Some books just demand a soundtrack – they either are about music and musicians or music is threaded through the book like a character. Pandora, one of several sites where you can create your own radio stations, has long been a daily musical companion of mine, but recently I’ve been thinking of it as a tool for building open-ended literary soundtracks. So, far I’ve built three such soundtracks – a pair based on two of my favorite non-fiction books about music and a third based on a novel with a finely wrought musical backdrop:
My station Please Kill Me is based on the oral history of punk by Legs McNeil. The book (and my Pandora radio station based on it), trace the early origins of punk from MC5, The Stooges, and The Velvet Underground, through to the New York heyday of The Ramones and British invaders like The Sex Pistols, not to mention various new wavy offshoots like Television and The Talking Heads, all of which get through treatment in McNeil’s book.
My station Our Band Could Be Your Life is based on the book by music journalist Michael Azerrad that chronicles the rise and fall of thirteen seminal indie rock bands. Detailed chapters on Black Flag, The Minutemen (whose line from “Double Nickels on the Dime” supplies the title of the book), Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Fugazi, Mudhoney, and Beat Happening effectively constitute the history of indie rock for a generation of music fans.
My station Fortress of Solitude delves into the realm of fiction and is inspired by Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel. Music is integral to the book – especially its first section, in which protagonist Dylan Ebdus befriends Mingus Rude, son of soul superstar Barrett Rude, Jr., and funk and early rap music is heard on Brooklyn street corners. In the book’s second half, a grown up Ebdus is an obsessive music writer with a CD collection spanning a generation of soul music and with music tastes and knowledge far beyond. The book’s publication spawned a question in the early days of The Millions about where a supposed soundtrack compiled by Jonathan Lethem to accompany Fortress of Solitude could be found. It turned out to just be a pair of “mix CDs” that Lethem was handing out to friends at readings, but lucky for us, a Lethem fan posted a track listing (and the site he posted it on – now defunct – was archived by archive.org). Scroll way down on this page to find the track listing. As much as was possible, it was used as the basis for this station.
There are no doubt thousands of non-fiction and fiction books that could be augmented with soundtracks (largehearted boy’s “book notes” project in which “authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published books,” would be a great source). Share some of your own ideas for literary soundtracks or links to soundtracks you’ve made in the comments below.
A note to our international readers: Pandora, because of music licensing issues, is only available to U.S. listeners. Sorry about that, and if there is a similar site to Pandora available in your country, hopefully you can try it there.
