Nick Antosca is the author of Fires [Impetus Press 2007], a novel described by John Crowley as “a striking work reminiscent of James Salter“. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has had his fiction and poetry published in the Barcelona Review, the New York Tyrant, Opium and Hustler. Ahead of 3:AM Magazine’s party tomorrow at KGB Bar (Nick will be watching from the floor), Nick shares “five tunes I really like”:
A while ago I wrote a similar list of music I love, but those songs were book-specific. They were songs I listened to while I wrote my first novel. These five are just songs I like, chosen almost at random out of the hundred or so songs I really love. Whatever made my fingers type the names of these five in particular is a mystery to me. I’ll say something good about each one.
1. ‘Bathysphere’ - Cat Power
This song is creepy and sad. It’s about a girl who wants to be very, very alone. Her father told her she couldn’t swim, and she “never dreamed of the sea again.” Chan Marshall, or Chan Marshall as she represents herself and the media represents her, is kind of my ideal woman. Great artist, a true talent, no one else like her. Famously difficult, kind of ruined-seeming, older than me, and sexy in a plain, unstudied, no-makeup way. And so depressed all the time! We should meet. It’d be disastrous.
2. ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ - Nirvana
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” really is one of my favorite songs ever recorded. So raw, so tired, so ugly. It’s better than the original Leadbelly version, I think. (The one that I’ve heard preserved, that is–I’m sure he played it hundreds of times.) Which is saying a hell of a lot. This song makes me think of a huge murderer with a head the size of a cinderblock and no expression on it walking through a forest full of pine trees in the middle of the night.
3. ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ - Black Sabbath
A fun, madcap song with absolutely slashing bass. It’s the best track on the incredible Paranoid album. Although I’ve got musical DNA (my father’s a composer), my ears are made of lead and I’m totally without talent when it comes to instruments. ’Fairies Wear Boots’ is the only song I can think of that really, really made me want to learn to play. Guitar, bass, drums, whatever. Black Sabbath sounds ferocious here.
4. ‘3000 Miles’ - Tracy Chapman
My friend Helen Oyeyemi introduced me to this song and then I listened to it about 3000 times. Like Chapman’s other masterpiece, ‘Fast Car,’ it’s yearning and extremely sad. But unlike ‘Fast Car,’ it’s menacing. Consider the lyrics:
Good girls walk fast
In groups of three.
Fast girls walk slow
On side streets.
Sometimes the girls who walk alone
Aren’t found for days or weeks.5. ‘Blind Willie McTell’ - Bob Dylan
This may be my favorite track Bob Dylan ever recorded (that I’ve heard…who knows what he’s got in his basement). There’s nothing jangly or shimmering or whatever it was he said he wanted Blonde on Blonde to be…it’s just an eerie, lonely reminiscence. And it feels so big and dark, like night in the west with the air getting cold.
First posted: Wednesday, June 27th, 2007.
