The Devil's Playlist
The Devil's Playlist
I put together a playlist to celebrate the upcoming release of Bloody Waters and it was a pretty big exercise.
To celebrate the upcoming North America release of my occult rock’n’roll novel Bloody Waters, my brilliant new publisher Outland suggested I put together a playlist of 5-10 tracks that best reflect the book.
Well, the book is a love letter to the music that made me who I am today (and a poison pen letter to an industry that has done everything it can to ruin it), so that lead to a full weekend of agonizing about which tracks to include. In the end I narrowed it down to lucky 13. I thought I should talk about each one briefly, and then I realized that I haven’t spoken much about music here on Substack. So let’s fix that.
I am not much of a musician. I played trumpet in my high school orchestra and I still play the guitar in the privacy of my own home, but I haven’t performed in front of more than a handful of people in 20 years. I love to play, but I don’t enjoy performing and I’ve never really wanted to be on stage. I have written lyrics for musician friends on a couple of occasions, but that’s about as close as I’ve come to making real music.
But I am a huge nerd about it. Guitar magazines, music documentaries, rock’n’roll biographies… I live and breathe that stuff, and you’ll see it all over my fiction. Just count yourselves lucky you’ll never hear me play.
The Playlist
I wanted a mix of the classic rock, metal and blues that inspired the story, and to celebrate some of my favourite female guitar players—since that’s what the book is about.
There are no bands that sound like Bloody Waters in the real world, so I added a palate section made up of quite distinctive songs contemporary to the late ‘90s/early aughts setting of the novel that capture aspects of the sound I hear in my head when I write about them playing.
There wasn’t room enough for everything, so I generally went with my gut.
The Opener
“The Incredible PWEI VS the Moral Majority”, released in 1990 by Pop Will Eat Itself, is not really a song—it’s a sample of a preacher (likely Jimmy Swaggert or Jerry Falwell) decrying rock music during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. I always thought this piece would be a perfect epigraph for the novel, but being unable to properly attribute the text made it a legal minefield. But I can just put the track on the playlist and let questions of Fair Use be the music label’s problem—which is fine by me.
Precursor Tracks
We follow this with Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B”, a song from their first album about the Devil finding love. I wanted Black Sabbath front and center in this playlist, as originators of the heavy metal genre (IMO, don’t @ me bro, etc). Does the song title stand for Nativity in Black, and refer to the birth of the antichrist? The band says no—it’s a joking reference to Bill Ward’s beard, which resembled the nib of a dip pen. Be that as it may, Nativity in Black is too cool to waste, and the song is one of Sabbath’s best—a true prototype for the genre—so it gets pride of place.
“Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones is maybe too obvious a choice, but it’s also such a large part of the book’s mythology that I had to include it. Lucifer introduces himself and tells us what he’s about. He makes us complicit in the evil for which he is blamed, and invites us to guess his identity (despite having named himself). All of this is baked into the plot of Bloody Waters, so I just couldn’t very well leave it out. Also, following up Black Sabbath’s majesty with a samba just feels great.
“Fire Storm Hotel” is from Motörhead’s last album, Bad Magic, released in 2015—the same year front-man Lemmy past away. 2015 puts it well out of the ‘precursor’ period of Sabbath and the Stones—but I reckon this is as good as any of the hits Motörhead recorded in their heyday. Bad Magic hows Lemmy coming to terms with his long career and it’s still one of my favourites. This song imagines a descent into hell from a hotel fire and I can listen to it on repeat forever. Lemmy intoning the word ‘burn’ after the second chorus gives me chills every time.
Women of the Axe
Larkin Poe’s cover of “Preachin’ Blues” felt like the perfect song to introduce the next set, honouring some of today’s finest female guitar players. The Lovell sisters—Rebecca on the guitar and Megan on the lap steel—are accomplished guitarists in their own right, but together they are an unstoppable juggernaut of authentic roots-rock. Their studio work is polished to a high sheen, but you can tell right away they’re the real deal. If you you look them up on YouTube you can see them doing some bedroom covers, including this song, that will knock you sideways.
Samantha Fish is a blues-rock guitarist with a playing style that’s both technical and gritty, and a really distinctive vocals. For this section I was keen to follow up the blues standard with something original, but it was hard to pick out one of Fish’s tracks. In the end I went for “Sucker Born”, a dirty and atmospheric ballad full of wit and attitude. It fits right in the tradition, but it’s immediately and unmistakably Fish’s. The one makes my hair stand on end.
Like Black Sabbath, Joan Jett is an anchor musician for Bloody Waters. I was actually going to put her in with the precursor bands, but I felt like I needed this track, “Bad Reputation”, right in the middle of the play list. This is a classic hard rock/punk number from 1980, from the period where Jett was starting out again with her new band, the Blackhearts. A guitarist entering her prime, taking ownership of her notoriety and becoming and a force to be reckoned in the male-dominated music industry. A stone classic.
Joanne Connor has been in the blues business for nearly 40 years and is currently having a career resurgence that gave her a no. 1 record in 2021, and, this year, a nomination for a Blues Music Award (instrumentalist-guitar). While it feels like she’s only now getting her due, but Connor can shred with any player, alive or dead. I particularly love the pyrotechnics in this swaggering version of “Walkin’ Blues” and you should, too.
Sonic Burn
I’ve seen Canadian three-piece the Tea Party more times than I’ve seen any other band. Their song “Fire in the Head” was a revelation for me when I first heard it on the radio. I loved the way the hard rock sound carries through the heavy world music influences, rather than diluting them, or being diluted by them. I loved the way the band was were always pushing into new territory, adding to the texture without getting cheesy or overblown. The track I selected for this playlist, “The Halcyon Days”, speaks to me about the way the music business abandoned the music I loved and screwed over the artists who made it. It’s dark and rich and full of pain and anger it pure rock’n’roll defiance.
“I Burn” by the Toadies is in many ways an opposite track to Halcyon Days. It’s simple and spare, slow and hypnotic, and it just grows in intensity from a private angst to an apocalypse through gradual escalation in tone and intensity. It’s clever and powerful and is definitely a template for some of the quieter songs (which of course don’t exist) described in the book.
Soundgarden was always my favourite Seattle band; an outlier of the scene that favours psychedelia over punk, but still full of the texture of grunge. The unsual time signatures, the exotic guitar tunings, the bagpipe vocals—there’s no other band that sounds like this. “Room a Thousand Years Wide”, is a droning sonic landscape that isn’t their most accessible, or their most popular, or even their best, but it is to my mind the most Soundgarden-ey, and that was what I wanted here. Something massive and unmistakable.
Bloody Waters is a heavy metal band, and this playlist was feeling a bit light on for the genre, so here’s Slayer’s “Skeleton Christ” in your face. My love of heavy metal started with the Bay Area thrash bands, and this is the default setting of my metal brain. I have been through phases where I’ve loved other subgenres but there’s never been a time when I wasn’t ready to listen to some thrash. Why this particular song? Well, I wanted to avoid Slayer’s most played material and this one has a chorus that ends with “Hail Satan!”
The Closer
“Symptoms of Love” by Buddy Guy, featuring Elvis Costello closes out the playlist for no good reason other than because I love the song. I love music, and I love rock’n’roll, and I just felt like listening to it at the end of all the other tracks. The palate section is pretty dark and heavy but this one puts a smile on my dial right away, so I just couldn’t resist making it lucky # 13.
Thanks for reading! I hope you had a good listen and maybe found some new artists to explore. I will almost certainly talk more about music in some upcoming newsletters.
If these tunes have put you in a buying mood, the new North American edition of Bloody Waters is available for pre-order right now, direct from Outland or from Amazon and I’d love it if you checked it out.
Franksly yours,
— Jason