SCENES FROM THE SONG
Susan Sloate
GENRE: Drama
Blurb:
On Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is rock'n roll history...
Their band, The GooseBumps, become a worldwide phenomenon, and the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, "Wrapped in Gauze", becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an out-of-nowhere family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can't be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.
SCENES FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it all.
Excerpt:
Jimmy hesitated for a moment, then took a good slug and felt it burn down into his stomach. Only then would he trust him-self to strum the first chords of “Bawk Bawk”. He’d written it in a sardonic mood one day, when he heard Debby playing “The Twist” on her record player and wanted to make fun of it. It had never occurred to him he’d end up playing it for a bunch of guys in a seedy bar after midnight.
Jimmy took a deep breath and launched into the song, speaking as well as singing it. After he’d written it, he’d realized he could even dance it a little, too, and he made gestures as well:
Imitating a chicken, clicking his heels together, clapping his hands. His father had told him he was a natural showman, so he gave it his all.
When he began to ham it up in the dance part, the boys be-gan to laugh, and they laughed right through to the end. Jimmy finished with the high whistle he’d learned the previous summer, and a final click of his heels before bowing to them.
Mark, Kellen and Hammy applauded enthusiastically, and Mick, who’d come back to see if they wanted another round, said to him, “Terrific, fella. Funniest thing I’ve seen since ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. You a comic?”
“Are you kidding? He’s a musician!” Mark roared. “A great musician! And ‘Bawk Bawk’s a number-one hit if ever I heard one!”
He jumped onto the floor and imitated Jimmy, clicking his heels together, arms flailing like a chicken, and making the ‘bawk bawk’ sound. In a minute, Hammy and Kellen were following him.
“Play it again, Jimmy!” Mark shouted. “So we can dance it this time!”
Interview with Susan Sloate
What is your favorite part of the book?
I have a lot of favorites in SCENES FROM A SONG! I love the story of the band, but there are other stories in there as well, all dealing with the song itself. It’s hard to pick one favorite, though, because each section evokes different emotions. I think my actual favorites are the ones that still make me cry when I re-read them. (Start reading; I promise you’ll find them.)
Does your book have a lesson? Moral?
To me, what makes this book special is emphasizing the power of music to change your life. I was thinking about that all the time while writing.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Interestingly, of the three vignettes that follow the main story of the band, two of them actually come from stories people told me. I didn’t actually know any of the characters involved, so I made them up in my head, and I think they work for what happens in the vignettes. But no, while I have patterned characters in other books on people I actually knew, in this book that wasn’t the case at all. Everyone was invented.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Probably Cady Cuyler (rhymes with Tyler) in FORWARD TO CAMELOT (co-authored with Kevin Finn), our time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination. Cady was pretty much based on me and details of my life, but she’s so smart and so brave (much more so than I) that she made her story turn out well. Interestingly, she starts out thinking that because she’s an actress playing a heroic character and people associate her with it, nobody really knows her, because that’s not her. Turns out… it is her. She just needed the right vehicle for that courage to come through.
What character in your book are you least likely to get along with?
Probably Mark. Mark is an angry young man who’s rebelling because he’s not being understood. I wouldn’t want to get on the other side of that anger, though I do understand it… heck, I created it!
What would the main character in your book have to say about you?
The main character in SCENES FROM A SONG is actually the song itself, which I didn’t figure out till the novel was finished. But if you’re asking about a human, it would probably be Jimmy, and I hope Jimmy would cut me some slack and say that I tried hard to tell his story honestly and put in the details that mattered. He’s a good guy, so he probably would.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
I’d love to be Thomas Hardy, who connected every one of his books to every other one, but that’s not me… at least not now. My novels are very different from one another—not just multi-genre but set in different time periods and different places. It would be hard for them to be connected to each other; they don’t have anything in common except me!
Author Bio and Links
SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel.
Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey young-adult book series, man-aged two political campaigns and founded an author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN.
Visit her online at https://susansloate.com.
Connect with Susan Sloate
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