What Science Fiction Master Jeff VanderMeer Is Listening to Right Now

In Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction, bears can fly, mushrooms walk and talk, and nature itself is a vast, interconnected organism with the power to absorb and obliterate all traces of humanity. VanderMeer has been publishing since the 1980s—along with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he’s a pioneer of the New Weird, a literary movement fusing speculative fiction with the uncanny, the unknown, and the flat-out batshit—but he is best known for 2014’s Annihilation, the mind-bending tale of a swath of coastal forest possessed by some mysterious, possibly malevolent force. The novel, which was made into a film starring Natalie Portman last year, is the first book of his Southern Reach Trilogy, a landmark of environmental horror for which VanderMeer was dubbed “the weird Thoreau.”

VanderMeer frequently writes serial works; his new novel, Dead Astronauts, is the third book to take place in the universe he constructed for 2017’s Borne, about a post-apocalyptic hellscape populated by mutant biotech. Featuring mind-reading foxes, parallel dimensions, and a humanoid figure made of moss, Dead Astronauts makes the twists and turns of the Southern Reach Trilogy seem almost conventional.

VanderMeer gravitates toward sounds that are as enveloping as the worlds he creates. “I love to listen to music when I work, but it has to be stuff I’ve listened to a bit, otherwise lyrics begin to get into what I’m writing,” he says over Skype from his home in Tallahassee, Florida. To avoid this potential interference, he vets new music ahead of time and makes playlists to set a certain mood. “It’s a really powerful thing—like a soundtrack for the novel, literally, to allow me to better connect with certain emotions and bring them out on the page.” VanderMeer adds that the rhythms of what he’s listening to can affect the cadence of his writing and, occasionally, a song will even give him the kernel of a literary idea: Years ago, he based a short story on “Sealine” by Australian alt-rock titans the Church.

Just as VanderMeer is inspired by music, musicians have used his work as a jumping-off point over the years. The Church turned around and recorded their 2008 album Shriek as the “soundtrack” to his novel of the same name. In 2009, Bloomington, Indiana indie rockers Murder by Death made an album meant to replicate the sound of a fictional band in VanderMeer’s novel Finch. Most recently, a Portland, Oregon, artist called Intrusive Thoughts fashioned an ambient drone album, A Pristine Wilderness, after the haunted landscape of the Southern Reach trilogy. VanderMeer welcomes such tributes. “Literally, approach me and I’ll say yes,” he says, “as long as a percentage of the proceeds goes to the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge,” the Florida wetlands that inspired the setting of the Southern Reach.

As a child, VanderMeer traveled the world with his parents, both Peace Corps volunteers, before settling in Fiji. His mother had Indonesian gamelan records in steady rotation; his father listened to Bob Dylan incessantly. In revolt, VanderMeer turned to opera. “I was a very serious young man,” he laughs. “It was actually Ann, who used to be in a punk rock band and knew Nick Lowe, who sent me these mixtapes full of all the Stiff Records stuff and changed my entire view of music.” His mind thus opened, the young VanderMeer promptly purchased three cassettes: Men at Work’s debut, the Kinks’ State of Confusion, and Def Leppard’s Pyromania. “It was kind of all over the place,” he admits, “but it was wonderful as I grew older to find that there was always a different Kinks album for whatever age I was at.”

Below, VanderMeer pulls a few highlights from the 900-song playlist that accompanied him while writing Dead Astronauts.

Tropical Fuck Storm: A Laughing Death in Meatspace

When my neighbor asks, “So, what are you listening to right now?” It gives me great pleasure to say: “Tropical Fuck Storm.” It sets the right tone for further conversation.

There’s something about some of these songs. Just the chord changes—it’s like MMA, where you’ve got two opponents who keep changing levels on each other, but it still looks like a dance. They’ve got great choruses too: It’ll sound very chaotic and then something beautiful will come out of nowhere and then be subsumed again by the chaos. There’s things on this album that just should not work—it’s almost like the birds I’m looking at out my window right now, with the different ranges of velocity, they look like impossible acrobats. If you slowed that down a bit and set it to music it might look like Tropical Fuck Storm.

Father John Misty: “Bored in the USA”

There’s a melodramatic element to this song that could be sentimental, but somehow he pulls it off. There’s something about the scope—I feel like he has operatic tendencies, even though that’s not the register he’s working in. Another band that does that “I’m fucked in my life but I can’t get out” kind of thing really well is the National. They’re world weary and they get away with it in a way that doesn’t seem pretentious.

The Dears: “Fear Made the World Go Round”

At their best, they’re this glamorous, luminous band—there’s almost a lounge feel at times—but then there’s also this really dark, dangerous thing going on. I just love the feel of the music, like it’s velvet. I like lyrics that almost read like poetry. The vagueness of it gives it some menace. It allows more space for my imagination. Especially in the context of listening while I’m writing, if I’m trying to conjure something with specific details, I don’t necessarily want the song to conflict with what I’m trying to write. The Dears were a good soundtrack for some of the stuff I was doing in Dead Astronauts, and they’re also the soundtrack for my next novel, Hummingbird Salamander, which is more of a thriller, where that kind of menace works really well.

The Coathangers: Nosebleed Weekend

Punk can be almost too basic, if there’s not some twist on it, and power pop can become too treacly, but the Coathangers have this great fusion of those two things. On this album, especially. We saw them perform this album, and they were one of the best live bands I have ever seen.

Spoon: “WhisperI’lllistentohearit”

I love Spoon’s coiled intensity. When they’re at their best, they’re always recognizably Spoon; it’s like a writer who has one particular style that they riff off of. But this is a stellar example of something that’s a little bit off the beaten track for them. It feels haunted, like the music itself has ghosts in it, and I’m absorbing something preternatural, with a very weak sun in the distance—maybe at dawn on a winter day. The lyrics are actually a little sad. It’s a beautiful, unusual song.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork