Songs from the Stories

About the music in Patrick Earl Ryan’s If We Were Electric

Introduction

I’m one of those people that has music in my head most hours of the day regardless if music is playing around me, though I often play instrumental music when I’m writing (especially revising), working, or exercising. I'll often absent-mindedly be tapping my foot and beating a beat in my thoughts, a sort of rhythmic accompaniment to my life, or humming something while I cook each evening. My earliest memories are filled with music, singing “Sunshine on My Shoulders” with my dad on stage when I was seven for one of his city charity concerts, singing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” with my Mom at St. Agnes’s Christmas show in the school cafeteria (forgetting half the lyrics). It amazes me how songs are still attached so strongly to events or places, like how the Violator album takes me right back to riding along the New Orleans’ lakefront in my college friend’s car on a sunny day heading for UNO, or how Madonna’s “Holiday” brings me right back to playing the then-brand-new video game Joust at Skate Country on Jefferson Highway when I was 13.

Many of the life experiences that inspired the stories in If We Were Electric carry musical memories with them, too. Some are clearly written in the stories, like The Smiths’ “Reel Around the Fountain” in my story “I Wouldn’t Say No.” Other songs call up the mood of a story for me, perhaps through the lyrics or the era of the song, like how “Love Plus One” brings me back to a very particular time and crush in the 1980s. In some cases, the songs are neither mentioned in the stories nor in this playlist, but are still called up from my memory each time I hear them or reread a story, like how my story “Blackout” reminds me of real life experiences tripping on acid in the Mississippi backwoods and is also intimately connected with Deee-Lite’s 1992 Infinity Within album, because my boyfriend and I listened to that CD driving back to New Orleans in 3 a.m. dark still tripping.

I’ve included a quote from the stories that ties the song to that particular line or scene. Now and then, though not for all of them, I also include an explanation. You can listen to all the songs in order in my Spotify or YouTube Music playlist.

Before Las Blancas

1. Two of Us · The Beatles

I drove most of that first day. I could smell him on my fingers, hours after we’d done it.

The perfect road trip song. There’s something slightly criminal about it, too. The idea of spending someone’s hard earned pay. I start thinking bank heists and Thelma and Louise schemes. Yet it’s completely upbeat and joyful. I like that dichotomy. Here, it feels like the perfect song about journeying to a new home, a new life, for Evie and Neil as they set off west on the Louisiana highway.

2. Jambalaya · Preservation Hall Jazz Band and The Del McCoury Band

My mom was throwing her annual crawfish boil… The party went on as long as my mom could force a drop of juice out of it.

This was probably the first Cajun song I ever heard, back when I was just 5 or 6 years old. Though most people outside of New Orleans are more likely to know the Hank Williams version, local versions always got played far more at the crawfish boils and Mardi Gras parties when I was growing up.

3. Slow Ride · Beastie Boys

“Damn, she’s got it bad.” He put on one of his Beastie Boys CDs. “You kissed a girl yet?” he asked me.

It had to be something from their first album Licensed to Ill. I love this album now, but when it first came out, I remember it was always the bullies in my class who liked it, dumb white boys who’d loudly and arrogantly rap the lyrics too close to my face. It speaks to who Aubrey is, his brand of masculinity, his bullyish nature. He’d be a completely different teenaged boy if he played Paul’s Boutique instead.

Blackout

4. Love Don’t Live Here Anymore · Rose Royce

My cheek still thumped and maybe I had a loose tooth. I bummed a ride to Mississippi with my neighbor…

Although I don’t describe the man or his car in the book, I’d always imagined Paddy’s neighbor to be a gentle giant, heavy-set Barry White type, squeezed behind the wheel of a powder-blue 1976 Ford LTD, always playing classic soul on his 8-track. Madonna covered this song on her Like A Virgin album, which was where I first heard it back in the 80s.

Feux Follet

5. O Marie · Daniel Lanois

The woods sang to him. The cicadas took no break. He knelt down in the grass listening to the insects sing…

Through the revision process for the book as a whole, I kept coming back to Daniel Lanois’ album Acadie. The watery, ethereal tone of it really worked for the stories that take place outside of New Orleans in the swamps. This song has a particularly Cajun/ Zydeco feel to it, yet it still has that Daniel Lanois moodiness that resonates well with my writing. If you think you don’t know Daniel Lanois, he was the producer of U2’s epic album The Joshua Tree, among many, many other brilliant projects.

The Blue Son

6. Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? · Harry Connick, Jr.

The house looks more and more like the place I wanted to come back to… I’ve wished I could be home again, hundreds of times, or thousands.

There is that draw that New Orleans has on its children. We leave and then realize that there’s no place quite the same as our home. I always think of it as an intense, unique-to-New-Orleanians magnetism.

An Undisturbed Dark Place

7. Warm Leatherette · Grace Jones
8. I’m Here Again · Thelma Houston

Halfway through dinner, your waitress gets up on stage and lip-synchs some disco number by Grace Jones or Thelma Houston.

Both of these I saw performed back in the day at Lucky Cheng’s, a drag restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter that is sadly long gone and missed. Someone always had to take on Grace Jones. More often than not it was Thelma’s other song “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” but I love the more empowering lift of this one.

9. Love Plus One · Haircut 100

I get songs in my head that won’t get out until I hear them seven or eight times in one day. It’s “Love Plus One” this time.

10. Lust For Life · Iggy Pop
11. Heaven · The Psychedelic Furs

Played everything from Iggy Pop to the Furs that night. No breaks. There’s sweat and blood in those drumsticks.

12. I Wanna Be Loved By You · Betty Boop

After appetizers, Madame Saigon pulls him onto the stage as she performs “I Wanna Be Loved By You” with a black-feathered boa…

13. More Than A Woman · Bee Gees

The radio plays that slow song from Saturday Night Fever. The one the DJ plays when John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney spin again and again.

I liked the idea of considering this a slow song and how relative that kind of interpretation can be. Disco, yes, but I find this song incredibly romantic, a soaring positivity that captures limerence perfectly.

Between Here and There

14. Charlie’s Angels Theme

He tiptoes back to their door, then enters the dark, booming heat, seeing Farrah Fawcett aim her pistol at sky-blue.

The Cargo

15. Bennie and the Jets · Elton John

By their second cup of coffee the stranger had invited them to the Hutzes’s wedding reception and promised to sing “Benny and the Jets”…

16. I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail · Waylon Jennings
17. Mama Tried · Merle Haggard

“You have no idea,” he said between verses of “Mama Tried.” Then just after the first three words of “I’ve Got A Tiger by the Tail,” he warned the memory…

I love what’s conjured by the image of having a tiger by the tail, the anxious danger of that, being too close to a killer.

18. Still Water · Daniel Lanois

It moseyed along like an old, fat gator, grunted discouragingly, then sank into the green water with a few bubbles and two loud burps.

Here Daniel Lanois’ much more moody and atmospheric “Still Water” conveys the swampy atmosphere, but also the eerie stillness of that water once the station wagon burps and settles underwater.

I Wouldn’t Say No

19. Matte Kudasai · King Crimson

…if he had room to pack the King Crimson box set I gave him for Christmas.

King Crimson’s 1991 box set is mentioned twice in the story collection. I’ve never been a King Crimson fan, but I bought the box set as gift for a good friend back when CDs were still the fashion.

20. Fascination Street · The Cure
21. Meat is Murder (Live) · The Smiths
22. Tom Sawyer · Rush

Sooner or later, he’d strip off his shirt, playing air guitar to “Fascination Street” or “Meat is Murder” or “Tom Sawyer.”

I spent a lot of time being in love with straight boys in my teens and early 20s before I came out fully in the world, and these songs represent some of the music that the straight boys introduced me to in those years. I was late listening to The Smiths, considering Morrissey was often singing about what I was subjecting myself to, and late to The Cure, too, and that brave androgyny that could’ve broken my shell sooner. It’s always amusing to me that it was a straight boy who introduced me to such queer artists.

23. Reel Around the Fountain · The Smiths

…mounds of vinyl and tapes without cases. “Reel around the Fountain,” he said, big smirk on his face, “and I have to piss, so get up, perv.”

There’s a very real memory attached to this song and how it’s used in the story. The sound of The Smiths and the angst, ache, and desperateness of being in love with a straight boy play really well together.

Labor

24. My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It · Louis Armstrong

By noon, he sat on a curb at the corner of Royal and Pirate’s Alley and smoked one bummed cigarette, then watched the street artists paint…

I couldn’t create a playlist so closely tied to New Orleans without including the jazz wonder that is Louis Armstrong, and I imagine that Asoto would be listening to him a lot when he sat in the French Quarter playing chess or on the corner of St. Ann listening to street music. The simplicity of the song mirrors the simplicity of his life.

If We Were Electric

25. New Orleans Bump · Wynton Marsalis

He waits on top of a blue city garbage can, long legs beating against metal, drinking straw hung from his bottom lip.

The Marsalis family plays a similar iconic role as Louis in New Orleans, and I always associate this kind of Dixieland music with the French Quarter, always blaring out of the shop, restaurant, and bar windows. This is the music I hear when I picture Mark and his feet keeping beat on the garbage can.

Where It Takes Us

26. Kashmir · Led Zeppelin

A beautiful song that I could never place when I wasn’t with Jack, but with him I knew it was Led Zeppelin because it was always Led Zeppelin. Like we were moving across the desert.

“Kashmir” is the song I had in my head when I wrote those lines. One of my favorite Zeppelin songs. I did lose my oldest, straight brother to AIDS in 1993. He was 13 years older than me. He loved race cars and Zeppelin. His music boomed from speakers taller than me through my entire childhood. So even though I was a Madonna and Whitney Houston fan in high school, I also knew every Zeppelin song. My late brother named his sweet, adorable pit bull Kashmir, and with that in my memory, I named a dog Kashmir in an unpublished novel The Jade Fish of Perpetuity, of which “The Tempest” is an excerpt.

The Tempest

27. Stairway to Heaven · Led Zeppelin

…cross-legged on the living room floor with his biggest, favorite bong as he listened to “Stairway to Heaven,” or stuffed immobile with Cheetos and fried chicken…

I’d mentioned quite a few other classic rock songs in the earliest versions of “The Tempest,” where Jude not only played guitar, but also listed many more of his favorites, like Heart’s “Dog and Butterfly” and early Queen.

Listening to this pretty eclectic playlist, I’m reminded of how much I owe the people I’ve had in my life through the years who exposed me to their favorite music: my mom and dad’s Streisand and Sinatra, my oldest brother Perry’s Led Zeppelin, my college friend Daniel’s thousands of rock ’n’ roll and funk and rap vinyl LPs, my ex’s classical piano repertory. I’m reminded, too, that music is about sharing, sharing songs with each other, sharing emotions through our songs, illuminating these memories with songs. I think when I write about music, when I mention songs or artists in stories, I rely on that memory of music, and I try to build on it, to find the aura around it, and hope that the people who read my stories will understand that deeper layer of story that’s in the track selections. This playlist seemed the logical step, for those who might not have known each of the references in my book, so that maybe it can bring you a little closer to the hearts of the stories.