My book is not a YA novel. I tried, and failed, to read both Eleanor and Park and Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. In both books, the main characters spent an excessive amount of time judging others’ music choices rather than pouring love into their own.
But when I created Nordhelm, I did hang on to some of the teen feels: social situations that feel like they might actually result in the end of the world, the sneaking suspicion that you are not a real adult in spite of what your ID says, and that new band feeling.
You know the new band feeling, but maybe you’ve forgotten.
Close your eyes, think back to being young, and remember the moment where you found a band that was singing the song you needed. It was your song, and they were singing it for you, and when you heard it you feel the coolest you had ever felt since you were five and had the best back to school outfit.
Perhaps you suffered the misfortune of having parents who were into music and opined that this band was actually not that good. You ignored them, of course, because they DID NOT GET IT. This band was epic, and if any of your friends had heard of them, it is only because you were a tiny clutch of people who GET MUSIC.
If you are of my generation, you bought the entire album and listened to it on repeat until it became your soundtrack. I don’t know how the kids these days are doing favorite songs, but it seems a shame to lose the whole album experience. You needed the just okay songs to make YOUR SONG that much more epic when it finally came on. The buildup. The crescendo. The coming-back-to-earth feeling of the songs that come after.
And if you were really, really lucky, this band will come to your city (small mercies associated with growing up near a party school long-suffering sigh: a lot of bands stopped here). You got to the venue early, with your besties, because you were teenagers and didn’t have a ton of other places to be. You would wait in line to get in, because you obviously were going to stand on the floor, and obviously NEEDED to be as close to the stage as possible.
There were two options for the opener: they were an equally new delight, or they were awful. There is no in between. But you would be patient, because after the opener, possibly openers (remember, this wasn’t a big name band, not yet), you would see your band. And they would be so cool. And they would sing your song, and all your other favorites, the ones you learned by heart the past few months. Because they had maybe two albums, max, and it takes an album’s worth of songs to fill a set.
If you were the HoH older sister, you would finally hear the band for the first time, the nuances of the music, the actual words in the lyrics (clear enunciation and a rock and roll voice are not part of the same Venn diagram). The music would feel alive. Partially because it was alive, and partially because you didn’t hear all of it before.
This was among the best experiences of your short life.
Afterwards, there would be hours spent scrolling their tours, listening to awful songs on the radio in hopes yours will come up in the mix, listening to the handful of songs uploaded to their website because YouTube literally didn’t exist yet.
But for a few hours, you were in a dark room with a tiny crowd of strangers, a few dozen people who knew how cool this band is. For that short time, the tests you were studying for, the job that was super annoying today, and the people who weren’t kind did not exist. There were only these songs, your songs, and the feeling that you are on the coolest (or maybe, since you just watched a video of you band playing at a tiny venue in LA, the second-coolest) place on earth.
In my book the MCs are frequently at odds, but there is one thing they unintentionally agree on: that new band feel. Local bands of uneven quality play in tiny mountain bars with terrible acoustics. The holy grail, the New Band of their world, isn’t touring the island—yet—but its debut album is on constant rotation for both MCs. They frequently eyeroll over one another’s musical choices (he can’t do singer-songwriters, she has no patience for metal), but I didn’t have it in me to sign them up for Nick and Nora-level hating on one another’s musical choices. They live in a high-stakes fantasy world filled with secret identities, conspiracy, and betrayal. If they can trust another’s music taste, I’m going to let them have that.
