Welcome to day 1 of the year end best-of blog circus! (Also, welcome to my birthday! Yay!) Up today, my top 5 albums to write to.

(Just a note that the music I love may contain dirty words and subversive ideas. Sorry, kids–when it comes to music, part of me is still a sixteen year old mohawked punk rocker!)

5. Now You Can See by the Thermals

On the surface, Now You Can See sounds like typical indie-punk. But take a closer listen to the lyrics: this is about evolution, the story (either) of a human turning into a sea creature or a race of sea creatures becoming men. There’s a strong sense of  epic history here:

We were born on an island,
we grew out of the sand.
Never saw another creature,
never knew another man.
Yeah baby we were nothing,
we existed for less!
Our present was empty,
our history a mess!

This is great music to write to when you want to mine the same sense of history. Who were your characters “before they could see”?

4. England Keep My Bones by Frank Turner

I first heard Frank Turner on late night television–he was playing his goofy quarter-life crisis anthem “I Won’t Grow Up.” When I picked up his album England Keep My Bones, I got the rousing drinking songs I expected–but I hadn’t anticipated his depth.

This is writing music for days when you have doubts, when you fear you’ve forgotten who you are and where you came from, when you need to be reminded the value of pure effort and moxie.

Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut,
not everyone was born to be a king,
not everyone can be Freddie Mercury,
but everyone can raise their glass and sing.

I may not be the perfect kind of person,
I may not do what mum and dad dreamed,
but on the day I die, I’ll say at least I fucking tried.
That’s the only eulogy I need.

3. On Avery Island by Neutral Milk Hotel

If you’re the least bit of a hipster (I’m a pretty big hipster myself), you’re probably familiar with Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Aeroplane is a great album, but I prefer to write to their chaotic, raw debut, On Avery Island. There’s something desperately YA about these lyrics–I’m fairly sure it’s about girls who grow up poor and chaste in Louisiana. Or, uh, something.

Threw a nickel in the fountain
To save my soul from all these troubled times
And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take
To soothe my mind so I’m always sober
Always aching, always heading towards
Mass suicide, occult figurines . . .

2. Dead Media by Hefner

I love all of Hefner’s music–but Dead Media is what I reach for when I write. Trippy and electronic, it’s a great background soundtrack. And yet it remains just as deliciously character- and story-driven as Hefner’s other albums.

Moving to the west end was a big, big, big mistake
We lost all our money and we got mostly heartache.
Some nights she would sigh, and place her head upon my lap
And she would cry. I couldn’t stop her shaking.

And I said, “Let me let you let me down again,”
She said, “No.”

1. Every Scene Needs Its Center by Tullycraft

I can’t explain my love for Tullycraft.

They’re my favorite band. And this album isn’t just my writing album, but also my dancing album, my making-out album, my afternoon-pick-me-up album. If there’s anything wrong with Every Scene Needs Its Center, it’s that I’m prone to jumping up and dancing like a dork while it’s playing. Makes it hard to reach your daily word count goals, but it sure is fun.

Every song on this album is about loving music, except for that one that’s about aliens. Every song feels like coming home at 2 am from a concert, your hair stinking of someone else’s cigarettes, your throat raw from singing. You’re tired, but you’re so, so happy. Yeah. It’s like that.

An orange glow, some blinking lights.
Don’t know how most folks spend their Friday nights.
Well I’ve seen evidence no one would dare dispute–
Witness accounts make up my life’s pursuit.
And in those photos there’s a sadness
And a message I can feel
Just give me one sign that you’re real.

Please give me one sign that you’re real.

—

Now go check out what all the other writers are rocking to!

The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor

This was a very silly book.

I was excited to request The Girl Who Became a Beatle when it came up on swap because it’s the first YA novel I’ve encountered that’s dealt with the Fab Four. As a preteen, I was absolutely obsessed with the Beatles—we’re talking, plastered-my-room-with-drawings-of-them, purchased-shelves-full-of-books-about-them, had-a-shoebox-full-of-newspaper-clippings, wore-out-my-tape-of-Backbeat obsessed. To this day, I still know a remarkable amount of Beatles trivia, love Beatles biopics, and have plans to someday finally make it to Liverpool to visit Mendips.

The protagonist of this novel, Regina Bloomsbury, would have gotten along well with little-me. She calls her basement hang out the Cavern, paints a Magical Mystery Tour rainbow on her ceiling, and starts a Beatles cover band called the Caverns because she loves the Fab Four so. When her band falls apart—because, you know, no one else really cares about playing Beatles covers—she wistfully wishes that she could be as famous as the Beatles.

And the next morning she wakes up to find out that it’s true!

This was pretty much a Beatles-themed version of Freaky Friday. The lightest, silliest of fantasy, Regina has a magical fairy godmother who grants her wish. Only problem is that they’ve become famous by replacing the Beatles in history—in short, they’ve cheated. “She Loves You” is now “He Loves You,” for example, and was “written” by Regina herself, using her extensive knowledge of Beatles jams. Now her band is slated to win a few Grammys, but they’re also falling apart, imploding—as rocket ships to success often do (I know this because I saw That Thing You Do, in the theater and several times, of course).

It was a little weird for me to read all of this because I wrote an exceedingly similar “book” (in a marble composition book) at twelve, in which a girl just like me becomes wildly famous with her Beatles cover band. The truth is, I’m sure that many girls and boys have written similar books. Who hasn’t imagined grappling with insane levels of insane success, just like your heroes? In this way, The Girl Who Became a Beatle isn’t very far off from fanfic, or just simple wish fulfillment.

But therein lies its strength, because it’s pretty fun. The prose isn’t spectacular (it is, in fact, simplistic and a bit wooden; more appropriate for a middle grade reader than a young adult reader), the fantasy cheesy and not really thought-through. But it’s also fluffy, satisfying, and fairly convincing. The Beatles references are light and a bit goofy (someday, maybe, I’ll write that dark young adult novel about the first several months of friendship between John and Paul—oh, the angst!), but this is really about Beatlesesque fame, not the Beatles in particular. I suspect that any thirteen year old with a dream of musical success would love this.

In that way, on its own terms The Girl Who Became a Beatle is a success in its own right. I have to say, though, that I found the last few paragraphs a tremendous cheat. Author Greg Taylor pretty much misappropriates the ending of a famous comic strip as his own (not unlike the Caverns stealing the Beatles’ songs). Cheap! But otherwise, this is fun, fluffy wish fulfillment that should satisfy its target audience immensely. It’s bubblegum, in the best possible way. Or jelly babies, as it were.

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It’s funny which deaths affect you.

Poly Styrene died last night. I haven’t really thought about her in years. I first heard of the X-Ray Spex when I was twelve or thirteen, going somewhere in my sister’s car. The car was olive green with a cloth ceiling that was falling in. She’d put checkered contact paper along the sidewalls to make it look like a cab. It smelled like motor oil and rust.

My sister was a Riot Grrrl. She made zines (which I was not allowed to read) and mixed-tapes and the hissing sound of the tape deck of her car is all mixed up in my memories of that time. I can’t tell you the exact day that I heard it, but I have a feeling that “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was my first Styrene song–the little squeaky girl voice shouting up from the tape deck as we drove down route 22, going somewhere. I was probably embarrassed–a thirteen-year-old’s hazy awareness that she’s listening to something dirty.

I wouldn’t rediscover the X-Ray Spex until I was sixteen or seventeen. I was already punk by then (thank Johnny Rotten’s short-lived TV series RottenTV, a summer spent torturing my mother with my own favorite tape, God Save the Queen), had started going to local shows and learned how to skank. I wore either a chelsea or a mohawk, a dog collar, torn fishnets, bright hair. You know, the usual.

One night, my friend Matt’s uncle drove us to the Princeton Record Exchange. We walked around for awhile. I saw Matt pull out a familiar LP–Germ Free Adolescents. “Hey, I remember that!” I said. We briefly bickered over who would buy it. He didn’t even have a record player (I had both my ancient Fisher Price one and a stereo I’d bought from the Salvation Army), but in the end, he won. He saw it first. I pouted and sulked, went home, and got on Napster.

The next day I went to school with “I am a poseur” sharpied to my forearm.

Because I was a poseur, of course. It was the turn of the new millennium in suburban New Jersey and I was doing my damndest to look like it was 1977, cutting up my T-shirts and safety pinning them back together. I knew that just as well as the kids who teased me knew it, but it was a way to feel ownership over how weird I was, and I liked it, too. The bright colors (a few kids shouted, “Hey! Rainbow bright!” at me in the hallways, and I just smiled). The craftyness. The Dollar Store lipsticks in blue and green.

Poly Styrene helped me take ownership of that. Yeah yeah, I said, sure, I’m a poseur. But so was she and so are you. What was I supposed to listen to, Powerman 5000? Anyway, this–this look, this music–made me happy. I figured that counted for something.

There was something about her–something that spoke to teenage girls in a way that the boy music of our own eras just didn’t. I hope that girls continue to discover her, that she’s always this spot of bright new wickedness and ownership. I hope she continues to make them feel thrilled.

I’ve been really missing Teaser Tuesdays since finishing up SEAS RUN DRY. What started as a fun way to share work turned out to be a really effective way to motivate myself to produce some reasonably polished pieces of writing. Now that I’m getting more immersed in my new project, TRIP, I’ve decided that it’s time to play along every week again.

TRIP’s a pretty complicated story. It involves aliens, time travel, multiple narrators, and a non-linear timeline (plus some other stuff that would be totally spoilerish if I shared but that is TOTALLY CRAZY YOU GUYS). But at its core, it’s really a story about adolescent longing. In order to not lose sight of that, I’ve been using music to help tease out my themes.

So I thought I might combine my teasers every week with a complimentary song. I recommend that you hit play just as you start reading, to properly set the tone. Today’s teaser is from the perspective of Francine, a bookworm living on the cusp of the 1970s who really doesn’t understand a lot of the cultural undercurrents of the day. But she is just beginning to understand cute boys. Her best friend Linda just gave her a poster featuring one of the Monkees. She never really watched the show, so she’s surprised to find herself a little, well, mesmerized by the image.

Fittingly, today’s tune is a Monkees cover by the band Shonen Knife.

After dinner, I hung Mike Nesmith up on the back of my closet door. I didn’t have any other posters. My room was still papered with bunnies—yellow bunnies, who were having tea in a rose garden, at that. I’d begged my parents to let me paint my room in middle school, but they hadn’t let me. As I stared down at the dark-eyed visage of Mike Nesmith, freshly unfurled, I knew that they would murder me if I put tape up over all those bunnies, hiding them. They needed to see them to know that I was still their little girl.

That’s why Mike went on the closet door. Really. It wasn’t so I could stare at him from my bed.

Eddie peeked in as I was taping him up.

“The Monkees? Really?!” he squeaked. His voice was changing, and he squeaked often. Momma said I wasn’t allowed to tease him about it.

“Really,” I replied, stepping down from my desk chair. I surveyed my work. The poster hung mostly straight; Mike’s eyes smoldered down at me.

“He’s sure got a big schnozz.” Eddie looked over to me, his tow-head tilted thoughtfully to one side. Then a wicked grin spread over his face. “But you like that, don’t you? You know what they say about men with big noses.”

“Big shoes?” I muttered. But I felt my cheeks heat up at the implication. Hastily I slid my chair across the wooden floor, avoiding Eddie’s gaze and the way he waggled his fingers at me.

“Francie’s in lo-ove!” he said in a sing-song voice. I tightened my hands over the chair’s carved back, but didn’t look up. “Aw . . . come on! Cheer up, sleepy Francie.”

I finally snapped my gaze up at him, glowering. Eddie lifted his hands. His laughter was snorted. “Okay, okay. I’ll leave you alone with your . . . lover.”

At that, I dashed after him. What else could I do? He clearly expected it, letting out a small squeal as he slipped through my bedroom door. I slammed it behind him. Then I winced as I heard the sound of the force reverberate through the skeleton of our house.

“. . . Francine!”

“Sorry, Daddy!” I called back, bracing myself against the door. “Eddie was teasing me!“

There was a pause. Daddy, I’m sure, was grumbling in his easy chair. “I don’t care! Don’t let it happen again.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I called, sweet-voiced. But my expression was not nearly as pleasant. Sixteen years in my house had taught me that I had to sound kind even when I wasn’t feeling very kind at all.

When I was sure that my father was placated—when all that answered was silence and the first steady creaks of crickets on the night air that drifted in from my open window, I turned back to the poster. In the dim light of my room, it almost looked like the face there could mov, at any moment, like he might lean forward and offer a hand to me. My eyes trained on the photograph, I went and rested against my headboard. “My lover,” Eddie had called him. What a ridiculous idea. I’d never even been kissed—had hardly even thought about kissing yet. But looking at the deep bow of his lips, at their soft corners and the slight smile there, it was difficult to think of anything else.

I closed my eyes, thinking of it. I wondered what was the right way to breathe while kissing—if you exhaled through your nose, or through your mouth, if the life force of your body entered the other person’s. Entered his. I wondered where you put your hands. On the back of his head? Or neck? Or did you let them fall to your side, your knuckles gracing his?

I reached over and flicked off the bedside light. In the darkness, his features were pale and strange. He could be anyone. Anyone with warm hands and lips. Anyone who gathered you into his arms and kissed you deeply.

It was there, in my bed, with my hands pressed between my knees and flushed from the first thrill of lust that my world lurched and shifted beneath me—and then abruptly disappeared.