Write About Love, and Music, and California
On a blustery, cold San Francisco night (cold for San Francisco, that is—a frigid 45 degrees), I walked to the end of a long line of well-dressed indie kids of all ages. We were queuing up on Valencia Street outside The Chapel music venue in San Francisco’s Mission District, the neighborhood that just happened to play a part in Nobody’s Empire, the debut novel by Stuart Murdoch, Scottish singer and mastermind behind the twee-pop wonderband Belle and Sebastian. Fans of the band, which dug its deep, pop hooks and its wispy rhymes into the hearts of twee music lovers from 1996 on, also know it as the name of one of their songs and the album it’s on. The book tour promos played to its audience: It was marketed as a night of “readings, songs, live Q&A, and book signing,” and it featured informal chats with moderators and hosts Mike Schulman and Nommi Alouf, the latter of whom figures in the novel as the college radio station DJ who invites the main character on her radio show.
