”: As Dodge City 2 moves toward its conclusion, the narrator enters a town-wide competition to remake Fellini’s autobiographical Amarcord, but set in Dodge City. As a drifter, he knows he’s not really from there, but he nevertheless makes a film where he claims to be, thereby cementing himself into the town’s revisionist legacy. This song gets at the sense of returning to someone else’s hometown and trying to make it your own.
Also, I have a personal connection to Australia because I took a gap year before college and lived there for the first six months. It was the first place where I’d ever lived alone, and thus the first place where I felt like a drifter, someone whose reason for being where they were wasn’t immediately obvious. I felt both the freedom and the fear that came with just happening to be somewhere, and so my experiences in Australia have informed my approach to writing about America, just as Australia itself is a kind of “bizarro-America,” another isolated, continent-sized nation filled with formerly-British weirdos clustered in coastal cities, with overwhelmingly vast territories, stolen from the native populations, in between. As one of Australia’s most iconic bands, The Go-Betweens have always had a place in my heart.
Lucinda Williams, “Lake Charles”: On the topic of drifters revising their origins to bolster their personal mythologies, this might be the most iconic song I know. When Williams sings, “He was born in Nacogdoches, that’s in East Texas, not far from the border… but he liked to tell everybody he was from Lake Charles,” the pathos in her voice is overwhelming. A perfect song.
Soul Asylum, “Homesick”: This is the third song in a mini-suite about being “homesick for the home I’ve never had,” as the chorus goes here. This time, it gets at a more cosmic, existential homesickness, a feeling of being not of this world and yet stuck within it. The Dodge City drifter may not know it, but I think this is really his predicament: it’s not about fitting into one town or another, but rather about how to live on Earth in the first place.
Magnolia Electric Co., “Whip-Poor-Will”: This is a classic Dodge City song, an anthem for the entire project, as it gets at the feeling of being a drifter holed up in the “Southern Cross Hotel,” watching the “desert cover over paradise.” By the end of Dodge City 2, as the drifter assumes the mantle of being Blut Branson, no longer lingering around as an anonymous drifter, a meta-nostalgia sets in, wherein he’s now not only homesick for wherever he came from originally, but also for his early days in Dodge City, when he was just there, before he’d tried to become somebody.
Phoebe Bridgers, “Garden Song”: To catch us up to the spring of 2020, when I was doing final edits on the book during the Covid lockdown in NYC, this song was heavily on rotation. It perfectly encapsulates the ominous, disconnected mood of that period, as well as containing an inspired scene of cinematic seduction and dreaminess (“I don’t remember what I’m seeing… the screen turns into a tidal wave”) that resonates with the book’s many interludes inside Dodge City’s “Temple,” the holy shrine that only shows Blut Branson’s films, where the narrator both finds and loses himself in the bath of flickering light.
Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul”: My other favorite song of last spring was Bob Dylan’s 17-minute opus, which begins by dramatizing the Kennedy assassination before developing, in classic Dylan style, into a prime piece of American myth-making, as well as a sly interrogation into that same process. Detailing a long line of national tragedies and conspiracies, as if Kennedy’s decapitated ghost were drifting through a farewell tour of the nation in his blood-soaked convertible, it felt like both a fitting end to the editing process on Dodge City 2 and a tone-setting entry point into the writing of Dodge City 3, which I’m working on now, just as we enter what seems primed to be an even more fraught period of American history.
In the trilogy’s final installment, I need to find a fitting way to burn Dodge City down, and for the drifter to make some peace with it and hence with his past and future as a 21st century American, so Dylan’s song, which feels like a leave-taking from the entire sordid and grandiose American story (in which Dylan himself has played a significant role), is a fitting place to begin, and will remain on rotation until the new book is finished.
David Leo Rice is a writer and animator living in New York City. He’s also the author of the novels A Room in Dodge City, The PornME Trinity, and Angel House, one of Dennis Cooper’s favorite books of 2019. David’s debut short-story collection, Drifter, is forthcoming in mid-2021. He’s online at raviddice.com.
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