Scott Guild's 'Plastic' Book and Album Are Dark and Entertaining

Scott Guild's debut novel, “Plastic,” is a dark and entertaining saga about a post-apocalyptic world populated by plastic figures, dominated by inescapable advertising, enslaved by virtual reality and fearful of increasing acts of ecoterrorism, as well as measures drastic government measures.

Scott Guild's first solo album, “Plastic,” is a dark and entertaining saga about a post-apocalyptic world populated by plastic figures—well, you get the point.

“Plastic” is that rarest of publishing experiences: a story that is published simultaneously in prose and music. (The most notable previous effort was Dolly Parton and James Patterson's “Run, Rose, Run,” which lacked Guild's literary ambitions.)

“It wasn't like I sat down and said, 'I'll write a book about plastic figurines that's also an album.' It was one idea followed by another and another for a full decade of brainstorming and stopping and starting,” says Guild.

To anyone familiar with Guild's former life as a songwriter and guitarist for New Collisions, an indie rock band that was gaining a following about 15 years ago, this combination might seem like a natural fit, but for Guild, who thought he'd moved on from music. Forever, the album was a total surprise.

“The dream of being a musician was beautiful to me, but I couldn't achieve it on a day-to-day basis,” Guild recalls. “The band was doing very well, but the tour was intense and I was in this cycle of writing about my anxieties over and over again; An anxious person who writes about his anxieties becomes too anxious to continue doing so. “I needed to save my sanity.”

Guild found a solution by writing fiction, eventually earning an MFA and a Ph.D. while working on the novel that became “Plastic.” “This is where my life makes sense,” she said. He and his wife, Rachel Cochran, are English professors at Marian University in Indianapolis, where he conducted this video interview, sitting in front of a large copy of Picasso's “Guernica,” appropriate considering the death and destruction of the novel.

Despite the theme, the novel is not relentlessly bleak, although Guild says it started out that way. In its first incarnation, as “Dead Limbs,” it was “a very unfunny read, full of sad, serious contemporary problems like gun violence and climate change.”

Guild notes that Picasso painted “Guernica” not out of fatalism but “to awaken people to the horror that surrounded them.” Every time you create something to represent what your current moment really is, it is actually an act of hope, a belief in community, that others will understand and share the same concerns.”

So Guild knew he would need to reimagine his book to bring it to life. After a two-year hiatus, he came up with the idea of ​​using plastic figures instead of people, inspired by “Barbie.” Years earlier he was watching a horror movie when a friend arrived with small children. Someone quickly pressed the remote to change the channel and a low-budget, poorly animated “Barbie” show appeared. “Then a door opened in my mind and many other things became possible,” Guild says.

The multiple traumas that the protagonist, Erin, experiences in “Plastic” make her think about her life from a distance, so we read the action as if there were a camera filming her experiences. She occasionally narrates and even speaks to the camera as if in a mockumentary; she's also obsessed with a sitcom in her world, full of characters who are dumb, including a MAGA-like president and a Christ figure named Morris who gives dubious advice; Ultimately, this show is revealed to be another coping device for Erin.

“A lot of us cope with having these different parts of ourselves,” Guild says. “But it was only once I made the plastic characters that I began to understand how to make the book more imaginatively alive.”

The book's editor, Anna Kaufman, notes that the novel changed dramatically after the publisher bought it. “Scott had so many imaginative ideas that we had to figure out what to cut and what to accentuate and the rules of the book world,” she says.

The songs came late in the game. “One day I was writing a scene and a character started singing,” Guild says. He realized that when Erin is most dissociated and feels her emotions most intensely, he imagines her world as a musical. “So I asked Anna, 'What would happen if she filled this book with musical numbers?' And we were in a playful space with that, so she said yes.”

Finally, Guild stepped back and looked at the lyrics and wondered what they would sound like as songs. He then approached musician Jonny Rodgers to create a concept album that would tell the same story in music.

Rodgers, who co-wrote and co-produced the album, said they didn't just get the lyrics off the page. “We used them as a starting point, but those were his first-person experiences and we wanted the album to be a realization of the whole world,” says Rodgers.

In the novel, contemporary music for the plastic people is things like popping corks and airplane sounds, but that would have been too strange for human listeners. “We wanted the music to be accessible but also futuristic and nostalgic, which is Erin,” says Rodgers. “I have a tendency to use orchestral music in strange ways. So I turned to the 80s, the most plastic music of all time, in search of synthesizers and then used the orchestral tendrils as a reality that infiltrated its plastic world.”

Pantheon marketing director Julianne Clancy says the album is not a gimmick but a “natural layering” and that they will use playlists to promote the book. And publicist Demetri Papadimitropoulos oversaw a unique promotional tour, featuring live music performances in many venues; He also notes that the audiobook is distinctive, with musical excerpts from the album and two full songs at the end to intensify the connection.

Guild hopes that readers and listeners will find that the two projects intertwine and enhance each other, but he also believes that each is successful on its own. “It's so exciting that, starting with this novel, I was suddenly able to reconnect with the music and it felt so organic,” he says. “I wasn't looking for a way to get back to it, it was like the book was just telling me, 'Hey, I can be an album too.' It was so healing and a full circle moment for my life. “It was almost a magical experience.”

Guild will talk about his new novel at Chevalier's books in Los Angeles on February 20 at 6 pm The Conversation (with the writer Ilana Masad) will be followed by a musical performance by Cindertalk, an audience question and answer session, and a book and vinyl signing.