Just Take Those Old Records Off the Shelf

In praise of songs we already know

Last summer I was walking my dog, Betty, on a wide loop through our neighbourhood when I heard a person playing guitar on a high apartment balcony.

I usually find neighbourhood walks to be pretty boring. I prefer to take Betty to the nearby dog park where I can chat with other people from the neighbourhood and she can do the dog equivalent of the same thing. But Betty was in heat, too young to have been spayed yet, and so the dog park was off limits. I love having Betty around, but the last thing I need is a bunch of puppies that are half Betty and half a horny, leggy Great Dane named Bambam.

There were giant leafy trees all up and down the street, so I couldn’t see the person with the guitar. She strummed some chords on her guitar, stopped, changed tempo, strummed some more.

“It doesn’t hurt me… yeah yeah…”

She was slightly off key, but she definitely had enthusiasm for the song. At that point in time, it felt like everybody did.

“Do you wanna feeeeeel how it feels…”

I heard Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ everywhere I went last summer. The song, in case you somehow missed this, was a major plot device in the most recent season of Stranger Things. I won’t spoil it* for you, but suffice to say, the song’s power is taken full advantage of in a pivotal scene. So people went kind of bananas for it.

Sure, there were the music nerds who grumbled about people just now discovering Kate Bush when she’d been there all along for the listening. But if Kate Bush herself was into it (“‘Running Up That Hill’ …is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show—I love it too!” That’s right, Kate Bush watches Stranger Things and uses exclamation points) then I see no reason to be snobby about it.

The whole ‘Running Up That Hill’ phenomenon reminded me that old songs can become new songs depending on who is listening to them. A person listening to ‘Running Up That Hill’ for the first time in 2022 can have just as strong a reaction as someone listening to it when it was released in 1985.

And it doesn’t even need to be a song you’ve never heard before. You can be just as innervated by a song you’d forgotten about. Recently, when working on a playlist for my forthcoming book, I re-listened to ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, the Tiffany version, from 1987. I was a young teen when the song was released and I liked it very much. Hearing it again sparked a giddy joy in me. I was an excited middle-aged person remembering the feelings of being an excited teenager with her new Tiffany cassette tape spinning in her Walkman.

And when that song came out, my parents and their friends definitely made some comments about Tiffany’s song being inferior to the Tommy James and the Shondells version from twenty years before. It wasn’t a new song, sure, but it was new to me. Just like the Tommy James version was new to my parents when they were listening to it in 1967.

For the sake of research I listened to both the Tommy James AND the Tiffany version of the song today and I remain staunchly in the Tiffany camp. But that’s just my opinion. I don’t subscribe to music snobbery of any kind, so I’m not going to tell you that the Tommy James version is inferior because the bass line in the sounds like the background music in a Scooby Doo chase scene. Because if you like Scooby Doo chase scene music, who am I to tell you that you’re wrong?

(Also, because I know someone may want to know, I listened to the Billie Joe Armstrong cover of the song, which I would argue is more similar to Tiffany’s than to Tommy James’. It was pretty good, but I’m sticking with my girl Tiffany and that’s my final decision.)

Where were we? Oh yeah, old songs. I’m not saying we should only listen to old music, especially because the support of new artists is what keeps music innovative and alive. And new artists need our financial resources (go buy that Martha album you’ve been thinking about) and our enthusiastic word of mouth more than older, already established artists do. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t fault people for being moved my older songs, and we should celebrate the magic of people falling in love with music regardless if it was recorded in 1967, 1987, or 2023.

Putting music in a work of fiction is harder than you might think. Choose a brand new song and you risk it dating your work when people read it years from now. Choose older, established music and your editor might ask why your 32 year old main character likes Joni Mitchell so much. Also, this is a slight tangent (who, me?) but you can’t put lyrics in your book unless your publisher pays for the rights and the rights are oh so expensive in most cases. So yeah, that part in my book where one character sings the first lyric of ‘Borderline’ by Madonna? Cut cut cut.

There are definite benefits to using older music in fiction. The one that is most important to me is that when songs have been around for a while they become short hand for so many other things. The male lead shows up in a Talking Heads t-shirt? I, as a reader know some stuff about that guy. He’s probably a bit arty, maybe a bit dorky, possibly a bit of a music nerd. Same guy shows up wearing a Go-Gos shirt? He likes an established, feminist all-female band enough to buy a shirt? Well, now things are getting really interesting.

I use a lot of music in everything I write, and if using song references in my work leads someone to discover a new band or a new song then I am thrilled, regardless of if it’s an Aretha Franklin song or a Sleater Kinney song or a Waxahatchee song. Because I live for the moment that a song gets its hooks in your heart and becomes all you want to listen to until the next amazing song comes along.

Please feel free to tell me your opinions about I Think We’re Alone Now and/or any other stuff in the comments.

January 2022 - Songs

I Think We’re Alone Now - Is this the best version? Or this? Or this?

Statuette On the Console - BODEGA This is the exact type of punk rock that I am always in the mood for.

Oh George - Peaness This band reminds me of Heavenly and boy, did I ever love Heavenly. (Peaness… huh huh huh)

C is the Heavenly Option - Heavenly See? So good.

Which of course leads me to want to listen to Halo Benders.

January 2022 - Feelings

No romance novels this time, but these books both gave me FEELINGS so they qualify for this part of the newsletter. Both of these books got a fair amount of attention when they were released in 2022, but in my opinion neither got the avalanches of attention and praise they deserved.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub is a a time travel story where the time travel is the only thing that feels sci fi-ish. So if you, like me, shy away from books in the science fiction/fantasy genres, let me tell you that you should read this anyway. It is essentially a tribute to Straub’s father (who died after the book was published after a long illness) and so it is written with a kind of naked emotion that made it a delight to sink into. Plus, if you were a teenager in the 90’s this will really bring you back. The book has so much to say about aging, growing up, parenthood, and family. One of my favourites of the year for sure.

The Witches of Moonshyne Manor by Bianca Marais is something I picked up because I really love Marais’s podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. But listening to someone host an informative ‘inside baseball’ writing podcast does not really prepare you for reading an entire gripping, roller coaster of a book that they’ve written. I knew Marais was smart and funny but I was not ready for the delights of this book. Again, it has fantasy elements (witches) but the rest of the world around the witches is pretty much how it is. That is to say, bleak. Case in point, some city officials want to tear down the titular manor so they can build a theme park for grown men that includes a shooting range. Read this if you want to see how witchcraft can destroy the patriarchy.

Thanks for reading! Happy 2023.

* I used to think that once a show/movie/book had been out for several months/years, then all bets were off regarding spoilers. However, I have recently learned that my husband believes that you should literally never spoil anything, ever. In the last week I have apparently spoiled both The Good Place and season one of Pretty Little Liars for him. Go figure. I want to point out that both of these are shows that we started watching and then collectively decided we were not interested in. He maintains that he might want to watch them someday, so I should not impart the knowledge that I have gained from Wikipedia/being-a-human-in-the-world about their eventual twists and turns.

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My debut romance novel, MAKE ME A MIXTAPE is coming from Doubleday in 2024.