Read on to discover the music that has most influenced the life and career of author Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket…
Who is Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket?
Daniel Handler is an American author, musician, screen and TV writer, and producer. He’s known by millions as Lemony Snicket, tormented narrator of the children’s novels A Series of Unfortunate Events, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. His new memoir And then? And then? What else? is published by Oneworld.
When was Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, introduced to opera?
My parents were big opera fans; they actually met in a box seat at the San Francisco Opera when they were both with other dates. They really wanted to expose my sister and me to opera and San Francisco had a free series of opera in the park. The first one they took us to was Bizet’s Carmen, and I have a very distinct memory of my mother taking some Fisher Price toy figures and using them to act out the plot for us before we went. Her version of the final aria was ‘You said you’d be my girlfriend’ and then she’d act out the stabbing of one toy figure by another. I liked the kind of breakneck pace and the large storytelling which the music ushers along, and opera has worked its way into a couple of my novels.
The music of Prince… a ‘beautiful beating heart’
Prince’s Dirty Mind album was briefly banned when I was in middle school, which made us all the more interested in him. The song ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ begins with an organ chord, and a churchy introduction by Prince. What spoke most poignantly to me was when he says, ‘Take a look around, at least you have friends’, and it was in ninth grade when I first began to carve out a handful of friends that have remained close to this day. When I think about Prince, I think about not only his explicitness and his experimentation, but how there was always a kind of beautiful beating heart in his music, even when it was filthy or seemed merely made for dancing. One of my more recent novels, Bottle Grove, is structured after his album Purple Rain – one of the messiest records ever to be a huge hit!
Discovering Sun Ra… music, and writing, should be enjoyable for the audience
One evening in college, I heard music that sounded like two records being played at once. One was kind of a piano jazz record and the other sounded like elementary school students learning how to play percussion. I asked someone much cooler than me who it was, and he said it was Sun Ra. I went out and bought my first Sun Ra record and now have a huge collection. He embodies the phrase ‘a joyful noise’, and you can hear it in ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ from Sound Sun Pleasure!! I think about his principles for connecting with a wide audience and never losing sight of the fact that music should be enjoyable, and I feel that’s a literary ethic for me as well – I like to write books in which the plots are interesting and the sentences are inventive and easy to read.
Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket… on playing the accordion
Stephin Merritt is known for the Magnetic Fields, but I’ve chosen a track by his other band, The 6ths. I bought Wasps’ Nests in about 1994 and when I heard the opening track, ‘San Diego Zoo’, I knew it was something that I had been waiting for my whole life. It is the perfect pop song. Someone told me that Stephin was writing songs every day in the same diner in New York and I should just show up and talk to him, which is what I did. About two days later I was in the studio playing accordion on one of Stephin’s songs. Since then, I have always identified myself as the ‘adjunct accordionist’ of the Magnetic Fields. I’ve played on many of their records and Stephin wrote a song for each volume of my Lemony Snicket novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Morton Feldman… delicate music by a cantankerous man
The American composer Morton Feldman’s personality was loud and cantankerous but his music, by contrast, is delicate; it often moves at a glacial pace and yet is consistently engaging. Feldman had a wonderful friendship with the artist Philip Guston and in 1984 wrote him this airy piece for piano and celeste, flutes and tuned percussion.
The way that For Philip Guston plays with your attention span is really interesting – four hours long, it stretches over several CDs, but Feldman achieves a meditative space through constant attention, which is quite an accomplishment.