Jennifer Egan on the best pauses in rock music

First aired on Definitely Not the Opera (5/11/11)

Plenty of authors have found inspiration for their novels in music and songs. But Jennifer Egan was inspired by a long pause in the middle of a song. One of the characters in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a young boy who is so obsessed with musical pauses that he records them and plays them on a loop, listening carefully to the different ways that songs can pause.

In a recent interview with DNTO, Egan spoke with host Sook Yin Lee about her favourite pauses in rock songs.

Egan's book was inspired by a pause in one song in particular: Closing Time by Semisonic. "The drummer from Semisonic, Jacob Slichter, wrote a fabulous book called So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, and he talks in detail about the recording of the song," Egan said. "And the producer was a guy named Bob Clearmountain who is known for inserting pauses into songs for dramatic effect."

Clearmountain is so well known for this practice that the songs he's worked on are said to have "Clearmountain pauses."

"This idea lodged in my brain and I couldn't get rid of it," Egan said. "When I found myself working on a chapter in PowerPoint, it very quickly came to me that this was where I would end up using the pauses in the songs, but it wasn't until later that I realized that the reason for that was that PowerPoint itself is a form structured around moments separated by pauses."

Once Egan had learned a little more about the function that pauses can serve in songs, she "fell in love with Closing Time all over again," she said. But her all time favourite rock and roll pause? "The song Bernadette by The Four Tops," she said. "I feel like it's one of the original pauses. The name 'Bernadette' just comes roaring back after the pause, and it's so dramatic. In a way I feel like it created a template for the way pauses are used in rock songs. If you talk about pauses in songs, that's one that comes up a lot."

According to Egan, pauses make us powerfully aware of what has been suspended. That's part of what drew her to explore pauses as a writer. "My book is very much about time," she said. "One of the reasons I was interested in pauses is that I think that as we feel a pause happening in life, the same thing happens. We're more aware of time passing in the moments where it seems to have stopped."

Egan was drawn to PowerPoint without fully realizing why at first. "I had never used PowerPoint," she said. "But once I got into working with PowerPoint, I realized why I had wanted to do it so intensely, which is that the book is built around these intense moments of experience, and then there are these long gaps in between the chapters in which time goes either forward or backward. PowerPoint is a microcosm of exactly that method -- a moment, a pause, a moment, a pause."

It was a way of making the structure of the book, which is about time and music, tangible, Egan explained. "It was a floating, momentary form, and it allowed me to represent pauses visually -- pauses that force the reader to pause."

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

Buy this book at:

From the publisher:

"Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption..."

Read more at Random House Canada.