As a teen growing up in the late 90s, you could typically find me after school doing my homework parked in front of the couch watching MTV or up in my room with the local rock/alternative station or my three-disc CD player on shuffle blasting through my chunky wired headphones. The radio was especially a communal way to listen to music thanks to its portability and locality. It followed me to the poolside in the summer and was with me as I stayed up into the early morning hours listening to the experimental or live tracks they would play or even switched to call-in shows where listeners would ask for advice dealing with tough problems.
Because of this, the radio is deeply associated with my youth as a sort of long-lost friend. Even though my favorite station is still around today and plays mostly the same songs that it did back then, the world and my world are not the same.
However, author Laura Lee recently transported me back to those days as I devoured her novel, Saturn’s Favorite Music. Her book is a love letter to this lost yet treasured era and a whole lot more. Below is my review of Saturn’s Favorite Music followed by an interview with Lee.
Saturn’s Favorite Music plot summary
Fresh out of broadcasting school in 1992, Clara Jane lands a job as a D.J. working the 10-2 shift at WRTV, a tiny, easy listening radio station in the equally tiny town of Saturn, Michigan. Thrilled to have landed a D.J. position so soon but still considering a stepping stone to a much larger career, Clara is thrown off guard by the fast-paced and primitive process of cuing up songs, recording ads, and reading the local news. She’s also the new kid in an eclectic group of seasoned professionals, some of whom welcome her with open arms and others who drive her to tears.
Every time Clara begins to grow comfortable with the job and settle into her place within the station, there are new changes to adapt to, hurdles to overcome, and new roles to learn. During this time, she grows especially close to Seth, the 37-year-old morning D.J. who is always there to lend a hand, a comforting word, or even take the fall for her mistakes.
Their closeness sparks rumors of a budding romance, one that even Clara begins to suspect could develop, but Seth’s demeanor constantly straddles sincerity with playfulness, causing Clara to consistently shrug off any hints of his true intentions. And eventually, their relationship, and careers, are put to the test.
The story
This novel efficiently balances its plot development and character development, both of which are equally important in telling its story. The main conflict is the transition of the radio station from a very manual, bare bones process to an automated one that injects more efficiency but loses its character. During that time, we watch Clara acclimate from one system to the next as a newbie and how it shapes her view of the industry and alters her own professional goals.
The chapters are very episodic and relate to the time of year and the different events and challenges that the staff must pull off from one moment to the next. This makes for a very eventful first year for Clara and a lot of tense yet fun situations to pull off. It also allows the story to build up a portfolio of problem-solving situations that builds Clara’s confidence and life experience.
There are long explanations about how the job is done, both prior to and after the changes that are implemented. The detailed breakdown of tasks isn’t meant so much to paint a picture of how to do the job as show the number of steps involved and the pace and choreography needed to pull it off and how easy it is for things to go wrong. The practice and ability to improvise when needed demonstrates how rewarding it is to pull off, like mechanical sorcery.
Lee also seems to consciously attempt to not predict the already known future of media, but there are hints of concepts strung throughout the story that relate to our technological advancements and how they have affected the way we consume information. With just a few early 90s technological upgrades, it’s clear to see the slippery slope of allowing machines to take over a previously very human job.
In an already shaky industry, the staff begins to question if they now have inhuman competition to threaten their job security and careers. To a modern audience, it touches on the ideas that we now constantly challenge in our technologically advanced world and preserves this stepping stone to our current methods of media consumption.
The characters
The cast of characters is largely relegated to the radio station staff which is a distinctly mixed bag of personalities with very distinct voices. Clara is driven and talented while also lacking in confidence and experience. She holds that youthful belief that careers are linear, and she will coast from one professional role to the next while the elders at the station share their life experiences and open her eyes to the fact that life in this industry can often be one step forward and two steps back.
Clara is an alternative goth girl. So, the easy listening station is not exactly her cup of tea, but she makes it work and comes to appreciate the soundtrack that they deliver to their Saturn listeners. Externally, she’s willing to change her appearance and style to keep management off her back and to represent the brand that she’s been hired to sell. However, her on-air personality still feels very much like her voice, and her authenticity is reflected in the listeners’ feedback.
The early 90s setting means that Clara has to face more obvious misogyny and unfairness as a young woman who is willing to work her way to the top, and as a result, she puts up with a lot. But her reactions are totally appropriate for a Gen X woman of that time period who is under the understandable belief that she needs to work twice as hard for minimal pay from management who bark orders from afar with no constructive solutions to offer those who are tasked with keeping their business running.
The character of Seth is a perfectly written potential love interest. He’s older but with a youthful spirit. He’s made mistakes but has always been well-intentioned. He’s easy going yet able to fight what he wants professionally, though not romantically. He is authentically nice, particularly to those who are nice back, and he is very forward yet hangs back just enough to keep Clara guessing at his intentions.
The dialogue
This story’s strongest feature is its dialogue which is always a make-or-break feature for me as a reader. Each character has their own distinct voice, sense of humor, and attitude. They each have their own ways of doing their jobs, and these process can clash, but it also gives the station its unique brand and various fanbases.
I felt like I was in the room as a background character in this story as long conversations were used to help tell the story and get the readers acquainted with, and later, gave them a deeper understanding of these characters. It felt like watching an early 90s indie film that was trying to make its own distinct mark in the genre and hitting the nail on the head each time, whether it was to convey entertaining banter on the air or two characters reminiscing about their pasts or sharing their life experiences.
The conversations are full of information, humor, and poignancy as we learn along with Clara. I especially love how Lee injects anecdotes of Clara’s past life experiences to help her make her current decisions. It’s so much more personal and realistic than the analytic internal monologue style that most authors try to use to explain a character’s actions or motivations.
My recommendation
The message I took from this story is that life is contradictory. You can feel driven to achieve big goals while feeling like you are failing at the small ones. The old school way of doing things can be better from a content and continuity standpoint but not so much in efficiency and profitability. You can know what you want but still be afraid to go for it.
There’s also a reminder that even those who run entertainment industry is ultimately in it for the money, not the art. That’s a tough lesson to learn for every creative individual who is trying to make a living doing what they love. Business always seems to get in the way of that creative drive.
I recommend Saturn’s Favorite Music to any Gen X or older Millennial who is nostalgic for their radio days and the simpler times that every older generation yearns for as they age. But this isn’t a story just for those who lived through the era. It’s a fresh take on a currently nostalgic time period that applies to anyone who has experienced the learning curve that comes with taking on their first real job, navigating relationships with a diverse group of people, and learning to change with the times. It’s easily one of the best books I have read this year and one of the best indie books I have read and reviewed on this blog.
My rating
An interview with Laura Lee
The novel’s title initially comes across as a potential sci-fi story, and there are nods to this throughout the book. How did the town’s name help to influence the events of the story and this otherworldly tie in?
I don’t really know where the name Saturn came from. I started working on this story around the time I left radio, or maybe even before, and Saturn was what I called the town in those early drafts.
There is no Saturn, Michigan. It is fictional. (There are, however, both a Hell and a Paradise in Michigan). Saturn was just something that popped into my head.
The theme of aliens and alienation that shows up as a minor motif came later. I tend to let my subconscious do a lot of the work, and I think that is where all those connections came from.
One thing that did come from life was having someone write me letters saying he was an alien and that he knew I was also from his planet. Without giving too much away, I thought that was an interesting anecdote.
Given Chekhov’s law– if you show a gun in the first act, it has to go off by the third– I couldn’t just drop in something like that without it paying off down the line. I like to have some sort of motif that runs through a story to give it a bit of color and dimension. So, you end up with a lot of David Bowie references and the protagonists watching bad sci-fi movies.
I imagine what my subconscious was getting at is that Clara Jane feels like she is an alien in this small town. There is also something mechanical about a radio studio. You’re communicating with people at a distance from your little capsule. (David Bowie’s Space Oddity video shows a bunch of audio equipment to give it a spacey feel).
I suppose the title could work against the book in some ways. I’ve already had one review from someone who was disappointed it was not science fiction.
The chapters are very episodic in nature. Did you have to plot out the sequence of events in advance, or did they come about as you wrote? Is it your normal process to outline a book before you write it, or do you write as you go?
I had the story arc of Clara’s journey early on. I envisioned it initially as a humorous short story. Bits of it got weaved into other projects and then taken back out.
At one point, this novel and my previous novel, Identity Theft, were one thing, but it didn’t work, and I shelved it and eventually stripped the radio aspect out of what became Identity Theft. It took me a while to get the right tone on the ending and when I finally did, I thought it would be a quick and easy thing to write, but when I looked back at the pieces I had, it needed a lot of work. So, I finally took a deep breath and finished it.
It was always chronological from Clara starting her job to automation coming in and then, well, what happens after that. I don’t want to give too many spoilers.
I had the story plotted out month by month from June 1992 to I think it is October 1993. There were things that had to happen to get from point A to point B and also a lot of little anecdotes and funny stories that I wanted to weave through. So, I just wrote bits of dialogue and scenes and then placed them where they belonged in the sequence and finally wrote the connective tissue between them.
Do you have a favorite real-life moment working in radio that ended up in the book?
A lot of the things that happen in the fictional station are drawn from real experiences. It’s not really my favorite moments that turn up in the book, though. It’s the horrifying moments that ended up in the book because they are much more funny.
For example, at one station with an early automation system, we did radio obits and we had a feature called “Good News” which began “And now the good news for Loudon County…” Someone had forgotten to load the Good News feature into the automation system, and so it did what the computer always did when a feature was missing. It skipped on to the next thing on the log, which in this case was the obituaries.
What people heard on the air was “And now the good news for Loudon County… Mrs. Edith R. Strict passed away….” That is the kind of thing that is horrifying when it happens, but also kind of hilarious.
One of those kinds of experiences, that I didn’t put in the book, happened when I was new to my third radio station, WAGE AM in Leesburg, Virginia. I hadn’t lived there very long, and I did the morning show, so I had to wake up super early and go to bed early.
I didn’t have much of a life outside the station. I was chosen to be the one to do a remote broadcast of a march for Martin Luther King Day.
I was out in my WAGE branded sweatshirt, walking along the route with the marchers, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea what the names of the streets were. I just wasn’t familiar enough with the local area. So, my narration came out as, “We’re now approaching the corner of… the corner. We’re almost up to the corner and we’re going to turn… on that street…on the next street. We’ll turn and then we’ll head to… our destination.”
It was terrible. Someone called the station to complain that I had offended the Black community. I guess it’s funny now, but I still cringe enough at this memory that it didn’t end up in the book.
Some of my favorite real-life moments were just bantering with the news announcer on the morning show I did on that station, or talking about Star Trek with the midday guy when he came in. The story in the novel draws on experiences from three different stations and I worked with a lot of great people over that time. Before you ask, none of the characters in the book are directly based on any individuals I worked with.
Do you have a favorite character?
They all have their own personality quirks. Of course, you want the reader to fall in love a little bit with Seth, the morning man. He has childlike qualities, but he is also the adult in the room a lot of the time with Clara. He is supportive and professional, but he also has a problem with authority. He takes his work seriously, but in a not so serious way.
Meanwhile, Rad, the antagonist, is arrogant and condescending to Clara, but what I find interesting about him is that he really does take his work seriously. He wants to do a good job, and a lot of what he says about what makes a good show and what listeners want from the station is actually true (And Seth really does cheat on the music programming system, as Rad alleges).
When you think about listening to the radio back in the day, where are you, and what are you listening to? Do you still listen to the radio?
I didn’t listen to the radio outside of work when I was working in radio. It was too much of a busman’s holiday. I watched MTV sometimes especially the show 120 Minutes, and I subscribed to the College Music Journal which came with a free CD to discover new music. That said, I was not a goth like Clara. I just liked hearing music that was less mainstream from folk to alternative.
Before I started working in radio I listened to 89X, which was the alternative rock station in the Detroit market. It broadcast out of Windsor, Canada. When I was a kid, I used to listen to Dick Purtan in the morning. I think he was on CKLW then– which was also a Canadian station. He was a Detroit radio fixture for decades.
One thing about radio was that it really was local and there were local stars, and knowing them identified you as part of a geographical community. There were syndicated national shows like Casey Casem, but you really got to know the local personalities. There were also local hits, songs that a DJ played that got a lot of attention in a particular city that others didn’t know about.
I think in Detroit we got exposed to more Canadian artists than other cities did. When I interned at 89X they talked about the “Maple Leaf Law” which was a rule about how much Canadian content a station had to play. There are still some hyper local stations playing local artists, but as a rule the big commercial stations are a bit more uniform now and play more syndicated programming and share playlists across stations in their station groups.
I burned out of my radio career, and for a while after that I really couldn’t stand to listen to music radio. Now I listen to a lot of podcasts and I am a Spotify power user, so I guess I am part of the problem of the decline of radio.
If the book is made into a movie, who would you want to play the main characters?
I like the idea of unknown actors who best fit the characters. I have a strong picture in my head of what some of them look like, especially Seth.
Do you know the band The Lemon Twigs? The brothers in that band have kind of a Seth look, although they are younger than the character. The Irish actor John Lynch had kind of a Seth look when he was younger. So really, everyone I know of is too old or too young. I’ll leave it to the casting directors.
What do you think Clara would be doing today?
Someone who read the book said she can’t wait for the sequel. I don’t have any plans to do one. I think the story is complete. The only reason I would consider writing a sequel would be to give Clara Jane the hyphenate name Andrzejewski-Butkiss. (This joke will make sense to readers of the book. Sorry to those who have not had a chance to read it yet.)
What’s next for you?
My summer ballet tour with my partner, Valery Lantratov, starts in June. Beyond that I don’t know.
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