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Every Music Fan Should Read Imagine Me Gone

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Every Music Fan Should Read Imagine Me Gone

Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone is a novel told by a family of five. It centers mostly around Michael, the eldest son and a deep music fan. Michael suffers from a host of mental issues, and he self-medicates with pills and really loud bass. The character recalls Haslett’s own brother Tim, a music obsessive who passed away eight years ago. Reading the book, I figured Haslett himself must be a pretty heavy record freak, considering the obscurity of his references and the innate way he writes about the power of a perfect song. But it turns out he absorbed a lot of that by just observing his brother’s experience. We spoke about the powers of music and how it’s an art so different from writing.

Pitchfork: How did your brother shape your experience as a listener?

Adam Haslett: His affinity for records was powerful, and that passion showed me what it could mean to someone. He was just a medium, almost like a shaman of music. He was playing me Nitzer Ebb when I was 13, and his enthusiasm was such that he always needed to be evangelizing about music to other people. It was not just a private enthusiasm, it was something that he needed to spread. When we were younger, when he was a late teenager himself, I was the person to be converted each and every time a new piece of music came into his world.

How often were you converted?

In a way that a little brother looks up to an older brother, I was in some ways tracking  him as much as the music, but it hit me all the time. The band that is probably the closest to his heart—and became by proxy closest to myself—was New Order. As I got older, and we weren’t living together anymore, it was probably more sporadic, and I wouldn’t necessarily know every one of his enthusiasms, but there would still be cassettes and playlists.

Music remains incredibly important to my writing process, too, as far as composition and the rhythm of sentences. The thing that I fell in love with—and this is also wrapped up with my brother, who was a serious reader and writer of music reviews—was the individual sentence, or poetry, read aloud. It’s sonic. It doesn’t hit you just as a proposition or an intellectual content. It is a sound and you experience its meaning as uttered. That relationship between the two mediums is profound, I don’t think they should be separate or on a different level.

To me, reading is such a silent experience. The sound of it happens inside my head.

Yeah, but that’s the sound, right? Your recollection of a tune is also in your own head. It doesn’t make it less bodily—the neural pathways that capture that sense of being moved or not being able to get something out of your head probably travel along similar lines.

Did you listen to music when you were writing this book?

I do listen to music immediately prior to writing. With this book, I would often be listening to a song in a certain genre when I was writing a certain character put myself in that headspace. But I can’t really compose while listening to music. I tend to be in the opposite the direction, I have earplugs no matter where I am. I can be in the middle of the woods but I have earplugs in. I find it just creates that further separation out from the sound of the world in order to allow the sound of whatever’s in my head to filter up through the distractions.

Do you read aloud to yourself?

I do, yeah. It’s funny, if I’m on my own in the office, I almost struggle to say how much of it is actually aloud and how much whispered and how much of it’s in my head. The process of reading is pretty much constant.

I’m assuming you have audiobooks for your own books, right?

I do. I’ve listened to almost none of them strangely.

It almost sounds like the audiobook would act like a cover band or something.

Well, I auditioned for the audiobook for my latest novel, and I realized I love to read [aloud] precisely for these reasons we’ve been discussing. I like to deliver things in the rhythms in which I wrote them. But reading the entire book and having a director there with you who was making sure that every last “S” was crisp—it just wasn’t the way I wanted to go through the book.

It is strange. The German audiobook of my last book was read by the German dubbed voice of Robert de Niro, which is so fucking bizarre. I didn’t even think of this before, but when they dub these things in other countries, Robert de Niro always has to be the same person.

How much of the specific music referenced in the book did you have readily available from your own knowledge and how much did you have to research?

I certainly went back and listened to most of the British new wave and the disco; I actually read Donna Summer’s autobiography out of curiosity. But [the other] stuff was pretty much floating around in my head. The later stuff, like dubstep, I poked around and had to do a little more research on.

There’s a way in which the writing of my brother’s character did feel like an act of ventriloquism for his enthusiasm for the music. He is someone who survived through music—he literally went around with a subwoofer a good chunk of the time. The volume of the music itself was a way to blast out of his own head. I don’t have greatly powerful speakers and I live in an apartment in New York, but I did at times try to listen to it at pretty high volumes.

Did the experience of writing the book change your relationship with either specific pieces of music or with music in general?

If anything, it deepened my belief in music as something that’s temporarily transcendent. In the writing of that [Michael] character, I was spending time imagining my way as deeply as I could into that idea. Personally, music does that to me sometimes, but so does painting and obviously literature.

For Michael, music is such a solitary experience, and his mother laments that he doesn’t dance in the book. Then there’s an important scene where he does finally dance. I wondered—are you a good dancer?

I don’t know if anyone should ever say that about himself! I like to dance, I do. There’s a line in the book—“after love, the dance floor is the greatest cure for individualism.” My experience with that mainly comes from gay clubs. When I was in my 20s in New York in the ’90s and going out, there was a tribal identification quality to it, a feeling of safety and alternative space, which is sort of true to this day, though I go out less than I used to. My brother knew more about gay dance music than I did, though he was straight. So it was another bond that I had with him in a way, that he was sharing things with me that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard. And that they were in a sense related to my world.

Did you ever bring him to a club?

I don’t know that I ever did. He’s been going to gay clubs far earlier than I was, but not because they were gay. They’re pretty interwoven, the history of dance music and the history of gay life in urban America.

In the book, it almost feels cruel that Michael doesn’t get to experience that. He would always be an outsider to that world. Is that why he also becomes obsessed with slavery and its effect on black music?

Yeah, the haunting. I needed to both borrow more from my own experience and the experience of my family than I have before, while at the same time allowing myself to be liberated from the facts. It’s a mix of the two. My brother studied African American studies like Michael does in the book, and it’s something I definitely talked about with him. Michael says in the book, “No one doubts that in gospel or spirituals the collective experiences of slavery being transmitted.” That’s not a controversial statement, so why would we imagine that that stops when you introduce a drum machine and a synthesizer? You don’t have to go very far in hip-hop to find that explicitly in the lyrics. It makes beauty that much more powerful because it’s won out over against. The push and the pull between the transcendence of beauty and the lived experience that that need for beauty is coming out of is what makes great music great.


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