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August 10, 2022
Emma Seckel's Playlist for Her Novel "The Wild Hunt"
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.
Emma Seckel's novel The Wild Hunt is a haunting and compelling debut.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Treading deftly into the worlds of folklore and magical realism, Seckel keenly captures a tone that echoes the eerie moor scenery of the island: hazy, haunting, and teeming with misgivings. A foreboding mystery with surprising glimmers of hope."
In her own words, here is Emma Seckel's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Wild Hunt:
I’ve always considered music an important means of entering a story—probably because in addition to being a writer, I’m also a classically trained singer, dancer, and musician. One of the first things I like to pin down when beginning work on a new story is the mood (I have said, more than once and not-quite-jokingly, that my first drafts are always ‘just vibes’), and to do that, I almost always turn to music, starting compile a playlist the moment I start mulling over the seed of a new project.
For The Wild Hunt, that mulling began nearly 5 years ago, and by the time I put the finishing touches on the final draft of the novel, the accompanying playlist was, to put it mildly, quite unwieldy.
Here I’ve chosen a small selection of the tracks from that hulking artefact of a playlist. These songs share a lot of similarities when it comes to theme and sound. They’re about love and death and regret and hope, and I think that together they start to capture what I was working towards in that first, vibey draft.
SEVENTH DAY (EXTENDED) — VOKA GENTLE
The initial seed of inspiration for The Wild Hunt came during my time living in Scotland while at the University of St Andrews. It was there that I discovered Voka Gentle, not-quite-accidentally—fellow students of the university, they were my upstairs neighbours for a year. I didn’t realise it until recently, despite the fact that ‘Seventh Day’ has been on my personal playlist for The Wild Hunt since the beginning, but its lyrics sum up the crux of the novel quite well: It’s a choice made, it’s a battle, and I’m weak and I lie/But there’s a fire in my heart.
THE GHOST ON THE SHORE — LORD HURON
When I first started working on the novel, its raison d’etre was to explore the idea of place. I always wanted the island setting to feel like a character in its own right, something living and breathing and changing independently of the people inhabiting it. Place and belonging are things that Leigh, the main character of the novel, thinks about a lot, and this song in particular reminds me of Graham, Leigh’s father, who passes away just before the start of the book. Throughout the novel Leigh feels torn between two poles, represented on one hand by her mother and brother, who left their little island community as soon as they could; and on the other by her father, who never loved anything the way he loved that little island. In this track Lord Huron alludes to the idea of being tied inextricably to the place of one’s birth and death.
THE BIRDS OF FINLAND — CONNER YOUNGBLOOD
Something about the rhythmic repetition of Conner Youngblood’s music worms its way into your head and stays there. In ‘The Birds of Finland’, Youngblood matches that steady rhythm with lyrics about summer turning to fall, replete with enough bird imagery to make its inclusion on this list a foregone conclusion. In addition to being about place and history, both personal and societal, The Wild Hunt is, to me, a book about changing seasons (summer to fall, wartime to peacetime, childhood to adulthood) and a steady, inexorable march onward.
FIRST FLIGHT — MORGAN TONEY
Traditional music played a big part of the development of this novel, and I listened to a lot of it while I was writing; I find it easier to listen to instrumental music than music with lyrics when I’m wrestling with my own words. Morgan Toney’s arrangement of this traditional song reminds me of something a fiddler would play at one of the island’s festivals, something someone could dance a ceilidh to.
SHRIKE — HOZIER
There’s a darkness and an earthiness to all of Hozier’s music that I find so compelling, and it was a wrench to choose just one of his songs for this playlist (honourable mentions go to ‘In the Woods Somewhere’ and ‘In A Week’). ‘Shrike’ captures the dichotomous beauty and horror of the natural world in its central analogy of the singer’s relationship with a lover to a shrike—a carnivorous passerine bird that impales its prey on sharp thorns. Like that central analogy, the myth of the sluagh provided, for me, a similar way of entering that liminal space between beauty and horror that so often exists in nature. Besides, this song is, most superficially, about weird bird behaviour. How could I resist?
THE GOLD — MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA & PHOEBE BRIDGERS
If ‘Ghost on the Shore’ is the track that reminds me of Leigh’s father, this one reminds me of her mother, Áine. Though Áine is long gone by the start of the novel, Leigh still reckons with the sting of Áine’s abandonment, and the fact that the island that Leigh loves so dearly was, to her mother, imprisoning. The lyrics of this song speak of dissatisfaction and dissolution and disenfranchisement, and about relationships that don’t travel along smooth lines—as almost none of the family relationships in The Wild Hunt do.
MEDICINE — DAUGHTER
There’s a heady mix of regret and hope in this track. It captures quite perfectly a feeling of realising you’ve come down the wrong path but not being sure how you got there or how to get out. Whether for Leigh returning from the mainland; or for Iain, an RAF veteran, returning from war; or for Sam, Leigh’s older brother, trying to pretend he was born fully-formed in 1945—this song is the perfect soundtrack for an unexpected, un-triumphant homecoming.
THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER — VERA LYNN
As I was researching and writing the war sections of the novel I turned to a compilation of music from the 1930s and 1940s. ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ was written in 1941 and was one of the most popular songs of wartime; it’s not hard to imagine any of the characters in The Wild Hunt turning on the radio and hearing its defiantly hopeful lyrics.
WACTENAMACI — LAURA NIQUAY
As I’ve said before, the idea of setting and place as an independent character was front of mind for me while developing The Wild Hunt. As part of that, I spent a lot of time thinking about each character’s relationship to the island in the same terms I would think about their relationships with the other human characters. I was interested what it means to be from a place, of a place as more than just a hometown but as a piece of personal identity—especially when that place is changing or slipping away.
Laura Niquay’s 2021 album, Waska Matisiwin, is sung entirely in her first language, Atikamekw, a choice spurred by her observation that her nieces and nephews living in urban Quebec are losing the use of their native language.
The Wild Hunt is, in some ways, about a community feeling the homogenising force of modernity—but while the island of the novel is fictional, these certainly aren’t fictional concerns. Indigenous people, especially, have faced this threat for centuries, and continue to do so.
CAOINEADH NA MARA/AMEN (LAMENT OF THE SEA) — MARY MCLAUGHLIN & WILLIAM COULTER
I’ll end with a song that, as a whole, sounds to me how the novel feels. There’s an interesting mix of Irish Gaelic and Latin at work here, which felt fitting as the soundtrack to writing about an island community that mixes Christianity and folklore like coffee and cream. From the dark Celtic movement at the beginning to the resolving key of the ‘amens’ at the end, this track has always sounded to me like a storm passing.
Emma Seckel is an award-winning writer and photographer living in Vancouver, Canada. The Wild Hunt (Tin House) is her first novel.
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