With a career dedicated to the written word and visual arts, one of the most striking American novelists in the contemporary canon talks Sophie Leigh Walker through the pivotal songs in his life.
Music, for Jonathan Lethem, has always been the unattainable thing.
The trick without a tell, a wonder which never wanes but only grows more unknowable. An act of creative grace. “Music symbolises what is impossible for me to do,” he says. “I’m humbled by it, endlessly.”
The Brooklyn-born novelist has long since tamed language: a material he has learned to contort, twist and entirely reinvent without prediction. Since passing through the halls of Bennington College in the cohort of era-defining authors including Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis, Lethem’s imagination has produced some of the most vivid jewels in contemporary American literature.
He writes of multi-post-apocalyptic futures in Amnesia Moon, psychedelic detective fiction in Gun, with Occasional Music and the tangle of place, memory and boyhood in 1970s Brooklyn in the semi-autobiographical The Fortress of Solitude – all sprawling pit stops belonging to the same, singular mind.
But before that, there was art. His first love, first instinct. From those tentative daubs of paint made on the same wall he used to hold himself up on two feet as a toddler, to carving marble at seventeen, the visual arts were a constant and natural medium in Lethem’s life.
At college, he took art classes while writing fiction almost secretly, as if it were a kind of betrayal. He knew how to be an art student, how to superficially impress in what he likens to an “extinction burst” of frantic action, just before deciding the act of making art was to be abandoned.
“My college art teachers saw through the bullshit,” he writes in his latest book, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. “I was hiding. The paintings had words in them, and were loaded with hints of characters, concepts, and situations. Overloaded. These are paintings that wanted to be novels and stories”.
Lethem made the decisive leap from “bodily artefacts to language-smoke”, and the chasm between them is the subject of Cellophane Bricks. The surreal and form-defying collection of stories are inextricable from the artworks which sparked them, printed alongside his prose in full colour. It’s a continuum of ideas, the way one reacts to another: the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art unified, at last, in a single form.
“It represents transparency about my gregariousness with visual artists and how much I want to be part of their world,” he tells me.
“I thought of these writings as orphans, because I knew that to make them land in a meaningful way then the book needed to be pictorial, and my ordinary publishers were not going to want to do a book which was so fabulously full of colour images – it would just seem so shrunken and marginal. And then ZE Books came along and instantly galvanised this into a real opportunity, so the book went from being about the work of other people to being very reflective, full of confession, self-portraits and moments of memoir.”
Lethem’s work notoriously defies convention or genre. His writing is borderless. His way of storytelling has been likened to a DJ mixing music. “I almost think, in a strange way, that my relationship to visual art and to music contains an opposite quality,” he explains. “I grew up making drawings and paintings, and I felt I could. Of course, it’s very rare to be a good artist – let alone a great one and have other people agree on it – but it felt accessible to me.
“I knew how to craft a painting or make a drawing, and it was very rooted in my own experience and capacity. But music? I don’t have the talent, I don’t have the ear, I can’t sing, I can’t memorise. It’s a kind of thing that reduces me to my state of awe, or my fan-ishness. It’s always out there, sort of in the sky, something I could reach for but never attain. But both nourish my sense of what life is for.”
Lethem grew up in a house of music, art and books; his father was an avant-garde painter, and his mother had been involved in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ‘60s. She handed him records to play and shared stories of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk, which cultivated an intimacy with the sounds and the city.
When his mother died from a malignant brain tumour when Lethem was thirteen, the music she introduced him to has defied the space between them. What followed was a head-first immersion into the heady days of NYC punk defined by The Ramones, The Clash and Talking Heads, with smuggled records and sweaty performances at CBGB’s.
What draws Lethem to music is not any common denominator of genre or taste, but instead the ideas they spark. His office is a monument to art: not only paintings and sculptures, but books which pin down the transience of words – and records, those thin plastic discs which capture the most elusive artform of them all.
“I listen to music all the time. I need it,” he says. “I listen to it while I write, and I console myself with it in the morning. And when I’m smart enough to turn off the news and put on my music, I’m always likely to have a better day. I hunger for it.”
“Did You Give the World Some Love Today, Baby?” by Doris
This song, which still just pulls me over anytime I hear it, exists for me in this kind of anomalous space.
I'd never heard of Doris. I didn't know who she was, but a friend of mine, Matthew Specktor, put it on a mix that they made for me when my first child was born - this very beautiful song list that introduced me to a number of things, or reminded me of some things that I'd forgotten.
It was 2007, and I was writing Chronic City – one of, I think, my best and strangest books – in an industrial building overlooking the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, while I listened to this mix over and over again. I couldn't place it, you know, the magic of it, her crazy singing and the sense in which it was a kind of mad manifesto for daily living. I almost didn't want to find out who Doris was or what else she represented. It seemed impossible – an impossible song – and so I didn't for a while.
You know when someone gives you a mix and you can just let a song be anomalous? I had this feeling for the longest time. It’s almost the opposite of my typical way: I’m such an information person. I’m such a collector and curator, I usually want to surround myself with knowledge or get the complete, collected works of a favourite artist. I need to know everything, and Google makes it all so easy. But Doris, I kept in a special place.
Well, I did eventually listen to the record it came from and found out who she was, of course – a Swedish artist who attracted little interest at the time, with a second life as an odd, funk rarity. But “Did You Give the World Some Love Today, Baby” struck my brain in such a joyous, nutty way.
There was something about her delivery that reminded me of a Black, American singer, but then I realised that what struck me as so odd and sweet about the song was that she’s a little bit like ABBA, in that she’s singing English phonetically. It’s not quite right.
But I experienced it as a message from the universe. I wondered, ‘Does anyone know this artist, this song, exists?’, and sometimes you encounter things where it’s richer not to know.
“I Love This Life” by The Blue Nile
Maybe I was leaning in a direction of songs that are emblematic for me of moments in my life, but also exist separately from my usual form of contextualising music. Because I would say again about The Blue Nile that, for a long time, I didn’t need any more Blue Nile than this one song, kind of like what I experienced with Doris.
When I did explore them further, it was moderately rewarding and I appreciated their other work, but this particular song still seems supercharged for me, in a way that separates it from the reality of this band who existed at a certain time. But when I learned the circumstances, I discovered it was their very first recording.
You never want to patronise artists by saying, ‘Oh, well, you were better before you knew how to play your instruments’, or ‘Your first novel was your best’. It’s irritating, certainly to the artists. But there’s this thing that sometimes occurs in which you hear the wonder of invention; it’s like they record themselves discovering that they can make a thing that is itself enlivening and magical.
The Blue Nile didn’t really exist as a band until they made this song, and then they were like, ‘Well, we made this, and now I guess we’re a band’. It’s the sound of them becoming that somehow gets into the feeling of the record, and it has the kind of lyrics you might write if you thought you were only ever going to write one song in your entire life.
It's a thing that’s true sometimes of people’s first novels too. They put everything in as if they’ll maybe never write a book again – but you’re going to write plenty of books. It’s also a bit of a manifesto for existence, but a much more melancholic one, even though it announces a decisive view.
It’s “I love this life” – but then everything you feel around the edges of that, from the tones of the music and the performance of the other lyrics, express how hard it is to earn that simple feeling. How bittersweet it is to accept that this is the life that one loves. It’s a song that falls away into abiding with whatever might happen.
I’ve sometimes thought – well, more than sometimes – that I should have this song played at my funeral. I mean, you don’t want to wear people out at your funeral with a really long playlist. It’ll go from an amusing and affectionate thing to people being like, ‘Why do we have to sit here?’ So you’ll probably only get two or three songs before you abuse their patience – and along with “Days” by The Kinks, I sometimes thought, “I Love This Life” would make it as song two or three.
It's very much a midlife crisis song for me. Honestly, if I’m truthful about it, it was when the marriage to the mother of my children was dissolving – not in a violent way, mercifully, in as equitable a way as one could wish – but still immensely painful. I was looking at who I had become and who I hadn’t become, and so the song was very well fitted to that.
“Pop Muzik (Todd Terje Remix)” by M
Todd Terje disassembles songs and restacks them slowly through time so pieces of them just pile up. So, in another way, this song is a chalice of time.
For me, it’s a container for so much of myself, because when “Pop Muzik” by M was first on the radio when I was a teenager, it floored me. It was everywhere, in my personal experience – it felt as if everyone was listening to it all at once and were gobsmacked by it.
I found it transfixing, because again at the outset, I had no context for it. M was totally anonymous to me. I hadn’t yet discovered krautrock or Kraftwerk. I’d heard some synthesisers in a few other dance hits, but there was something about the total synthesiser effect of the song – the way the entire thing was shamelessly sprung from the machine – that it seemed to be goosing you, “Boogie with a suitcase / You’re living in a disco / Forget about the rat race…”
It’s tiny scraps of punk sentiment or revolutionary idealism with totally hedonistic abandon, all shredded and put into a blender. It was irresistible and that seemed to me like the magic I needed that summer. I was just crazy for it.
It's also making fun of itself and making fun of you for liking it too. The song doesn’t even know what it’s talking about. But it has command, it’s a self-reinforcing loop – and if you can’t stop dancing to it, then then the song has quality. It’s almost a referential trick.
So, I loved it unduly. I would resolutely play it for people over the years who thought it was some trite, embarrassing trinket. It was one of those things that you’d insist is not stupid because you believed in it.
And then I got to listen to Todd Terje’s remix. You can now find a few of them on Spotify, but they originally circulated as illegal artefacts. He wasn’t getting permission and I was very keen on a number of remixers who were doing these kinds of releases.
I don’t know who he is, but he’s working in a basement somewhere, disassembling all the songs I love most and making them take twenty minutes – that was just great. I felt very cool for being in on it.
So when I found his version of “Pop Muzik” I felt like I was back to that first feeling. But, of course, it’s so much more sultry. If only I’d had it to convince people with over the years, I could’ve really made my case, because it’s so much cooler and so much more mysterious – and yet it’s energised by the secret heart of the original.
And this is a relation that fascinates and mystifies me: if you’re into appropriation art, remixing, sampling, if you’re into Lichtenstein paintings that reference comic book panels. It’s so dependent on its reference and yet it seems like such a great thing of its own. And this unquantifiable, like, doubleness is really the mystery that has never stopped exciting me and agitating me.
“Time To Get It Together” by Marvin Gaye
I love this song so much. To me, it’s so beautiful. It’s not the first Marvin Gaye song someone knows, or even the twentieth – there are so many hits and irresistible moments – but I would take this one to a desert island in some strange way for the way it reaches me.
It’s from Here, My Dear which is this initially quite rejected project in the middle of Marvin Gaye’s grey era, just before he would make big hits after. This was seen as a kind of mistake, even an embarrassing mistake.
When it was released, it was a double album on the theme of his divorce. It’s very pensive, strange… It was some lyrics which are kind of squalid in their specificity about paying his attorney fees, but then there’s singing and performing of just unbelievable gorgeousness. There’s an introspective quality that people didn’t know what to do with when he was on a hits-driven label.
Motown was a singles label, really. The albums were just vehicles for the singles. Even some of his most celebrated records are three immortal singles and then some filler – they’re not really albums. But this was.
It wasn’t comprehensible in terms of his career, or Motown, at the time. The bitterness of some of the lyrics is uncomfortable, but it’s slowly grown to be seen by some as a masterpiece. The fold-out illustration inside the LP has a man’s hand reaching out to give the woman’s hand the record.
He was divorcing Berry Gordy’s sister, the sister of his own producer and the owner of his contract. So the reason the record is called Here, My Dear, and the reason it’s being handed over, is a statement that the royalties from the record will cover what he owes her: ‘I won’t make any money from this, this is what I’m going to have to pay you, but you’re going to have to listen to me talk honestly about what’s going on.’
There are songs about anger, time and a keynote address to the whole divorce, which is: ‘When did you stop loving me? When did I stop loving you? When did you stop loving me?’ – the phrase just gets sung over and over again. It’s an entrancing psychological self-portrait of a very, very damaged psyche, when Gaye suffered inordinately. His life didn’t just end tragically but was a genuinely tragic one. And this is the album where he lets you know, but also the one where he reaches for the light the most.
This song, most especially, has become a defining one for me. I was introduced to it by someone who thought I would find it funny, actually. I listened to it in the ‘80s and I was fascinated by the squalid details revealed in the songs and then it stopped seeming like something I needed to hold at arm’s length.
Its beauty reached me gradually and I realised it’s much better than ‘I’m letting myself accept and everyone else knows.’
“Dream Baby Dream” by Suicide
I’d been hearing this song all my life before I’d paid attention to it.
When I pivoted to punk-rock as a teenager and I had the luck of going to CBGB’s and Mudd Club, they were on the bill. I think their name scared me, actually. I didn’t like gothy things as much as I liked the more nerdy or political punk, like Gang of Four or Talking Heads or Buzzcocks.
I didn’t really dig the death and doom vibe as much. So I resigned myself to thinking they’re not for me, but “Dream Baby Dream” is irresistible.
I’ve heard it hundreds of times in various covers as well, which I knew before I really addressed the song itself consciously. It’s an archetypally perfect song, in some ways. I also think it’s one of the songs that most clearly relates the greatness of certain early punk recordings to the greatness of ‘60s garage-rock. Its radical simplicity and effortlessness raise it up to heaven.
I love that you can keep from being exhausted by the first seminal version of it by listening to all the incredible covers by different people. There’s the Neneh Cherry cover, which is quite amazing, and then Suicide themselves rework it in many different ways – if you go deep into their catalogue, you can find all these strange, distorted, stretched-out versions.
It’s almost like they do a Todd Terje thing to it. It’s a song that’s a single object but also exfoliates into all these other versions.
“Vitamin C” by Can
Can are the quintessential krautrock band and they lasted a long time, so there are many recordings and phases of sound across different times.
They were prodigious and strange, because they sounded very different live to what they do on record. They were enormous improvisers – but they would claim that they didn’t improvise at all. They always claimed that everything was composed, but they would play these insane things that just went on for hours and hours.
Then, sometimes, on a record they would nail down something that was almost like a pop gesture. And, you know, I guess my list has made it clear that even when I want it to be made weird and remixed, I really love the compression and urgency and irresistibility of a pop hook.
I do cherish those four or five times that Can stayed in one place long enough to make a song with a hook, as opposed to spinning out into their weird, trans-psych. They’re an interesting band because you sort of associate krautrock with punk in a way – it’s like an early German punk – but they were a really psychedelic band too.
And they anticipated present day bands like King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard in Australia, who are not embarrassed to be catchy, or to sing, or have ideas that are recognisable in their songs, but they also are psychedelic and sprawling and improvisational. I think they’ve really captured the spirit of Can.
I’m a literalist, in some ways. I’ve always liked songs I got an idea out of that I could think about, like a short story, or a declaration, or an anthem. I think the songs on this list are predominantly that way. But Can is the gateway for me realising that I do like things to stop making sense when it’s done in the right kind of way.
There’s another side of me that’s very irrational, which takes me into my dream life, and in a weird way, this might be my favourite song by my favourite band – and yet I can’t tell you one thing about what they’re trying to impart by having this song about Vitamin C.
“Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight & The Pips
This is me not avoiding the obvious. A lot of my listening centres on going back to these imperishable crescendos of the soul canon. I listen to Al Green’s Greatest Hits all the time. I never exhaust these things and my God, I love this song. If you just let yourself be drawn inside it, it slays you every single time.
I have no defences when I hear it. I also love the call and response of this song in a particular way, which is that The Pips are doing much more than supporting or reinforcing the main lyric.
They’re actually doing a kind of interrogation or inquiry – but they’re also an emotional support. They’re a Greek chorus. They’re witnesses and psychiatrists. They say things that she’s not saying, and they help her think as she develops her thinking through the lyrics.
They’re there to cultivate the story that she’s telling, you know? I love the way it’s written like that, with that surplus layer of emotional meaning.
It's A Star Is Born, right? It’s that mythic tale. The Pips sing to her at one point, “I know you will” – it’s such a stupid thing, but I can’t say that to you without crying. What is it they know, and who are they?
“Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” by Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks were my special favourite. Once I made my punk turn, that was very social for me. Everybody was going around in a fever, trading albums: ‘Oh, wait. You haven’t heard The Clash’s second record? It hasn’t been imported yet, but I’ve got one…’
We were also seeing some of these bands, if we were lucky. I saw The Clash in New York and then someone else would come along and say, “Oh, The Specials! You got to hear The Specials…” It encompassed this incredibly wonderful social time in my high school life. It was all about things that other people were showing or telling you, or you were knowing.
I heard this song on the radio, and I ran immediately to Greenwich Village and bought the record. I was like, ‘I have to have that track!’ But nobody else in my world, in New York knew who they were.
I think the Buzzcocks were much less saturated in America than they might have been in the UK. Nobody knew them, nobody ranked them, nobody recognised what I was talking about. It was me, in my bedroom, with a record where I was like, ‘This is fucking amazing, because every song on that record seems so good to me’.
This is a pre-internet universe. You can’t triangulate your experience. It’s so different now. But back then, they were not part of the story that my friends and I were telling about our discovery of punk. They were my own private punk band.
Now, of course, I wasn’t really the only person who had heard that record, but I hadn’t seen a review of them. No one said, “Hey, the Buzzcocks are coming to New York” – it was just in a vacuum. It was just me and this greatness.
“Psychic City” by Yacht
It’s a beautiful song and it makes me feel so much about the moment I found it, which is relatively recently compared to the other stories we’re telling here.
What’s interesting about “Psychic City” is that I grew to be quite enamoured of Yacht because I’m kind of buddies with them, they’re sort of my peers. Their vocalist Claire is a writer as well; she’s written a number of books, and she was my interlocutor for a thing about Cellophane Bricks in L.A.
But when I first heard the song, someone gave it to me on a mix and I was like, ‘What the hell is that? Where did it come from? Who is Yacht?’ I don’t know, and I don’t need to know.
We’re in the iPod era, so I would just walk around – and the moment I connected with this was when I was back in Brooklyn. It’s always very emotionally exciting and intense for me because I’m there rarely, so it stirs up a lot of memories of who I am, who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.
I was alone, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve got this date in Manhattan tonight, I’ve got time. It’s a beautiful day. I’m going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.’ One of the treats I always lavish upon myself when I’m taking really good care of myself in New York City is going somewhere by foot. And it’s never more delightful than when it can be a crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge.
So, there I was, in the middle of it, “Psychic City” came on shuffle, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is my “Psychic City”’. It’s jubilant.
Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture is out now via ZE Books
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