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March 31, 2022
Andrew DeYoung's Playlist for His Novel "The Temps"
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.
The Temps is an office novel, a satire of capitalism, and apocalyptic, and does all of these things brilliantly.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"This boiling-pot of a novel is a vivid experiment in millennial disillusionment...Simultaneously a dark dystopic and a hilarious tale of bureaucratic absurdity, The Temps is bizarre—and unexpectedly fun."
In his own words, here is Andrew DeYoung's Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Temps:
I wrote The Temps in an attempt to capture the disillusionment of being a young person trying to make your way in the adult world of work and capitalism. My own version of that experience happened in the aughts and early 2010s, so it's no surprise that when I picked songs to accompany this novel about young temp workers riding out a global apocalypse in the office complex of the mega corporation that employed them, I mostly chose songs that happened to be in my earbuds when I was, myself, a young office worker trying to get through the work day.
"The Execution of All Things," Rilo Kiley
This song evokes a lot of the feelings of disillusionment and apocalyptic fear I tried to capture in The Temps. The lyrics are a grab-bag of catastrophes, from war and capitalist exploitation to environmental decay, colonialism, and genocide. Whether Jenny Lewis is singing about these things literally or metaphorically, the song captures the feeling of living in a world where everything good is slowly being killed off in front of your eyes.
"Wake Up," Arcade Fire
If there's a single lyric that could capture The Temps, it's Win Butler's "I guess we'll just have to adjust." It's all about a generation coming to learn that the world isn't what they thought it was when they were kids. It pains me a little not to be able to grab an Arcade Fire deep cut, but Booklist called The Temps "a vivid experiment in millennial disillusionment," and this is the most millennial-disillusionment anthem I can think of. It's the song a lot of us elder millennials belted when we were mourning our lost childhoods and our passage into the compromised world of adults.
"We Will Become Silhouettes," The Postal Service
One of the best songs about an apocalypse that isn't by R.E.M., this track by The Postal Service gets close in spots to describing the actual apocalypse in my book. "All the news reports recommended that I stay indoors / Because the air outside will make / Our cells divide at an alarming rate..." Except for the cells dividing part, that's pretty close.
"Where the Streets Have No Name," U2
Funny story—this song actually made an appearance in an early draft of this book. My first-chapter setpiece happens at an outdoor all-company meeting, when the CEO takes the stage...and then the apocalypse happens. I had the CEO coming on to the beginning strains of this song, because I thought it was the kind of thing a billionaire with a God complex might choose as his walk-on music. Then, in the scenes of disaster that followed, the music kept playing and the lyrics took on apocalyptic significance: "We're beaten and blown by the wind...We're still building then burning down love..." I ultimately deleted the lyrics from the book out of permissions concerns, but I'll never hear the song the same way again.
"1996," The Wombats
The little dramas of our lives happen against the backdrop of impersonal forces and huge world events, and no song conveys that better than this one by The Wombats. It adopts the voice of a speaker yearning for the days of youth when he was blissfully unaware that "war was breaking out all around me”; now he’s stuck in the more complicated world of adulthood, when "we kiss with one eye on the TV set." I can think of no better encapsulation of the modern predicament, where we try to live our lives while constantly bombarded by images of major world events and symptoms of societal disease.
"Myriad Harbour," The New Pornographers
One of the things the characters in my book keep coming back to is the feeling that this must all mean something, that there is some great significance to the things happening in the world, if only they could interpret the signs. This track by The New Pornographers is my favorite expression of that feeling, where everything seems to throb with some ineffable meaning that hangs just out of reach. It tells the story of a trip to New York where, even in the midst of chaos and disconnection, a sort of epiphany looms. With its constant switching from a single singer to a collective voice, and it’s build to a symphonic chorus, the song affirms the sense that there must be some meaning hidden in the mess of contemporary life, even if it can’t tell us what that meaning might be.
"Hey Julie," Fountains of Wayne
The Temps is an office novel, so I needed at least one office song on this playlist. Fountains of Wayne has a few great songs about work ("Bright Future in Sales" is another), but "Hey Julie" is my favorite. It's a perfect example of the late Adam Schlesinger's compact, wry, and heartfelt storytelling style, expertly sketching a portrait of a guy who hates his job and lives to get back home to his partner, Julie. Work sucks, but love is the best thing in the world, and the joy of one can be held as solace against the soul-crushing drudgery of the other.
"Live While We're Young," One Direction
Another song that was in an early version of the novel! Midway through the book, I've got a group of temps deciding to deal with the apocalypse by ignoring it and just partying instead, and this is a song they play at the end of their revelry each night. I like it because this is another classic millennial/Gen Z track, but also because it comes to mean something different in the apocalyptic context. "Let's live while we're young" becomes "let's live it up before we (probably) die!" Another song I'll never hear the same, even if my editor (wisely!) told me to ditch the lyrics in the final version.
"Crown on the Ground," Sleigh Bells
An absolute banger by Sleigh Bells. Back when it first dropped, I'd absolutely crank this song in my headphones on the bus or at the office, trying to drown myself in sound on days where I was feeling down or depressed. The lyrics are a little cryptic, not least because they're practically buried in distortion, but they seem to offer a perspective about moving on and letting go of ego in order to grow. Which is exactly what the characters of The Temps struggle with, each in their own way.
"Sons and Daughters," The Decemberists
I've long adored this song, which seems to be the anthem of a group of people emerging from some sort of catastrophe ("we will arise from the bunkers") to inherit a paradise they create from the wreckage of the old world. It all culminates in the repeated chorus: "Here all the bombs, they fade away..." The song is almost prayerful, a fervent wish sung in the hope of making it come true. It is, ultimately, the song of my hope for the temps, and for all of us, really: that there's a better world waiting on the other side of all this disaster.
Andrew DeYoung is an author and editor living in St. Paul with his wife and two children. His debut novel, The Exo Project, was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.
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