Brendan Halpin
Girl in a Cage

Brendan Halpin is the author of five books: It Takes a Worried Man, Losing My Faculties, Donorboy, Long Way Back, and most recently, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, which was just released in paperback by Random House's Villard imprint. The book is a romance between two pop-music refugees who have each had a hit song written about ugly breakups, and while the novel finds its footing in the world of pop, it quickly grows to inhabit the complexities and challenges of love and life in the modern world.

Welcome to the first stop on the Brendan Halpin Virtual Book Tour. This week, we'll be offering some questions and answers with the author, starting here and moving across the blogosphere to four great literary-minded sites.

Tomorrow, the discussion will make an orderly move to Syntax of Things. On Wednesday, Halpin will be Rarely Likable, and he'll be proud of it, too. On Thursday, you'll find out what this young writer would have done After the MFA (if he'd gotten an MFA). And finally, on Friday, the book tour will slidewheel around the last curve and Drive Like Hell across the finish line and into the weekend.

If you'd like to hear our conversation with Brendan Halpin on the emminently subscribable TypePad Books Podcast, it makes a great background to the questions and answers you'll read on this week's tour. Please check it out.

So, without further ado...

In Dear Catastrophe Waitress, both main characters have breakup songs written about them. We talked about "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morrissette in the podcast. What breakup songs do you personally like, if any? And which, in your estimation, are just too cruel to have been recorded?

I think the Stones have probably written the best breakup songs -- "I Used To Love Her", "Out of Time", "Dead Flowers", and "Under My Thumb", which isn't technically a breakup song, but rather a fantasy about someone who treated you badly coming crawling back and giving you the power to humiliate them the way they just humiliated you.  I doubt that has ever happened in real life. 

The funny thing about "You Oughta Know" is that it's not some fist-pumping empowering breakup song--it's about how she's scarily obsessed and stalking her ex. 

I've always thought it must suck to be Shawn Colvin's ex and be the subject of the line "go back to your mama, go back to high school, get out of this house."  Ouch!  I mean, she just emasculates him with one quick, painful stroke there.

I don't know that any breakup song is too cruel to have been recorded--I mean, I figure, you date a songwriter, you've got to know there's a song coming when you break up.  The one that makes me kind of uncomfortable, though, is Prince's "I Love U But I Don't Trust U Anymore."  I think it's incredibly brave, but he's just so naked and vulnerable on that song.  It's just him and the piano (maybe a cello too?) and these lyrics about being cheated on and being heartbroken. You're just so used to musicians having this pose of being strong that having somebody lay his heartbreak and humiliation bare like that is just incredibly powerful.

But I think my favorite is "Red Rubber Ball" by the Cyrkle. The rhymes in the verses are somewhat cheesy, but it's definitely got that cheery melody, and the chorus is all about getting on with your life and not wallowing.  Just to show you that artists are bad judges of their own work, I once read an interview where Paul Simon said this was the worst song he'd ever written.  I was yelling at the magazine "Have you listened to "The Dangling Conversation"?  Have you listened to the entire "Hearts and Bones" album?  How can you possibly say that?"  I think "Red Rubber Ball" is actually the second best song Paul Simon ever wrote, after "Hazy Shade of Winter."

The Internet loves musical memes. If you do a random shuffle on your mp3 player, what are the first five songs that come up? Give us some commentary on what those tracks mean to you...

1. Too Much Joy -- "Starry Eyes"

A cover of the Records' classic, with new lyrics.  I liked this a lot when I bought the album (92?), but that was before I heard the original.  Now this one kind of pales in comparison.  I still like Too Much Joy, but this particular song isn't one of their strongest outings.

2. Belle & Sebastian -- "Judy and the Dream of Horses"

This is from the live version of If You're Feeling Sinister.  Normally I prefer studio recordings to live recordings, but this is faster and more energetic than the studio version and really joyful.  This wasn't my favorite B&S song until I heard the live version.  When I first downloaded this, I was so taken with this song that I couldn't listen to anything else for a day.

3. The Clash -- "Listen"

It's the instrumental that opens the Super Black Market Clash CD. Nice, but as far as Clash instrumentals go, I prefer their version of "Time is Tight."

4. Magnetic Fields -- "The Way You Say Good-Night" 

It's from the second disc of 69 Love Songs.  I listened to the first disc kind of obsessively for a while, and, about a year later, I loaded the other two discs on to my computer without really having listened to them.  So I don't really know this song, but now, as it's playing, I think it's pretty good.

5. Paul Westerberg (aka Grandpaboy) -- "Knock it Right Out"

This is from the "Mono" album, which I love.  It came packaged as an extra with "Stereo," but it's way better than "Stereo" -- just one great, Stones-y rock song after another. It seems like a weird act of career sabotage on his part, though.  These are clearly supposed to be just fun knockoff songs, so he recorded them live to mono in his basement or something.  I'm not an audiophile, but the sound on this record is so awful as to be distracting.  But I think this is the best thing he's done as a solo artist.

Thanks, Brendan! For more with the author, check out Syntax of Things on Tuesday, March 27th. See you there!

And here, again, is the entire Book Tour schedule:

Tuesday, March 27 --- Syntax of Things
Wednesday, March 28 --- Rarely Likable
Thursday, March 29 --- After the MFA
Friday, March 30 --- Drive Like Hell

Thanks to all the lit blogs who considered and agreed to be part of this, the inaugural TypePad Virtual Book Tour!