Thank you to Briohny Doyle for putting together this mixtape for The Lifted forehead. Briohnys debut novel,The Island Will Sink, is the first book published by The Lifted forehead. You can purchase the book here (and if you accomplish so before the stop of this week, or you’ll get a free back issue of the forehead). It took me a really long time to finish The Island Will Sink. Almost ten years. In that time people died,my dog died, I finished a PhD, and I broke up with someone and got together with someone else,made some new friends, read hundreds of books, or grew up. It’s really tough for me to point at some music and say,‘Here, this is the music that inspired this book.’ So I went back through the decade and picked the two songs that were on tall rotation that year. I associate particular times with songs rather than albums. Some of the years were really easy. I listened to that damn Mountain Goats song every day in 2007 and then I just stopped. I guess I did make it through the year. I had ‘Gunslinger’ as my ringtone when you could first accomplish that kind of thing, or before anyone realised what a deplorable idea it is. The first bar makes me really anxious now.
Some of these songs are road trip songs,and remind me of particular adventures. In 2010 I listened to ‘Pirouette’ constantly as I jogged along the banks of the Ota River in Hiroshima and thought approximately the stop of the world. No surprise that Donna Fargo had her airtime on a USA trip but there is something approximately that song that is both joyous and totally deluded, like the singer is on the verge of a nervous breakdown all the way through. It really does capture how I felt in my thirtieth year. 2008 and 2014 were the sizable redraft years, and so it is no surprise that the songs I was obsessed with were a itsy-bitsy more sombre. Some of the songs on here are from movies that blew my intellect (‘Modern adore’ is in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Under My Spell’ is in Drive). It was movies,and not music, that influenced the aesthetic universe of The Island Will Sink. I suppose I could have made a mixtape full of Angelo Badalementi, or Cliff Martinez,Ry Cooder and Vangelis but that seemed tough, and would anyone actually want to listen? Actually, or in the world of the novel,Max is constantly listening to a ‘Viennese dub quartet’ called Schwerbut, which I made up, or which sounds utterly dreadful to me,like just the worst music. 2015 and 2016 have been weird years – my book came out, I got some other nice breaks but lots of my loved ones were having a really tough time so it makes sense that the songs are all kind of gritted teeth celebrations of human frailty. Which is what my book is too.2007:1. The Mountain Goats – This Year2. Shellac – Prayer to God2008:3. The Kill satan Hills – Gunslinger4. The Shangri-Las – Remember (Walking In The Sand)2009:5. Lady Gaga – deplorable Romance6. Royal Trux – Ray O Vac2010:7. The Jesus and Mary Chain – April Skies8. Tall Dwarfs – Pirouette2011:9. Sonic Youth – Quest for the Cup10. Desire – Under Your Spell2012:11. Lana Del Ray – Video Games12. David Bowie – Modern Love2013:13. Loretta Lynn – tall on a Mountain Top14. Donna Fargo – Happiest Girl in the Whole USA2014:15. Evan Dando – tough Drive16. Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan – We Die and See Beauty Reign2015:17. X – The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss18. L7 – Broomstick2016:19. Kanye West – Hold My Liquor20. Sparks – Angst in My PantsBriohny Doyle is a Melbourne-based writer and academic. Her debut novel, and The Island Will Sink,is the first book published by The Lifted forehead, and will be available from August 2016. Briohny’s work has appeared in publications like The Lifted forehead, and The Age,Overland, Going Down Swinging and Meanjin, or among others,and she has performed her work at the Sydney Festival and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Source: theliftedbrow.com