Lost City is the final book in Jay Stringer’s Eoin Miller trilogy and, if I have been remiss in bringing it to your attention, it’s not because it isn’t really, really good (I had declared it the best of the three by the time I finished the first draft, and now I’m re-reading it as a published novel my opinion hasn’t changed). For the first two books, you may remember that Stringer made an accompanying Spotify playlist. Last time around I got to host it here, but these days he’s too big for his invisible woman and instead posted a track a day on the Stringerville blog in the run-up to the book’s release.
I have, however, compiled them in one handy post due to my love for the intersection of music and literature.
If you have not yet purchased Lost City, please do so on Amazon [UK] or Amazon [US].
The rest of the words in this post are Jay Stringer‘s.
Frank Turner: “Peggy Sang the Blues”
The first track is “Peggy Sang The Blues” by Frank Turner. Frank kindly gave me permission to quote this song as the epigraph for the book: “it doesn’t matter where you come from, it matters where you go”. It’s a good summation of the journey Eoin Miller has been on through the three books, a character who has spent most of his life running from – or apologising for – his past, only to realise it’s his actions that will define him. The final book in the trilogy starts with Miller at his lowest and darkest point. Can he save himself? Can he save those around him? Do they need saving? Find out.
I’ve been following Frank’s music for a long time now, and he doesn’t need anybody’s help in showing his talent or converting people to his music. But if you haven’t checked him out yet, you can do so here. The track is from his 2011 album England Keep My Bones. His newest release is Tape Deck Heart. Frank – along with his band the Sleeping Souls – is one of the best live acts on the road, and if he’s taking in a venue near you (and he will be) you’ll get 2014 off to a great start by seeing them play.
CHVRCHES: “Lies”
The second song on the soundtrack album is “Lies” by CHVRCHES. You don’t need me to tell you who they are at this point, but this track felt like it belonged in the book since the very first time I heard it. There are three characters in the trilogy who have been dancing around each other, wrapping themselves in lies while building mythic versions of each other that will be be torn apart in this final book. They’ve been spinning webs of deceit, love, lust and resentment. Each person finally sees themselves, and each other, for what and who they are. Do they like what they see? And which three characters am I talking about? Find out.
CHVRCHES pretty much seem to own the world right now. But if you’re that one weird person who lives in a cave and sends me hand-drawn pictures of your toenails (great shading, by the way) then you can check them out here and you should immediately run to the shops and buy their debut album, The Bones Of What You Believe. Or you can buy it online, and pay for someone to run to your front door with it.
The Twilight Singers: “Never Seen No Devil”
The third track in the official (totally not official) soundtrack album for Lost City is “Never Seen No Devil” by The Twilight Singers. This track fits the story – and the whole trilogy – on so many levels. In one sense, the whole series has been a long-con play on the unreliable narrator. Does Eoin Miller tell the truth? Is he honest about his own position, his own culpability in the game, and about his own addictions? You’ll have to read to find out. Greg Dulli of The Twilight Singers writes of addiction, self-deception and lies in ways that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced those things. It’s a level of deception where you know the truth but convince yourself that you don’t, and then convince yourself that there isn’t a truth to know. Miller has been setting himself up for a fall for a long time, and needs to hit a form of spiritual rock bottom before he can admit things to himself that he already knows. The title of the track competed very hard to be the title of the book, and really only lost out because I wanted to keep the same two-word pattern as Old Gold and Runaway Town.
The Twilight Singers have had a slow-burn at the back of my brain to being one of my favourite bands. They crept up on me. The track is from their 2011 album Dynamite Steps. Check it out.
Whiskeytown: “Turn Around”
Whiskeytown are one of my favourite bands. Top 5 material. I’ve had a love affair with them that has lasted longer than I’ve had with almost any other musical act. And this song in particular, off the first Whiskeytown album I bought (1997?s Strangers Almanac), has stuck with me. What is it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the organised chaos as the song heads into its second half. Maybe it’s the haunting plea contained within (“All I want from you, is for you to turn around.“), maybe it’s the way the song fades in an out like passing weather, or maybe it’s that it’s one of Ryan Adams’ finest vocal performances. Perhaps the real reason I love it is because it so perfectly fits this book.
Lost City is a book filled with broken and wounded people. Some are fighting back, some are laying down, but it’s not a town full of winners. Each of them needs to ‘turn around’ in one way or another. It’s a book where failed romances rekindle, and unrequited love comes tinted with doom. Friendships and family ties are the only things that might drag you through the mess, but you’ve burned them and thrown them away. Am I not doing a good enough job of selling it? Well, there’s more tracks to come.
The Selecter: “Big in the Body, Small in the Mind”
Track five sees another band return to the Miller soundtracks. There are a few acts that have appeared before, on either the Old Gold or Runaway Town soundtracks. Simply put, I love The Selecter. In all of the forms they’ve taken. They’re an example of why 2-tone and ska needs to be remembered as more than white southerners in hats singing about condoms while dancing funny. It’s an urban music, a music that speaks of the towns and cities that birthed it, and the social issues that really matter. And they do it with wit and style, and more than a little humour. Most importantly, they do it with Pauline Black’s voice, the key ingredient to what can so often seem like a very male form of music. Music like this feels like home to me.
“Big In The Body, Small In The Mind” is taken from the same album as the song I used for Old Gold, 2011?s Made In Britain. The song tells of the modern problems in Britain – via a helping hand from Woody Guthrie – in which the real issues of greed, self interest and corruption bring a country to its knees while the media wants us to look at other distractions. “All of you fascists bound to lose,” goes the old refrain. Do I still believe that? I have to. I think having faith in people to win out is the only sane choice we have.
Lafayette Gilchrist: “Assume the Position”
Never too cool to admit when I’ve taken the easy route, I discovered this track because of the much shorter version that featured in The Wire. There’s no moment in the trilogy where Eoin Miller could be said to have reached the Peter Gunn level of cool, that perfect spot where you deserve a kick ass theme-tune that can pump away in the background while you drive around the city at night. Miller is just not that cool. Just not that collected or tough. But there is a part of him that wants to be. There is a part of him that would love to be that cool. In in those moments, those moments we all have if we’re honest, when he closes his eyes and imagines his life is trailed by a rhythm section, he would also throw in an amazing piano track and get somewhere near “Assume The Position” by Lafayette Gilchrist.
Add into that the idea that the very phrase ‘assume the position’, one which has many meanings, fits just about everybody in the book. Each waiting for something to happen. And it feels most appropriate for the people of Hobs Ford, the fictional Romani settlement that features in the book. Whole families there are used to being messed about and done over by the authorities, and they are primed and ready for another attack, they are expecting it, and they know nobody will stand with them.
Chris T-T: “Elephant in the Room”
Track 7 in the mighty and official (and totally not that) Lost City soundtrack is “Elephant In The Room” by Chris T-T who is both mighty and official. (No, I don’t know what last bit meant either – move on.) Chris released an album in 2013 that’s been on constant play for me ever since, called The Bear, and I’d been planning all along to have a track from that album on my list. It’s meaty and electric, full of wit and anger, and then for good measure it throws in a couple of tracks that will break your heart. I saw Chris live a couple of times in the last few months, and a funny thing happened. As I stood there listening to his new songs and arguing to myself over which one I should choose, one of his older songs slapped me in the face.
“Elephant In The Room” is perfect for this list. One of the best bits about being a novelist is that we get to totally misappropriate songs. Regardless of what the artist intended or intends as they sing a song, we will glom onto a lyric or a sound and let it rattle around in our heads, then decide how to fit it to our own needs. This song is a great example. I can completely make it fit the story and characters of my book. Eoin Miller has spent his whole adult life forgetting important parts of himself, and burying his feelings for others, and the lyrics fit that. But then, beneath all the anger and despair in the book, there’s also a hope to cling to. There’s the settlers on the Romani camp who choose to stay on their muddy field, even though they know the cops are coming through the barricades at any moment. There’s the old man who serves eviction notices on members of the local council to make his point. There’s the addict determined to hold onto his second chance with both hands. There’s the one friendship that the trilogy doesn’t manage to kill, even when it looks to be lost. There’s the hope that Miller might find himself again, and find someone in there worth liking, and may even find something worth standing for. Through it all, there’s that hope that, as the song puts it, we can still win.
But does anyone win? Do they get free, or do they all die? And is the book really about any of these things, or is it simply a crime thriller?
Perfect: “Thing I Call My Life”
Are you sat comfortably? Are you sure? How’s your day been, bad? Good? Vaguely meh? I’m going to do you a favour. I’m going to give you a great track, by a great band, off a great album.
Track 8 on the Lost City soundtrack is “Thing I Call My Life”. The band is question are called Perfect. They were formed by Tommy Stinson following the breakup of The Replacements and the end of his criminally underrated Bash & Pop. B&P had carried the swagger and groove of Ronny Wood, but Perfect were a straight up slice of powerful garage rock, spiced with great power-pop hooks. They recorded an album in the 90s that became something of a legend, shelved by the record label during a reshuffle of the powers-that-be and then forgotten once Tommy Stinson joined Guns’N’Roses. The fans didn’t forget, though. The album, known at the time as Seven Days A Week, became a rite of passage for Replacements fans. Sure, you were a fan, okay, but had you heard Seven Days A Week? I still remember how excited I was the day I got my hands on the bootlegged copy. And it was fucking glorious.
Jump forward several years and Tommy had some clout now, and was able to secure an official release for the album at the same time as his first official solo album. Remastered, remixed and retitled, it came out in 2004 as Once, Twice, Three Times A Maybe. The mix was so different to the bootleg that it took me quite a while to accept it as the ‘real’ version of the album. But now I listen to it once a week, along with Bash & Pop’s Friday Night Is Killing Me, which might be the one 90?s album that you should go out and buy right now.
Why put this song on the soundtrack? Well, why not, I love this band.
But also, it’s right. It fits.
“This thing I call my life won’t leave me alone.”
If Eoin Miller shared my habit of getting song lyrics tattooed on himself, he could do no better than that. His life just will not leave him alone. It won’t give up, it won’t let him forget, and it won’t let him quit. Whether it’s Miller as we first meet him in Old Gold, given up on life but keeping going simply because it was better than the alternative; or as we meet him in Runaway Town, desperate to find something to believe in. We meet him again, this final time, in Lost City, when he’s got no lower to sink, and yet, through it all, something keeps him going.
M.I.A.: “Bad Girls”
Track 9, and we get a theme song for two characters in the book. When talking about the book, or reading reviews, you’ll usually see it referred to as an Eoin Miller novel, and the series as the Eoin Miller Trilogy. That’s accurate, as it goes. But not completely. The trilogy has three main characters, it just happens to be narrated by only one of them. Laura Miller and Veronica Gaines both deserve equal billing with Eoin Miller. They’ve been on journeys that matter just as much as his. This was always the plan for Laura, she was always going to be crucial to the story and the place we leave her in the trilogy is where she was headed all along. Veronica surprised me at every step. I’ll save the why and how for later, to give people a chance to read it, but for now just know that she’s the character that wasn’t going to stand for any of my shit, she was the one who decided to rewrite her own story.
Franz Nicolay: “My Criminal Uncle”
I’m not sure I have anything new to say about Franz Nicolay. He’s been on the soundtracks to all three books in the trilogy. He provided the epigraph to Old Gold with the great lines: “If the choice is cynicism, rage or giving in; Which world would you rather live in?” In many ways that’s a question that the trilogy has been exploring, even when I didn’t realise it. There are a great many things about Lost City that surprised me. Most of all, it was the I didn’t realise what the trilogy was really about until I finished this third book. There is a message buried away in there, even from me, that couldn’t help but win out at the end. And it feels somehow fitting that Franz’s question preceded the whole story, when it could be said to finally be answered with the final pages.
I’ve picked “My Criminal Uncle” as track 10 for two reasons. Well, for three reasons, but the third – “because it’s great” – is a given. The first reason is that it’s fun. It’s infectious and loud and makes you want dance. Secondly, and more importantly, it’s something of a theme song for Aaron Miller, Eoin’s father, who finally makes an appearance. His presence has loomed over the trilogy, always eating away at Miller from the past, but in Lost City he finally gets to meet the reader. Does he live up to the legend? Find out.
You can pre-order Franz’s next album here.
The National: “Start a War”
The penultimate song of the soundtrack is “Start A War” by The National. This is one of those moments – as with the next track – where to give away too much detail about why I’ve picked it would be to give away massive spoilers. But suffice it to say I could hear this song playing in the scene as Miller leaves a restaurant in chapter 61 and heads into the next conversation in chapter 63. Bear that in mind when you get there, it might add to the experience.
The Mountain Goats: “This Year”
The final track on the soundtrack is “This Year” by The Mountain Goats. It’s a song that I’ve come to love by osmosis, as the band/writer is important to my wife. As with the previous track, giving details as to why I’ve chosen it would spoil the story. There’s a spirit in the song that fits the final scene of the book. You could imagine the track starting to play as the final lines of dialogue are spoken, and then building to the chorus as the camera pulls back, showing the story continuing on even after our stay in the fictional world ends. I wrote the final scene with a big grin on my face, and the feeling that somehow – somehow- I’d managed to actually hit the spot I’d been aiming at for three books. I knew all along that I wanted to end on that scene, but there were times along the way when I wasn’t sure I’d get to it.