In another life, Susannah Felts might have found her path as an indie rocker in Chicago’s turn-of-the century pack of musicians, playing Free Mondays at Empty Bottle, recording with Steve Albini and getting signed to Touch and Go or Bloodshot Records.
In real life, though, Felts found her calling as a writer. In the early and mid-2000s, she worked up a familiar byline in the Chicago Reader, married another writer (Chicago’s “The2ndHand” zine maker Todd Dills) and eventually moved back to Nashville.
But Felts never forgot the fertile time she spent as an observer and admirer of Chicago’s music scene and made it the epicenter of her new novel, “The Come Apart,” out June 15 on Northwestern University Press. It follows the story of Maggie Corbin and her up-and-coming band Spinning Birds from 2008-2010 as they struggle to get a sophomore record going during the Great Recession. At the same time, complex inner-band dynamics, a freak bike accident and unexpected family drama end up setting the quartet and Maggie on a different path.
Felts pays incredible attention to detail in the book, including coming up with Maggie’s catchy lyrics and mock interviews with a music journalist, as well as a faithful replication of the era. From waxing about Pitchfork Music Fest to late nights at Danny’s Tavern in Bucktown and Rainbo Club and Maggie’s day job at Holfax Café (inspired by former West Town spot Bite Café), the 250-page book reads like a love letter to the scene that she watched from the outside for years. It’s even more impressive considering the fact that, in all the time she wrote for the Reader, it never once was about music.
“I have spent quite a bit of time over the course of writing this book being like, ‘What is this all about? Should you have done something different with your life?’” Felts jokes. “Having been a music fan for my entire life, though, music is deeply important to me. And I think it’s a good place to write from. To find a world or community or setting that you know well in some ways, but you’re also kind of on the edge of it so you can have a curiosity.”
Felts, who’s a native of Nashville just like her main character, moved to Chicago in 1998 for grad studies at the School the Art Institute of Chicago. She settled into Logan Square and, over the course of the next decade, filled her free time with copious shows.
“I was always at the Empty Bottle. One of the best was Interpol, and [I] visited Lounge Ax a few times before they closed. I saw Cat Power play there with the Dirty Three. I saw Ryan Adams at Schubas. Neko Case at Double Door. Low at the Metro. Andrew Bird at the Hideout. Oh and Radiohead at Millennium Park was another great one,” she said, recalling some of her favorites. Felts put together aSpotify playlist or soundtrack to the book that includes many of these acts.
“The Come Apart” also follows an unpublished essay she wrote years ago about how Bloodshot Records changed her worldview when she lived in town. “Being from Nashville, I had grown up hating country music and everything to do with the new Nashville sound, but as soon as I got to Chicago and heard everything going on with Bloodshot Records, I was like, ‘oh, I like this. This is really good,’” she says.
Felts has been working on “The Come Apart” for more than a decade, finding mentorship in Chicago-based writers and teachers Megan Stielstra of Columbia College and Rebecca Makkai, who is also the artistic director of Story Studio Chicago. The book follows her 2008 debut “This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record” (naturally inspired by a Violent Femmes lyric) that was released on another Chicago imprint, Featherproof Books.
While that title was more YA-geared, Felts says, “I honestly think it’s been read more by like 20-somethings over the years than by teenagers.” And she hopes “The Come Apart” finds the same crowd — a young artist crowd who can find inspiration in Maggie Corbin’s story and the will to keep going.
“I find it weirdly encouraging that nothing is going to keep artists from continuing to make art even when it’s harder than ever and I hope the book resonates in that regard,” she says. In fact, over the long course of writing “The Come Apart,” Felts watched her daughter grow up, pick up a guitar and start songwriting, in many ways fulfilling her parallel life dream, one that she also gets to live out in Maggie Corbin. “The artistic journey Maggie is on, the place she’s at in her life, those feel very real to me and reflect my own experience with writing,” Felts said. “And I hope those are universal themes for other people trying to make a life in art and believing it’s possible.”