LINKS

Get a copy of Dan Solomon's book, The Fight for Midnight, on Bookshop.org.

You should also read his work in Texas Monthly, it's frequently hilarious.

How do we still have things to say about The Cure?

TRANSCRIPT

Melissa: Hello, I'm Melissa Locker. 

Courtney: And I'm Courtney E. Smith. 

Melissa: And you are listening to Songs My Ex Ruined, the show where we talk about songs have been ruined by our exes. 

Courtney: This week we're really, really happy to have Dan Solomon on the podcast with us. He is one of my favorite writers at Texas Monthly for his snarky blogs — especially about Buc-ee’s. And he has a great new YA novel and it's called The Fight for Midnight, and it is set against- well actually I'm gonna have you tell us what it's set against because I think this is such a cool conceit for a book and it's such a seminal moment, especially for Texans of a certain generation.

Dan Solomon: Sure, yeah. So it's set at the Texas State Capitol 10 years ago in 2013, on the day of Wendy Davis', filibuster of the at the time pretty extreme now, wildly progressive abortion law that Texas was passing and that ended up going to the Supreme Court at the time.

Courtney: I watched that whole thing, the whole entire night on my laptop in my studio apartment in Manhattan, and was just like, “What is happening, Texas?” Now I'm talking to you from my house in Dallas and thinking, “What is happening, Texas?”

Dan Solomon: Yeah, it really is, uh, wild. Just, you know, how you can see the seeds of where we are now in that, and that's what I wanted to try and get at with the book is that when I wrote it, Roe was still in place and we didn't know what was going to happen. By the time the book was getting published, the writing was on the wall for it. But I really wanted to be able to engage, especially young men, like teenage boys. The people who nobody talks to about abortion, unless it's like Jordan Peterson talking to them about it. I really wanted to just give them a reason to be engaged and to understand why this affects them and how, and use that scene as the sort of starting point for we're just gonna talk about this. We're gonna get really deep into it, and this is how you figure out what your values are around this, was the hope anyway.

Courtney: So, we're gonna talk about this some more at the end. I've been breaking the format of our podcast because I'm just really excited to have another Texan on, if I'm being honest. But let's do what we usually do, which is make you get right to the point. Dan, tell us about a song that an ex has ruined for you, please?

Dan Solomon: Okay, so I cheated on this. I've been married for a really long time and I can't really think of a song that an ex ruined for me. However, I do have a song that I am fairly confident I have ruined for someone else.

Courtney: This is so funny because right before your episode, we recorded with Sadie Dupuis from Speedy Ortiz, where she talks about ruining an entire discography for someone else. So yes!

Dan Solomon: I don't know that I've done that, I suppose it's possible. But this one goes back to high school. I was 15 years old and I was dating this girl, I’ll make up a name for her. We'll call her Erin because that isn't her name and I don't want her to accidentally stumble upon this and hear her name. I feel like she deserves that, for sure. But I was 15. I had my first girlfriend and, frankly, we weren't a good match. I wasn't feeling it. I don't think she was really that into it. It just was like a first boyfriend girlfriend situation for either of us. And so that was very exciting. But it wasn't like young love or anything. And we were together for about two months. And then this girl who went to another school, who I had a big crush on, came back into town and was in the picture a little bit. And I was like, “Oh, what am I doing with Erin when she's right over there and she's the one I really like?” And I was about to turn 16. And so I decided I'm gonna be 16, like I need to begin that year with full integrity and unencumbered by this relationship that just isn't doing it for me. And so I knew I needed to break up with her, but I had never done that before, either. And I didn't know how. And so I kept thinking about like, well, I really wish that, you know, that I felt the way about her, that I felt about this other girl. Because that would be so much easier. And I was listening to The Cure a lot.

Courtney: Oh no.

Dan Solomon: Which I did then and still do. And there's the song on the album Wish.

Courtney: I knew it was gonna be  Wish, I knew it was gonna be a Wish. This is such a brutal album.

Dan Solomon: Yeah, and so there's this song called “A Letter to Elise,” which is a pretty intense song about breaking up. It is in fact the breakup song from the perspective of the person breaking up.

Courtney: Dan, you did not send her the song and break up with her doing that.

Dan Solomon: I did worse than that.

Courtney: Okay, go on….

Melissa: You asked the DJ to play it at Homecoming.

Courtney: Mean.

Dan Solomon: Oh gosh no, but, but what I did was I decided I could call her and do this but that would fill me with such dread and anxiety that I can't imagine doing that. I could sit in person with her, although we didn't like really see each other that much because we lived on other sides of town and we were both 15. So, you know, we would see each other at a mutual friend's house on weekends sometimes. But we didn't spend a lot of time together outside of school. And so trying to find time to get together and go somewhere only to break up with her felt impossible. So I wrote a note, and in that note I tried to explain like, “Hey, you know, I like you but I'm not really feeling this, and I don't know how to express that fully. But Robert Smith of the Cure has said all of this the way that I would like to say it.”

Courtney: Oh boy, okay..

Dan Solomon: I wrote the lyrics by hand to “A Letter to Elise” in this note.

Courtney/Melissa: Wow.

Dan Solomon: And I passed it to her in the hallway at school so that she would say, “Oh, I've got a note from my boyfriend.” And then she opened it and saw that she was being broken up with, but not even in my words. In the words to “A Letter to Elise.” 

Courtney: Oh boy.

Melissa: Okay, so wait, how did you get the lyrics to the song? Did you just listen really closely and hand transcribe?

Courtney: They were in the booklet for the CD. 

Dan Solomon: I think they were in the CD booklet. That's my recollection of it. I mean, I could recite the lyrics from memory if I needed to, I'm sure, but…

Melissa: Are you breaking up with us?

Courtney: I mean, Robert Smith was not like Michael Stipe, where he was purposely not giving you the lyrics. Robert Smith was a lyricist who wanted you to know exactly what cutting, terrible shit he was saying.

Dan Solomon: Oh yeah, yeah. Like he based this on Kafka's letters, like he was really proud of this one. And like thinking about how intense the song is, the, “I could make your eyes catch fire the way they should.” Like it's very beautiful and poetic and sad, and like thinking about that in the terms of this like really pretty half-assed high school relationship, it's very funny. Unless, presumably, you're the one receiving that letter, in which case it's extremely annoying.

Courtney: Mortifying! But okay, this brings up two things for me. The first is, as everyone who listens to this podcast knows, our ongoing conversation about if men listen to the lyrics or not. You were already listening to the lyrics at 15. That is like remarkable from our very narrow market research.

Dan Solomon: I had lots of feelings and I didn't know what they were, but I knew that. Robert Smith had some way of communicating them. So yeah, like I  needed those 'cause I didn't know anything about myself. And the songs were a really good way to figure that shit out.

Courtney: And did you just pass her like a note in the hall or…?

Dan Solomon: Yes, I did. Yeah, I'm not proud of this. Like, I'm not telling like, check out a cool thing I did when I was 15. No, this was, I was a dipshit and…yeah.

Melissa: Was she a Cure fan as well? Would she recognize it?

Dan Solomon: I don't think so. I remember specifically that I identified that these were song lyrics that I was quoting. I didn't try and plagiarize “A Letter to Elise,” especially, 'cause the first line is “Oh Elise,” which isn't her name. So it would've been easy to pick that up. But no, I don't think so. I remember she was really into Dragonlance. That was the only thing that she really liked to talk about, and I wasn't, and that is can be a big barrier. But we didn't have that much in common. So musically, I don't think she was into the Cure. I don't remember what she was into. That was the issue.

Melissa: This song may not be ruined for her so much as she found the whole thing very perplexing.

Dan Solomon: Yeah, yeah. It could be that like if she does hear the song ever, it was a single, so maybe she did, she's probably like, “Awwww.” Not like, “Oh my gosh, I loved that song and now it's gone.” But more like, “Oh, I remember when I was 15, that doofus that I dated broke up with me with this song.” Maybe it's a funny story for her, I suppose.

Melissa: Yeah, honestly, that would probably kill like in my like friend group. You tell that over drinks one night we are dying laughing.

Dan Solomon: That's a nice thought. I like that. I would much rather be the butt of the joke.

Courtney: Was there any reaction from her?

Dan Solomon: So her friends, who I wasn't also friends with, we didn't, again, have much overlap, did want to talk to me about this because she was upset like that one day. I don't know that she was upset like a week afterwards, because I don't think she was that into it either. I think that it's sad to get broken up with. Having somebody break up with you on their birthday is probably, it's better than having them break up with you on your birthday, but maybe you had some plans or some ideas about like, “Oh, it's your birthday. I'll do something nice.” And now you can't because you just got broken up with.

Melissa: What if she already you a present?

Dan Solomon: Yeah, I don't know.

Melissa: What if she got Robert Smith's handwritten notes?

Courtney: On Kafka.

Dan Solomon: That, I think that's more effort than certainly more effort than the relationship deserved. And I imagine probably outside the reach of this situation. There might have been a cupcake or something.

Courtney: Okay, well, so this is such a familiar scenario to me. What you're describing about going out with people, “going together” was what we called it, in junior high and high school before you had your license when you rarely saw them, maybe you had nothing in common with them other than you both thought each other were cute and that's the whole of why you connected. And you find that you have nothing to talk about and you aren't ever gonna go on dates or ever spend any time together. And it's just like this formative bumping into each other that isn't even really a relationship. It's just like practice for how to figure out who you like and what you like. And really defining yourself, like really sharpening your sense of who you are.

Dan Solomon: Yeah, absolutely. Like the main thing that I learned from this relationship was that someone who likes you back, that's not enough. And that's a really important lesson, I think, to get as a teenager because if you've never been in that situation before, you don't actually know yet. Oh, does there need to be more than this? And it turns out there does.

Melissa: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I didn't figure that out until I was like 30.

Courtney: Okay, so I have a similar story that I'll tell you, and maybe it'll make you feel better. Because your story at least has some poetry to it. Mine is, I'm like the girl in your story, but we were younger. I was in 8th grade, and so I was air quotes “going out” with this guy who I had literally never had a conversation with. I just passed him a note and suddenly we were “going together.” And we literally never spent any time together. We would just pass notes back and forth at the bus stop and he broke up with me out of the blue one day. And I was like, “Wait, why?” In a note and his note back was, “You were on student council, so I thought you were popular, but then you dropped off of it and now you're doing something else. And I was dating you because you were popular.” And I was just like, that thing I was doing that I left student council for was to start a community service club back up that stopped. And I had to get an adult to be our sponsor and get everyone to join this club again and devise a whole program. Like it's so much more than being on student council, you dumb ass. Like, what the fuck? So, that's when I realized he was an idiot and I didn't feel too bad about it. But you know, she might have had that moment too, where she's like, “Oh, he's an idiot. Nevermind. It's fine.”

Melissa: Yeah, he doesn't like Dragonlance, so…

Courtney: Yeah, what's the use of you? With your Cure lyrics.

Dan Solomon: I really don't think that this probably affected her deeply. I imagine that I was a pretty easy kid to get over that. That seems like it should be the case, certainly.

Courtney: I don't know. I've read your writing and I don't know about that. Did the next girl work out? Did you end up going out with her? Did that go anywhere?

Dan Solomon: Oh, no, no. I was…

Courtney: No, no.

Dan Solomon: Yeah, not even close. It was one of those things, like I had such a crush on her that I felt like I had to keep that a secret because it was such a big crush. It was like, “Oh no, this is, if she finds this out, then it's a trick or something.” So I worked really hard to make sure that she never knew. And then the next summer went by and I think she moved back in with the parent who lived further away. And that was it for that. But nothing could have possibly happened there. I did not have the confidence for that.

Courtney: You had to go back into that school year with your integrity in place and not go after this girl at all.

Dan Solomon: Exactly. I just had to begin 16 unencumbered.

Courtney: What else were you listening to at 16? What else was on your like playlist?

Dan Solomon: Gosh, a lot of kinda ‘90s gothy stuff. Not like full deep end goth, although a little bit of that, but the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, little bit of Marilyn Manson but not a lot, The Crow soundtrack, and stuff like that.

Courtney: Do you ever feel guilty when you put on that album or when you put on “Letter to Elise”? Do you still have the tinge of that moment on it?

Dan Solomon: Yeah, I definitely- it's not something I think about a lot, but if I'm listening to Wish and that comes on, sometimes it'll just hit, “Wow, that was a really dopey thing to do.” Like, it's not guilt exactly. It's just like a little bit cringey.

Courtney: Yeah, cringe. 

Melissa: That's what high school is for, just cringey behavior. And I also, I love that idea of, like when you're that age and you're just trying to figure out who you are and trying to figure out how you think about things and how you wanna say things, it's so helpful to have these like lyrics where you can just be like, “Oh, that's how I feel.” And then even if it is cringey to copy them down and hand them to somebody, it's still — I don't know. It's so helpful and just it helps you explore who you are and figure out your way through the world. And someday you can write your own letter to Elise in your own words.

Courtney: Hopefully not. I hope your marriage works out really well and you don't have to do that, but if necessary, you've got a blueprint.

Dan Solomon: I think that's actually really insightful though, that I don't know if I realized or if I would've realized that I wasn't into this relationship if it weren't for that song. If I didn't have that song to express that feeling and be like, “Oh, okay, yeah, that's a normal feeling. That's a feeling that exists in the world.” that you can be with somebody and wish that you were more into them and feel like you have to leave the relationship because you're not. So many of the songs that I listened to that really kinda steered me in directions that I wanted to go in, I think taught me like, “Oh, okay, here's a feeling.” You don't know how to explain it, but when you have this song, it articulates it and then it becomes true for you.

Melissa: Right, it's like when someone once played me the Wham rap over the phone. It was really meaningful. Clearly, they didn't know how to say what they truly meant inside.

Courtney: And obviously Wham did.

Melissa: Job or no job? You can't tell me that I'm not.

Courtney: Do you think that this is a trope for men? Certainly of our generation, I feel like it is because of the movies that we grew up with, but that guys making a mix tape or expressing their feelings via music is something that is fairly common?

Dan Solomon: Yeah, I think so. I think that we don't necessarily encourage teenage boys to be aware of their feelings. And even as those teenage boys grow up into men, there's not like a great, “Okay, now it's time for you to be emotionally healthy.” Instead you watch High Fidelity or whatever, and it just kinda keeps you on that same path. But you will still have feelings even if you don't know what they are or how to articulate them or how to feel them. And so I think that for a lot of boys in particular, songs are like, okay, you know they're there. This is just a way to get them out there and maybe you don't know how to communicate them at all. So you put “Nightswimming” on a mixtape and that means I love you, or whatever.

Courtney: I like how firmly you're sticking with 1992 here specifically.

Dan Solomon: It was a good year for music.

Courtney: It was a good year, it really was. “Nightswimming,” wow. I would be devastated if someone put that on a mix tape for me. Like I don't know if I'd fall in love with them or just be like, “Explain yourself. Are we breaking up now? I don't know what this means!”

Melissa: So they used “Nightswimming” as a music sync in, I think the season finale or right at the end of the season of Better Things. And it was just so beautiful 'cause I had completely forgotten about that song. And then it just comes on and it's that moment of you recognize it and then it takes you a second to realize like exactly what it is. I dunno. It was a great sync.

Courtney: It was like so out of time to, out of — it didn't match what was happening on the screen in a nice way, like in a way that was very nostalgic. I don't know. It was cool.

Melissa: Yeah, gotta love a good needle drop.

Dan Solomon: For sure.

Courtney: So let's circle back here. So you hit on something right there, Dan, that I think taps into maybe the reason for writing your book. This idea of giving teenage boys a way to express emotion and also to have an ownership into a subject that they don't feel like is theirs, which I think expressing emotion is one of those things but abortion is also one of those things. Most people think when they think young adult, they think women like girls, they think books for girls, they think, Judy Blume. What inspired you to write a YA novel that was also especially aimed at young men?

Dan Solomon: I think that the feelings that young men have are valid and real, and I wanted to explore those feelings. Like I felt things so deeply when I was that age. I didn't always know how to feel them, but there was a reason why I was drawn to the Cure or whatever. Like these really emotional things really spoke to me. And so I wanted to write about those feelings just because they're important to me. Trying to explore those kind of teenage feelings naturally leads you to write young adult, anyway, but also I wanted to be in conversation with young people. There are people who, when I was that age, whether they were people in my life or Henry Rollins, but people who would really speak to me and who really offered some guidance that was really meaningful and really important and really shaped me. And so, you know, I wanted to write about feelings in a way that felt really honest, so that if there's a teenager who's going through what I was like, here's a voice. Here's somebody who is trying to talk to you and who isn't Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate or whatever, ‘cause there are a lot of people who want the attention of teenage boys right now who I don't think should have it.

Courtney: Yeah. What has the reception been like? Have you actually heard from teenage boys at all, or parents who are buying this book for them?

Dan Solomon: I've heard from one teenage boy, a friend of mine or, or like an acquaintance of mine, not even someone I know very well, she had given it to her 15-year-old brother, and he texted her about it after he finished it. And she sent me the screenshot of that, which was really nice of her because we're not close friends or anything. But I've gotten some good press for the book, but like none of it has meant as much to me as this 15-year0old telling his sister that he couldn't put it down. That was really very meaningful to me.

Melissa: That's amazing.

Courtney: Were there any particular like sources of inspiration? What you're describing is making me think of the way I felt when I read Judy Blume’s Forever. Like the way that it opened up conversations around sexuality and birth control and teenage relationships. Was there anybody, any authors you looked at as you tried to think about how to write a YA novel? I asked because you're a journalist and this isn't necessarily your like beginning point of your career writing fiction.

Dan Solomon: Yeah, yeah. So there were a couple of books. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell is a really, that's a really meaningful book to me. I was an adult when that one came out, but it's a wonderful book and it really caress deeply about young people and their feelings. The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a huge touchstone for me as I was a teenager. I like comics a lot, and there was this very long run of Spider-Man comics by Brian Bendis that was set when Peter Parker is a teenager. And he was very open about his process for writing. And one thing that he had talked about for that was that like you just mine your minor but very significant like emotional pain from that age. You can do that really authentically and so much of that pain isn't trauma. Maybe some of it is, but you don't have to touch that. You can just touch the things that feel so big because they're so new and because your feelings are so raw and really write something that's very true and authentic, and honest and powerful without having to like dig up the worst things that ever happened to you just because of how teenage feelings work.

Courtney: This makes me think of something Melissa talks about a lot. I feel like anytime we talk about a story from the teen years or even the early 20s, you talk about how these formative experiences with music really shape us and imprint on us.

Melissa: Yeah, there's scientific studies showing just like how much the music that you listen to as a teenager and like in your early 20s as your personality is being formed become just so important to you. It's why so many people stop listening to new music in their like 30s and 40s and 50s because all they wanna do is listen to, you know, what they listened to when they were 20. And it just helps like define who are. So, I do feel like people who grew up listening to the Cure are just inherently better.

Melissa: They're gonna be interesting. They're gonna have more going for them, better personalities. Just a thought. There hasn't been a scientific study on that one yet.

Courtney: So something I've learned this year is that once you're a goth, you can be a goth forever. And I learned this because my friend Beth, shout out to Beth, learned during the pandemic how to play bass. Formed a goth band with her boyfriend — they're both in their 50s — and I went to see them open for Clan of Xymox. They also opened for Sisters of Mercy now, and I'm just like, “This is amazing.” She's been in the music industry forever and has never played. She's done A&R for her whole career and now is like, in the band doing the tour, living this dream that you know — you can do it at any age and you can continue to be a super cool goth, at any age.

Dan Solomon: That's so cool. I imagine that the Sisters of Mercy fans are super into seeing like a new goth band of people their own age or the kinda their own age group out there. I would enjoy that a lot, I think.

Courtney: They're called A Cloud of Ravens, which is an amazing name.

Dan Solomon: Hell yeah they are.

Courtney: You can all go check them out on Bandcamp.

Melissa: That's amazing. Yeah having gone to the Cruel World Festival this year, I feel like my goth card has been dusted off and re laminated. But it's amazing to see how many people are so happy to relive all of their childhood memories in public. Just dress all up in goth. Get the whole family goth. Go out. Have a good time.

Courtney: Did you go to the curator tour this summer, Dan? Which is another thing we've talked about excessively on this podcast.

Dan Solomon: Oh yeah, I went. I went to the Austin show and they played for three hours. They played everything I wanted to hear. It was a real good time.

Melissa: So Dan, if you went to see them, you went to go see the Cure. If they had played “Letter to Elise,” what would you have done?

Dan Solomon: I probably would've done the same thing I did in the song before and after, but I would've also felt just, maybe there was somebody watching me a little bit. Like if I was reacting appropriately, could they tell that I had written these lyrics in a letter to this young lady? 

Courtney: Not Elise.

Dan Solomon: Yeah. To, to not Elise back in 1996. Would they have known? Maybe I don't know. I hope not. But sometimes it feels really exposed when that's going on.

Melissa: Can I just, can I just add one last question just 'cause I'm curious? So, why did you choose to start with Wendy Davis? Is it just because she's such a badass, like she was so incredible? Or just do you think teenage boys resonate with her, should resonate with her?

Dan Solomon: I don't know that she's particularly resonant for teenage boys, but that's the idea here. Like Wendy Davis is very important to the story of this book, but she's not like a character in it. There's a lot of Wendy Davis says X in the book, but it all comes from directly from the historical record of the day. She's not important to the book, except that she was the person around whom all of the stuff that had this really pretty intense, like very suspenseful, if you remember watching it at the time, very suspenseful narrative centered around her. But ultimately it's not about her, and that's the lesson that Alex, the protagonist of the book, that he has to learn is that this isn't about her. This is really about, “Okay, what do you believe and why do you believe that?” And so he listens to her talk sometimes, but other times she was filibustering, so she wasn't always captivating to listen to. And she's been. Like wildly supportive of this book, which has been a really neat thing to see. We have a mutual friend who sent her an early copy of it and she agreed to blurb the book, which was really nice of her. And then when we did the book launch at Book People in Austi,n she surprised me by showing up with her husband and just hung out with everyone else, which was very cool of her. She had asked, “Oh, tell me if there's a book release thing.” And so I did, but I thought she was being polite because she's a pretty busy person, but she was there.

Courtney: It sounds like it hinges on a political moment, and maybe Wendy Davis will be the Cure of a generation because of your book. Let's do this again in 10 years and find out.

Dan Solomon: That sounds great.

COURTNEY: All right. Amazing. So you can pick up a copy of Dan's wonderful book, The Fight for Midnight, in our bookshop.org or your local bookstore. Dan, where can people find you on ye ole Internet?

Dan Solomon: Sure, you can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram as @DanSolomon. You can find me on Texas monthly.com, where I write many things about many different topics every day. And yeah, those are the main places to find me these days.

Courtney: I am a longtime Twitter follower. Number one fan, but also Twitter sucks. I need to go find you on Threads, actually, after this.

Dan Solomon: Please do.

Courtney: Thank you so much for joining us, Dan. It was really a treat. It's such a treat to have another Texan on 'cause usually people are like, “Oh, you're in Dallas?”

Melissa: We're a judgy crew.

Courtney: Yeah, look, I'm, it's understandable. Texas is pretty questionable right now. Thank you for joining us and telling us your teenage boy story.

Dan Solomon: Thank you so much for having me.