We chatted with Author Scott Guild and Cindertalk about Plastic: The Album and More
PLASTIC: THE NOVEL, OUT VIA PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Available Here
NATIONAL BOOK TOUR X MUSIC EVENTS THIS SUMMER
We had the chance to chat with Scott Guild and Cindertalk about the album and the album release party which is set for Tomorrow. The link to the live stream will be here. Our Full interview will be up tomorrow.
Scott: So we've been working for about a year now. putting together an album that essentially takes the story of the book and the characters from the book, but then turns it into musical form in this new way.
So it's been a really exciting process. And I was a fan of Johnny for many, many years before this. And so when I reached out to him about this, I was so excited that he, came on board to work with me. So it's been a joy. Um, and it's really exciting.
HM: To know now there is a musical component to this really piqued my interest in reading the book. Um, and as somebody who's a huge, like, audiobook person, I noticed that a lot of the music has been incorporated into the audiobook. Now, when it came to writing the book, did you kind of want it to have a musical component in it?
Scott: So when I was writing the book initially, uh, there were songs in the book. So there were characters that the book is, I mean, if you have the book, you know, it's, it's a bit surreal, right. It's set in a world of plastic figurines, and the main character, Erin, is very dissociated from reality in some ways.
So when things get really stressful for her, music starts playing kind of in her mind and the background, and she breaks into song, it's a little crazy ex-girlfriend, if, you're familiar with that show, so there were those songs in the book, but it wasn't until the very end of the process when I thought, wait a second, what if this novel also has an album and, you know, the album is part of the novel and it's like a joined project where people could actually hear this music and step away from the book and go into this musical world kind of with Erin. So it was, it was a later thought I had, uh, but then once I started doing it, my publisher, you know, God bless them, Pantheon Books, they're wonderful. They immediately got on board and got excited. And then the whole thing got rolling. So it was, it was really, it was really exciting.
And it was really exciting too, to feel like the publisher and the project itself had room to sort of like stretch what a novel can be a little bit. It's always fun when you're dealing with a form that's like, you know, 2500 years old or something to feel like, you know, you can, you can do something with it.
HM: especially when listening to the audiobook format, it kind of carries the storyline in such a soundtrack way that you can't help but be in, you know, vested into that, into the story.
Cindertalk: Yeah, I think Scott found, a good collaborator in me because I am both like a sort of a songwriter pop music world person, but I also write, I compose music for film like, you know, my other half of my full time, my double full time. So yeah, and when he sent me the, the drafts, early drafts of the novel, uh, when we were talking about collaborating, it was easy to see it as.
Both songs and the film score are kind of underscore. So the songs have, like when we were looking for the sound of plastic, we did a lot of digging into just the, like the raw sound, like what is the word, the sound of these people, the sound of these people's, these plastic people's world feel like. Yeah, there are a lot of complicated layers to it because the sounds that they actually listen to in their own world are almost unpalatable and foreign to our world, if that makes sense.
They listen to things like, uh, beats and whale sounds, right? Or the sounds of popping corks and planes. Yeah, overhead.
Scott: sort of like ASMR taken to like a very extreme degree, you know?
Cindertalk: So we found, I think, we quickly realized that that wasn't going to be the underscore for the, for the, just having whale noises.
Scott: And something Johnny said early on that was really insightful too and the idea that we then went with was we had all these lyrics from the book that were Aaron and then we had Stranger Cats singing who really embodied the character of Erin, so well, but it felt like the actual soundscape Johnny was creating like that was the world of the book.
That was the plastic figurine world and he did such a great job kind of incorporating synthetic sounds with organic sounds that really kind of match the way in which like you have Erin who's a human being. And yet she's seeing herself as a plastic figurine. She's in this world of all these other plastic figurines.
So, like, having a song where there's all this synth going on, but then also you can hear this really like a haunting violin in the background to kind of capture the emotional tonalities too. So, not to get too in the weeds with all that, but yeah, that was, that was a big thing we were thinking about as well as, like, how do you have a character front and center and a voice like Stranger Cat, uh, front and center, which is so distinctive, but then craft this soundscape that feels like you're putting her in the middle of the world of the book.
The more we worked on it, the more it became just like, Oh, let's take these songs from the book and put some music to it. And more like, how do we create something that feels just as like full as the, um, As the book itself.
HM: how did you guys come across Stranger Cat?
Cindertalk: I had worked with her before in a few different contexts. She's a singer I knew from New York, and we had a lot of mutual friends. Um, so, yeah, we had done a few things together before, and I knew that she had a very futuristic in her own music, but she's also got like, just like this hint of sort of 1980s DNA in her delivery, sometimes in her voice in a way that is, um, you know, to me, that decade is, is very nostalgic and Cat seems to have a little tiny hint of that in her voice and it, it felt right for this project. We didn't set out to make an album that kind of had little hints of the 80s in it, but we kept coming every time I would do something that had a little hint of it both Scott and I would feel like, yeah, this is, this is like, it's right to pull that decade into this project, you know, and then once we had cat, the first song she sang on was a song called Fiona.
And I just, I remember pulling her, takes up in the studio and just kind of like sitting back in the chair and not, not even knowing where to begin because it was so good. You know, I felt like I was hearing something iconic for the first time ever and sort of just like raw in my studio.
HM: So everybody will have the opportunity to see the live stream, How much have you guys been practicing?
Cindertalk: Together, not at all. We're gonna, we're gonna be in the same room
Scott: But Johnny and I have toured this project together a bit. So we're, we've done it. We've done a number of shows together, but this will be with Kat.
Cindertalk: Yeah. And Kat and Scott did a short bit of Scott's earlier book tour. so this is the first time we'll all be together, but I, Kat's a total pro and I rehearse up the wazoo, so we're going to be great.
Scott: And Johnny's already made like live versions of like, essentially he recreated the entire album live and emailed it to us, like, long in advance. So we have sort of like the musical setting of the show.
And yeah, it's just a strange way we all exist now that you can be truly in different parts of the country. I mean, Johnny's in Oregon, I'm in Indiana, Kat's in Miami. So, you know, but we're all, we're all practicing and then we'll be meeting up on a Friday or I'll be meeting up with Kat on Thursday and then all of us on Friday.
We had a great time chatting with Scott and Cindertalk, and there is a lot more. You can listen to the full podcast on our YouTube channel. We continue the conversation about book thoughts, book tours, Kate Bush, and so much more.
On Now author and musician Scott Guild will release Plastic: The Album via North Street Records (The Orchard/Sony Music). The LP was produced by Grammy-winning producer Peter Katis (The National, Sharon Van Etten) and is the companion project to his wildly successful debut novel, Plastic (Penguin Random House) which was released earlier this Spring to wide-spread critical acclaim. Together the album and book lead audiences into a surreal near-future world, peopled by plastic figurines and filled with the perils of climate crisis and a recent nuclear war.
The LP is a collaboration between Scott and the artist and producer Cindertalk (Son Lux, My Brightest Diamond), as well as the singer Stranger Cat (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins) who stars as Erin on the album, embodying the fears and desires of the plastic protagonist. Scott also drew on his background as the songwriter/guitarist of the Boston band New Collisions, which toured with the B-52s and opened for Blondie. Plastic: The Album allowed him to explore a different kind of songwriting, creating a concept record in the tradition of Joni Mitchell, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Kendrick Lamar, and Jazmine Sullivan, using the album format to tell a compelling story song by song.
Guild and his collaborators have been touring the project and are heading back out again with the first show - a record release party - scheduled for May 31 in San Francisco. Additionally, Guild will appear live on Instagram on the B-Drop Los Angeles Podcast and live on YouTube on the I'm Probably Wrong About Everything Podcast. All dates are listed below.
Plastic: The Album bio
When the plastic figurines started singing, Scott Guild was at first confused. Luckily they were characters in a novel he was writing—he wasn’t having a daytime hallucination. But his book, Plastic, had just sold to Penguin when his characters interrupted his edits, pausing an important scene to burst into song. He wasn’t sure how his publisher would feel if his ambitious debut novel—peopled with plastic characters in a troubled near-future world—suddenly became a musical as well.
To his good luck and ours, his editor loved the new direction, and the first seed of Plastic: The Album was sown. Scott had spent his twenties touring in the Boston band New Collisions, writing the songs and playing lead guitar in the eclectic art-pop group, which toured with the B-52s and opened for Blondie. Now, in his thirties, he immersed himself in a different kind of lyricism, exploring the fears and desires of his main character, Erin, an all-too-human young woman despite her hinges and hollow body, struggling to rebuild her life in a future of climate crisis and ecoterrorism. Before long, the novel was full of Erin’s songs—along with a blue spotlight that shone down on her as she sang—and Scott was starting to hear a Plastic album take shape in his mind, leading him back to music for the first time in years.
He reached out to his friend Jonny Rodgers (a.k.a Cindertalk), a baroque-pop artist who collaborates with Son Lux and My Brightest Diamond, and whom The New York Times once praised for his artful use of tuned glass. Jonny slipped into the plastic world with ease, and from there he and Scott began a year-long collaboration, transforming the novel’s lyrics into stunning, unique creations, often built around string or wind arrangements, or discoveries from Jonny’s vintage Prophet synth. The music gave sound and texture to Erin’s story, as well as the book’s political and spiritual themes—healing from grief and loss, finding new love in a crumbling world—with instrumentation that defied genre, adventurous song structures, and melodies centered on Erin’s longings. A wide range of influences flowed into the music, whatever helped to plumb her emotional depths: Anohni, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Bon Iver, Nina Simone, Peter Gabriel, Jazmine Sullivan, Brian Eno, Radiohead. This led to songs that felt wholly singular, but also in dialogue with expressive pop of the last five decades.
From the start, Scott and Jonny had planned to make a true concept album, like The Kinks’ Arthur or Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid. The album would guide listeners song-by-song through Erin’s story, beginning with “A Doll’s House” in the first chapter, and ending on the last page with “The Absence.” As the pensive strings faded on the final track, the novel in song seemed complete.
What the album needed now was Erin herself, a singer to embody the plastic protagonist. Enter the artist Stranger Cat (Cat Martino), a frequent collaborator of Sufjan Stevens and Sharon Van Etten, whose visionary music ranges from soulful folk to soaring electropop. Her voice brought Erin into being on the songs, whether singing about her terrorist sister in the lead single, “Fiona,” or the thrills and doubts of newfound love in “Lightning,” or political violence in “Only Killers,” or the carceral state in “Nighty Night Now.” Through Stranger Cat’s nuanced vocals—which could switch from vulnerable to biting in the same phrase—Scott felt like he was meeting anew the character he’d known for years.
Around this time, the Grammy-winning producer Peter Katis joined the project. Scott had met him years before at a crowded The National concert, recognizing his favorite producer from an old picture in Tape Op magazine. The auteur behind nearly all of The National albums, as well as Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights and Jónsi’s Go, Peter brought his singular brilliance to the album, placing Stranger Cat’s voice at an intimate closeness to the listener, while the strings and synths and echoing pianos swirled around her like the torn fragments of Erin’s world. While never leaving a pop aesthetic, Peter favored innovative, unconventional choices, letting the story and emotions guide the music.
The final result is an album that feels as ambitious and immediate as the novel. The album and book together create a unique, multimedia experience of the story, drawing readers and listeners deeply into the world of figurines. The audiobook of Plastic will feature songs from the album throughout, weaving the words and music together in a format that offers story through sound.
“All my life,” Scott says, “I’ve been obsessed with art that pushes boundaries, especially boundaries of genre and format. Kate Bush with her high-concept videos, Anohni’s work with Marina Abramovic—I love art that creates an immersive world, that lets me lose myself in someone’s vision. That’s my hope with Plastic: to find new ways to tell a story, to put people in a vivid space of imagination. It might sound silly, but I’ve grown very close to Erin through the years. I’m excited for everyone to meet her.”