RIDING THE MUSIC WAVE No. 5: ISMET PRCIC
During COVID, I lost my mind in that tiny flat in Salem, OR, in an apartment complex that used to be a ropy motel.
I couldn’t even watch TV anymore, after watching all of it twice. So, in need of disassociation, I surrendered to YouTube, binged on an eagle nest for a couple of weeks (you should see an eaglet poo out of the nest; it’s an ugly, hilarious endeavor for them), then close-ups of blackheads squeezing out, that both disgusted and eerily thrilled, then some skinny Brit play a survival video game, etc. I was in a lurch with my novel, trying to bring it to a conclusion but being stuck, which made my YouTube perusing a very self-hateful undertaking. It’s in this headspace that I saw the following reaction video: exquisitely elven-looking lady opera singer breaking down a live performance of Pearl Jam’s “Black.’ The way she did it, stopping and starting, catching and pointing out all the nimble little nuances of the song and particularly the vocal performance, made me . . . kind of . . . love Eddie Vedder! I was always a punker, so that’s a hard, hard admittance. Her analysis was so eye-opening that I started seeing the artistry of a singer’s interpretation for the first time perhaps, the absolute necessity of emotion to guide the voice into organic improvisations, the amount of freedom one has within a song of feeling one’s way into an ever-new variation of a melody that already exists.
All of this to say, when I sat down to write in my office, in a closet next to the water heater the next day, I kept thinking of paragraphs as measures, and syllables as individual notes, what I was writing as a piece of music. I have this notebook where I write down all the new words I hear or read and the way I had them arranged on the pages looked like guitar tabs. I started sounding out all the words: flapdoodle, rankled, piddler. I couldn’t wait to use them, whatever they meant! Was this a way to unblock myself? I always write at butt-crack of dawn, in darkness and silence; very heavy shit. Not this time. I waited until noon, dug up my old phone and turned on my Pandora, opened up a new Word document and just listened and waited. And it was the listening that brought a perfectly placed memory to mind, one that would lead me to the mountaintop later. It was “Broad Majestic Shannon” by the Pogues that played, and I was reminded of my boozy past, which, in a small way, is what the novel is about. Shane MacGowan’s immigrant melancholy and nostalgia carried on his voice and went through my tissues and rearranged them, and I gleaned a way through the thicket to the ending of the book. Words started to come and I mixed them up with the notebook words I didn’t know, kind of sang them into the sentences by feel, by sound, and only later checked if they made any sense. Not all of them did and I had to improvise then and find new phrasings, sing them out loud over and over until they fit musically in the sentence. The most important chapter in this novel, the hardest one to write, too, was written like that, in daytime, with music playing in the background. My first.
So, that’s how music influences writing of autofiction. Sorry it took so long, but I’m a novelist. What can you do? All of the songs on my list are sacred to a particular era of my life, some for their drama, some for their laughs, some for attitude and others for their charm. Smiles galore. Much love to y’all!
Ismet Prcic (Izzy) was born in 1977 in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the U.S. in 1996. His debut novel Shards was published in 2011 by Grove Press to critical acclaim, winning prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times and many others. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has been translated into 10 languages. His new novel, Unspeakable Home, is set to come out in August 2024. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Imperial Dreams, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and won the audience award in its category. Prcic lives in an Airstream behind a yoga studio in The Valley.