The evolution of Scott Guild’s Plastic from sci-fi novel to surreal, heartbreaking album

Scott Guild. // photo credit Anna Powell Denton

Author and musician Scott Guild‘s Plastic is both a novel and a record. The novel, released back in February by Penguin Random House, is a surreal sci-fi drama that looks at the climate crisis through a surreal lens, and once you find your way into its unique world, it’s nigh impossible to put down.

Throughout the novel, characters take a moment to step into the spotlight and sing songs which lay open their inner thoughts with emotional candor and unflinching honesty. Many of those songs have found their way onto Plastic: The Album, out this Friday, May 31, via North Street Records.

Created as a collaboration between Scott, the artist and producer Cindertalk (Son Lux, My Brightest Diamond), and the singer Stranger Cat (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins), it’s a concept record of the highest order and will break your heart, regardless of whether or not you’ve read the novel.

We hopped on Zoom with Scott Guild to discuss the book and the album and how they developed into this immersive experience.

The Pitch: It took me a minute to get into the book. It took me like five tries and I don’t know what, but once it hit, I could not put it down. I think it’s because Plastic operates on so many different levels. What was the nugget you started with and then went out from?

Scott Guild: I think I started with the climate crisis. The book started with some of these larger political questions–and when I say started, this is way back in 2013. When I first started the book, I think I had some of these bigger societal and political dynamics before I even had a really clear grip on the characters. I was also really into the filmmaker Michael Haneke [Funny Games], and I was also reading a lot of J.M. Coetzee, the South African writer at the time–this art where you create a world in the midst of some huge societal crisis or huge ethical crisis and then you create a character who represents the inflection point or what’s at the center of that crisis.

That was the nugget from which I started with the question: “How do we respond to the climate crisis?” “What’s an ethical way of responding?” “Is violence justified?”

I was living in Boston at this time, and right at this moment, the Boston Marathon bombing happened, and I was living right near where the the bombers lived. I was completely surrounded for a minute there when I was first starting the book by just tons of huge police vehicles rolling through the streets and everything like that. Then I was thinking about questions of terrorism. That was the nugget from where I started.

But, then once I got to know Erin, my main character, and the concerns of her life, and then once the idea came to make the characters plastic figurines–obviously, some of those larger political questions are still in the book–I think it ultimately became a much more human type of situation. I’d be fascinated to hear what you read on that: if you felt like this was a very political read or if it was more like you were deep in the lives of the characters with some tension in the background.

It’s both for me. Their lives are informed by this turmoil and their political allegiances/beliefs/however you want to look at it. It is sort of fascinating because, in addition to talking about current climate issues, you’re also getting in the idea of generational trauma. Also, the influence of like media and use of it as escapism, which I really appreciate. I’m a huge fan of metafiction or epistolary sort of stuff. This isn’t strictly an epistolary novel, but where you have Erin essentially monologuing, as well as plot transcriptions of a television program, and then the songs on top of all of that, it’s a lot to chew on and take on, but it also creates a world that, as I said, once I got into it, I was just like, “I am fully in,” because all the layers are operating in tandem.

Well, I’m so excited you enjoyed it. That really means a lot to me. It’s clear you really appreciate it in a very nuanced, detailed way, which means a lot to me.

The thing I really appreciate is that the musical aspect of this didn’t come until you were doing edits after the book was done. In the press release about this, you’re talking about how Erin just started singing to you. How do you go from “I want to add these songs in” to “I want to make a record”?

The short answer is. You have a very fun and creative editor who’s up for these things, you know what I mean? Because I think Anna Kaufman, my editor, we had been in such a collaborative mode working on the book that I felt comfortable for saying like, “Oh hey, I just got the idea of making this book a musical,” which is a really kind of bonkers thing to say to your editor late in the process.

It’s not as if I was saying, “What if my main character had a beloved pet?” “Oh yeah, like I could see you weaving that in.” It was literally like a spotlight’s going to shine down from the ceiling, and the characters are going to break into song, and people behind them are going to start dancing. It fit with the aesthetic of the book, but it was still a major change.

I was so grateful that instead of a sort of like queasy answer from her of like, “Oh, I love that,” instead, there was this kind of enthusiasm for like, “Oh yeah. How fun and strange” and “I see how that works.” Then, once the songs were there and I realized there were about an album’s worth of songs in the book, when that idea came to me, I reached out to some friends and made a couple of demos and then brought them to Anna and also to Pantheon and they just kind of became fans of these first two songs right away. There was just this excitement and momentum to keep going, to keep doing it.

It doesn’t seem like it’s a totally left-field thing, given that music is such a strong part of the book. You’re literally creating new genres as part of this. How do you come up with something like “rhythm and noise” as a genre?

It’s one step at a time where, once I realized I wanted it to be a world of plastic figurines and the world was strange in these different ways, I just got into this really playful space with every little invention of the world. I think in an earlier draft, the characters were playing soccer, but then I was like, “Soccer exists in our world. I want this to be the plastic world sport,” so now they’re playing smuggling, which is the sport where everyone has the buckets on their head and so forth.

With rhythm and noise, I wanted to create a kind of music that would–as with everything in the plastic world–I didn’t just want it to be satirical, just pointing a finger and saying like, “Look how bad their society is. It’s so dumb.” I could really see enjoying some forms of these, like rhythm and noise, where there’s an energetic track playing and there’s like a cork sounds popping.

It makes sense to me that the music could be fun, but at the same time, much like how the characters speak to each other, you can feel like the fact that there are no lyrics or thinking, “There is something lost in their society and the way the changes have happened.” Does that answer your question?

Totally. It addresses the idea that they are plastic people and there’s an artificiality. It’s not necessarily creativity in rhythm and noise. It’s just taking things that already exist–“When you talk about champagne popping, why talk about it when we can just pop corks?” right? Revving motorcycles is energy. It’s discarding the metaphors and just making them literal.

And with everything in the plastic world, like the fact that their bodies are plastic, that church, Coda that they all attend, I didn’t want it to feel like this was just an allegory mocking certain trends in our current world, but that you could see something about alienation from a deeper human experience had happened in their world as a result of trauma and that the zany creations were manifesting that in various ways, but that still people are having authentic emotional lives with each other in those spaces and don’t necessarily themselves see what’s been lost.

They don’t necessarily understand that themselves. This just seems normal to them, but they’re still relatable characters, and we’re not just laughing at them. You can still be with them. That was a big challenge for me, creating a world that zany while still wanting readers to make deep emotional connections to what was going on in their lives, which can be lost in satire a little bit.

I was really on the cusp there, trying to make it like, obviously, you can’t create a world that zany without satirical vibes, but not to go too deep into that.

All of the shop names in the Coda church were great. Shroud of Purrin’ had me dying.

My wife came up with Blessed are the Fleek. There should be little footnotes for some of these inventions I’d get from other people.

You’ve already done a book tour, during which you performed some of these songs with Cindertalk. Based on the responses you’ve gotten as part of the book tour or otherwise, are there plans for grander performances?

The book tour went so well that there will be another round of touring in June and July. We actually expanded our sense of what we wanted to do with the album a little bit just because we were having so much fun with it.

I’ve done different versions of the event. Stranger Cat, who’s the singer on the album joined me for the New York release event. My wife was an incredible singer. Sometimes when Cindertalk is in Portland and I’m doing an event, we’ll sing the song. I’ve done all different iterations of the music live, but I do think going forward, all the events will be musical just because there was such great response to having a reading where you’d read a little bit, get to one of those moments where the song appears in the book and then, like, click on the music and have the singing happen.

Having Cindertalk there though, where Johnny Rogers would actually play the songs and play his guitar, that was unbelievable, ’cause then he would be playing under me reading and it almost felt like I was the singer in those moments. It was a really awesome experience. In the Portland show near where he lives, he actually plays tuned glass. He can play wine glasses in real time, so he did one of the songs just as he’s like singing with wine glasses.

Scott Guild’s novel, Plastic, is out now from Penguin Random House and Plastic: The Album is out Friday, May 31, from North Street Records.