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Christine Ma-Kellams’ debut novel is whip-smart, darkly funny, and biting. The Band follows a psychologist with a saviour complex who offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol on the run, and this thriller creates an unflinching condemnation of the music industry and toxic parasocial relationships. When Duri, a K-pop idol, through his latest solo single accidentally stirs a political controversy, he disappears from the public eye. Hiding in Los Angeles, he’s offered refuge by the unnamed narrator, a Chinese American woman. Years of repressed trauma and an obsessive fandom’s intense scrutiny drive this story’s portrayal of mental health and a problematic industry. Anna Dorn, author of Exalted, has praised this debut as “the perfect companion for brainy pop culture heads”. Along these lines, it is this inspiration from musical artists whose works feel like mini-novels packaged into rhythm and beat, that Christine Ma-Kellams (The Band, April 2024) writes on here. To view more such posts by debut authors, make sure to check out this collaboration, Debut Dialogues!

The Note of ‘Novelistic’ Songs

Christine Ma-Kellams (The Band) shares musical artists whose songs that tell a story have inspired her debut novel, from Adele to Stromae.

There’s a line in my novel that I will stand by until the day I die: “All art is story; the only musicians we remember are the raconteurs.” Now, The Band may be a fictional novel about a made-up boy band whose musical producer was moved to this conclusion after watching a (real) Duran-Duran music video—in this case, “Save a Prayer”—but the sentiment here is based on all the true-to-life musicians out there who’ve made our lives less forgettable with their song. Duran Duran, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles all make direct cameos in the book, and the storyline itself is loosely inspired by the members of BTS (along with their singular mastermind, Bang Si-Hyuk). 

But they’re not the only ones who’ve mastered the art of the “novelistic” song—songs that tell a story, particularly with a beginning, middle, and end. If anything, the best musical artists in the world are arguably those whose own work feels like mini-novels packaged into rhythm and beat.

Apart from BTS—whose canonical pieces like Black Swan and One Spring Day read like a short story and present like a Sundance short film—there’s Taylor Swift; there’s Adele.

There is a reason Taylor Swift sold more albums last year than apparently anyone else and commands the kind of dedicated fan base of Swifties that will defend her with the kind of unconditional dedication the best of mama’s boys save for their mothers: every song of hers feels like a revelation, the kind of story your best friend tells you under hushed tones and promises of secrecy. If you’re idealistic or romantic, you’re eagerly waiting for the happily-ever-after of her current, very high-profile romance—or else if you’re cynical and jaded, you’re waiting for the the tell-all break-up song as the best consolation prize ever if this romance ends in flames. As an artist, Taylor does this blurring of the lines between fiction and real life as well as any autofiction, whether it’s Silvia Plath or Elif Batuman. 

Adele does the same thing. Listen to the lyrics of her “Hello” ballad and you will find an entire romantic trajectory, complete with the long and heart-breaking aftermath we know and love. Hello is particularly interesting because the lyrics themselves read less like song lyrics and more like actual prose—in this case, the start of a dialogue (maybe a voicemail or text chain): 

“Hello
How are you
It’s so typical of me to talk about myself, I’m sorry—”

If the likes of BTS, Taylor Swift and Adele are best known for providing the storybook soundtracks of our lives, there are also the less familiar artists you may or may not know: Stromae, Giant Rooks, Annenmaykantereit, La Oreja de Van Gogh. 

I discovered Stromae when he performed “Sante” on Jimmy Kimmel:admittedly, it was the infectious beat of a guy rap-singing in French about working-class heroes that originally peaked my interest, but it was also the unconventional storytelling in the rest of his discography that has maintained it ever since. In his much anticipated latest album (released after a prolonged seven year hiatus), he has a wildly cinematic song, “Fils de joie.” In it, he personifies a son at his mother’s funeral—but in this story, the mother is a sex worker and her son oscillates from being flippant to reverent about his progenitor’s choice of career. Fittingly, the music video is so elaborate and visually rewarding, it feels like a scene from a big budget studio film.

Even so, my favorite Stromae song remains his 2013 classic,“Formidable.” At first glance, it’s your classic breakup song, but unlike lesser tracks bemoaning similar interpersonal outcomes, this one seems to cover an entire relationship trajectory and character arc, complete with jarring self-revelatory secrets—there are lines about sterility, side-chicks, and aging disgracefully. Moreover, the song is voicey and character-driven, much like all my favorite novels. The personage Stromae plays here sounds drunk and admittedly, a bit of an ass: throughout the lyrics, he takes turns insulting strangers, calling out friends, and hitting on women while insisting that he isn’t hitting on them, a tragicomedy at its best. Not surprisingly, the music video is a delicious feat of acting: Stromae stumbles through the rainy streets of Belgium at traffic stops and in subway trains, belting out his lyrics like a real-life drunk. He is so convincing, several policemen stop and try to help him out and inquire about his well-being. Like Taylor Swift, he brilliantly blurs the line between autofiction and reality.

The most controversial example of this fuzzy border between the fiction in songs and the real person behind the mic came when Stromae, during a live TV interview where he was asked about his own mental health, answered by breaking into song—here, “L’enfer” unflinchingly addresses thoughts of suicide and gives a stark portrait of the mind of a depressed person, not unlike the way David Foster Wallace famously did in his magnum opus or short stories.

The German indie pop-rock band Giant Rooks does something similar in their recent track, Fight Club, from their new album, How Have You Been? Although not explicitly about depression, its lyrics paint a visual snapshot of mental anguish using the figurative language of feeling like someone’s feet are constantly stepping on your spine. Even more poignantly, the track “Cold Wars” spells out an all-too relatable scene of a child watching their parents fight and finding themselves inextricably stuck in the middle:

“I remember cold wars/Daddies running into closed doors
I’m right here between the frontlines/Always on the wrong side.” 

Leave it to three boys from Hamm, Germany to take what is arguably one of the most notable and drawn-out conflicts of the 20th century—the Cold War—and refashion it as a metaphor for marital conflict from the perspective of the child in between.

At this point, I have a confession to make, and admittedly I find this a little embarrassing: I only recently discovered Giant Rooks a la TikTok thanks to the viral cover they did with another German rock band, AnnenMayKantereit, of “Tom’s Diner.” Now, I wasn’t alive yet when the original Suzanne Vega version of the song came out, so it took this cover for me to discover its existence, but this track is another brilliant—albeit very different—take on the novelistic song. If all the previous examples present like novels in musical form, then “Tom’s Diner” resembles a short story. Instead of a whole saga, it’s more of a snapshot of a single scene—in this case, a ruminative breakfast on a distinctively gloomy day.

Interestingly, AnnenMayKantereit embodies this short-story approach in their original music as well. Their latest album, Es ist Abend und wir sitzen bei mir, is replete with tracks that read like Raymond Carvel’s fictions. “Es ist Abend” captures an evening at home where one friend loses a game of cards while waiting for his buddy to show up; “Als ich ein Kind war” wistfully flashes back to a childhood where TVs still had cables and Instagram didn’t exist. Like Carver, these stories are less about plot and more about the potential subtext of seemingly ordinary moments in life that could turn at a moment’s notice, frequently over some mundane detail—whether the friend you’re waiting on will bring a crate with him to the card game at your place, or what color the mail was when you were a kid. But then again, what is existence but a collection of these instances when the quotidian might meet with the divine?

After all, these are the moments of our lives, and these are the songs that help us remember, survive, or appreciate them long after the instant has passed us by. 

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Christine Ma-Kellams a college professor, cultural psychologist and writer whose fiction and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, the Rumpus, Catapult, Southern Humanities Review, Saturday Evening Post, the Rupture/the Collagist, the Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and elsewhere. Two of her short stories were also nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her empirical studies on culture and relationships have also been widely covered in GQ (Australia), Esquire (Middle East), Boston Globe, Vice News, Elle Magazine (UK), Yahoo News, MSN News, Fox News, New York Post, and Daily Mail. Her debut novel from Atria, The Band (April 2024), follows a cancelled Kpop boy bander who escapes by hiding in the McMansion of an unhappily married therapist with a Savior complex. In its indicting portrayal of mental health/public obsession/fandom/cancel culture, The Band considers how old tribal allegiances disrupt modern celebrity.