Yeah yeah, no punny title this time. Get over it.
Not long ago, I interviewed an actual 90s kid (like someone who was a teenager in the 90s): longtime musician, Columbia College fiction writing teacher, author of Hairstyles of the Damned, Demons in the Spring, Office Girl and more, Joe Meno. I got a full half hour and several pages of strong material from this interview, so, not to bog you down with too much of an awesome thing at once, I'm gonna post this in, oh, three parts. Maybe four. Maybe more if you're good. I see you back there. Little troublemaker you.
So uh... how do real music journalists do this? Some kind of dramatic narrative introduction, right? Well, I walked into the Fiction office at Columbia College, some stuff happened, then the interview started.
We shot the shit for a minute or so. Joe asked about some of my own playing experience, I gave as spruced an account I could manage of my sordid experiences. Now here's the part you actually want to read.
Meno: I think it’s funny, because when I went to grad school here mid-to-late 90s, there were a lot of fiction writers here that were also playing music. Actually, I came into fiction writing through music. Starting in high school, I was playing in bands – awful, awful metal bands – and that’s how I first started writing stuff, like awful HG Wells-inspired metal songs that became an entry point into writing really bad poetry, and then that became really not-so-good stories, and it was somehow… incremental? It’s funny, what I do with fiction writing, like all my novels as I’m putting them together, I’m trying to figure out “what’s the style, what’s the sound, the tone?”
Me: So it’s almost like putting an album together?
Meno: It is, especially with novels. I have this one, Hairstyles of the Damned, it’s about growing up in the early 90s, and there’s this kid, he’s like sixteen, who gets turned on to some early punk music and it shows the effects that it has on him. This last novel I had, a big family novel, it was totally my interpretation of the White Album. I wanted it to be big and expansive and have all these different voices. When I’m trying to organize a big project like a play or a novel, I go to music. It feels less like cheating, because it’s not another writer, it’s not another novelist. It’s a lot more abstract. I’d grown up in bands, played in a bunch of bands in my twenties, and then I finally stopped playing when I turned thirty. I have kids now, but I’ll still sometimes take the guitar out and they’ll run away, cuz they don’t wanna hear it. It’s still a huge part of what I do, still has so much to do with how I construct things. Those songs... they're the first things that I built.
In my twenties, I was in a band and we toured a bunch… And the idea of the tour as a way to promote your work has been huge for me as a writer because I do basically the same thing. Instead of going to a club, I go to a bookstore; instead of playing at twelve o’clock or one o’clock, you do your thing at seven – so I use the same principles. I would never go to a town and try to read by myself. I always look for another writer or even some band or another to put a show together with, cuz if I bring twenty people and they bring twenty people, then you have forty people instead of just your twenty people.
Even just the idea of a performance: if I do a reading, it’s the same thing. You get up on stage, you’ve built this thing and you put it out in front of a crowd, which is exactly what I did playing in bands. I feel like it gave me this great training, where you learn to get past certain things. Not to say you don’t get nervous, but this is part of what you do. You don’t write a song or whatever and keep it to yourself; you go play it. I feel like it’s really informed the performative aspects of what I do.
…Does this have anything to do with your questions?
To be continued!
Spoiler: It totally did.
Sorry if that's not too much this time, folks. Next chunk's way bigger, just the right length. By tagging this one onto that one, it'd just be whopper and... Oh calm yo tits, I'll do what I want. Stay tuned for more Meno.
No comments:
Post a Comment