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Liner notes for the soundtrack to "The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City"
I have recently finished the almost-final draft of The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City, my thesis novel that's about what happens when the left-wing Quebecois insurgencies of the late 60s and early 70s result in the growth of an impenetrable thorn-hedge around a section of Montreal -- and what happens several decades later, when the heiress to the powers of the thorn-hedge falls in love with a Vietnamese-Canadian girl from the other side of the city.
So - for my own amusement - here is the playlist that I've made as I was writing the novel, and my notes thereupon!
Arcade Fire / Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
This was one of my first inspirations for the book. Mystical, dreamy, snow-covered, apocalyptic; love as the thing that forges connections in a frozen world. The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City starts out with two lovers separated by the thorn-hedge that has cut a section of Montreal off from the rest of the world; one of them, Celeste, is heir to the thorn-hedge, one of the few people who knows how to get through it -- even if she isn’t actually supposed to. “Then I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours” becomes, perhaps, the leitmotif of the whole book.
Stars / Fluorescent Light, From the Night, Trap Door, No One is Lost, Backlines, The Theory of Relativity, North, Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It, Take Me To the Riot, In Our Bedroom After the War
I put a heck of a lot of Stars songs on this playlist because they are intensely evocative to me of Montreal, the way it felt to me when I was in college: dark, cold, neon, filled with loud music and rebellion and intense longing.
“Theory of Relativity” is here because of that atmosphere, and its evocation of high school, and “If I fell apart / Could you bring me back?” which I think is one of the big questions in the romance arc between Jude and Celeste: what does it feel like to love someone who you’re afraid is going to fall apart, what does it feel like to be scared that your mental illness is going to scare off the people you love?
“Backlines” is a song about fighting and courage and anxiety, which makes it a song for Jude.
“The North” starts with a line that I used as an epigraph in an earlier draft - “It’s so cold in this country, every road home is long.” That line blew me away the first time I heard it, just by how much it evoked for me every January day I had to hike back home after class. But in a larger sense, I think this book is about how long the road home is when you’ve been displaced and you want to get home but you also don’t know if home is still a place that exists for you, and that makes it a song for Celeste. For the same reason, I have “Fluorescent Light” on this playlist: “You can travel for a thousand miles / You can spend a thousand nights alone / You can lose your way so easily and never never make it home.”
Besides the fact that Stars have so many songs that evoke Montreal for me, they also have so many songs that evoke love that’s tense and fraught, love that’s dead or love that might still be rekindled or the ambiguous zone between those possibilities. That said, if there’s a single verse that sums up what’s going on between Celeste and Jude in the latter half of the book, it’s this one from “Take Me To the Riot”:
You sprung me, I'm grateful
I love when you tell me not to speak
I owe you, but I know you
You'll have me back but it's gonna take a week
“No One is Lost” -
“The girls that shiver in their high heeled shoes / The ones inside all feel like winners / Put your hands up if you know you’re gonna lose.”
Barenaked Ladies / Lovers in a Dangerous Time
I have both the Bruce Cockburn original and the Barenaked Ladies cover on this playlist, but to be honest I like this one better, by a hair; there’s less synth, and Steven Page’s voice is so sweet. I’m being very literal here, because Celeste and Jude are indeed lovers in a dangerous time, and “When you’re lovers in a dangerous time / Sometimes you’re made to feel as if you’re love’s a crime / Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”
Indigo Girls / Romeo and Juliet
There’s not much on this playlist that is not Canadian Content, but - my advisor is a big Shakespeare guy. And when I told him the premise of the book I had not even yet started writing, he said “It’s Romeo and Juliet.” The parallels are not all that strong except in the sense that it’s about a love between two people from households both alike in dignity who from ancient grudge break to new mutiny - if the “households both alike in dignity” are the Canadians and the Free Community of Montreal. Okay, close enough -- anyway it’s gay and raw and bitter and it’s such a great song.
Rufus Wainwright / Hometown Waltz
One of the few songs I know that’s explicitly about Montreal, and specifically it’s about having a complicated relationship with Montreal as a hometown. It’s about wanting to fly away, but also not having things be so simple. And there’s this:
“Anything your mother left attached to the phone / could have walked around the block, ‘cause all roads lead to home.”
Bruce Cockburn / Get Up Jonah
One of my favorite songs, a song about complicity and responsibility and the things you allow yourself to think about or not think about. And this is a story about how both Jude and Celeste have to deal with complicity, and responsibility, and choosing to get up and be born.
Arcade Fire / The Suburbs
Okay - I have this on here for no reason but “You always seemed so sure / That one day we'd be fighting in a suburban war / Your part of town against mine / I saw you standing on the opposite shore.”
Which seems appropriate enough for a city at war with itself.
k.d. lang / Hallelujah
… I MEAN. Isn’t this just the perfect Venn diagram intersection between “Canadian Content,” “lesbians,” and “extremely sad love songs”? (I mean, that probably applies to MANY k.d. lang songs, but what kind of Montrealer would I be if I didn't include at least ONE song written by Leonard Cohen?)
The Tragically Hip / Ahead By a Century, Fully Completely, Grace Too, Lake Fever, Fireworks
One thing about Jude in this novel is that she is deeply passionate about music. Our tastes don’t actually overlap that much considering that she’s a Canadian of close to my own generation, but it’s a good excuse to put some Canadian Content in the novel -- also I did write a fair bit of it while feeling fairly sentimental about the death of Gord Downie. A Tragically Hip cassette tape becomes a small plot point. I did want to include at least one genuine love song that wasn’t just wall-to-wall angst, and that’s “Fireworks,” which also includes the splendid line (for a novel obsessed with national borders) “Believing in the country of me and you.”
Isn't it amazing what you can accomplish
When the little sensation gets in your way
No ambition whisperin' over your shoulder
Oh isn't it amazing what you can accomplish, eh
This one thing probably never goes away
I think this one thing is always supposed to stay
Oh this one thing doesn't have to go away
So - for my own amusement - here is the playlist that I've made as I was writing the novel, and my notes thereupon!
Arcade Fire / Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
This was one of my first inspirations for the book. Mystical, dreamy, snow-covered, apocalyptic; love as the thing that forges connections in a frozen world. The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City starts out with two lovers separated by the thorn-hedge that has cut a section of Montreal off from the rest of the world; one of them, Celeste, is heir to the thorn-hedge, one of the few people who knows how to get through it -- even if she isn’t actually supposed to. “Then I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours” becomes, perhaps, the leitmotif of the whole book.
Stars / Fluorescent Light, From the Night, Trap Door, No One is Lost, Backlines, The Theory of Relativity, North, Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It, Take Me To the Riot, In Our Bedroom After the War
I put a heck of a lot of Stars songs on this playlist because they are intensely evocative to me of Montreal, the way it felt to me when I was in college: dark, cold, neon, filled with loud music and rebellion and intense longing.
“Theory of Relativity” is here because of that atmosphere, and its evocation of high school, and “If I fell apart / Could you bring me back?” which I think is one of the big questions in the romance arc between Jude and Celeste: what does it feel like to love someone who you’re afraid is going to fall apart, what does it feel like to be scared that your mental illness is going to scare off the people you love?
“Backlines” is a song about fighting and courage and anxiety, which makes it a song for Jude.
“The North” starts with a line that I used as an epigraph in an earlier draft - “It’s so cold in this country, every road home is long.” That line blew me away the first time I heard it, just by how much it evoked for me every January day I had to hike back home after class. But in a larger sense, I think this book is about how long the road home is when you’ve been displaced and you want to get home but you also don’t know if home is still a place that exists for you, and that makes it a song for Celeste. For the same reason, I have “Fluorescent Light” on this playlist: “You can travel for a thousand miles / You can spend a thousand nights alone / You can lose your way so easily and never never make it home.”
Besides the fact that Stars have so many songs that evoke Montreal for me, they also have so many songs that evoke love that’s tense and fraught, love that’s dead or love that might still be rekindled or the ambiguous zone between those possibilities. That said, if there’s a single verse that sums up what’s going on between Celeste and Jude in the latter half of the book, it’s this one from “Take Me To the Riot”:
You sprung me, I'm grateful
I love when you tell me not to speak
I owe you, but I know you
You'll have me back but it's gonna take a week
“No One is Lost” -
“The girls that shiver in their high heeled shoes / The ones inside all feel like winners / Put your hands up if you know you’re gonna lose.”
Barenaked Ladies / Lovers in a Dangerous Time
I have both the Bruce Cockburn original and the Barenaked Ladies cover on this playlist, but to be honest I like this one better, by a hair; there’s less synth, and Steven Page’s voice is so sweet. I’m being very literal here, because Celeste and Jude are indeed lovers in a dangerous time, and “When you’re lovers in a dangerous time / Sometimes you’re made to feel as if you’re love’s a crime / Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”
Indigo Girls / Romeo and Juliet
There’s not much on this playlist that is not Canadian Content, but - my advisor is a big Shakespeare guy. And when I told him the premise of the book I had not even yet started writing, he said “It’s Romeo and Juliet.” The parallels are not all that strong except in the sense that it’s about a love between two people from households both alike in dignity who from ancient grudge break to new mutiny - if the “households both alike in dignity” are the Canadians and the Free Community of Montreal. Okay, close enough -- anyway it’s gay and raw and bitter and it’s such a great song.
Rufus Wainwright / Hometown Waltz
One of the few songs I know that’s explicitly about Montreal, and specifically it’s about having a complicated relationship with Montreal as a hometown. It’s about wanting to fly away, but also not having things be so simple. And there’s this:
“Anything your mother left attached to the phone / could have walked around the block, ‘cause all roads lead to home.”
Bruce Cockburn / Get Up Jonah
One of my favorite songs, a song about complicity and responsibility and the things you allow yourself to think about or not think about. And this is a story about how both Jude and Celeste have to deal with complicity, and responsibility, and choosing to get up and be born.
Arcade Fire / The Suburbs
Okay - I have this on here for no reason but “You always seemed so sure / That one day we'd be fighting in a suburban war / Your part of town against mine / I saw you standing on the opposite shore.”
Which seems appropriate enough for a city at war with itself.
k.d. lang / Hallelujah
… I MEAN. Isn’t this just the perfect Venn diagram intersection between “Canadian Content,” “lesbians,” and “extremely sad love songs”? (I mean, that probably applies to MANY k.d. lang songs, but what kind of Montrealer would I be if I didn't include at least ONE song written by Leonard Cohen?)
The Tragically Hip / Ahead By a Century, Fully Completely, Grace Too, Lake Fever, Fireworks
One thing about Jude in this novel is that she is deeply passionate about music. Our tastes don’t actually overlap that much considering that she’s a Canadian of close to my own generation, but it’s a good excuse to put some Canadian Content in the novel -- also I did write a fair bit of it while feeling fairly sentimental about the death of Gord Downie. A Tragically Hip cassette tape becomes a small plot point. I did want to include at least one genuine love song that wasn’t just wall-to-wall angst, and that’s “Fireworks,” which also includes the splendid line (for a novel obsessed with national borders) “Believing in the country of me and you.”
Isn't it amazing what you can accomplish
When the little sensation gets in your way
No ambition whisperin' over your shoulder
Oh isn't it amazing what you can accomplish, eh
This one thing probably never goes away
I think this one thing is always supposed to stay
Oh this one thing doesn't have to go away
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