Songs that Spoke to me in the Dark

Before I was anything else, I was loud (and according to my mother, rather kicky.)

As a baby, I babbled continuously to my parents. As a toddler, I hummed whenever I needed to concentrate. As a teenager, I was always singing to myself, and to this day, I very seldom wake up without a song in my head.

As much as Shakespeare, the Bible, and Emily Dickinson have shaped my understanding of narrative and appreciation of language, I'm an auditory creature by nature. I write to sound good, I write to feel good, and even if the end product falls short of one of those goals, everything in me starts with music.

Here are some of the artists that have inspired me most thus far.

Fall Out Boy

Pete Wentz's double entendres, Patrick Stump's soulful vocals and composing, Andy Hurley's impeccable rhythm, and Joseph Trohman's soaring guitar chords forever combine to create a stained glass cathedral of human complexity. There's no such thing as a simple Fall Out Boy song. The emotions depicted and evoked are always complicated, if not nuanced. Nostalgia meets loneliness, lust meets regret, despair meets hope, reverence meets terror, and all of it combines to form the sweetest, deepest ache.

The complexities both in the musical arrangements and in the lyrics have forever inspired my to create complex characters with still more complicated relationships. It's the fraught nature of the human experience--the unspoken emotions, the ache, the loss, the joy, the free fall, the climb--that creates the stories.

Panic! at the Disco

Long before guitarist Ryan Ross was on "The Bad List" with Z-Berg and singer Brendon Urie was getting cancelled on Twitter for alleged abuse violations, Panic's premiere album A Fever You Can't Sweat Out rocked the airwaves and the entire pop/punk subgenre.

At the time, the scene was rife with pop stars sirening and pale men in eyeliner bemoaning their exes. Fever's cool mix of techno, rock, lyrical self-effacement, and almost musical theater level narrative structure felt revolutionary. While other artists were also experimenting with theatrics and techno/hip hop elements in their music, Panic's execution felt smoothest to me, perhaps because in the midst of so many acts in band t-shirts screaming depression ballads, they sang self-mockery and stoicism in 1900s garb. They were Vaudeville when everyone else was a Tim Burtons rendition of Romeo & Juliet. Even on the more melancholy side of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, on songs such as "Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks" and "Lying is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off," there's an unshakable pluckiness.

Just try listening to "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies" see if you don't come away dancing.

Billie Eilish

When I first started writing the stories that would become my first book, Singing to The Dark, Billie's music was everywhere. Her first full-length album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? had just premiered the summer before and every radio station was still playing "bad guy," "when the party's over," and "bury a friend" almost hourly.

Billie's alternately punky and vulnerable lyrics, meme culture references, and jazzy ASMR vocals over Finneas's masterful melodic layering was a culmination of everything in music and pop culture I loved. The snarky, yet self-aware lyrics, the emotional sensitivity under jaunty teenage bravado... I fell in love with Eilish both as a singer and a narrator. All her songs echoed back to me the complexity of human spirit and of competing needs and desires--the need to feel seen and loved pitted against distrust of others and imposter syndrome in "bury a friend," the emerging heartache and love blossoming contrasted with fear of heartbreak in "i love you," the subversive joy in playing tough in "bad guy."

Her songs were not only catchy, they were iconoclastic, and not simply for the purposes of going against the grain, either. "xanny" is an anti-addiction ballad. "all the good girls go to hell" is about climate change. In between sound clips from The Office ("my strange addiction" samples) and Sherlock references ("you should see me in a crown" was an inspired by an episode of Sherlock), the album is rife with social commentary.

There are several artists not included who have influenced me as well, including Juice WRLD, Drake, Childish Gambino, and many others, but all in all, what pulls me to a narrative in any sense is complexity. Emotional complexity, relational complexity, lyrical complexity--and I strive to capture that in my narratives as well.