The Guest List | Ratboys
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The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas talks with Julia Steiner, the singer-guitarist for Ratboys. The group’s latest album, The Window, was released in August.
Jimmy Cajoleas: What are you reading right now?
Julia Steiner: I’m reading a book that my sister recommended to me. It’s called Fight Night by Miriam Toews, who is a really great Canadian author. Back at the very beginning of the lockdown period in 2020, my sister Molly did this really nice thing for me where she mailed me a box of books that she thought I might like. One of the books was a Miriam Toews book called A Complicated Kindness, and I totally fell in love with it. Fight Night is her latest novel, and my local library branch just happened to have it. So far I’m really enjoying it.
JC: Are there any books that inspired your new record?
JS: I went through a bit of dry spell when it comes to reading fiction, and I was pretty much reading mostly nonfiction and memoir for a few years. But during the writing of this record, I did read the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. I think I saw on Lucy Dacus’s Instagram her recommending the first book in the series, so I picked it up while on tour and fell completely in love with it and couldn’t put it down. At the end of the book—or what I thought was the end—the page just cut off, and I thought, “Wow, that’s a really avant-garde way to end a book!” I looked it up and realized my copy was missing the last forty pages. So I called the bookstore in Nashville where I bought it and they were so nice and said they’d mail another copy, but I was on tour, so I had to wait another week to pick it up and get to the ending. I was dying to find out what happened!
That series really got me. I’m a huge sucker for any sort of fiction that’s grounded in history. There were certain events peppered throughout the book, like a volcano erupting or the stock market crashing, that made it feel so real. I don’t know if that directly inspired our music, but it’s something I loved to get lost in while writing. Our music is pretty autobiographical for me, but those books gave me a good feeling. I admired Ferrante’s blunt and descriptive language, the way the narrator writes about her life, looking back. It’s very sad, but also compelling, and leaves you with some faint glimmer of hope that you can’t quite understand. Maybe I was feeling a similar way. And the enduring threads of friendship and family and how those relationships ebb and flow over time—those are themes present in those novels, and they’re definitely present in this record.
JC: What’s the last great memoir or nonfiction book you read?
JS: I just read a memoir by one of the Beatles’ recording engineers, Geoff Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. I’m a sucker for a music book. I am a nerd and I love reading about music. I mean, any Beatles fan who read this book will tell you there’s probably an asterisk next to it, because this guy is remembering full conversations he had with the Beatles fifty years ago, so sometimes it can feel like a bit of a stretch. He definitely admits to having biases about the different members of the Beatles, and I think he acknowledges his blind spots. But it was so entertaining, and I read it in a day.
I like biographies a lot. During COVID I read a biography of Mozart I picked up in an extremely used condition from a dollar bin at a record store. It’s called Mozart by Marcia Davenport, and it was published in 1932, so it’s pretty old. It was so entertaining. I highly recommend this book. Mozart—“Wolfie” as he’s called—was a total freak. He’s a bad boy. Marcia definitely takes liberties too. The first line is like, “Mozart’s mother moaned through the open window,” describing in detail the labor that produced Mozart, something nobody could ever know. But if you read about Mozart’s life through the perspective of a touring musician, it’s pretty fascinating. Dude was touring from the age of five. Like DIY touring. It’s wild.
JC: You don’t think about touring musicians back then, but they kind of all were. They had to be.
JS: Totally. And Mozart went through it. As an adult he lived in Vienna, but he couldn’t sell tickets in Vienna. At one point he planned this big hometown show in Vienna and it wasn’t selling tickets. So he goes to the promoter and says, “Hey, can we make this a free show?” It was like, fuck, I’ve never felt more in tune with Mozart in my life. I get it. We’ve all been there.
I just picked up a paperback book called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. Basically, this book examines the assassination of JFK and what could have been behind that. It’s actually from a peacemaking perspective, a peace studies outlook, which I studied in college. Ratboys were just in Dallas, we went to the grassy knoll, it was a whole thing. I kind of went down this internet rabbit hole and decided I needed a hardback, academic book to read about this subject, because it’s a lot. I’m excited to dive in.
JC: Any other music books you’d like to recommend?
JS: My favorite recently was Sellout by Dan Ozzi. Read that in literally a weekend. It’s extremely entertaining. I like how it’s formatted. Each chapter is about a different album, and it was fun to put that album on while I was reading each chapter and to immerse myself in the stories. And I discovered a lot of new music, because I’d never heard some of those albums.
I recently got a copy of this book Bodies: Life and Death in Music by Ian Winwood, which is about the toll that music can take on people’s physical and mental health. Which I think is an important subject to write about. I’ve been waiting to read it until I’m off the road, because that would be a little bit masochistic. I’m a huge Wilco nerd, so I’ve read all of Jeff Tweedy’s books, and I’m excited to read his new one. I poked around Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe, which is really nice. And the Kim Gordon memoir Girl in a Band is amazing. I’ve read that book twice.
JC: Do you have any all-timer books that you revisit?
JS: Good question. I’m a big short story reader, something my mom knows well, and she gives me an anthology of short stories each year. The one that I love the most is Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a collection published after he died. I got my copy of it at Powell’s in Portland, that amazing, massive bookstore the size of a city block. It was my first time there. I’d always been attracted to Kurt Vonnegut and his Midwestern-ness, and I went to the Kurt Vonnegut section and that was the book that called out to me for whatever reason. I picked it up without knowing what it was, but it has some of my favorite short stories that I‘ve ever read. Some of them are extremely morbid and funny, which is the theme of stuff that I like.
There’s one long, crazy story where a couple goes out for their anniversary dinner and it gets messed up really quick. There’s a sharp turn, and things go wild. You never really know what genre of story you’re reading. It’s cool. Keeps you on your toes.
JC: Anything else you’d like to mention?
JS: I got to shout-out this book called The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty that came out last year. Tess won the National Book Award for that book. It’s her debut novel. And it’s crazy because Tess and I went to the same college and took a poetry class together. I’ve always enjoyed following her writing and her novel is absolutely astounding. Her writing is so sad but hilarious, brimming with imagery and memorable characters and interesting dialogue. It’s really a fabulous book. The whole conceit of the novel is that it follows different people who don’t know each other but live in the same apartment complex. It’s neatly presented and compact but still so filled with life. It’s wonderful. That was my favorite from last year. I mailed that one to my sister. I love sharing with the fam.
The last one I want to mention—and I’ve been told these books are having a moment on TikTok, an app that I don’t have—is the Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas. It’s what we in the community like to call “romantasy.” If you can imagine Game of Thrones—which I’ve never seen—mixed with Fifty Shades of Grey—which I’ve never read—then you can imagine what I’m talking about. It’s this really intense story of this young woman who becomes entrenched in the faery universe without her consent. And it’s crazy. I wasn’t sold on it until the very end of the first book, and then I was like, yep, I’m in.
What’s crazy to me about these books is the structure. In school they teach you about story structure, that you’re supposed to have exposition, rising action, the climax, and then a decent amount of falling action at the end of the book. But the thing with Sarah J. Maas is she just throws that climax right at the end, with like five pages left. You’re turning and you’re like, what is happening? How is this going to end? I’d never seen that before. Highly recommend.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
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