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September 12, 2022
Cecil Castellucci's Playlist for Her Graphic Novel "Shifting Earth"
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.
Cecil Castellucci's graphic novel Shifting Earth is a powerful and thought-provoking treatise on climate change and life itself.
In her own words, here is Cecil Castellucci's Book Notes music playlist for her graphic novel Shifting Earth:
I am sitting in my office in Los Angeles during a horrible and relentless heatwave that has lasted over a week. The sun was blood red when it set yesterday, signaling that there’s a fire somewhere covering the sky with smoke. We are in a terrible never-ending drought in California and the farms and their crops are suffering and we will all feel the consequences of that. That’s just the reality for us on this Thursday but it’s been that way for a long time now and this march towards more and more extreme weather due to the climate crisis is what motivated me to write this book. But I didn’t want to write something hopeless, where there were no solutions and there was only dystopia. I wanted to write something that was hopeful, that had at its heart stated that today is always a good day to start doing something to help this planet that we love and live on. I wanted to write a book where we could see that there are other paths that we could have taken and that though we are human and that we may fumble, we can still course correct if we have the will to take bold actions moving forward. Shifting Earth is an attempt at having a character, botanist Maeve Lindholm, seeing and landing in a place where the grass is literally greener, but that doesn’t mean that there’s still not a lot of work to be done. When one does comics, it’s a collaboration, and so I want to give a shout out to Flavia Biondi for her beautiful art that really shows the two paths the two Earths in our book take. I’d also like to give a great big nod to our colorist Fabiana Mascolo, whose colors in the book really drive home the differences in the two worlds. This play list is a listen along mood board for the whole book, moving through the story from beginning to end.
I hope you enjoy the music and the book!
Human History by Explosions in the Sky
I am always so moved by the dreamy trueness of life that Explosions in the Sky weave into their music. Here I feel that they really capture the bittersweet folly of being human and the long history that we have in making mistakes and having a lack of awareness of the consequences. In Shifting Earth, Maeve is dealing with the fallout from the missteps that those before her have wrought. She’s living in a near future Earth where biodiversity is lacking and she’s desperately searching for seeds of hope. I thought about how at the beginning of the book there is this melancholy she has of harboring hope when it seems as though all is lost and this track sort of reflects to me how painful that feels.
A Day in the Life of a Tree by Beach Boys
This song is just a beautiful summation of the damage that we have been doing and been aware of for a long time. That’s the whole tragic thing with where we are at now in our climate journey is that we knew that we were mishandling our planet for decades. If you look at music and films from the 70s, it’s there thrumming in the background. So, this song just sets the tone for where our Earth is my near future setting. The trees are singing this to us right now. We should do something about it.
Feels like Summer by Childish Gambino
It always feels like summer now with weather snaps and extremes. And the seasons have moved from the quaint spring, summer, fall, winter to fire, hurricane, heatwave, and deep freeze. This song is shouting that and to me it feels like the conversation that Evan and Maeve have in their push and pull relationship. They agree but they have different ways of saying the same thing.
Breath of Life by Florence and the Machine
This song feels like the moment that she runs out of the seed bank and runs straight into the thing that pulls her away from our Earth and onto the next. She is conflicted within herself but then she is touched by something that whisks her away.
Disintegration Anxiety by Explosions in the Sky
Once again, Explosions really captures the mood of terror and wonder that Maeve feels as she’s pulled apart and shot across to a parallel world. This feels like various particles spinning around and reconstructing themselves in the fabric of space time. They are a great band to write to.
Moon over Marin by Dead Kennedys
The new world that Maeve lands on has two moons. It’s idyllic but there is also something sinister about it. This song also talks about water and beaches and what’s underneath your feet and this new world that Maeve finds herself on is full of islands because it’s mostly covered with water and battered with storms. It also has this horror element to it that I think kind of ties into what’s going on in this new place. But I don’t want to spoil anything! And in my opinion, punk rock has always been concerned with calling attention to the ills of the world.
(Nothing but) Flowers by Talking Heads
To me this song sort evokes a little bit of the love story that is central to the book, but also intersects with the way that Maeve is seeing double. On this Earth there are flowers everywhere, but she’s still seeing all the things from her own world that aren’t there. She’s sort of standing in both worlds when she first arrives, noticing the differences. And that last line “Don’t leave me stranded here, I can’t get used to this lifestyle.” Sort of sums up the shock that she feels from seeing all the abundance that her own world lacks but also seeing all the advances (or are they?) that we have that this world doesn’t have.
Atlantic by The Weather Station
This song is for Zuzi, the parallel character of the book who sort of mirrors Maeve. Zuzi is used to the storms, but there are forces at work that are conspiring against her because of what she is beginning to understand about her own world and so she is sent to the middle of the ocean and has her whole life upended by that. The events in the book that she witnesses, and experiences are a real awakening for her, and she knows, just as Maeve does, that she can’t turn away from what she’s discovering about the nature of her home and of the universe. It’s unsustainable. She can’t cover her eyes. And neither should we.
From a Shell by Lisa Germano
For me this song cuts to the heart of the love stories that occur in the book. Not only the romantic love, but the love of the larger world that both Maeve and Zuzi care about to the people that they are close to that mean everything to them. There is also a scene where you see a sort of theatrical presentation of one of Earth Two’s myths and I think that this song slides in there.
The sun and the moon have a lot of meaning in this book, they both incite. I love this lyric: From a little shell at the bottom of the sea, With the Earth and the Moon and the Sun around me.
Feed the Tree by Belly
This song is so joyful and is asking us all to be present for the circle of where we are all going, but in this instance, for this part of the book, I think the title says it all and has a different implication. I’ll leave it at that.
We took the Wrong Step Years Ago by Hawkwind
In conflict with Ben, Maeve really sees this new world she’s on as being on the cusp of great change. This song speaks to that section of the book and echoes the beginning of the book (and the Beach Boys song) when you have us all dealing with the consequences of lack of action. What are you going to do today to take the right step?
End by Alex Somers & Sigur Ros
Alex Somers, Sigur Ros and music like it (see Explosions in the Sky) are in constant rotation when I’m writing. This one was heavily played when I was writing Shifting Earth and I like that it’s called End and that it has that feeling of being the end of something but that ending can mean opening up and giving into your destiny and living your story with your heart forward, which is what I think Maeve and Zuzi do at the end of their story here. It has a hopeful quality to it as well, and I think an ending should have a hopeful note even if it is truly the end of things. Of course, there are no endings, there are only and always beginnings of the next chapter.
Cecil Castellucci is the award winning and New York Times Bestselling author of books and graphic novels for young adults including Shade, The Changing Girl, Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, Soupy Leaves Home, The Year of the Beasts, Tin Star, Female Furies and Odd Duck. In 2015 she co-authored Star Wars Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure. She is currently writing Batgirl for DC Comics. Her short stories and short comics have been published in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and many other anthologies.
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