Earworm Wednesday: GRAVEYARD SHIFT

There's a soundtrack for that

Good morning from Madrid! My red-eye from Nashville (via four-hour layover at IAD, an airport almost as horrible as my arch-enemy DFW) landed at 8 a.m. yesterday. Because I can’t sleep on planes—an unfortunate defect for someone who travels as much as I do—I’ve been walking around in a jetlagged Twilight Zone of the mind for the past 36 hours or so. The fact that this hotel charges 25€ for a buffet breakfast and there’s no other way to get coffee (Jail! Go straight to jail!) has not helped. There are few more gutting moments on tour than realizing there’s no caffeine to be had without putting yourself together and walking half a mile to a café to talk to a server in a language that isn’t your first when you haven’t slept for two days. But because my publisher just pushed our lunch an hour later, I thought I’d drop in for an impromptu Earworm Wednesday which is eminently On Theme.

You probably know by now how essential music is to my creative work. As I wrote in the intro for my Midnight Radio playlist, it’s Point Zero for my writing process. This isn’t just the case for Hot Wax, which is so deeply steeped in music it has five separate playlists with 110+ hours of tunes and counting, but for everything I’ve ever put on paper. The first part of my process is almost entirely aural. As soon as I’ve got the germ of an idea, I start dumping songs in a playlist which expands and evolves throughout the “discovery phase” of the project. I write first drafts in three parts. The first, that “discovery phase,” is mostly just mucking around in the story space, getting a feel for the characters and the setting and the major themes and the “tentpole” moments of the narrative. The second is outlining, the third the actual composition of prose. I might spend six months or a year in the discovery phase before I even move on to outlining, which is why I end up with playlists thousands of songs long. New resonances emerge as I’m fleshing out the people and the places and the plotlines which make up the body of the book.

Because music is so indispensable in my writing process, when my publisher asked about extras and Easter eggs for Graveyard Shift, I insisted on including a playlist in the back of the book. It only seems fair to give credit to the people whose music has been a major source of creative fuel and inspiration. Having a dedicated playlist for each project not only helps me pull the thing together but is the easiest way for me to stay in the story space when I’m away from the keyboard and to get back into the right mindset when it’s time to get back to it.

Of course, you can’t print a playlist of hundreds of songs in the end pages, so I had to be a little more selective. But because I’m also very old-fashioned when it comes to my listening habits (I have deep respect for the album as a cohesive artistic statement and a well-crafted playlist; “shuffle” is one of the worst “innovations” of the streaming era) I take the curation of a soundtrack very seriously. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun! It just means that rather than dumping 20 vibey songs in the folder at random, I spend a lot of time thinking about the sonic and thematic flow from one to the next. I want the listener to have a seamless but varied experience—shuffle be damned.

Because I’m so far removed now from the writing process of Graveyard and I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Hot Wax for the past year, it’s been a while since I listened to anything other than that collection of playlists. But in the weird, liminal space of a overnight flight when I was more or less the only person on board not getting any shuteye, it was the Graveyard playlist that really suited the mood.

If I could have a job besides “writer,” I would love to soundtrack movies and TV shows. Running sound was one of my favorite jobs in tech theatre. There’s a unique satisfaction in finding just the right tune to make a moment come alive. When I was building the playlist for the back of the book, I wanted it to reflect not only the atmosphere, but the personalities and listening habits of the major characters. Of course, my own taste is also a factor, which is why you’ll see many of my favorites here—Tom Waits, the Rats, Concrete Blonde, Elbow, Interpol, to name just a few. Overall, I wanted it to move through the night just as the characters do: brushing elbows with the lights and loudness of the town’s nightlife before sliding into the woozy, chimerical midnight hours when only the nocturnal creatures are up and about. “Ghost Town” by the Specials is a song you might hear spilling out of a doorway on Azalea Street before the bars close. Patti Smith’s “Revenge” might be playing in Hannah’s head when she drives out to Bothell Forest. Roll credits to Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream.” Any one of these tracks has, at some point, been the soundtrack for my own insomnia.

So I thought I’d share them with you. If you’ve already read Graveyard Shift but want a little something more, this might scratch that itch. If you haven’t read it yet, this should get you in the mood. And if you just can’t sleep, I hope these tunes can keep you company.