13 Stories - Official Playlist
Of course a short story collection with cover art based on Fugazi’s legendary compilation album 13 Songs and influenced so much by this writer’s love of punk rock (and music in general) needs to have a playlist all of its own!
You can listen to 13 Stories - The Official Playlist on Spotify.
Check out the tracklist below where I’ve included a note of which story the song in question inspired, influenced, or acts as a perfect musical accompaniment to.
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone - Sleater-Kinney (Rip Her To Shreds)
Stay Together For The Kids - Blink-182 (Home Afraid)
They - Jem (An Abduction)
Gardening At Night - R.E.M. (Darker)
Breathe in Now - George (Safe as Houses)
Bad Mouth - Fugazi (Bad Mouth)
Trouble (With a Capital T) - Horslips (His Grace)
Stay on These Roads - A-Ha (In Waking Memory)
right where you left me - Taylor Swift (right where you left me)
Nightswimming - Okay Kaya (Darker - Part 2)
I’ll Be Home for Christmas (Instrumental) - Van Vogel Ensemble (If Only In My Dreams…)
Song To The Siren - This Mortal Coil (MAW)
Strangelight - Fugazi (The 13th Storey)
If you like this, you’ll love…
When I fall in love with a story, I’m usually desperate to keep that vibe going, to find another piece of media (book, movie, show or even album) that allows me to sustain or recapture that same mood and let me live in that world just a little longer. Sometimes, it’s as simple as picking up another book by the same author, or watching another movie by the same director, but other times, it ain’t so easy.
Every time I finish re-re-re-re-watching The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix I find myself at a loss as to where to turn next. Of course, Shirley Jackson’s original novel is a masterpiece but it’s a completely different beast to the series. And as much as I love Mike Flanagan, none of his shows have recaptured Hill House’s level of greatness, that startling balance of human drama and genuinely terrifying horror (though Midnight Mass comes closest for my money).
So, for 13 Stories, I thought it might be helpful to provide my own intrepid readers with some suggestions and recommendations for places to where they might continue their travels after they’ve run out of the road I’ve haphazardly laid down for them.
Note - mild spoilers ahead
Rip Her To Shreds
Listen to…Blondie’s storming self-titled debut album (which includes the track this story is named after).
Watch…
Staff Infection
Consider this a deleted scene, bonus track, or unreleased B-side.
13 Stories was intended to be an exhaustive - though hopefully not exhausting - collection of my fiction up to that point. However, even if it killed the completist inside of me, some stories simply didn’t belong in a collection that is admittedly eclectic but overall leans heavily toward the weird and spooky.
And so, we have Staff Infection. The first short story I ever completed, this comes from a time and place when I was undecided about my writing style and thought I might like to be a sardonic, jaded mixture of Charles Bukowski and J.P. Donleavy, crafting literature that was all smoke and liquor with jazz and bar-talk as its background soundtrack.
This story was greatly informed by the period in which I wrote it, my aimless, alcohol-soaked late teens and early twenties which I spent working, drinking, and living in bars around Ireland. This same experience came out in a very different way (i.e. in a romantic comedy fashion) in the screenplay Staff Relief which is available for your eyeballs over here on my Bonus Content page.
If you feel like taking a holiday from the horrors, Staff Infection is a shot of working class blues that will give you the boozy break you’re looking for (minus the hangover).
