I must make a somewhat shameful confession: I am not a huge fan of playlists. When I’m actively working on a novel, I’m much more the listen-to-the-same-song-over-and-over kind of girlie than someone who spends her time crafting curated playlists. Nope! I am way too intense for that kind of meticulous ordering, too messy and obsessive.
Instead, I tend to find a song reminiscent of the chapter or scene I’m working on, and then listen to it on repeat until I’m finished. Whether I was detailing the budding friendship between Lexi and Ava or writing a love scene between Kayla and Jamie, I focused on the one song that set the tone and immersed myself in it, which somehow managed to create not just a mood, but an entire world.
So, that all being said, here are eight tracks that inspired my new novel, The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana:
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- “Head Cheerleader” by Pom Pom Squad
- “Lust For Life” by Iggy Pop
- “Venus” by Television
- “Awful” by Hole
- “Bloodstream” by Soccer Mommy
- “Nightmare” by Halsey
- “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac
- “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have—but I have it” by Lana Del Rey
“Head Cheerleader” is about getting involved with someone who has a much stronger presence, but choosing to learn from that strength instead of being subsumed by it. The line, “I’m learning how to be someone I could put my faith in if it really came down to me,” encapsulates Ava’s whole journey from start to finish. “Lust for Life” and “Venus” will forever conjure up the streets of the Lower East Side for me, so they were the perfect soundtrack to the scenes between Ava and Lexi as they discover the whole glittering city, making it new, and making it their own.
“Bloodstream” is bit of a strange choice, given that it’s a song about anxiety and mental illness, but I wrote a large part of the book while having Long Covid, so lines like, “There’s a pale girl staring in the mirror at me, maybe it’s just a dream, wish I could go back to sleep,” were very much the way I was feeling at the time, and why the writing of this book was such an escape for me.
“Nightmare” has a kind of creeping dread, underscoring many of Kayla’s investigative moments, and echoes the feminist bent of the narrative, namely Kayla’s decision to take on the corrupt world of the music industry and the men who run it. “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like we to have—but I have it,” is so true and pure that it breaks my heart, especially when Del Rey closes with, “but I have it.” That purity reminds me so much of Ava, who never loses hope, even when she loses her way, and of Kayla, a character who believes that connection and love are dangerous bedfellows at the start, but who eventually learns to hope—and to feel again—by the novel’s close.
The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana by Jennifer Banash (Lake Union Publishing) is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Read an excerpt from The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana here.