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October 18, 2022
Ethan Chatagnier's Playlist for His Novel "Singer Distance"
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.
Ethan Chatagnier's Singer Distance is an outstanding debut, a smart, surprising, and captivating novel.
Foreword reviews wrote of the book:
"Exquisite. . . . Its turns are both intelligent and magical, and its surprises are heartbreaking and boundary-testing. . . . The most arresting science fiction novel in recent memory."
In his own words, here is Ethan Chatagnier's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Singer Distance:
Singer Distance is about people trying to communicate with a civilization on Mars that’s never taken much interest in humans. They only message us mathematical proofs. They only respond when we solve one, and then, only to give another, more difficult one. In that way it’s about the distance between planets, but it’s also about the distance between people, especially between Rick and his girlfriend, Crystal, who’s solved the latest proof. The young lovers are at times impossibly close, and at times unbearably distant. So that’s what you’ll find on this playlist I’ve made for Singer Distance: songs of love and distance, of space and longing.
But there’s another playlist I had long before this one, an instrumental song for each of the book’s three sections that I listened to, often on repeat, to capture the mood of that section. I’ll kick each part of the playlist off with its respective instrumental song.
PART 1
“Glassworks - Opening” by Philip Glass, performed by Valentina Lisitsa
This song has an overwhelming feeling of forward momentum, a sort of “charging horses” sound. The notes seem to almost trip on each other in their hurry to get out, to clatter like hooves. But it’s also solo piano in a way that gives it a dark, echoing sound as well. When I hear it I think of a horse galloping through the night on a secret mission–which is similar to the way the reader meets Rick and Crystal, not on horseback, but speeding across the country in the middle of the night with their own secret plan. It also matches the feeling I had writing a lot of the book in a mad rush when it was dark outside my windows, before my kids woke up or after they went to bed.
“Close to Me” by The Cure
For all the infinite ballads about being in love, about the soaring power of love, “Close to Me” captures something about it that the big-vocals songs never seem to: the fun of being close to the one you love, the eagerness for their company. Despite a dark backstory about the song being inspired by Robert Smith’s childhood visions of a disembodied head floating in his halfway (?!), it’s happy, cheerful, and intimate. Maybe sometimes being in love is like flying higher than eagle, but more often it feels like the sweet little xylophone riff this song rides on.
“Starlight” by Muse
Sorry to go radio-rock on you, but the energetic, triumphant sound of “Starlight” feels like the right one for the set piece at the end of Part 1: when Rick and Crystal reach the Arizona desert where they’ll paint a message to Mars. And the lyrics–“the starlight / I will be chasing a starlight / until the end of my life” echo the midnight discussions about love Rick and Crystal had along the way.
PART 2
“Ends of the Earth” by Dirty Three
After the desperate charge of Part 1, Part 2 tells the story of Rick’s life, his plans, disintegrating. It’s a tale of entropy, with all the direction he thought his life had slowly drifting away. Dirty Three was the band I knew I needed here, a string trio with a roughened sound and a willingness to go off the rails, but it took awhile to find the right song. Many of their songs devolve into a frenetic chaos, but I needed the opposite–energy going still–and I found it in “Ends of the Earth,”, which sounds like a ship coming to rest in becalmed waters.
“Stars” by Grace Potter and the Nocturals
What did I say about love ballads earlier? Well, in this section, not to get too spoilery, Rick and Crystal are more distant than in Part 1, and this power ballad by Grace Potter is perfect for Rick. “I can’t look at the stars, they make me wonder where you are.” You could even rhyme Mars in there: “I can’t look at the Mars.” Okay, maybe not. Nonetheless, not being able to look up, because what you see reminds you of what’s gone and it’s too painful–that feeling is perhaps the core of the book.
“Lovesong” by The Cure
Here’s The Cure at that intersection of dark and romantic they do better than anyone. Here love isn’t in the closeness but is a tether across the distance. The longing, the pain, in Robert Smith’s voice when he stretches out “However far away, I will always love you,” that’s Rick. That’s the song he’d have on repeat.
PART 3
“Infra 5” by Max Richter
This part is the reflection of Part 2—if Part 2 is about slowing down until you’ve lost all momentum, Part 3 is about waking back up again. Slowly, at first, as Rick finds himself crossing the country again, then with increased energy as he finds himself on Crystal’s trail. I had this song on constantly while writing this section, following its sleepy opening of low strings to a piercing violin crescendo. If I did my job on this section, its build feels like this song.
“Life on Mars?” by David Bowie
A playlist for a book about life on Mars isn’t complete without this song, of course, and this seems like the place for it, because this section introduces Rick to a disaffected teenager like the one in the song, one trying to decide if there’s more a life beyond her small hometown and what she sees on the silver screen.
“Space Oddity” by David Bowie
Bowie back-to-back, I know. What can I say? He’s the undefeated champ of space songs. This one’s on here for Crystal. Neither Rick nor the reader knows where she is at this point, but a picture is starting to emerge of the isolated decade she’s spent away from him, along with fringe theories that she’s departed Earth for Mars, a picture that makes me think of Major Tom floating off in his tin can, far above the world.
BONUS
“Tusen Tankar” by Kronos Quartet (from a Swedish folk song)
A bit of Singer Distance trivia: when I first sent the book to my editor, it had four parts. The denouement was a separate Part 4 until my editor rightly suggested we blend it into Part 3. But because it was its own part, it has its own “soundtrack” song like the other sections. "Tusen Tankar" is a traditional Swedish folk song mourning an unrequited love, and Kronos Quartet’s instrumental version feels filled both with longing and a kind of acceptance of that longing, a state Rick also has to reach before the end of the novel’s journey.
Ethan Chatagnier is the author of the story collection Warnings from the Future. His stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, New England Review, and other journals, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize and listed as notable in the Best American Short Stories. He lives in Fresno, California, with his family.
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