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August 9, 2022
Melody Razak's Playlist for Her Novel "Moth"
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.
Melody Razak's debut novel Moth is a compelling and moving portrait of a Delhi family during the Partition.
The Times wrote of the book:
"Gripping... Razak painstakingly paints a portrait of a family; their rituals, their private languages, their shared lives. This careful characterisation pays off, heartbreakingly, when the horrors of partition wreak havoc on small, happy lives."
In her own words, here is Melody Razak's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Moth:
Anuradha Paudwal - Gayatri Mantra
I wrote a large section of the first draft of Moth in Varanasi in India.
Every morning, at around 6am, I would walk along the backstreets from my hostel in Dashashwamedh Ghat to Assi Ghat, stop for a quick thimble of chai before disappearing into my favourite café to write. Makeshift temples and bony cows were squeezed into the tiny lanes and local early risers would pour water and milk along their steps to cleanse and purify. This mantra would play on repeat from every open door and window and those tiny streets would fill with the sweetness of the sound that became coterminous to creativity. There is something so soothing, so almost mythical in the gentle repetitions and I would find myself humming the melody even as I sat down, opened my laptop and began to write.
The first draft of Moth had a line from the mantra threaded through the narrative, that although eventually cut, I hope remains as a palimpsest beneath the final story.
The Beatles - Within You Without You
I have listened to the Beatles on and off since adolescence. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, their Indian influenced album is one of my favourites. Like all the songs in the selection that follows, I would listen to this with my headphones on, a dawn walk along the Ganges on my way to write. Depending on the song, always loud, I would walk quickly, fingers drumming my thighs, or I would meander and stare out across the water.
When you’re writing all day, music brings a welcome respite.
I love the philosophy behind the lyrics. That we are after all very small and that life flows into us, around us and out of us, that there is much to be said about the space between bodies that can separate or connect us.
As for the tension between sitar and violin, offset by the tabla, it floors me every time. I can almost feel the strings pulling against the skin on the back of my legs, the quick fingers tapping against my temples.
Nina Simone - Work Song
I love the way Nina Simone draws out the political story telling of her race and times and sets these narratives against a poignant melody. In "Work Song" especially, the melody is so lively and even as I can feel my limbs perk and move to the defiant rhythms, the brutality of the words pierce through me. I love music that works like this affecting the listener on multiple levels. The cry for emancipation is loud and clear and the sentiment, the flagrant unfairness leaves me short of breath.
I was so eager when writing Moth to find ways of exploring the intimate human experience against the grand political one and to offset them against each other. Nina Simone does this beautifully every time.
P. J. Harvey - Is this Desire?
Not only is P.J Harvey akin to a god in my eyes, but this song in particular I find so lazily, confidently seductive – her voice grating along all the senses, twanging all the right nerves – that I can’t actually listen to it in public, for the way my legs cross at the knee.
A sublime masterclass in considered pacing.
Her voice touches some inner pith and reminds me of how I want to do a similar thing with the characters I write – I think of Pygmalion and Aphrodite who breathed the heat of fire into his cold marble statue.
As for desire, what is it but that slippery abstraction I am always trying to pin to my characters, the way I myself rifle for ‘the secrets in their eyes’, and a greater understanding of the spaces they consume.
Nick Cave – God is in the House
I listened to a lot of Nick Cave whilst writing the first draft of Moth. I find his skill in narrative song writing, his turns of phrase, to be utterly superior to most other song writers. I would defy anyone not to find a dozen strange and enticing stories to tell after a day of Nick Cave.
I love the playfulness of this song. The delicate piano intro that is slightly fairy tale-ish. The seemingly sincere religious devotion until you start listening to the lyrics of this ‘very pretty town’ so devoid of any colour or edge, but simmering with a whitewash of hypocrisy.
The best line has to be, ‘And we’ve bred all our kittens white, so you can see them in the night.’
So on point. So clever the way it unspools the structures of organised religion in those soft, dulcet tones with a secret nod and half an ironic smile.
Pulp – Common People
What I listened to when I was in India and homesick for the friends and memories that make up a life. I despise Brexit England and remember sitting in a guest house in Leh in Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas, the first draft of Moth finished, surrounded by fellow Europeans who could not understand why England had voted against. Under their scrutiny, I was hot with shame but songs like this tethered me back home in the best possible way.
Glastonbury Festival, stumbling into a secret gig in the Park Field: Jarvis Cocker on stage, all thin hips, belting out "Common People," I dropped my bag, kicked of my shoes, attempted to lose all dignity.
Writing is made up of memories like this, the essence of which I am always trying to peg down. Songs like this played loud make me glad to be alive, bring precious minutes of clarified joy.
Genuis lyrics and so perfectly tongue in cheek.
Plus, a secret disco for one. What more could you ask for?
Max Richter – Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works
I have included this album in its entirety as I believe it must be listened to as one song for the full, glorious effect. It is how I listened to it on all those long train journeys across the sub-continent when reading was no longer an option and neither was sleep.
We begin with Mrs Dalloway in the "Garden/Meeting Again." The piano plucks at the heart, the strings cause the heart to soar and then to drop. This is how I imagine falling in love to sound. It reminds me too of the quote from Mrs Dalloway, the novel, when Clarissa remembers an incident in her adolescence, ‘Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination: a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.’
I am always trying to capture that moment of illumination in a character. I will spend the rest of my life trying.
About half way into the album, let’s call it song, there is the sound of the clock chiming, fading and echoing and then the words, quoted from Woolf herself, of memory as the ‘capricious seamstress.’
The final reading from Woolf’s suicide note has a devastating impact and always leaves me reeling.
I defy you to listen to this in its entirety and not feel a range of emotions creeping along your neck, swelling your heart and head. A song to lose yourself in and wake up eyes blinking against the light.
Placebo – Running up that Hill
Because Kate Bush.
Also, the words, ‘Be running up that hill,’ reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost which I read religiously whilst researching Moth, the wisdom of it so valuable to a first-time novelist as impressionable as myself.
‘Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.’
Okay, I said.
I feel this song covered by Placebo in their own very distinct voice is a vital reminder that all art borrows and copies and superimposes and that as an artist or writer, you have an entire library at your disposal. Use it well.
Patti Smith – Free Money
I love the slow build up from the tinkle of the piano intro to a frenzy of sound and movement. Because sometimes after you have been writing all day sequestered in your tiny room, you just need to stick your headphones on and dance with wild abandon to the sound of voice-symbols-drums clashing furiously and faster than your own limbs can follow. Guaranteed you will end the song in a hot sweaty mess collapsed on the floor and grateful for it.
I say you when I actually mean me.
Also, Patti Smith.
Devdas Soundtrack - Silsila Ye Chahat Ka
I have no idea what this song is about but I like to imagine the following: love, unrequited as well as true, family, death, murder, clandestine meetings in dark alleys, cheap whiskey and all the gods.
High-drama in all its magnificent forms.
I also like to imagine that if Ma and Alma were real they would be singing this round the courtyard, Daadee Ma shooting them filthy looks from the charpoy, Dilchain-ji in the kitchen dancing around the copper water carrier, even Bappu would be tapping a toe. They are all characters from Moth and it gives me great pleasure to see them thus entertained.
Close your eyes and you too can see the sequined skirts swirling dervish like, the gold feet tapping, the ropes of dark hair unravelling. The audience in the cinema on their feet in the aisles, clapping and whopping.
Bollywood magic.
Leonard Cohen – You Want it Darker
A slow almost biblical start, Greek chorus like, and then that voice, raddled and unkempt after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes and singing, it feels as though some great wisdom is about to be imparted.
I love the thought-provoking ambiguity of this song, the grainy texture of the deep male voice. Amongst the religious overtones, I can never quite work out who the ‘we’ is that kills the flame, whether in fact it alludes to organised religion as I believe it might, or something else. There is a deep and rolling sadness in the melody, a sense of futility, of extinction even and yet it is never mawkish.
During moments of writing Moth, faced with the mammoth task of trying so hard to capture a devastating moment in history, with all the requisite weight that required, music like this took my hand, inched me one step closer.
CocoRosie - Beautiful Boyz
Another sublime example of music that excels in story-telling full of deliberate contradictions and questions like all the best story-telling should be.
CocoRosie’s music touches on fairy tale and nursey rhyme both in the poetry of the lyrics, the whimsy of the rhymes and the constant tension between the two voices, one high-pitched and angelic, the other low and defiant and gritty.
There is something so transgressive about this song, especially in the lyrics, but yet it manages to be playful, whilst keeping you firmly on the edge. The transgression is encouraged and welcomed for the way it bends, curves the song into a shape of its own, for the way it prods at the listener’s imagination.
I am always searching for characters that are nuanced, neither good nor bad, nor well behaved but a mixture of all things. ‘A devil’s child with dove wings’ is an image I find particularly potent.
Melody Razak started writing Moth while studying for her MA in creative writing at Birkbeck. Previous to writing, she owned the café treacle&co and more recently worked in the kitchens of Honey and Co. in London as a pastry chef. Melody has been awarded distinctions for her short stories, and has also written articles for the Observer, Food Monthly, and the Sunday Times. Moth is her first novel.
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