The Xorientation Playlist
Songs that helped inspire and shape the world of Xorientation.
Recently, I put together a playlist of songs that are meaningful to me in the context of my debut novella, Xorientation. Some are referenced directly in the text, others are just thematically relevant. Though I think the written word is an extremely powerful way to tell stories, one of the things I have long felt is one of the biggest advantages of visual media is the ability to include music, which when used well can deepen the emotional impact of stories.
1. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Zephyr Song
“In the water where I center my emotion
All the world can pass me by
Fly away on my Zephyr”
Obviously, this song referenced in the first chapter in the context of riding the California Zephyr, an Amtrak train. However, it subtly serves as an overture for a lot of the themes explored in the book. Scuba diving pops up multiple times in the story as a way for Dawn to “center her emotion.” The song also has numerous subtle references to drug use, despite its innocent sounding lyrics — the relaxing water here even meant as a double entendre about bong water — foreshadowing Dawn’s use of drugs later in the story.
2. Hem - Not California
“Who's the girl inside of the blue-screen light?
The sun is just pouring out
And everything's out of sight”
After the initial excitement of college wears off, Dawn finds herself struggling, further exacerbated by an increasingly strange series of events that has her questioning her reality and what is real. Though the song was written about the fake realities of Hollywood, there are deep parallels here. Dawn is trying to find herself in an existence that feels fake.
A literal dawn pours in light, but she struggles to see what she needs to see. She is in the blue-screen light, living through experiences she knows cannot be real, her essence and existence thrusted into incomprehensible settings.
3. Sigur Rós – Glósóli
(Translated)
“Roam the streets
Can’t see the way out
And so use the stars
She sits for eternity
And then climbs out
She’s the glowing sun”
Dawn listens to Sigur Rós while wandering campus, and Glósóli (“Glowing Sun”) personifies the rising sun — the dawn — as a woman. The brooding, dreamlike lyrics capture the essence of the chapters where Dawn is lost in projections of her own mind, often involving climbing upward, where her rays can shine once more.
4. Taylor Swift - cowboy like me
“You're a bandit like me
Eyes full of stars
Hustling for the good life
Never thought I'd meet you here”
Dawn is a Swiftie — eyeroll if you must, but she’s a college freshman girl in a contemporary setting — who likes to listen to Taylor’s brooding songs when she’s sad, and “cowboy like me” is about feeling like an outsider trying to impress rich people in show business while feeling alienated.
She reunites with Natsumi at a party of a rich former classmate over Christmas break — a party where she did not expect to find her. The love alluded into the song is implied at first to not be able to last but does, mirroring Dawn’s hesitation to accept how she feels about Natsumi.
The story culminates with them in adventuring in Wyoming in the heart of cowboy country together, which is featured on the book’s cover.
5. Nobuo Uematsu - The Man with the Machine Gun (Distant Worlds II Version)
An orchestral arrangement of Laguna’s battle theme from Final Fantasy VIII, which is a minor but important part of the story as Dawn’s favorite video game. Much like how the characters of the game repeatedly find themselves suddenly waking up in Laguna’s reality and struggling to make sense of it, Dawn finds routinely herself in different realities she struggles to comprehend herself.
I chose the Distant Worlds version simply because I find the orchestral arrangement more emotionally evocative than the one from the game.
6. Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit
“Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head”
The Alice in Wonderland books are a major huge on Xorientation — one of the chapters is literally even titled “Through the Looking Glass” with references to a jabberwocky and minor characters that are intended as a sort of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Of course, Xorientation features a young woman traversing a series of strange and surreal environments as well.
On very many levels, the story is about Dawn “feeding her head.” She’s attending university, she’s going through these surreal experiences that challenge her mentally, she, at one point, uses psychedelics — what Jefferson Airplane was getting at. The ending further drives this home in ways I do not want to spoil.
7. Arcade Fire - Keep the Car Running
“They're not coming to take me away,
I don't know why, but I know I can't stay”
A song about feeling like you’re being watched and there are people after you, but you aren’t sure who and why, and living on edge in fear of it. This is directly relevant to Dawn’s headspace in much of the story. Furthermore, the album it’s on (Neon Bible) was one I listened to a lot when wandering around campus myself in my college days.
8. Muse - Algorithm
“We are caged in simulations
Algorithms evolve”
Part of the story involves experiments run on digital lab rats literally caged inside of simulations. Dawn finds herself stuck in strange and incomprehensible situations from which she often struggles to get free. I could stay more but want to stop here for those who have not read it.
9. Porcupine Tree - Trains
“A 60-ton angel falls to the Earth
A pile of old metal, a radiant blur”
Trains play an important part in the story, more positively in the beginning with the California Zephyr, but in a more surreal and terrifying light when Dawn is swept away on the mystical Divine Comedy Express en route to the land of the dead. In general, the story treats vehicles as liminal spaces between realities — the places between places where Dawn’s strange connections to other worlds becomes the weakest.
The song also deals with “summers slipping away,” and Dawn struggles to accept her deep love for Natsumi, a friend of hers, with whom she would only be able to reliably spend the summers until after college. Natsumi’s name (夏美) even literally means “Summer Beauty” in Japanese.
10. The Mars Volta - Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)
“Specter will lurk, radar has gathered
Midnight deuces from boxcar cadavers
Exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed”
De-Loused in the Comatorium was extremely influential on me as a teenager, a concept album about a man battling projections of his mind while in a coma after an overdose. Though his story is a lot darker and sadder than Dawn’s is in the end, I’m not sure this story would exist without The Mars Volta’s influence. The song evokes imagery of a train carrying the dead, and the “exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed” refers to delays in their protagonist, Cerpin Taxt, returning from his dark, dreamlike experiences.
11. Modest Mouse - Missed the Boat
“Looking towards the future,
We were begging for the past.
Well, we knew we had the good things,
But those never seemed to last.
Oh, please just last!”
Toys with a lot of relevant themes — moving forward towards the future after reconnecting with your past, desperation to make what feels like a fragile relationship last, performances as tiny bubble realities, angst about humanity’s place in a world where we are just “useless tools” compared to ever more powerful technology.
12. Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride
“Close your eyes, girl
Look inside, girl
Let the sound take you away”
In a scene that’s a not-so-subtle nod to Star Trek: First Contact, Dawn and Andrea listen to this song. However, the band’s name is also a reference to a novel by Hermann Hesse that is a massive influence on the book, a quote from which serves as the epigraph for Xorientation.
Dawn’s detours into strange and surreal realities are her “magic carpet rides.”
13. Against Me - Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart
“You have to fight to stay in control.
You have to fight to stay in control.
No, you don't have to fight to stay in control of the situation.”
A song that involves being afraid of love falling apart “when the summer’s over,” directly mirroring Dawn’s internal conflict over Natsumi. The entire song feels cynical until the last line when there is an abrupt 180 — no, you don’t have to fight to stay in control. You can embrace your feelings, even if you have deep uncertainty about where they will lead.
14. Of Monsters and Men - King and Lionheart
“And in the sea that's painted black
Creatures lurk below the deck
But you're a king and I'm a lionheart
And as the world comes to an end
I'll be here to hold your hand”
Towards the end of the book, the world is quite literally on the verge of ending, and Dawn only does what she must out of her love for Natsumi, which involves diving beneath nighttime waters to see what creatures lurk below.
Symbolically, Dawn is also taking the role of the protagonist of her favorite game, Final Fantasy VIII. Though the game only gets a mention in one chapter, Squall is a “Lionheart” — it’s the name of his best weapon, his last name “Leonheart” literally means “Lionheart,” and Griever, his necklace, is a lion’s crest.
15. John Prine - Fish and Whistle
“Fish and whistle, whistle and fish
Eat everything that they put on your dish”
A song about having a zen-like attitude in the face of trials and tribulations. At the conclusion of the book, Dawn is finally at peace with herself and reality, able to just take it all in and enjoy it, even quite literally going fishing with her friends.
16. Yosui Inoue - Yume No Naka E
(Translated)
“Are you still going to search for it?
Wouldn't you rather dance with me?
Don't you want to try going into a dream,
Into a dream?”
Yosui Inoue is a giant of the Japanese classic rock scene, often called “The Bob Dylan of Japan.” A cover was used as the closing theme for the romance anime Hideaki Anno made on the heels of Evangelion in the late 90s, His and Her Circumstances. Much of the story features Dawn running away from her strange, dream-like reality that often turned nightmarish, searching for explanations — and she gets a lot of them. But by the end, she chooses to focus on embracing the reality she was previously trying to escape to “dance” with Natsumi.