Somewhere with nobody in it

There is a line in chapter four where she catches herself about to smile and stops, because that could wait until she was somewhere with nobody in it. I wrote it once and then found it would not leave me alone. It is a title now. "Somewhere With Nobody In It" is three minutes and thirty seconds long, out on Spotify since 25 September, and sitting on the book's own page with a player and the full track.

Perpetūra already has an album. This is Pantheon's first music, and I wanted it to work the way the book works.

So it is a duet, call and answer. She goes first, alone and low. Every line of hers is a thing she does with her hands, or a routine she keeps: fixing her face before seven in the morning, the seat with the light behind it, the curtains. She never says what she feels. He comes in after her and says what he wants in plain words, because he has nothing to hide. That split is the whole method of the book, how these two people actually talk to each other, and I was not willing to soften it for a song.

One line goes out in Cantonese and comes back in English, because the city the book is set in lives in both. The chorus rests on the line that is already public: he wants to know her, and she cannot survive being known. Say that twice, in two voices pulling in opposite directions, and it becomes a fight without either voice ever rising.

The song grew out of the music under the book's trailer, that cold, built sound where the only warm thing in the room is a voice. It ends the same way here. Her voice is alone for a moment, no words left in it, and then the cold closes back over it and the track stops.

No name is sung anywhere in the song. That was not something I noticed after the fact. It is the decision I would defend if anyone asked me to change it. A song that named her would be an easier song, and it would give away more than this one is allowed to.

The lyrics are mine. It was arranged and generated in Suno. Have a listen.