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February 8, 2023
Stephen Graham Jones's Playlist for His Novel "Don't Fear the Reaper"
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.
Stephen Graham Jones impresses again with Don't Fear the Reaper, a novel as unsettling as it is smartly written.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Jones expertly blends snappy graveyard humor with nail-biting suspense, and he gives his characters distinctive personalities that distinguish them from the underdeveloped body fodder common to most slasher scenarios. This characteristically clever gore-fest proves Jennifer to be a horror heroine worthy of many more adventures."
In his own words, here is Stephen Graham Jones's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Don't Fear the Reaper:
The first novel I wrote, I wrote it to a single song playing on repeat. Ten months of that song, and I never got tired of it (Marty Robbins, “El Paso”). This was 1998. Since then, I’ve learned about playlists, and make a new one for each novel. This one for Don’t Fear the Reaper is the first time I’ve re-used a playlist. Reason I haven’t done that before is that the same songs will land me in the same emotional terrain as that previous book, and I need to be forging into new spaces. But, since Reaper’s the second book in a trilogy, dialing up that old playlist I’d lived with writing the first installment, My Heart is a Chainsaw, it dropped me right back into Indian Lake. It was like coming home. And, these are long books, so this is a tall playlist—how about I just annotate the first ten tracks:
“AbOriginal,” Frank Waln
How Scorcese uses “Gimme Shelter” over and over to pull the audience into the epic feel of this story he’s telling? Frank Waln’s got that same thing going on here, and it’s the perfect way to start a hundred writing sessions. I mean, if I weren’t Blackfeet, maybe I could take the same ramp up into a feeling by watching Braveheart. But, I am Blackfeet, so it’s “AbOriginal” all day long. And that chorus, If your skin is brown then you’re down for the old pain, Frank Waln really can’t say that enough times. This is one of those songs that keep playing in your head long after it’s over, one of those ones that just last and last, and make you walk into and against the world that much harder, because . . . today? Today the world doesn’t win. No matter what. That’s what I needed for the main character of this book.
“Time Off for Bad Behavior,” David Allan Coe
The live version, from Billy Bob’s, which has the best concerts. And, David Allan Coe, man. Dude’s a lot like Eminem, to me—they have this ability to phrase things such that they sound right. Not in the factual sense, and not in the sense that this line’s been sculpted and adjusted to death. I’m not sure how to say it better than that. What they do, it’s a little about syntax and word-choice, but it’s a lot about intonation and maybe elocution, and . . . something else, I don’t know what—I call it “phrasing,” for lack of a better term. And this song’s got it. And, no, David Allan Coe didn’t even write this one, I don’t think—in spite of what the song might say—but man does he inhabit it. That’s what Springsteen says is the most important, right? Some singers just have that. David Allan Coe’s one of them.
“Who Knew,” Pink
The tense and the point of narration in this song is endlessly fascinating, to me. The persona singing this is doing so from a point after this relationship’s already over (somebody’s dead, maybe?), but, in the present, this singer’s “going back”—in her head, in her heart—and saying she’ll punch anyone out who says it’s going to go over . . . I guess for that Garth Brooks reason of “I would have missed the pain / but I’d have also missed . . . the dance.” It’s beautifully complicated, twisting back on itself, and, man, if that’s not what it’s like to be a person, to exist on this earth, live this life, I don’t know what is. We don’t make sense, and why would we. But we feel just so intensely, so irrationally.
“Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen
I know “Born to Run” is the one you’re supposed to love and understand as emblematic of “America” and a generation, and it is that, a hundred times over. Still, for me? For me, it’s this song. There’s hope in this song. There’s rumbling up to the curb to pick your date up, and then blasting off into the night, and whatever it holds. These two lanes will take us anywhere. Riding in that car like that, man . . . this is why I love “The River,” too: “I remember us riding in my brother’s car / Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir.” In my heart I know that the Mary from “Thunder Road” is the Mary from “The River,” that this is a progression—we’re watching a couple of kids grow up. We’re watching ourselves grow up. And Reaper’s about that, some.
“Let’s Go Crazy,” Prince
I think this novel needed this song over and and over for that preaching up front. That organ. I like how dramatic and self-important and just ‘grand’ it is. But I think I also needed to feel like I was in sixth grade, driving cross-country with a friend’s family, the two of us in the backseat the whole way sharing a Walkman with a big sister’s Purple Rain tape in it. This is the first song on side 1. After listening to it one more time, we’d fast forward to the end, flip the tape, and listen to “When Doves Cry.” Those two songs, man. They’ll get you across the country. They’ll get you through sixth grade. And they’re pretty good for novel-writing, too.
“Mainstreet,” Bob Seger
Such a forlorn, nostalgic song, and a great comedown from the previous track. Like, Prince gets your senses all jumping, but then this one reaches right in for your heart. It’s a high school song, too, and Reaper’s got a lot of high school kids in it. And a Main Street as well. So, everything sort of ‘fit’ for this song. But . . . I’m really not that strategic. I just like where this songs takes me, where it leaves me. I think I could live there, I mean. Or, I guess I sort of do.
“Yankee Rose,” David Lee Roth
That back and forth at the front of the song between David Lee Roth’s vocals and Steve Vai’s guitar absolutely blew my mind, once upon a time. The generation before had had Frampton; I had this. I’d never heard anything like it. Think I was fourteen when it came out? This and Crazy from the Heat, man. If that wasn’t a good time to be alive and listening to the radio and watching music videos, then I don’t when’s supposed to have been.
“Horses,” Bonnie “Prince” Billy
The version in the playlist linked above isn’t the version I listen to, alas. But it’s the same song. And every time that opening line moans out, I’d be riding horses if they’d let me, man, I know again what it feels like to have a songwriter take words written in secret on my heart and put them to music. I so, so feel with the persona singing this song. Or, it’s not a persona: it’s me. I have all these dreams of what I could do, if they’d just let me.
“Oh Sherrie,” Steve Perry
Steve Perry can sing anything. He’s got that breathiness between words sometimes, he sometimes clips the first part of a syllable off to somehow make the whole word hit harder, he’s got range for days, and he’s not afraid to lean back and wail into that mic, just bring the ceiling of the arena down on us all. One of the big regrets of my life is I never saw Journey live, back when. I miss that so much that I wrote a novel about a guy named Steve Perry, even. And, this song, this song. Like the Grinch, every time I listen to it, my hearts grows three sizes. At least.
“Bringing on the Heartbreak,” Def Leppard
Years later, a lot of Whitesnake would sound like this song, to me. Which is probably why, when my Whitesnake ’87 cassette got stuck in my player for thirteen hours one drive, I wasn’t sad. This sound, I mean, it’s the good stuff. It’s the best stuff. I especially like how it has a couple places in here where it feel like someone’s placed the pads of their fingers on the record, to slow it down for a tenth of a second or so at the party, to see if anybody notices. I do. And I love it. Thank you.
“Your Latest Trick,” Dire Straits
Oh, horns. I’m forever a fool for anything with horns. Give me Morphine, give me Ides of March’s “Vehicle,” give me all of them, please. And always the Dire Straits. “Prehistoric garbage trucks,” right? Ever since hearing this line, I’ve never once seen a garbage truck as actually being from this era. And this song is one-hundred-percent why there’s sort of a garbage truck at an important spot in Reaper. Too, I was talking phrasing above, with David Allen Coe? There’s something to do with that here, with security was laid back and lax. It’s different than what Coe and Eminem does, and I think maybe it’s particular to the Dire Straits. You find lines like that all through their catalogue, though. It’s why I go back to it again and again.
And I guess this playlist goes on for eighteen more songs, I guess, a 131-minute affair, which is about a half-hour longer than I usually go for novel-writing stuff. There’s Tina Turner, Sheena Easton, Sir Mix-a-lot, Spandau Ballet, and, guess I was in a Springsteen-mode, which happens every few years, as there’s a few more from him. But? You can’t really ever have enough Bruce Springsteen, I don’t think.
I’ll try to come back here for the third Chainsaw book, too—had to whip up a whole new playlist for that one.
Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians. He has been an NEA fellowship recipient and been recipient of several awards including: the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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