Latch Key Kids Playlist

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Before I can write a book, I have to create a playlist. It’s part of my process.

When I was a youngster in Sarasota, Florida (former Spring Training home for the Chicago White Sox), before I developed my current musical taste, I obsessively listened to WKXY, the local top 40 AM station that played the same ten hits every hour.

Latch Key Kids, one of two planned prequels to my only semi-successful novel (Small Town Punk), takes place in the mid-1970’s. It features proto-punk Buzz Pepper and his prematurely world-weary sister Sissy Pepper. These two characters are based on me and my sister. Most of what happens in the book happened, in one form or another, in real life.

Why write a novel then? Why not write a memoir? Because, as we’ve all learned in 2020, real life makes zero narrative sense.

Most of the secondary characters in Latch Key Kids are composites of real life people. Most of the events in Latch Key Kids happened in real life. But they’re all rearranged and compressed into a coherent narrative.

Here’s my playlist for Latch Key Kids.