Christian Kiefer, author

Christian Kiefer’s bio is simply too long: Musician. Novelist. Professor. Publisher. Former SN&R music columnist. His second novel, The Animals (Liveright, $25.95), is set in Reno and Northern Idaho and is about a man’s efforts to cut himself free from a wasted youth and a boyhood friend that he wronged. A novel of the West in the traditional sense, where the landscape is a character and the human characters are all desperately seeking a way to reinvent themselves, it’s also far more action-oriented than his debut, the well-received The Infinite Tides. Kiefer took some time to discuss his book and the soundtrack he made to accompany it.

The Animals is so different from The Infinite Tides. Is this deliberate?

It’s definitely deliberate. The Infinite Tides purposefully has to do with velocity in that Henry James, contemplative sort of way. In this one, I wanted to see if I could do velocity at all. I didn't know if I could. A guy looking out a window, eating a bowl of cereal, I could do that all day. But put a gun in his hand and have him actually do something serious that takes actual physical effort outside of his head? That's hard for me.

I watch movies like Mission: Impossible, and I'm like, “How do you do that?” It seems impossible to me. The velocity. It's just not what I do. And I don't really read that kind of thing. In reading things like Henry James, I think I learned the wrong lesson: that nothing should happen. Not that nothing can happen, but that nothing should happen.

Reno and Northern Idaho are also characters in this book, and Reno is not a terribly sympathetic character.

Reno in the ’80s in particular was really a cocaine trafficking hub for the United States, because it was easier to get it through Reno than through Las Vegas or L.A. or anywhere else. Reno is such a weirdly tiny town for how big and loud it seems when you’re on Virginia Street. In the ’80s, there was a lot of money there, but it was still full of really broken people. It was still very much a cash culture, so payday rolls around or Friday night rolls around and everybody’s walking around with a huge wad of bills. It’s a town entirely based on the myth of luck, so you stay up all night from Thursday to Sunday playing slots or whatever and then you’re broke and Monday you go back to work.

If you have cash, everything in Reno is possible in 1984.

That possibility is what your characters are desperate to find, right?

But that’s also a myth. There’s a scene early on in the book where it’s 1984 and the elections are going on and Reagan is sweeping the country. They have a little discussion about the politics and Nat won’t tell anyone who he voted for, and the takeaway for me is that it really doesn’t matter who you vote for if you’re broke. The president is irrelevant. Is it Mondale or Reagan? Who fucking cares? You’re broke, and you just spent all your money on cocaine and the rest of it you gambled away and you’re broke. It just doesn’t matter.

And you’ve got a soundtrack for the book that’s also about to be released. Is this original music?

Well, it’s not all me. I almost made a soundtrack for Infinite Tides, and then didn't end up doing that. But with this one—I listen to a lot of music as I write, instrumental music of a particular kind, and I had a kind of a mixtape for Infinite Tides that I listened to a lot and a similar mixtape for this one, which included a lot of wordless acoustic blues and finger-pickin' guitar, but also Morton Feldman and people like that.

You specifically reference Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” Van Halen, “Jessie’s Girl.” But that’s not what the book sounds like.

No, that’s what those kids think the book sounds like. For them, driving around in the desert listening to Rush on a boombox. When I was collecting musicians for the soundtrack, Jason Roberts, my longtime friend and guitarist and writer, he asked me, “So, you don’t want me to deconstruct Van Halen’s 'Eruption’ for this, right?” And I said, “No, no, it’s a totally different thing.” I wanted to get at the sonic texture of the words themselves.

The record is called a “Christian Kiefer Production,” which is to say that some of the tracks I'm not even on. I just assembled—I took Ross Hammond's guitar, and I added something to that, or I used Kevin Corcoran's percussion track that he did in my studio, but I stuck Jeff Pitcher's kalimba playing over the top and assembled.[

It's just this really beautiful sonic, droney, acoustic-sounding thing, with some moments of real musicality—Ross and Jason Roberts do this beautiful guitar duet that I put on it.

So it comes out on vinyl this month, on Jealous Butcher [Records]. The digital version is a little different. It's a little longer, and I actually read some passages on it, but the vinyl version is just music, no words.

It's exciting. I get so busy with the novel that I actually forget sometimes that I've got a record coming out, too.