Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Brendan Gillen writes about Static from Vine Leaves Press.
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A Guide to Writing Music that Doesn’t Exist
Confession: I’ve never played an instrument. Was never held hostage by a purse-lipped piano tyrant. Never regaled the quad with the thick-skulled tabs of “Smoke on the Water” or “You Really Got Me.” Never even had the devilish pleasure of driving my parents insane with atonal bleats from a school-issued recorder.
But I’ve long nurtured a deep love of music. I’ve DJ’d and collected records for twenty-five years now, and my love of hip hop—specifically vinyl and DJ culture—has only deepened as an adult. The urgency and truth that propels the music. The quicksilver syllables. The internal rhymes and triple entendres. And perhaps most of all, the ingenious recontextualization of the samples that form the foundation of the production.
When I was in my early teens, a pal of mine managed to get his hands on some turntables, so after school, we’d retreat to his room to practice rudimentary mixing, scratching, and beat-juggling with doubles of “Still D.R.E” and like, “No Scrubs.” I was instantly hooked. It was our own sort of alchemy, but visceral. Tactile. And we didn’t even have to know scales or chords or sheet music to make some noise.
When my debut novel, Static, began to take shape around a fictional band called They Is (shoutout to the last line of Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”), I was faced with a dilemma: how to write about the band’s music? It was imperative to me that the scenes of music creation and songwriting feel authentic. Or at least as authentic as someone who’s never been in a band was capable of writing.
As a baseline, I shaped They Is around bands whose ethos was rooted in DJ culture and who leaned heavily on samples and synthesized production: Portishead, The XX, Everything but the Girl, among others. Beat-driven music. Contemplative. Moody. Ethereal. As a fan, I was confident in my ability to write authoritatively about the elements of this music that speak to me and translate it into a fictional setting. I’ve also made some rudimentary sample-driven beats myself, so I have a working knowledge about the technical aspects of creation. And say what you will about Pitchfork, but years of reading their often quite literary reviews opened me up to writing about bands in unexpected and evocative ways. The way say Portishead’s Dummy, “tastes not like warm milk but coppery and bitter, like blood.” In many ways, Pitchfork was a north star.
But look, I’m being evasive. The best way to break it down is to examine the five songs that make up the EP at the heart of the novel. Static aims to examine the nature of success, and these five songs become the vehicle by which Paul, the protagonist, and his bandmates learn that true success isn’t always counted by record deals and Spotify plays. Each of the tracks that I “wrote” for They Is were inspired by songs that I love. Songs that not only have distinctive audio fingerprints that translate well into prose, but also that I return to again and again as a listener: for comfort, for inspiration, or to simply lose myself in. In writing Static, I hoped to translate the elements of these songs that move me into text that gives the reader the same feeling.
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Track 1: “Lights Go Out”
The first song the band makes together was inspired by a fusion of DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” and Massive Attack’s “Teardrop.” Dusty. Subterranean. It’s the song that gives They Is confidence they might be onto something, and the song that cues the reader into their sound. With “Lights Go Out,” the reader is meant to understand there’s a creative spark amongst the three members—Paul on beats/production, Bunky on bass, Eloise on guitar/vocals—that simply doesn’t exist when they’re on their own. The song weaves in samples of Paul’s ex-girlfriend’s voice and violin—without her knowledge—a move that not only helps him heal from heartbreak, but also leads to a creative epiphany that catalyzes the band. I was interested in the ways in which this technique mirrors what we do as writers: we “remix” the voices in our lives to craft our stories. Lastly, I wrote some snippets of hushed, emotive lyrics, which were meant to provide some insight into the pain that Eloise is hiding from her bandmates.
He pressed play and the beat gurgled to life. The slurry intro of Sara’s voice: It’s me. The steady, open pulse of the lilting piano. The drums kicked in—drums engineered to rattle trunks and clubs—and with them, Sara’s dismembered violin. Bunky focused his attention on his bass and negotiated the strings for the right chords. He closed his eyes, worked his tongue into the corner of his mouth and settled into a sparse, minor key bassline. Eloise craned over her guitar until Paul could see the pale crease of her scalp where the dark hair was parted and pulled tight by her red bandana. She picked clean notes that fell like icicles around the open space.
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Track 2: “King Kong”
Inspiration for “King Kong” fell somewhere between Dead Prez’s “Hip Hop” and Tyler, the Creators’ “Yonkers.” Heavier. Menacing. Snarling. But undeniably head-nodding. The kind of jam that makes you twist your face up like you smelled rank milk. Again, the goal of the song as a plot device was to provide distinctive auditory markers for the reader—the 808 drums that pushed the EQ into the red, the ticking high hat—that would provide clues as to the musical geography of the song without having the luxury of hearing it.
A subterranean 808 kick drum threatened the integrity of their shitty speakers. The beat was open and spacious, held together by a ticking high hat and colored by a squelching synth, punctuated at intervals by that single word: work. Paul couldn’t help but bob his head and Bunky did the same.
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Track 3: “You’ll Never Know (What Your Eyes Do To Me)”
In my imagination, “You’ll Never Know (What Your Eyes Do To Me” had the sped-up sample of the iconic “Funky Drummer” break on “Clipped On” by Blood Orange. Uptempo. A crisp beat. Throw it in a blender with “Loud Places” by Jamie xx and “Hold On” by Drama, and you’re in the right zone. From a plot standpoint, the pace and tempo of this track is meant to mirror the emotional landscape of the three members of the band: they’re sensing potential, riding the momentum, and as the reader, we’re meant to feel it too.
After a few measures, the pulse of the track quickened, the kick and snare weaved together into a spare, four-on-the-floor breakbeat.
“Makes me want to double-dutch,” Eloise said and rocked her shoulders.
“Or like, bust out a square of cardboard and start breaking,” said Bunky. “Never thought you’d have a dance track in you.”
The steady pulse of the beat was held together both by Eloise’s spiky guitar and the come-ons she exchanged in verse with Bunky. Their words told the tale of a missed connection, two lovers passing each other like ships in the night on the dancefloor.
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Track 4: “Friends”
“Friends” is the kind of tune you might find on a playlist wedged between “Intro” by The XX and “Jets” by Bonobo. Who says you need vocals to evoke an emotional response in the listener? At this point in the book, Paul is beginning to realize that what will “save” him isn’t a breakout record but rather, salvaging the familial relationships that he’s let curdle. This is marked by the sample of his brother’s boyhood voice. Before Paul was ready to repair these relationships in real life, I could have him test the waters in his songs.
The fourth track remained an instrumental, a song they called, “Friends,” the one that featured Will’s boyhood voice. Paul built the beat around a toy piano sample and plunged it in watery reverb. Bunky added a low-end pulse and Eloise thrummed crystalline accents that gave Paul chills.
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Track 5: “Crescent Line”
Inspired by Portishead’s (sensing a theme?) “Glory Box,” “Crescent Line” is ultimately the song that helps They Is break through, and it’s no mistake that Eloise, perhaps the purest “artist” in the trio, is the one to give it an emotional core. It’s also the only song for which I wrote “complete” lyrics. Songwriting is an artform for which I have infinite respect, so I wanted to honor the form by writing no more than a few lines of lyrics for most of the songs to put the reader in an emotional headspace. But for “Crescent Line,” I expanded on a poem that I had stashed on my hard drive and that suited the song’s theme: running away from the ones who love us most.
The fifth song was all crumble and clutter, a trip-hop beat run through a blender, inspired by the spare drums of “Beat Bop,” which Paul had listened to again and again before he’d sold it off. The glue of the track was the sample of Mika and Dante—an end-of-the-world drone dappled with Dante’s voice—to which Paul added layers of decay until it was rusting at the joints. He peppered in skittering drums and warbling, pitched-down record scratches. The result sounded as if it had been recorded from the depths of a slow-moving iceberg.
I believe there’s a cosmic bank when it comes to making art. That every time a work moves you—novel, sculpture, or say, the Roseland Ballroom version of “Only You”—you’re withdrawing from that bank. I know I’ve taken out more than my fair share. So, at the very least, I hope that with STATIC I can pay back my debt in some small way. That by creating They Is and their fictional music, I’ve honored all the bands and DJs and record stores that have made me who I am.
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Originally from Charlottesville, VA, Brendan Gillen lives in Brooklyn and earned his MFA at the City College of New York. He is the winner of the 2023 Wigleaf/Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction and his short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. His fiction appears in the Florida Review, Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, Necessary Fiction, and many other journals. Static is his first novel. Brendan is also an Emmy-winning writer/director at Boomshot Productions where he has developed films and content for ESPN, Condé Nast, BBC, Fox Sports, the US Open, Resy, Anheuser-Busch, NASCAR, FanDuel and other global brands.