Living With Music: A Playlist by Rachel Kushner // Paper Cuts Blog

By Gregory Cowles // article here

Rachel Kushner is the author of a novel, “Telex From Cuba.”

I don’t write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it’s possibly no different from saying you don’t eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you’re at the keyboard. Music happens in addition to writing, as does much of life, and music remains in the head, there to be turned and viewed and felt and drawn from. It stains into the deep psyche. I’ve culled here partly songs that give me the emotional fix I want on a moment or scene, and then again songs I associate with something cinematic. The writing is about working in the round, with the aid of stolen referents from film and music, and trying to determine precisely how they might touch one another, and me, in order to create something new, a new and transliterated effect.

1) Primitive Painters, Felt. If you don’t already know about Felt, one of the great bands of all time, songs like this one, and so many others from their 10 albums and 10 singles — “The World Is as Soft as Lace,” “Penelope Tree,” “My Face Is on Fire” — fling off so much beauty and solicit so much desire that you might not be able to handle it. I’m not kidding. The singer and songwriter Lawrence (known simply as) has this Lou Reed-like voice and an angel’s face. I’ve never seen someone look so cool in every photo — most hauntingly, in the video for “Primitive Painters,” where he leans in a stairwell in a black fedora while Maurice Deebank, slumped next to him, plays a 12-string. Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins sings backing vocals and the way her high voice harmonizes with Lawrence’s for the refrain (“oh oh you should see my trail of disgrace”) is really shattering the first time you hear it. No one seems to know much about Lawrence, except that he once drove to a gig in first gear, is considered a genius and is notoriously, unreachably remote and enigmatic. There is supposedly a film coming out about him. I can hardly wait.

2) Will I Ever Be Inside of You, Paul Quinn. Like being in an empty disco that’s inside a space capsule and there are spinning lights and lush colors and it’s all very seductive and then you realize that you’re totally alone and jettisoned. It goes on for nine minutes. I didn’t know anything about Quinn, a Scottish singer who worked with members of Orange Juice, until two weeks ago, when my friend Hedi introduced me. He put on the record and I thought it was Fred Neil, of “Everybody’s Talkin’” fame. Like Felt, Quinn worked with Creation Records, and like Lawrence, the two striking impressions are of almost unbearable physical beauty, and then again of melancholy and despair.

3) Cheree, Suicide. This 1977 song is indelibly linked for me to the bittersweet ending of “Downtown 81,” the predawn cruise through the streets, a scene that operates all the levers for wistful nostalgic reflection on ye olde glittering and sordid New York.

4) Hot Child in the City, Nick Gilder. You might think this song is campy. I don’t. I still find it kind of electrifying. Maybe because it was on the radio a lot when I was a child, and so there’s a nostalgic hook. Also, I was a little girl and seduction was threatening. But Nick Gilder was not. Because I wasn’t even sure Nick Gilder was a man. The voice is so androgynous that it seems like this every-voice, and we can all just sit back and revere the hot child in the city, or even want to be her, instead of, you know, wanting to take something away from her that she won’t get back.

5) Tears at the Grand Ole Opry, Wanda Jackson. Another song I think about a lot, because I have connected it in a loose, affective way to a movie I have stolen in its entirety for the novel I’m currently writing. I am too suspicious to name this movie, but here is a clue: it ends in roadside honky-tonk devastation, and it’s a lot sadder than this song, which is merely sweetly sad.

6) He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss), the Crystals. A song I really want to get inside of and twist and manipulate, somehow, as a fiction writer. I can’t really say more.

7) There Is Something on Your Mind, Big Jay McNeely. This super sexy song and its spare, simultaneously clumsy and elegant saxophone hook is a popular oldie with the lowriders, but I only discovered it because it is the soundtrack to a magical little 1966 film called “Olivia’s Place,” by Thom Andersen. Olivia’s Place was a diner in Santa Monica, long-demolished. “There Is Something on Your Mind” plays as the camera roves around the diner, a valentine/time capsule with a shadow of death and obsolescence clinging to it.

8) Sofia, Los Super Elegantes. Los Super Elegantes are the Tijuana-born Milena Muzquiz and the Argentine Martiniano Lopez-Crozet. I saw them perform “Sofia” as an “impromptu” dinner theater piece (impromptu is in quotes here — everything these two do is both slapdash and also very deliberate) in Milena’s living room, while we ate her birthday cake. “Sofia, now you’re drunk / you’re on the floor again . . .” Milena, as Sofia, air-performed the trumpet solo on a wine bottle. Milena and Martiniano are the two people I know who seem most like they live inside a movie, complete with costumes, artful montage, crimes of passion.

9) Whiskey River, Flaming Fire. This cover of Willie Nelson’s classic is robotic and beautiful and creepy. Flaming Fire’s frontman, Patrick Hambrecht, and his wife, Kate (who sings backup), are preachers’ children who seem as if they accidentally wandered onto the set of a Kenneth Anger film and decided to stay. The Hambrechts are waiting for the apocalypse, and their version of “Whiskey River” is the soundtrack to its aftermath.

10) I Am the Cosmos, Chris Bell. Such a delicate and moving song. I’ve been thinking of Bell, and Big Star, because of my obsession with William Eggleston’s 1973 video “Stranded in Canton.” There is a scene in which the Memphis local Jim Dickinson, who produced both Big Star and some of Bell’s solo sessions, leers into the camera in rhinestone-rimmed glasses. Then he and an unnamed woman kiss, but they are loaded out of their minds on quaaludes and sort of miss each other’s lips. He’s wearing a hideous tuxedo and it seems as if they’re on their way to a really unwholesome prom in a streamer-festooned high school gymnasium. I think I have watched “Stranded in Canton” 30 times. There are two different dentists who each figure prominently, raconteur-drunks, one shirtless, both louche. Those dentists are dead now, as are many if not most of the people who star in the video. According to the credits, a not insignificant percentage of them were murdered or committed suicide. Chris Bell is long dead. Jim Dickinson, last year. And now Alex Chilton. Neither tragic nor legendary, I myself will never die.