RIDING THE MUSIC WAVE No. 6: CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
When I think about my relationship with music, I am always struck by the collage-y mishmash quality of it; the way I lack expertise in any element of it but love what I love with a kind of rabid intensity. As a kid, I was obsessed with pop music, and used my boombox to record songs off the radio. I would dance wildly around my bedroom, vividly hallucinating myself in music videos and stumbling into furniture until my brother was sent to my door to shush me. The first cassette tapes I bought with my own money were the Spice Girls’ Spice and Merril Bainbridge’s The Garden. My mother loved Gordon Lightfoot and Barbara Streisand, and was an avid country music fan—I have whole albums by Reba McEntire and Patsy Cline memorized—and my father inexplicably adored new age music: Enya, Yanni, Sarah Brightman; a lot of lush instrumentals and chanting and pan flutes. Around the same time, my best friend introduced me to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Ros, and my aunt gave me Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes. In college, I illegally downloaded anything I could get my hands on—rap and hip hop, movie soundtracks, theatrical heavy metal, singer-songwriters like Ani DiFranco and Dar Wiliams—and my friend Neal dragged me all over Washington, D.C., to see concerts by The Decemberists and Regina Spektor and The Mountain Goats. Out of college, I got hooked on a newly-emerging Lady Gaga and spent six months with Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone in my car’s CD player. And so on, and so on.
The result of this chaotic musical upbringing is an appetite defined by its unpredictability. I’m bad at explaining the kind of music I like, or what I like about it. I am deeply susceptible to earworms, and am known to play a song a hundred times in a row. There is no consistent quality to the music I like, except for perhaps a general sense of high drama, big feelings, and horniness. (Also, a solid 85 – 90% of it is performed by female vocalists, though I can’t exactly tell you why.) I don’t write to music ever—I find it distracting—but like I’ve done since I was a kid, I love to take breaks and put on my headphones and run from one side of my workspace to the other, doing quite frankly embarrassing dance moves and blowing out my remaining hearing. I might skip from a song on the Les Mis soundtrack to Salt-N-Pepa to boygenius to Taylor Swift and every so often I crash into something I genuinely don’t see because I’m just—somewhere else.
This playlist? It’s what I’m listening to right now. There is no logic to it besides that. I can’t explain it except to say that I’ve loved Chappell Roan since 2021—I’m having a real pop moment in general, and am wild for her in particular—and I recently played Kentucky Route Zero and was brought to tears by its droney lush bluegrass electronica I don’t know what it’s called. But it was so, so good.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.