I Blame Myself But Also You: The playlist
Silence unsettles me. It always has, though I’ve learned to make peace with it as I’ve grown older. I think this is my mother’s doing: when I was a baby, she’d put me down for a nap and then turn on the vacuum cleaner just outside my closed door, to drown out my crying (I was apparently not all that interested in napping as a youngster). But I don’t hold it against her. She was just doing what she needed to do to get through the day, and you can’t fault a person for that.
Because I don’t like silence, I need to fill it, and I tend to do that with music. My tastes are all over the place, so what I’m listening to at any given moment is going to be a reflection of my mood more than anything else. When I’m writing, I’ll draw from any of over a dozen writing-specific playlists I’ve built over the years. Much of the music is instrumental—I usually need for the only words in my head to be my own when I’m working—but sometimes I’m trying to access specific memories or vibes that can only be unlocked by music from a specific year, for example. In those situations, anything goes.
So, for your listening pleasure, may I present to you the official playlist for my new short story collection, I Blame Myself But Also You (and other stories):
The stories in I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories were written over a stretch of four years or so. They’re not linked in any obvious way—they take place in various points between the 1980s and the present day; they unfold in Florida, San Francisco, Massachusetts, the desert, and the ocean; none of the characters have ever met, and are unlikely ever to cross paths. Thematically, there are common threads: The search for that one existential totem we expect to fix everything, but that never quite does; the strange, unnerving liminal space between childhood and not-quite-adulthood; the endless struggle to find our place in the world, and the nagging fear that maybe we never will.
Twelve songs for eleven stories, each chosen to reflect something about the core of the story as I understand it, which I elaborate on below. Your mileage may vary, but no matter what, I hope you enjoy.
I Blame Myself But Also You
“Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh” by Say Hi To Your Mom
I listened to this song a lot while writing this story, and it took me a while to understand why. It’s a car song for me: I had it on a mix CD I burned specifically for driving around town when I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, where this story is set. In the story, all the pivotal moments—the inciting incident when Randall Rainwater intentionally rams his scooter into Lindsay’s car; the aftermath of the funeral when the case of mistaken identity resolves itself; the final scene at the top of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge—take place in Lindsay’s car. I like to imagine that she had the same mix CD I made for myself, but her car stereo was permanently stuck on this track and also she could not turn it off, ever.
The Insomniac Traveler’s Guide to the Lost Pyramids of Quartzsite, Arizona
“Woven Birds” by Calexico
This story was inspired by two things: the two days I spent driving through the American Southwest when I moved from Florida to California, and my own lifelong struggles with insomnia. (I’ve tried using those biometric health tracking apps that are all the rage; they all tell me I actually sleep just fine. But I don’t believe them.) The vibe of this song, I think, perfectly aligns with the vibe of the story: off-center, a bit hazy, and like so much of Calexico’s catalog, strongly recalling the haunting emptiness of the desert.
Tube Man
“Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan
In “Tube Man,” Carl is fixated on the idea of jettisoning all the stuff that has come to define his life until he is unencumbered enough to live in a tube, similar to what he imagines he’d find in a Japanese capsule hotel. Steely Dan was never a minimalist outfit, so this song may seem like an odd choice to represent this story. But there’s one line that rings out more clearly than the rest: “Just get it all out of here.” We hear it just as the song’s narrative tension comes to a head, and I imagine it playing through Carl’s favorite bluetooth speaker as he homes in on that one isolated lyric, trying to decide what goes and what stays, and getting more and more desperate about it.
Singapore Song
“Borneo” by Firewater
The very first line of this song—”Oh, I ain’t gonna live in your world no more”—could have come straight from the lips of Grady, the father in this story who builds a sailboat in his garage so he can pack up his family and sail away from all his problems. The song has a manic undertone to it that fits Grady’s personality well, and I can imagine him singing it to himself as he fires up the circular saw or applies yet another coat of fiberglass to the plywood hull.
When the Drought Finally Ends
“Angel” by Massive Attack
This song starts with a slow, bass-y throb. Tension ratchets slowly as tracks begin to layer over each other, gradually building into a discordant, psychedelic wall of distorted sound. The drums, insistent and steady, never pick up the pace, never deviate from their simple pattern. “You are my angel,” Horace Andy sings, “come from way above to bring me love … she’s on the dark side, neutralize every man in sight.” It’s a soundtrack to the blending of the real and the unreal, and in that way it’s an ideal companion piece for this story.
Hugo
“Who’s Behind the Door” by Zebra
“Hugo” is a mildly fictionalized account of something that happened at the summer camp I attended as a child in suburban Detroit. Hugo and his cave were very much part of the lore there, and I hope they still are—the slight but persistent undercurrent of menace the tales sent radiating out into the camp was an important part of the experience of growing up for me, in ways I can’t easily explain. This song was popular for a short while around that time before suddenly and completely disappearing from both the radio and MTV, and it never fails to whisk me back to the play fields of Roper Day Camp whenever I hear it.
Fantastic Atlas
“Boy with a Coin” by Iron & Wine
Yes, there is a literal boy with a coin in this story, but that’s not why I chose this song to pair with it. The story is rooted in Julia’s sense of quiet (and increasing) disorientation regarding the strange things happening around her young son Zachary. Sam Beam captures that sense perfectly here.
Controlled Descent
“Come Sundown” by Bobby Bare
A top ten country hit in 1970, this is a song Cynthia would know well—she spent her entire life in rural and small-town Ohio and would have been on the cusp of her teenage years when this was on the radio. It’s a familiar and comforting artifact of the time when she first met Glenn, her long-since-passed husband, and her mind hearkens back to the memory of those days as the story draws to a close.
Headbangers’ Ball
“The Last of the Unplucked Gems” by The Tragically Hip
Even though Iron Maiden’s “Two Minutes to Midnight” makes a brief cameo in this story of two teenage Florida metalheads who are convinced the owner of their local record shop is actually the Devil, I don’t think it really captures the spirit of the thing the way this song does. For one thing, “Gems” has a languid, hazy droning quality that always reminds me of how it felt to just exist in Florida in the summertime. Also, to me the song is a brief exploration on the meaning of meaning itself, which ties into the way Clay assigns such a specific meaning to the old Kiss poster in Joe Devil’s store. Finally, the line “It's hard to say, it's sad but true/ I'm kinda dumb and so are you” sounds like something Clay and the unnamed narrator might each secretly want to say to the other.
Fancy Gap
“Christian’s Guitar Piece” by Sparklehorse & Fennez
When I first got serious about writing fiction, I focused on flash pieces, because I thought that the skills I’d picked up from advertising copywriting would translate reasonably well: get in, get out, and do it in a way that ensures what you’ve said is greater than the literal meaning of the actual words used. I was listening to this album a lot the year I wrote this story, and I’ve always thought this tune accomplishes exactly the thing I was trying to do with my flash fiction.
Fight or Flight
“El Paso” by Marty Robbins
and
“Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger
(This is the longest story in the collection, so it gets two songs.)
I spent two years on a Coast Guard ship very much like the one in this story; the character of January is based on one of the ship’s cooks I knew there. He was short—the kind of guy people might describe as a fireplug—with a pushbroom mustache (which I’m sure my memory is exaggerating), and he had a smile and a quip for everyone he met, no matter what. Whenever it was his turn to serve breakfast, the galley reverberated with “El Paso” at 5:30 in the morning while he prepped, cooked, and sang along with a surprising level of gusto. To this day, I can’t hear the song without thinking of that ship, or those breakfasts.
“Flagpole Sitta” is my pick for the definitive song of the late 1990s—wired and hyperactive, fun with the potential for a sudden burst of poorly-directed aggression, and just a little too manic for its own good. Though I don’t specifically call it out by name in the story, this is the song Stick’s band plays at his going-away party, the one that lures Janelle out onto the dance floor and kicks off the rapid spiraling of her marriage to Langtree.