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June 14, 2022
Eric Orner's Playlist for His Graphic Biography "Smahtguy"
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.
Eric Orner's Smahtguy is a well-researched and insightful graphic biography of former Congressman Barney Frank.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"An astute, richly detailed profile of political and gay rights icon Barney Frank . . . witty, empathic . . . Orner has a gift for capturing a sense of place, be it the halls of Congress, Boston streets on a sultry summer’s evening, or a depressed whaling town, all rendered in archly funny, colorful cartooning . . . Orner achieves an exceptional balance of poignant biography, warts-and-all character study, and salty political satire. Political bios don’t get much better than this."
In his own words, here is Eric Orner's Book Notes music playlist for his graphic biography Smahtguy:
Drawing is the thing I love best. Yet writing and drawing a graphic novel can be a lonely and, well, Sisyphean.
If I had been without things to listen to that gladdened my heart, stiffened my spine and got me in the mood to work, I’d still be toiling over the first chapter of Smahtguy, The Life and Times of Barney Frank, my graphic novel about America’s pioneering LGBTQ+ member of Congress.
I've divided my playlist into two parts: I. Songs to get me ready to work, and II. Songs to work by. Appreciate Largehearted Boy's offer to let me share this with you.
I. Songs to get me ready to work
It strikes me as pretty rare that a pop (or punk or rock or bluegrass) song addresses what it means to be American without lapsing into something schmaltzy or jingoistic. To me, X’s 4th of July evokes the loneliness and longing that exists in the space behind the noise of national holidays. The lyric --
On the stairs I smoke a
Cigarette alone
Mexican kids are shootin'
Fireworks below
--acknowledges something beautiful, not threatening, behind the fading Rockwell façade.
2. Dirty Water by The Standells
Boston is as much a character in Smahtguy as the politicos, hacks activists, gay folks, and townies that populate the book. And really, there hasn’t been a better song about what it means to be Boston than the Standell’s Dirty Water. I’d play it twice, then sit down to my drawing table and get busy drawing the town I love.
3. Me Gustas Tú by Manu Chau
Manu Chau makes me smile. And this song, crossing a love story with a sampling of late-night radio news bulletins always got me in the mood to write and draw a story about (mostly) forbidden desire with a newsy political core.
4. New York by St. Vincent
What’s a song called New York doing in a playlist for a book about Boston and DC? Well, for starters, I began drawing Smahtguy while living on 9th Avenue, and during the time that I was drawing it, I lost one of my dearest friends –who lived down the street on 16th—to alcoholism and addiction. The song’s lyrics,
New York isn't New York without you, love
So far in a few blocks, to be so low
If I call you from First Avenue
Well you're the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me
strike me as both beautiful and furious, make clear that she’s pissed at her friend who is no longer here. I know the feeling
5. Great Leap Forward by Billy Bragg
A great, galvanizing, Saint Bernard of a political song. It also speaks on a weirdly intimate level to all my insecurities:
Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses
I mean, substitute the word “pop” with “comics” and you have my life in a nutshell.
6. Sharkey’s Day by Laurie Anderson
I’d listen to this song when I needed a dose of bravery. Laurie Anderson tells a story in language that’s all her own. It’s like she takes a leap of faith and decides to use phrasing that wouldn’t survive five minutes of a writer’s workshop.
At one point in Smahtguy, I described a female politician from Boston long ago as a “Beauty Shop Godzilla”. I worried that people wouldn’t get what I meant. I listened to Sharkey’s Day, with all its wonderful, quirky wording, told in this completely funny conversational tone, and decided to go with the phrase I wanted.
7. Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed
Smahtguy is a book with sex and call boys and the seamy side very much at its front and center. The great American anthem of all things subversive has to be Walk on the Wild Side, I’d give it a spin, and be ready for work.
II. Songs to Work By
A second cluster of music is what I’d listen to when I was actually working, rather than getting ready to work. These songs were less about inspiration, more about feeling, atmosphere, mood.
8. The Universe by Gregory Alan Isakov
The lushness that flows from his band—its guitars, banjos, horns and keyboards—offset by his sorta laconic western vernacular—in all of his work—but especially in this song, are completely hypnotic to me. Which makes him perfect to draw by. He reminds me of a modern Van Morrison, who I’ve listened to all my life (I hear anything from Astral Weeks and I’m transported to an unmade bed in Brookline, Mass, thirty years ago, rumpled sheets smelling of the first boy I loved). Isakov makes me feel the same way.
9. Rock Creek Park by Oddissee
Where Boston’s personality is vibrant, DC’s can be hard to access. Especially for this white guy from the suburbs. I wrestled with this during the creation of Smahtguy, because the entire second half is about life in Washington. The key to DC, I think, is appreciating its Chocolate City roots and understanding its singular place in African American culture. This song taps into the relaxed, jazzy, sophisticated vibe that I think represents the real DC.
10. All That We Perceive by Thievery Corporation
When I’ve got hundreds of pages to draw (and ink)—Smahtguy was mostly drawn by hand, only the finishing was done in the computer—my go-to genre is Electronic. Thievery Corporation jumps out as a better-known artist from Washington, which never gets much credit as a creative capitol. (Here’s a test: Name a great movie, or TV series or novel, set in DC, that isn’t about politics? I’m stuck at The Exorcist and y’know, hello, released in 1973!) During the writing and drawing of Smahtguy, when I wanted to conjure the DC up, All that We Perceive (a good title for a town in which perceptions are everything, and often deceiving) was what I’d play
11. Leaf Off/The Cave by Jose Gonzalez
Hypnotic, rhythmic and beautiful, like many of this artist’s tracks. The lyrics are poetic and to my ear, just ambiguous enough for me to read into them what I want/need.
12. 8 Ball by Underworld
My favorite song from my favorite electronic artist. Hypnotic, funny, raw, dismissive of pretense. Driving and propulsive. With a really uplifting, racing, final several minutes (of a 9-minute track). Like plugging myself into an electric socket—I’ve played it over and over to get me over all sorts of humps. Drawing and otherwise.
Eric Orner is a former Congressional aide to Barney Frank and the acclaimed author of The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, one of the country's most popular and longest-running gay comic strips. A feature film of the same title appeared in 2005, the same year that Orner retired the comic strip. Orner has also published comic strips and illustrations in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New Republic. His cartoon story "Weekends Abroad" was included in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Comics 2011. Orner lives in New York and Smahtguy is his first graphic novel.
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