The Undercover Soundtrack – Josh Malerman

October 26, 2016October 29, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris3 Comments

The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is contemporary horror/thriller author and songwriter Josh Malerman @joshmalerman

Soundtrack by Richard Band, White Lies, Between Music, Allison Laako

You ever seen the 1986 movie Troll? There’s a bonkers scene in which Sonny Bono (the very same) gets touched by the troll and turns into a forest. This scene scared the living piss out of my brothers and I growing up; watching the poor guy morph into an apartment full of plants (and the pain on his face, man o man) had me asking Mom if he was going to be okay. She said yes, he was gonna be fine, and then she laughed because, of course, she was thinking about Sonny and Cher, not “the poor plant man”.

Now, years later, I think about that conversation with Mom and I wonder if horror has a way of freezing time, trapping moments in amber. The Troll soundtrack came out on vinyl recently and I listened to it quite a bit while writing A House at the Bottom of a Lake, not because the music sounds like it’s underwater (that’ll come later here), but because Richard Band’s music has both the innocent freak and the wonder of youth. Cantos Profane best encapsulates this on the album. It’s the song most of us Troll-lovers remember the most from the film. (Recently I had a documentary crew at my house, filming a short about my first book, and I had Troll playing and when Cantos came on, he stepped out from behind the camera and said: “TROLL!”)

First date

A House at the Bottom of a Lake is about two 17-year-olds, Amelia and James, on a first date. It sounds perfect: canoeing across a chain of lakes, sandwiches and beer in the cooler. But the pair discover something below the water’s surface that changes their lives forever. It’s a house at the bottom of the lake.

Although most of the music informed the writing of the book was without lyrics… soundtracks… ambient noise (my cats included), there was a dollop of rock n roll. And nothing seemed to fit the mood I spotted between Amelia and James better than White Lies’s Death from the soundtrack to the movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. I suggest you strip down to a t-shirt and underwear and dance alone like alone to this one.

Now freak

Because A House at the Bottom of a Lake is a first date story, a teenage love song, I gravitated toward movie soundtracks that do both the freak out and the wonder. Because that’s what teenage life is. (That’s what life is like now, too, but let’s focus on the past for a second here, eh?) The whole ‘gravitating’ thing becomes clear after the fact; I can’t imagine lining up a series of albums with a mind that this or that is going to influence the story because really why not listen to something that feels the opposite of your book idea and see what comes of it? But in this case, and in hindsight, it’s clear to me that I was thinking of teenagers in love and the horror of “firsts”: first kiss, first sex, first love. And, in a skewed way here, first home, too. So Troll worked because it came out about the time I was experiencing some firsts of my own. But about halfway through writing the book, my girl Allison discovered a band that changed the whole process.

Yes. They’re under water

Now, before I introduce Between Music and their project AquaSonic, I feel it’s necessary to say that if I were making a movie, I wouldn’t be the type to play a song whose lyrics matched up perfectly with the scene. Too literal. Too cheesy. It just doesn’t feel right to play Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter if a character of mine is named Mrs Brown and she actually does have a lovely daughter. But when Allison showed me a youtube clip of Between Music I said screw my own rules.

The band has an entire under water show. All their instruments are underwater, recorded under water, played underwater. Hell they even sing underwater. While working on the book I knew the setting was a naturally horrifying place: it’s dark, wet, distorted, cold, and claustrophobic. The only details of the house you see are by the end of your submerged flashlight beams, and that’s through the prism of your facemask. About 60 percent of the book takes place in the submerged house. So to discover a band who has shown us what music sounds like below the waves was, for me, a step deeper than kismet.

It was magic.

Here’s another clip (it’s too good for just one).

Courtship song

Lastly, I wish I had a clip of Allison performing the song she wrote based on A House at the Bottom of a Lake. “The Courtship of Amelia” is a gorgeous, freaky, hit and you’ll have to believe me when I say it’s an earworm. A worm that, I discovered, can live long under water.

Josh Malerman is the author of Bird Box and the forthcoming Black Mad Wheel (May, 2017, ECCO/HarperCollins.) Along with a half dozen published short stories, Malerman is also the songwriter for the rock band the High Strung. He lives with Allison Laakko and their pets (including a brilliant weimeraner named Valo) in Michigan. Find him on Twitter as @joshmalerman and on Facebook.

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Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Barry Walsh

July 10, 2013July 10, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris10 Comments

‘Love starts with a face’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to tap into a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s post is by debut author Barry Walsh @BJWalsh

Soundtrack by Neil Young, Handel, Beniamino Gigli, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Marvellettes, Rod Stewart, Adele, Flanagan & Allen, Mozart, JS Bach, Hildegard von Bingen, Beethoven, Dexy’s Midnight Runners

The Pimlico Kid is about first-love, which can quarry a hollow in one’s life that is hard to fill. It’s also about kids scrabbling past puberty and slamming into emotional or physical barriers set by adults.

… the most we might have expected to deal with was a first kiss or a dying grandparent, we were undone by love itself, and violence – and that adults betrayed us.

The lyrics of Neil Young’s songs were ever-present in my head while writing the book. For years I had piled up notes from which to make The Pimlico Kid a novel but it was the beautiful reference to childhood friendship and secrets being revealed in Philadelphia that turned intention into action.

Happy families

The narrator, Billy, unlike some of his friends stands on the solid ground of happy family life. His easy-going father is a hard man and his volatile brother, John, will become one. However, Billy’s father is comfortable revealing his softer side and expresses it in his fine singing. And, when his sons were small, he kidded them he knew Italian and sang his favourite Beniamino Gigli songs, such as Handel’s Ombra mai fu, in beautiful gibberish.

This contrasts with Bob Dylan’s less mellifluous The times they are a changin’ (played loudly enough to shake the house) that defines the rebellious younger brother John, who is yet to discover his softer side:

When he’s asked or told to do something, he has this stiff, chinny look that makes it clear he doesn’t have to comply, but that he will, only on this occasion.

The exhilaration of first attraction is almost always about a face. And it is nailed by the Beatles’s I’ve Just Seen a Face. When Billy falls for Sarah, he worries that his more mature friends will disapprove because she is still flat chested. However, he’s prepared to wait for breasts:

I know that whatever Rooksy says about fabulous flesh, love starts with a face.

A host of songs evoke the summer of 1963 but none more vividly than the Beatles’s She Loves You. Billy and his friends stand transfixed outside a pub from which it is blasting out, again and again. This is the song that vanquishes the old pop music order – along with Brylcreem. When an Elvis song starts up, they leave.

Never-ending summer

During one of those never-ending summer days of childhood, the loves of four friends – Billy, his best mate, Rooksy, Sarah and Josie collide and magic is conjured up by declarations of love and secrets revealed. The Marvelettes’ When You’re Young and in Love kept popping into my head as I tried to pin down the excitement of new love. The lyrics may be simple but if you are young and in love, they couldn’t be more true.

At a critical moment Billy’s behaves like an idiot in front of Sarah. Burning with shame, he’s surprised to find that it doesn’t affect how she feels for him. This reflects my experience of how often weak and flawed people, usually men, are lucky enough to find someone who loves them anyway. Neil Young ‘gets’ it in Hangin’ on a Limb, in which a man wobbles at the edge of an emotional precipice and a girl teaches him how to dance.

As their relationship grows, the four friends come to learn that love breeds compassion and diminishes judgement of those it’s easy to ridicule, whether it’s because of a birthmark or sexual orientation. In the early sixties there were few openly gay teenagers and a great deal of unthinking homophobia. A decade later, Rod Stewart’s The killing of Georgie helped to change things a little and it came to mind constantly while I struggled to get this issue onto the page.

Adele’s Someone Like You wasn’t a creative influence but, on a more exalted level, it provided creative confirmation of the universal theme that I was trying to make personal. During my fourth re-write, the song was playing every day and everywhere and its reference to glory days of summer goes to the heart of The Pimlico Kid, in which …

love can endure but … promises are hard to keep.

Finally, the streets of London are the main stage for The Pimlico Kid. Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner anchors Billy – and me – to the greatest of cities.

The writing

I write to classical music, which provides welcome harmony to counter the dissonance in my head. I start most days with Mozart’s String Quintet No 1 because it lifts my default mood of pessimism about finding the right words. Each day features Bach, lots of Gregorian chant and the liturgical songs of Hildegard von Bingen. I regularly work my way through Beethoven’s quartets but stop when I reach No 15, which triggers Wordsworthian ‘thoughts that lie too deep for tears’.

When the writing has gone really well, I celebrate with the Kyrie from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which isn’t at all ‘solemn’. And, when there’s no one else in the house, I turn to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen and jig around like mad Ben Gunn on the beach.

Barry Walsh grew up in the heart of London during the 60s and thought belatedly that there might be a story in it. The result is The Pimlico Kid, published by Harper, a story of first love. He is now writing his second novel.  When not at the keyboard, Barry enjoys cycling (he once rode non-stop to the top of Mont Ventoux), holidays in France, watching Arsenal, listening to Neil Young and gazing at Audrey Hepburn’s face. He is a proud trustee of the world’s oldest youth club – St Andrew’s, Westminster – and believes that London might just be the centre of the universe. He is married with two daughters. Find him on his website and Twitter @bjwalsh

GIVEAWAY Barry is offering a signed print copy of The Pimlico Kid. For a chance to win, leave a comment here or share this post on Twitter, Facebook, G+ or anywhere else (and don’t forget to leave a note here saying where you shared it).

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Love starts with a face’ – Barry Walsh

July 9, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

When this week’s guest was on his final rewrite, Adele’s Someone Like You was playing from every radio. He says it seemed to reinforce the story he was polishing – a tale of first love, the transition into puberty and the emotional and physical barriers of the adult world. He says he’d been scribbling notes for years, but first felt emboldened to write the novel – based on his childhood memories of 1960s London – when a Neil Young song convinced him he was sitting on a story. He is Barry Walsh, the novel is The Pimlico Kid and he’ll be here on Wednesday talking about its Undercover Soundtrack.