We Don’t Know What We’re Doing – the playlist

Bolt

Synopsis: A young man moves from north Wales to Caerphilly to live with his university girlfriend and her mother. He gets a job in a video shop, but – soon after – his girlfriend moves to London and breaks up with him. And he carries on living with her mother…

I’m pretty sure this song is about Joanna Newsom’s own experience of dropping out of university. But it works perfectly for those feelings of loss and cluelessness that I felt after I finished university and regularly still feel now. These lyrics especially:

And I go
Where the trees go
And I walk
From a higher education
For now and for hire

It beats me
But I do not know
And it beats me
But I do not know
It beats me
But I do not know
I do not know

Castle View

Synopsis: A 27-year old married teacher has an odd feeling that his life isn’t quite right. He lives in a pristine new house, and he loves his wife, but things are strained for some reason. He plays a lot of FIFA and watches a lot of porn. As things begin to go downhill emotionally, he starts thinking about his own childhood and his parents’ divorce. 

I don’t think I specially listened to this song when writing the story, but the refrain of ‘it is happening again’, its I-don’t-know-why desperation, has always stuck with me – and I think/hope it’s there in this story. 

Fugue

Synopsis: A young woman returns home for Christmas. 

It’s a story told a million times before, and I wanted to do something new with it. So I decided to make the girl someone who was once convinced her parents were malevolent aliens. 

When drafting the story, I watched the video for ‘Oblivion’ every day for about three months straight. I love the sense of the lurking masculine threat, side by side with the sense of the men just fooling around – and how quickly the latter can descend into the former. And yet, there’s Grimes among the men, and it’s almost like a Japanese horror film, with the supposed innocent girl in the centre – but there’s a hint, just a tiny glint, that she’s the menacing one. Grimes wrote the song after being attacked; and I think the song and the video capture the feeling of vulnerability and subsequent strength that she may have felt in that period after the attack and the writing about it. 

Strange Traffic

Synopsis: Jimmy Hughes, 78-years old and twice widowed, tries to persuade Mrs Morgan, who lives across the road, to go on a date with him to the town’s summer festival. 

Jimmy doesn’t listen to this song, but I think he’d appreciate its sentiment.

17

Synopsis: A seventeen-year old boy, forlorn after the end of his first relationship, gets thrown into the back of a police car.

I wrote the first draft while listening to this song on repeat. I wanted to try and replicate the jaggedness of the sound, the angular feel to the tune, and the way it takes abrupt left-turns in mood and tempo. (Annie Clark (St Vincent) once said that she tries to capture the feeling of panic attacks in her music.) I got rid of some of the jaggedness in the drafting—introducing seventeen chapter headings because it just got too confusing—but the pulse of the story came from this song.

Clap Hands

Synopsis: Amy, a single mother with three kids, works in a nursery, looks after her own mother, and a whole load of shit keeps happening to her.

Broughton’s song ‘Onwards We Trudge’ was a more direct influence on this particular story, but I just love this one and the way he layers so many sounds on top of each other. I’ve started trying to replicate this by throwing event on top of event into my stories. David Thomas Broughton is truly brilliant and his live performances are incredible. He’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

Big Pit

Synopsis: A brother and sister haven’t spoken since their father’s funeral. She’s going through a divorce and comes to stay with him for a few days. One night they stay up late, drink cans and talk things over. They have something of a bonding moment while listening to Dolly Parton. The next day she goes missing – and thus begins an odd adventure which comes to a brief pause with the brother listening to Bob Dylan’s ‘"One Too Many Mornings" on the side of a mountain.

I’ve always loved the mood in the song, and of course, there’s that Certified Genius line: ‘You’re right from your side, and I’m right from mine’.

all the boys

Synopsis: A group of Welsh guys going to Dublin for a stag weekend. One of them has a secret.

I wasn’t listening to it when I wrote the story, but the first time I heard the song I was just blown away by its intensity. (At almost 12-minutes long, the song takes some commitment at first, but it repays the effort with each listen.) And once it gets going after the intro it doesn’t really stop; it just keeps escalating and that’s kind of what I wanted to do in this story. ‘all the boys’ is told in the future tense and I wanted it to keep going, going, going. 

How Sad, How Lovely

Synopsis: A man is made redundant, goes mad, and then kind of falls in love with his next-door neighbour. 

Originally called ‘Low’, I wrote a very over-the-top ending while listening to Devotchka’s Cover of ‘The Last Beat of My Heart’ (Original by Siouxsie and the Banshees.) The cover has a big sound and it inspired me to write a huge comma-laden final paragraph. And although I cut that ending, it did set the temperature for the centre of the narrative. 

Later on, when I massively changed the story, I came across Connie Converse—who home-recorded an amazing album in the 1950s and then went missing. 

I was moved by one track in particular, “How Sad, How Lovely”, a song so beautiful and doleful that I felt compelled to borrow its title.

Nos Da

I don’t want to give away too much about the plot here, but this story took years to write, and went through several entirely different drafts. When I saw Kishi Bashi and heard him play this song, I finally understood the pitch I needed to reach – and how I had to try and balance the sadness with the beauty, and the regrets of one life with the hopes for another.

Whatever about the story, the song is just lovely and this live performance is extraordinary.