Deep Cuts

“Joe’s song was quiet but with full instrumentation, programmed drums, heavy reverb. A little Elliott Smith in the guitar styling. The lyrics were pleasantly inscrutable, with themes of gossip (‘The night lit up with talk of your talk’), betrayal (‘Let’s both be Judases, see where it takes us’), and looming heartbreak (‘Awoke to the memory of the possibility of the worst’).”

Brickley tries to provide a sense of what Joe’s music sounds like by alluding to the work of real-life musician Elliott Smith. The citation of lyrics and specific musical qualities like “heavy reverb” similarly evoke the idea of Joe’s music, even in the “silent” medium of literature. At the same time, the author establishes what Joe is able to achieve on his own before Percy exerts her influence.

“I felt with some certainty that I was watching a star—that the reaction I was having would be the reaction of anyone with eyes and ears, of hordes of college girls and sensitive young dads across America; I was not special. It gave me a surge of vertigo, like I’d leaned too far over the edge of a balcony.”

This passage marks the moment when Percy recognizes Joe’s talent. Tellingly, she identifies this quality by locating herself in the fantasy of Joe’s superstardom. She does not rise with him, but watches him from the side, among the thousands of talentless people who are forced to witness his ascent. Brickley reinforces Percy’s emotional state by using tactile imagery—the feeling of vertigo—to make her feelings physically vivid.

“There were people who could make something like ‘Surf’s Up,’ I decided—people with talent—and there were people like me who could only appreciate it. But at least I had that. I could appreciate ‘Surf’s Up’ so hard. I could live on the way that music made me feel, its endless unfurling of emotion and possibility, like a private magic carpet I could ride into my future.”

Percy establishes her Pursuit of Impossible Desire when she defines herself as someone who lacks the skill or talent to write great songs but has the taste required to identify them. This consolation prize satisfies her as she is growing up, but becomes something of a curse once she meets Joe and realizes that she is achingly close to the dream of writing a great song.

“I personally like to pretend the phrase ‘deep cut’ has a totally different meaning, one that has nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. How deep does it cut? How close to the bone? How long do you feel it?”

The deployment of the novel’s title in this passage illustrates how to interpret its structure and its relationship to the music it continuously evokes. While the music choices are arbitrary and nebulous at first glance, they resonate with the emotional reality of the big moments in Percy’s life. This makes the book’s structure feel like a mixtape, something that Percy has curated herself.

“If the rage is manageable now, it’s because of music…Because of good music that made me feel okay, even when there was a monster inside of me.”

Brickley characterizes Joe’s relationship with music by weaving it into his backstory. Music is an essential tool that enables him to work through the grief of his mother’s death. Joe effectively thinks that music made him a better person by preventing him from channeling his grief into unhealthy outlets.

“I think songs gave me a window into a magical life…Something bigger, or whatever, waiting out there. And I felt like the only way to get there was through the songs. Like the songs, if I listened hard enough, would show me how to get it right.”

Unlike Joe, Percy’s relationship with music is characterized by the wonder it inspires. This is an important distinction, as it helps to explain why Percy has a better ear for music than Joe does. Joe is attuned to the emotions that music helps him to manage, while Percy is sensitive to the emotions and ideas that music evokes.

“Listen to something unexpected for once, something uncool, far from the college playlists. Listen just for yourself.”

Early in the novel, Percy tries to position herself as a champion of “fun” art. This passage appears in her first column for Ring Finger, where she argues that listening to something “uncool” like No Doubt is more fulfilling than performing an appreciation of music for others’ approval. Percy’s advocacy illustrates the idea of Earnestness in the Age of Performative Cynicism.

“I was starting to piece together the timeline: after his mom’s death, Joe had survived for a year while his dad spiraled; then he’d gotten together with Zoe and become, effectively, a Gutierrez. An uninformed observer of the photograph would’ve thought they were siblings.”

This passage illuminates the core of Joe and Zoe’s relationship. Although Zoe’s romance with Joe initially makes her a threat to Percy, Percy realizes that Zoe is an important part of Joe’s life because of the role her family played in his youth. This realization softens the conflict between Percy and Zoe, allowing Percy to accept that Joe needs someone like Zoe in his life.

“‘So by trying to find an opening, I actually slammed the door completely shut. […] Why do I push so hard?’

‘That is not what I said,’ she said. ‘It’s really grossing me out how you keep blaming yourself.’

Then a new thought occurred to me: if the promise had been my idea, it had less power than Zoe seemed to think. I could wait it out. I could be less critical in the meantime. More patient.”

This passage exposes Percy’s naiveté, showing that she is quick to blame herself for Joe’s rejection. As someone who intimately knows Joe, Zoe tries to alert Percy that Joe is responsible for his own decisions. Percy ignores this and convinces herself to wait for Joe to change his mind about her.

“I knew we were both thinking it, how the title could’ve been on the news that day: we had pillaged the earth for its riches, stoked violence for its oil, and now it had come to this. But my favorite lyrics were the personal ones, the way the narrator lies in a basement watching an entire ecosystem collapse while having the vague, weary thoughts of everyday life. Thinking about what a friend had said.”

In this passage, Brickley calls attention to the way music can resonate with political anxieties and drive personal reassurance. Percy sees how “After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young reminds them of the new world they live in after the September 11 attacks, evoking the Second Gulf War by alluding to the pillaging of the earth for oil. Nevertheless, the song also comforts Percy when she draws a direct comparison to the situation she finds herself in with Joe, watching the system collapse from her bay window.

“The problem with your baggage, the song seemed to say, is that no man will want you…I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable.”

While living at a distance from Joe, Percy struggles with her deeper desire to connect with people who share her obsession with music. As she tries to embrace Earnestness in the Age of Performative Cynicism, she doesn’t know whether to be fully herself or to project a performative version: one that will allow people to look past the quirks that she worries will repulse them.

“She tries to kiss me as the sun goes down—I only give her my cheek. I promise friendship and we face the screen again—what a day to be so weak.”

The lyrics Percy writes for the bridge of “Bay Window” reflect her unresolved emotions from the time she spent with Joe. In the bridge, Percy views herself from Joe’s perspective but uses the same point of view to accuse Joe of being “weak.” She is effectively calling him out for being too cowardly to act on the intimate tension between them; he fears that it will put his ability to exploit her musical talent at risk.

“But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so much.”

This passage from Percy’s workshop essay helps to make sense of the previous passage and the act of infusing Joe’s song with her vulnerability. By channeling her unresolved feelings into the song’s emotional center, Percy purges them from her life and transforms them into something beautiful. This is the effect that “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell has on her. At this point in time, Percy is still unaware of how powerfully this song will affect the lives of its fans.

“Honestly, nothing has happened to me. That’s the problem with my life, more than anything, probably: nothing has fucking happened. I don’t deserve to write a piece like that. I didn’t have some terrible boyfriend or father or something, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Percy’s lack of confidence comes from a misguided belief that she must deserve her talent. This attitude implies her self-comparison to Joe, who survived his grief, his estrangement from his father, and the death of his mother to become the musician he is. Percy, on the other hand, cannot say where her love for music comes from because her life has been simple and uncomplicated. At the same time, she downplays her own life experiences, including her fraught collegiate relationship with Joe.

“Watching Joe perform was like observing an animal of a different species. How could someone I knew so well, someone who had just been inside my body, be so comfortable up there? So natural with his instrument, with his voice, with all his limbs? He owned the mic from every angle, laughed at himself, jerked his shoulders emphatically before standing totally motionless to deliver a line. I wouldn’t even be able to speak into that microphone […]; my voice would crack and dissolve on a single hello. I wondered if seeing him live would ever stop making me feel inferior, if I would ever be able to just enjoy his talent, or if that required a strength of character I lacked.”

Percy’s self-comparison to Joe extends to his performance at the wedding, foreshadowing the recurring motif of her envy for professional musicians. Percy has a similar reaction when she is watching Joanna Newsom perform at the start of Part 3, and these details stress the link between her envy and her Pursuit of Impossible Desire.

“Of course I wonder about the road not taken, honey. That’s part of life. But I don’t regret it nearly as much as you think I do.”

When Percy asks her mother about the life she left behind in New York, she is trying to figure out whether she can be content with the disappointment she feels with her own life. Percy believes that because she doesn’t have musical talent, she is barred from having the kind of life that Joe is living. At the same time, she wonders whether that would have made her as morally repulsive as he is to her. Percy’s mother tries to convey the idea that the present direction of her life doesn’t condemn her to regret. Some people choose the smaller, simpler life because it is more desirable from their perspective.

“We don’t get to choose what we love, any more than we can choose our talents.”

Percy reframes her ability to appreciate music as her own personal curse. She is trying to draw attention to the irony that she loves music more than anything but feels that she lacks the talent to create it. She cannot bring herself to abandon that love just because of her perceived lack of talent. Conversely, she cannot force herself to become a talented musician just because she loves it.

“And I rationalized that my job challenged me—I had to learn to be a slightly different person, to split myself into two Percies and be able to jump into the new one at a moment’s notice, the more brazen one with the capacity to approach strangers in bars. It helped to remember that I would be, almost always, the highlight of their night. That flash in their eyes: Finally, I’ve been discovered!”

As an adult, Percy learns to perform a version of herself that can attract trendsetters to support her work as an analyst. The irony of this performance illustrates the idea of Earnestness in the Age of Performative Cynicism since it demands that Percy feign earnestness in the company of people she might normally bond with quite naturally, given their shared love of music.

“I described how it felt to be on a packed dance floor screaming along to ‘Mis-Shapes’—wailing, I said, like a lost animal who’d found its family—while realizing the loneliness that has characterized your life so far may in fact be optional…I wrote that it had taken a decade-old record to help us figure out what we wanted, and what we wanted was fun—real fun, which requires freedom, and belonging, and affordable housing, and peace from wartime. The Bush years were ending, I wrote; you could feel it on the dance floor.”

Because she grew up among people who shunned her for her musical tastes, Percy has always yearned to find a community that loves her for her passions instead of being repulsed by them. To call herself a “lost animal” that has finally found its way to its family suggests that Percy accepts the part of herself that repulses most people now that she is accepted by like-minded enthusiasts. Brickley transposes this feeling of belonging against the social conditions of the time to give those sentiments a political undertone, conveying the idea that fun is the symptom of a just, developed society.

“More have whined about being loved, but these dudes understood it’s the giving—the love you make—that matters more. Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone?”

After discovering her community at Poplife, Percy grapples with the fact that she cannot permanently inhabit that space because she came to it as a visitor. This limitation makes her realize that while she no longer feels the need to receive validation from men like Joe, she does need an outlet into which to channel her love. Her desire to belong is transformed into a desire to give love, and at this point in the narrative, she can only channel that love towards Zoe.

“Amazing. That is the best ‘fuck you’ in the history of ‘fuck yous.’ Like, okay, you don’t want to kiss me? I’m gonna make you sing about this mistake for the rest of your life, dude. You’re going to be singing about this at the fucking Troubadour in a fucking decade, dude…He’ll still be singing about it in five years. He’ll be singing about it when he’s forty.”

This passage represents a milestone in Percy’s journey as a songwriter, driving her Pursuit of Impossible Desire. In this scene, Joe’s fan validates Percy for writing the “Bay Window” bridge, which calls back to the point Percy made in her workshop essay about wanting to write a song as emotionally powerful as Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” The fan emphasizes this validation by predicting that Percy’s emotions will continue to resonate with audiences for decades.

“After a particularly decent playback, Dennis murmured, ‘We should call this “Least Worst Song on the Album,”’ and that’s when I started having fun. That’s when I decided it was worth it to have jumped into two dudes’ pissing match—not because it was any great accomplishment to take this song from terrible to almost good, but because this man was a professional, a recording music professional, and he was on my side.”

This passage also drives Percy’s self-esteem in her Pursuit of Impossible Desire. Although Dennis is initially portrayed as being antagonistic to Percy due to her association with Luke, she earns his respect by vastly improving Luke’s song. This moment convinces Percy that she does have the skill to succeed as a musical industry professional.

“She wants to be the only one. She wants him as her deep cut, a B-side unearthed from a rarities bin, proof of her own specialness because she’s the one who discovered it, because she doesn’t know how to sing her own damn song.”

This passage calls back to the novel’s title again as Percy transposes it over her relationship with Joe in the apology post that she writes on her blog. Percy admits that part of the possessiveness she feels towards Joe comes from her desire to assert herself. Most fans can say that they love Joe’s music, but Percy makes herself feel special because she recognized it before anyone else did. She does not necessarily mean to gatekeep Joe from the world; instead, she tells herself that she was special enough to see that he was a talented musician. However, navigating their relationship also means disentangling her sense of talent and self-esteem from her association to him.