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But it had to be this one, this wailing, emotional, even playful tribute to the desire to break free from your life, from the place that defines you, and strike out for somewhere new, somewhere you can write your own story. The Dixie Chicks are wonderful and many of their songs would work for this list. I don’t want to ruin it with words - just hit play.
Gillian Welch’s “The Revelator” is a sacred album to me, and this track my favorite. If Marlena had lived, I imagine she might have tried to write her own version.
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Marlena’s rendition of this song - slowed down, a little angstier, inflected with a vocal crack and tear here and there for slightly misguided and melodramatic impact - is the embodiment of her aesthetic. She’s got a musician’s ear - and like so many teenagers, a hubristic faith in her own instincts. Both girls want to be famous, or feel famous already, in that bashful way that all teenagers sort of believe they are the true center of the universe. In the second half of Marlena, Cat records a video of Marlena singing this song. But when I thought about what I wanted my novel to be, how I wanted it to make readers feel, I thought of “River.” I wanted to write that song in novel form. That aural memory will haunt Cat for the rest of her life. In the opening pages of the book, Cat, the narrator, remembers Marlena singing “California,” one of the anthems of small town girls, no matter the decade.
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Her voice, as I imagine it, is a cousin of Joni’s - a little more textured, but full of that same trembling strength, a similar ability to make high notes pierce and shimmer. Marlena, the title character of my novel, is a 17 year-old girl with perfect pitch and wide ranging taste in music - from folk to country, pop to punk to blues. You just have to listen you just have to feel it. Frank singing “Blues Run the Game,” or Gillian Welch singing pretty much anything. No explanation can evoke what I’m trying to get at as deeply and fully as Jackson C. The list can be split into roughly two groups - there are the tracks that make you long for where you come from, that fill you with yearning, and the ones that remind you of the promise of the place that took you in. This is a soundtrack for city people from small towns - the leave and I’m never coming backers, the runaways. And that’s what those songs capture so well - the impossibility of ever outrunning yourself, no matter how far you go. Turns out, those parts were just as stubborn as my taste in music. And when I grew up and moved away from the midwest, as Cat does, to New York City, I found that my taste had mostly cemented, that the songs I played on repeat while waiting for the subway were the folk and country songs I thought I’d left behind like the parts of myself I didn’t much like. I was in high school in the early 2000s, a few years before Cat and Marlena were - but like them, I preferred the older stuff, and was a bit of a snob when it came to Top 40 radio (except for the Dixie Chicks). That’s one hundred percent ode to the songs I loved as a teenager. But the plot is fictional, the girls are characters, and the story is not my own.Įxcept for the music. I have written nonfiction about losing a close friend from high school it’s no secret that certain elements of the novel are influenced by real experiences. I find this question annoying, but it’s not totally unjustified - the narrator of the book, Cat, is a woman slightly older than me, also from northern Michigan, looking back on an adolescent friendship that ended in tragedy and changed the course of her life. The book came out earlier this month, and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked over and over again how autobiographical it is. And so perhaps it’s not a surprise that my debut novel, Marlena, is set in this remote and beautiful place, and that the girl at the heart of the story harbors secret dreams of becoming a singer. I grew up in rural northern Michigan, incongruous land of both country music radio and months of endless snow. Folk music is my drug of choice, anything nostalgic, women with hard-living voices, and yes, I love a good sad man with a guitar. I like country more than I want to admit. I should get this out of the way up front - for me, music is for singing, and for feeling. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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