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July 8, 2022
Conner Habib's Playlist for His Novel "Hawk Mountain"
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.
Conner Habib's debut novel Hawk Mountain is masterfully crafted literary noir.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"The tension is palpable on every page, and Habib skillfully illustrates the complexity of relationships and the pain of unmet desires, both queer and otherwise. His prose is as brutal as it is profound and beautiful."
In his own words, here is Conner Habib's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Hawk Mountain:
“The Weight of Things” by The Gloaming
I moved to Ireland in 2019, but was (and I still am) writing about America. For the whole first year, The Gloaming’s album The Gloaming 3 led me into Ireland. The song’s lyrics are in Irish and come from a poem by Liam Ó Muirthile. I didn’t know what was being sung, so the song remained opaque. It was how I felt about my new home: still trying to figure it out, but comforted and held by it. Later, I’d learn the translated version fit Hawk Mountain more than I could know.
“The weight of your corpse as we waked you three nights and three days//The weight of the terror in your eyes as they called to you from the other side.//The weight of your refusal to go.//The weight of the anchor from yonder as it took a firm hold of you.//The weight of secrets that had nowhere now to hide.//The weight of unspoken love that death’s call freed in you.//The weight of confusion that had your head in a merry-go-round.//The weight of life draining away. The weight of my last visit…”
The miracle of how songs live in us, even when we aren't sure how!
“As Long As I Live” by Bruce Peninsula
“You can’t hide what you want,” the songs tells us. Whatever you repress will find a compromised solution. Sometimes the compromise is a desperate, violent distortion.
“And Then You Kissed Me” and “And Then You Kissed Me II” by The Cardigans
A brace of songs that, though they’re separated by two years, are best played together. I wrote Hawk Mountain first as a short story years ago, with melodrama in mind. Exaggerated gestures and panic that reveal something more truthful than “realism” can. Patricia Highsmith, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, crime novels. The idea was to show love that doesn’t know it’s love until it has already exacted violence. Nothing is revealed until it’s too late.
The first version of “And Then You Kissed Me” is pretty enough; it creates a metaphor of love as threatening. The second version is the final song on the final album by The Cardigans, and the aforementioned threat is embedded in the song. So the final word on the final song of the final album — sung so forcefully by Nina Persson, who is one of the greatest singers of our time — eclipses all that came before it. And the word is “end.”
“If You Can Hold Your Breath” by Karate
I grew up with Karate; as they changed, I changed. from 1993 - 2005, their songs became increasingly complex as their commitment to jazz and American traditional music grew. Apparently they’re touring now, again. Thank God. There is a beautiful, artful loneliness in everything they play. This song, from their first full length, is about a gathering of people at Walden Pond that leaves you attenuating to something else. The woods, the water, the sand. Noticing your surroundings while your friends are off drinking and swimming, you can feel like you’re a world away.
“Stick Around” by David Ramirez and “Dizzy” by Throwing Muses
Sometimes I find a song that I’ll listen to on repeat, literally for a few hours on end as I write. The song intones a sort of mood into the writing. These songs both found their way into the book, not in any literal sense, but as gestures. Played again and again, until the obsessiveness of the music overtook me and blocked everything else out and my fingers started moving on the keyboard. I can’t tell you, exactly, how these songs figure into Hawk Mountain, but they’re in it, nevertheless.
“White Dress” by Lana Del Ray
Even though this song came out after I’d finished Hawk Mountain, there’s a longing for life before it was interupted that fits so well. My friend, the Irish journalist Una Mullally, played it for me and remarked on its nostalgic strangeness. In case you hadn’t noticed, most of the songs on this playlist have a nostalgic aspect to them, if for no other reason than when they came out. I was hooked. It’s a singularly haunting song.
Remember when things were different.
Remember when things had a completely different potential to them.
And then.
“The Dam at Otter Creek” by Live
The feedback and hum of this song was inspired by a dream one of the band members had, and it found its relationship to a tributary of the Susquehanna River somehow. It just feels like Pennsylvania to me; occultic, beautiful, abandoned. Even though Hawk Mountain takes place in fictional New England towns, my childhood in Pennsylvania inspired the emotional weight of the whole thing.
“Sexual Frustration” by Brainiac, “Legs” by PJ Harvey, and “Be Aggressive” by Faith No More
High school songs.
I once read a review of Brainiac’s Bonsai Superstar that said “If the devil had a band, it would be Brainiac.” I bought this CD was 16, and I felt like I was encountering something absolutely terrible, frightening. While “Sexual Frustration” doesn’t necessarily match the intensity of other songs on the album (especially not “Hot Metal Dobermans”) it’s probably closer to the unhinged manic teenaged boy sexuality as any song I’ve ever heard. It’s too overwhelming to be rhythmic, but there is still some sort of cadence that means you can’t get it out of your head.
On the other hand, “Legs”, which came out one year earlier, is the fantasy of enacting desire no matter what the cost. Though it’s not frenzied like “Sexual Frustration” it’s much scarier to listen to. It’s not a depiction of how things are, but how things could be if they’re not let go of, not healed.
Finally, one year before that, “Be Aggressive” came out on Faith No More’s Angel Dust, capturing the pulse of the entire school. Of course I was in school when it came out, and it was all there: The joking about being gay and the joke of being straight; the cheerleading demands to, well, be aggressive; the posturing; and the sociality amplified to Vincent-Price-organ-sound-level. When everyone is confused about who they are, everyone is searching for guidance from everyone else, and everyone is failing.
“Rest My Head Against The Wall” by Heatmiser
Elliot Smith’s old band featured another brilliant frontman and songwriter, Neil Gust. So much of the novel is about the exiling of certain types of people from certain commonwealths of desire. Gust’s song illustrates that, and painfully so. I imagine this song, also, filling in some of the years we don’t see in the book.
“Sex War” by Lungfish
Don’t ask, just let it thrum in your blood.
“Divine Forgiveness” by Susie Ibarra
Hawk Mountain begins with a poem by the great Irish poet Paul Perry, and it’s an unforgiving one. It fits because the novel in many ways belongs to the earth, not the heavens. Everyone that has read the book and is searching for something else, some other way out, can ease into Susie Ibarra’s song (and actually the whole album, Walking on Water). It’s a different world entirely; even the birds are different there. Nut you get the feeling that anyone who felt the feelings Ibarra evokes here could find another path in life.
“Before You Go” by Sarah Jaffe
“My heart pretends//Not to know how it ends” To write Hawk Mountain, I had to draw on depression, break ups, and the most crushing moments of my life. Suburban Nature by Sarah Jaffe, which “Before You Go” is the first track on, was like a mast I tied mysef to get through one of those times. Jaffe is one of the most versatile and emotionally affecting artists making music today; once you listen to her, you don’t forget her. Like heartbreak, there’s a mark.
“Basement” by Danny Malone
Without revealing too much of what happens in the book, this is the “closing credits” song.
(As of the writing of this, Malone’s excellent angst-ridden 2009 pop-folk album Cuddlebug is not available on Spotify, but here’s a great live rendition on YouTube.)
Conner Habib hosts the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, which features conversations with artists, intellectuals, and countercultural figures, and covers topics as wide-ranging as punk rock, philosophy, pornography, and occultism. His nonfiction writing has appeared in multiple online and print magazines. He lives in Ireland. Hawk Mountain is his first novel.
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