My novel THE UNDERSTUDY will be in bookstores on August 5th, 2025. A thriller set in the New York City opera world, THE UNDERSTUDY centers on the increasingly volatile rivalry between a pair of dueling divas locked in a mortal battle for the lead role in a new opera based on the 1967 sci-fi cult film Barbarella: Kit, who is a driven perfectionist, and her charismatic understudy Yolanda, who is a homicidal time bomb.
What I’ve prepared here isn’t so much a playlist of songs to listen to while reading THE UNDERSTUDY–though if that’s your thing, by all means go for it!–as it is a glimpse into my thought processes as they relate to the book. In other words, if you’re interested in reading THE UNDERSTUDY, this list might give you a sense of what you might be getting yourself into. Some of these songs are there because they bridge the gap between classical opera and contemporary music (sometimes this is done with impeccable style, as when En Vogue whips out a sleek-yet-cheeky riff on Carmen, and sometimes this is done in the most chaotically unhinged manner possible, as when Malcolm McLaren hurls his entire bag of tricks at Madame Butterfly), while other songs are simply meant to invoke the atmosphere of my book, which, in addition to being about the opera world, concerns itself with crime, sex, buried secrets, betrayal, vengeance, and murder. All the plot twists near and dear to classic opera, in other words.
Also there’s some Duran Duran on the list, because… well.
Here’s the master Spotify playlist; the hyperlinked titles within the post go to individual YouTube videos.
“Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Requiem
The classical piece Requiem is my default background music whenever I’m pounding out an early draft of any bit of writing. I have the attention span of an overcaffeinated squirrel and thus get distracted by lyrics, so I prefer to draft while listening either to instrumentals or pieces sung in a language I do not speak; Requiem is in Latin, so that works out nicely. The entire hourlong piece is sublime, but if compelled to pick a favorite section, it’d have to be the brilliant, bombastic “Dies Irae,” which could be the most dramatic two minutes of music ever written. When I was a film major at USC, I scored one of my student films to “Dies Irae.” We were required to submit written feedback on on each film viewed in class; one of my classmates wrote that he was angry I’d used this piece because he had an idea for a film, to be made at some nebulous point in the future, that he had planned to score to it, and his film would have been better than mine, and thus he felt I had robbed him of his chance by using “Dies Irae” first. He was not joking. Film school was wild.
“Total Eclipse” by Klaus Nomi
Pour one out for talented, tragic oddball/1970s East Village art-scene mainstay Klaus Nomi, who put his opera training and six-octave range to glorious use on this 1981 New Wave dance number about how we’re all going to get vaporized in a nuclear war. (In the first half of the 1980s, roughly one out of every five New Wave songs featured that exact same theme.) Nomi was a countertenor, which is the highest male vocal range. In “Total Eclipse,” he starts quite low in his chest, so when he suddenly busts out those dizzyingly high notes for the chorus, it sounds unreal in the best possible way. It’s a song that requires a virtuoso singer; I can’t imagine anyone without classical voice training pulling this one off. In 2001, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond paired up with German pop duo Rosenstolz for an excellent cover of “Total Eclipse,” which they performed as a tag team: Almond handled the verses, while Rosenstolz’s AnNa R. used her pristine soprano range to tackle the high notes.
“A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins
If Yolanda in THE UNDERSTUDY had a ringtone (…I know, no one has ringtones anymore, I’m old), this would be hers: Collins’s slinky, sinister song from 1994 about some poor dupe who gets mixed up with an irresistible woman who might be the devil. It’s a great song, and the best thing about it is the way Collins, much like the various lovesick saps who have seen their lives wrecked by Yolanda, seems to be richly enjoying his fall into depravity and despair.
“Glitter and Be Gay” from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide
This aria, sung by a kept woman who chafes at her gilded cage while secretly taking a fierce joy in the over-the-top luxury that surrounds her (“I have no strong objection to champagne,” she muses), is the song Kit performs a cappella at a key moment in THE UNDERSTUDY. It’s a notoriously tricky piece, even for experienced singers; that Kit was able to set down her glass of wine, rise to her feet, and sing it flawlessly without any preparation speaks to her impeccable training and technique.
“Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode
If I could pick one style of music to permanently eradicate from the world, it’d be the breathy, slowed-down, near-tuneless cover versions of thumping good songs that seem to be omnipresent these days. Sometimes I’ll adopt that style of singing solely to annoy my sister, who shares my sharp distaste for it (she stopped watching the 2021 Black Widow film when a tortured, anemic cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” kicked in during the opening credits). I’ll gasp and mumble my way through, say, some old-school Depeche Mode, just to be obnoxious. Inspired by my bad behavior, in THE UNDERSTUDY, the singer who takes the stage just before Yolanda at a cabaret club chirps out a ghastly rendition of “Personal Jesus,” which is a great song that deserves much better than the fate I give it in the book.
“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” by Ella Fitzgerald
In 1956, Fitzgerald sang this oft-recorded standard from the musical Pal Joey by Rogers and Hart better than anyone else could. No one’s ever going to take her crown, but Yolanda gives her a run for her money in THE UNDERSTUDY when she croons it at the cabaret club. Her performance makes Kit realize that, while Yolanda has some gaps in her opera training, she’s a ferociously talented singer.
“Those Dogs” by En Vogue
If I had to name the single best-known aria in the world, a very safe pick is “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen: This piece gets used everywhere in pop culture, from Sesame Street to Superman Returns to Up and hundreds of other films and television shows. In 2000, the talented women of En Vogue whipped out their own take on “Habanera” with reworked lyrics (and a surprising amount of beatboxing!), and they did it with a whole lot of flair.
“Mack the Knife” by Bobby Darin
The English-language version of “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” a song from The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, rose to the very top of the charts in 1959, thanks to pop idol Bobby Darin. (A few years earlier, in 1955, the great Louis Armstrong also put his own stamp on the song). Oh, sure, the lyrics are about a series of brutal gangland murders (“Now on the sidewalk Sunday morning lies a body just oozing life,” Darin sings with his signature wholesome cheer), but the tune is so swanky and infectious that this song crops up in the most unlikely of places. Remember the surreality of McDonald’s “Mac Tonight” ad campaign in the late 1980s, in which “Mack the Knife”’s gritty lyrics about knifings and bloodstains and cement shoes were reworked into a catchy ditty about hamburgers? And how it was sung by a sunglasses-wearing lounge lizard who had a gigantic crescent moon for a head? Anyway, both for the opera connection and for reasons that I can’t possibly go into without delving into spoilers, “Mack the Knife” seems like a fitting song for THE UNDERSTUDY.
“Don’t You Know” by Della Reese
Detroit-born star Della Reese–gospel singer, ordained minister, talk show host, and star of the long-running CBS series Touched by an Angel–scored a big pop hit in 1959 with her rich, soaring vocals on “Don’t You Know,” an English-language version of “Musetta’s Waltz” from the Puccini opera La Bohème. “Don’t You Know” reached number two on the US pop charts. You know what kept it from taking the top spot? Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” 1959 was a huge, huge year for opera songs doubling as lively pop numbers.
“Hello Earth” by Kate Bush
Never an opera singer yet always operatic, singer-songwriter and music virtuoso Bush is probably best known these days for “Running Up That Hill” from 1985’s Hounds of Love. My favorite track from that album, though, is “Hello Earth,” a haunting and ethereal piece about staring up at the sky while drowning. To add to the eerie and off-kilter atmosphere, a chunk of a Georgian folk song titled “Tsintskaro” is stitched right into the center of “Hello Earth.” “Hello Earth” was used in the cult-favorite Miami Vice episode “Bushido,” which is the one in which Castillo wields a samurai sword and battles a Tommy-gun-toting KGB agent named Surf. I made over a hundred YouTube videos drilling home this very point, but holy smokes, Miami Vice was a weird, bleak, dazzling beast of a series. A stranger with impeccable taste contacted me out of the blue last week after having read a synopsis of THE UNDERSTUDY to say that, while he thinks an opera based on Barbarella is a terrific idea, an opera based on “Bushido” would be much cooler. I am inclined to agree.
“Electric Barbarella” by Duran Duran
Of course there’s going to be a Duran song on this list, and in light of THE UNDERSTUDY’s Barbarella-themed opera, it makes sense that it would be “Electric Barbarella,” their cheerily seedy, sleazy 1997 ode to a sexy robot. (I almost went with “Girls on Film,” honestly, but it’d be tricky to explain my reasons without dipping into spoilers.) Model Myka Dunkle plays Barbarella in the über-tacky video, and she looks like my mental picture of Yolanda, all big shiny hair, glossy lips, and cleavage for days.
“Madame Butterfly” by Malcolm McLaren
McLaren, the music promoter and manager extraordinaire (for McLaren neophytes, this is the larger-than-life character played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster in Pistol, Danny Boyle’s invigorating 2022 miniseries about the Sex Pistols), cobbled together a surprise electronic hit in 1984 with this deranged riff on the classic Puccini opera. A soprano sings the aria “Un bel dì, vedremo” while a male voice intones snippets of dialogue relevant to the plot of Madame Butterfly. The resulting track, as you might expect, is pretentious, impenetrable, and absurdly catchy. While McLaren’s bailiwick was punk and New Wave, he delved into opera again in 1989 with an odd yet gorgeous electronic arrangement of the famous “Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes for a visually striking British Airways commercial.
“First We Take Manhattan” by Leonard Cohen
This is one that I kept returning to in the early stages of THE UNDERSTUDY, when I was still feeling my way through the story. I can’t tell if I think the song, from Cohen’s 1988 I’m Your Man album, is more appropriate to Yolanda or to Kit. It’s dark, ominous, and scheming, which makes me think of Yolanda, but there’s something about the narrator’s singleminded yet righteous quest for retribution (“Remember me, I used to live for music/Remember me, I took your groceries in”) that makes me think this would be an excellent theme song for Kit.
“Still Loving You” by Scorpions
A hard rock ballad that feels like an aria: Lead singer Klaus Meine’s powerful vocals and expansive range give this 1984 Scorpions hit a near-operatic sense of drama and grandeur. Delivering the heartfelt lyrics in his thick Teutonic accent, Meine spends the song repeatedly climbing up to the chorus before backing off at the last second… and then, as he draws near the end, as the power chords kick in, he finally unleashes the full might of his voice: “I’M STILL LOVING YOOOO-OOOO.” It’s a magnificent payoff. If you’ve got the pipes for it, this is an extremely fun song to sing, though a word to the wise: The album version is close to seven minutes long and has a noodling guitar solo in the middle of it, so it’ll tax the patience of everyone in the room if you choose it for karaoke night.