An Interview With Novelist Liz Riggs

Talking to the brilliant and sexy author of 'Lo Fi' about fandom, emo music, and paying tribute to all our favorite bands.

Something I’m hoping to do more of on Substack this year is interview people I like about the work they’re doing. I’m especially interested in talking to writers. Actors and musicians get more clicks but, in my experience, authors give the best interviews.

We begin with Liz Riggs, whose debut novel Lo Fi is releasing this summer via Riverhead Books. She holds a Master’s Degree in Fiction from NYU, and her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Bon Appétit, American Songwriter, MTV and lots of other places. She is also my hot wife.

Lo Fi is the story of Al Hunter, a girl who stamps hands at the front door of a Nashville music venue at the dawn of the 2010s, mooching free drinks off bartenders while navigating lust and love to the tune of Death Cab, Dashboard, the Dead Weather and all our other favorite bands. It’s a really great book.

Daisy Alpert Florin (My Last Innocent Year) called Lo Fi “swoony, sexy, and melancholy. . . a tattered love letter to youth, music, and Nashville. A portrait of our ‘lo fi’ days, before we come fully into focus, before we know we are worthy of being heard.”

Jessica Anya Blau (Mary Jane) wrote that Lo Fi “perfectly captures the angst and cringeworthy predicaments of navigating hard love and huge heartbreak in your twenties. Music nerds won’t be able to turn away, but you’ll love it even if you’ve never owned a record in your life.”

I know I’m not exactly beating the Wife Guy allegations here, but as someone who has read Lo Fi, I’m pretty confident readers of this Substack will love it when it comes out. For reasons I don’t understand, pre-orders remain very important in this industry, so buy it now instead of later at this link and juice those pre-orders!

To try to make this interesting for both reader, host and talent, I tried to stick to questions I didn’t actually know the answers to. It ended up being a fun talk, and I recommend interviewing your wife or the closest person you have to a wife, whether or not they have a new book coming out.

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TYLER: Something a lot of people said was they always knew you were going to write a book. I was surprised because before I knew you, you were an athlete. Athletes aren’t always known for their literary aspirations. Do you think if you’d kept up with soccer, you’d still be writing books? 

LIZ: Well, I think that I did. You didn’t meet me till I was 26. I was a very serious athlete in high school and one thing that happened is that I decided instead of pursuing a longtime dream of D1 soccer, I’d go to a D1 school and play club soccer. Part of the reason I did that is because I wanted to pursue the other things I’d be interested in. That became reading and writing. I was writing the most emo fucking poems and listening to Dashboard Confessional but I loved my English classes. I continued playing soccer, but I played it in a way that allowed me to devote time to writing.

Did you feel like there were two wolves within you? The jock and the emo girl? 

I never had to choose. I was playing soccer competitively but I was also taking music theory. I was playing music on the weekends and learning to play the guitar and going to shows and exploring that side of my creativity. I was never in one group. I floated through friend groups. I was friends with soccer people but also weird music people, but was also a straight A student. Mostly, I was a nerd.

A lot of people who’ve read the book have described it as a love letter to Nashville. I think you’d argue it’s a love letter to a certain era of Nashville. What’s the difference between the Nashville you write about in Lo Fi and the Nashville you and I live in now? 

It is a love letter to Nashville, because as much as New Nashville frustrates me, it’s still home. But the Nashville of Lo Fi doesn’t exist, literally. Many of those places are gone, either physically or spiritually. Mercy Lounge has been closed for about a year. The restaurants and even the streets …it’s so different. 

But I fell fucking in love with this city. I couldn’t believe that I got to live in a place that had this much creativity pulsing from it. I’m from the Ohio suburbs. It was vacant of culture. My only experience of art was going to shows when tours came through. So to be in a city where there was music every night, you bump into someone and they’re either working on an album or doing a shoot or just got back from tour, it was incredible to me. I was bowled over. 

That’s not the case anymore. 

There is still an immense amount of creativity here, but I got swept up into a scene and you don’t realize you’re in a scene when you’re in one. It wasn’t until I wrote this book that I realized what a scene it was.

I think that still exists. It’s much more spread out. The affordability of Nashville has forced a lot of artists to the outskirts. The way the city has grown has made it less attractive to creatives. It’s so different. Many of these places that these characters go to — the places I went to — are physically gone. 

A lot of music fiction is written from the perspective of insiders. A Star Is Born. Bohemian Rhapsody. Almost Famous. You wrote yours from the perspective of just a fan. Why was that important to you? 

It’s the only perspective I have. A friend recently called it “Meet Me in the Bathroom with less access and better tits.” [laughs] I thought that was accurate. I can’t speak to anyone’s tits but, I agree, I definitely had less access.

People are going to ask me how autobiographical this is and I don’t totally know how to answer that. It’s not me, but what is very real is that I have never been an insider. I’ve just always been very close to it. 

When I moved here, my best friend’s uncle was a very successful music exec and, through him, we started to get invited to a lot of things. We fell into this crowd. At the time, we were high school teachers. We would show up to house shows or a party or a dinner with a friend, and people would be like “who are these teachers??” Everybody else was in a band. We were the only people who didn’t work directly in music. I was just there as a fan. 

In an industry like music, the tension of not being on the list is a real tension. I’ve done both. I’ve slept with the band and I’ve not been allowed into the show. I’ve not had tickets and I’ve been backstage. But mostly, I’ve been the person who buys a ticket, walks in, and tries to get to the front. I think that’s a valid perspective. 

Did writing about this challenge how you felt about the scene? 

It made me appreciate it more. That part of my life was ten years ago. I’m still near that world, but in a different way. I knew it was important to my life. I didn’t realize how important it was to the fabric of this city. How many fantastic people came out of it. How many relationships and creative identities formed. The people whose careers have taken off. A lot of them were playing house shows then. It’s so cool to see the trajectory of that too. We were all so young. 

Most of the music you write about is the indie scene of the late ‘00s. But you like popular music like *NSYNC and Britney then; Taylor now. Would you ever write about the mainstream pop scene or do you think emo is just more naturally interesting to write about? 

I’ve said many times that if I were ever given a chance to be a biographer for Taylor Swift, it’d be the honor of my career. [laughs] But a lot of it has to do with access. … The music I loved that was more nationally mainstream — Death Cab, Bon Iver, the Format, Matt Pond — is huge in this book. But we also have bands here that are a little more Nashville-y — alt-country like Andrew Combs and Madi Diaz and the Apache Relay. Those people who went on to play with Mumford and Sons, Old Crow Medicine Show. It’s an interesting level for a band. 

I ended up dating someone who, at the time, was in a pretty successful indie band and it was fascinating. Everyone thinks being in a band like that is the sexiest, most incredible thing you can do. “I have to get this person to sign my bra!” But these guys were driving a van from Denver to Boise by themselves, smoking weed, eating Jason’s Deli outside the venue, drinking PBRs. It’s an interesting level. There’s so much talent. They’re the bands I loved to go see at a 400-person venue. You think they’re gods. But they’re also just guys and girls with a career that looks to us like it’s going crazy but for them is still a slog. 

Something that I know you’ve heard from a few people is that you write sex well. And I’m not trying to be too tawdry, but I’m curious about why you think that is. 

Oh god. [laughs] I don’t totally know. I think one of my strengths as a writer is emotional nuance and chemistry between characters. I think that helps. When you walk into a sex scene — just like in real life! — if you have the emotional connective pieces, it’s gonna go pretty well. 

Less is more with sex writing. It can be uncomfortable to write and to read them. I try to be very straightforward. I make them very literal. That’s where I think people go wrong. Making sex metaphorical is a fast way to make it cringe. 

Like “she opened up like a blossom.” 

Yeah. [Laughs] I don’t think there’s metaphor in any of my sex scenes. You have to write them fearlessly. People hesitate and don’t put it on the page at all or they write way too much. Fearlessness and literalness helps a lot. Put it on the page exactly as you want it, and then make it better. I learned a lot from Sally Rooney, who writes sex very well. I probably re-read her sex scenes 40 times. There’s some great sex and really great masturbation in Marlena by Julie Button. I read that over and over again. I learned how to write from people who are better than me. 

If there was one band who was the heart and soul of Lo Fi, who would it be? 

Nashville band or national band? One of each? 

Sure. 

Do you know who I’m gonna say? 

I have a guess. 

It’d be the Apache Relay for Nashville. They broke up in 2012 or 2013. They were my absolute favorite band, and then my best friend ended up marrying the lead guitarist. They were so fucking magical on stage. They made three great albums and had a breakout, opening for Mumford and Sons. They were one of those bands where you were watching them ascend out of Nashville. Those guys were the soundtrack to those years ,Nashville-wise. 

A national band that embodies Lo Fi and is important to me personally is the Format, and that first Fun album that Nate Ruess went on to make with Jack Antonof and that guy from Anathallo. They were the soundtrack to my life from ‘07 to ‘12. It makes me think of the question you asked about pop music and indie. I’m a pop music fan. Anything that has that hook behind it can pull me in. The Format and Fun were always …that is the hookiest shit. It’s indie pop. There’s an emo sensibility, but there’s a lot of joy and cleverness. It’s chaotic. It sounds like life in your 20s. Emotionally chaotic years. There’s a reason I use them as the epigraph. 

There’s this old quote about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture. 

Never heard that in my life. [Laughs]

Meaning it’s hard to use one artform to describe another. 

Sure. 

Did you encounter that in writing this book? 

That’s a good question. We’ve talked about this, because I’ve said that you’re much better at writing about music. Two things come to mind. One, for a long time, I wanted to be a music writer. I saw Almost  Famous and said “I want to be William Miller.” And I did some interviews, reviewed some albums, reviewed some shows. I had a music blog for a long time. But I was never that good at what you’re saying. I was never that good at writing about the music. I didn’t have the vocabulary or the auditory skills to pinpoint how to describe a sound. I didn’t necessarily have the music history knowledge to connect the dots between eras of music, and I think really great music writers need to do that.

But what I am good at is writing about emotions. For me, music is an extremely emotional experience. So there’s some technical music writing — she's songwriting, she knows a little theory, you know. I’ve read a lot of great music journalism, so I know how to cheat a little. But what I’m interested in is the emotional experience — the experience of going to a show and screaming along with your closest friends and 500 strangers. That, to me, is more interesting to capture than the technicalities of a specific synth sound. It’s easier to write about too, at least for me.

A lot of people look back on that as a ridiculous time in their life. “Emo” is used pretty pejoratively now. If you call someone emo, you probably mean they’re not mentally or emotionally very stable or mature. How do you think Lo Fi engages with that? What do you think someone who feels that way about emo would take away from that book? 

How do any of us look at our previous selves and not cringe? I cringe at my old writing. I cringe at my young self all the time. But when I think about music, I’ve never had any shame. I might look back and be like “oh my god, was I really wearing eyeliner like that?” and feel silly. But once you go full throttle into the *NSYNC fandom — and I did — you kind of lose that filter that tells you to dial it down, so I’ve never done that with music. 

My hope is that people who read this will acknowledge how great some of the music was, and how important it was and is, and how much it validated the emotions of the people who listened to it. That matters when you listen to someone. I hope it honors that and appreciates that. I love it so much. I still listen to all this music. I listen to plenty of new music too but those bands are so important to us. They were so important to me! I’m gonna cry. That’s why I wrote this book. Because this music was so important to me. It soundtracked my life and my emotions, and I wanted to pay homage to that.

Lo Fi is out July 9 wherever books are sold. But, once again, pre-order it here.

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Liz isn’t the only person making moves in the Huckabee-Riggs household! My new limited series podcast with my former boss, current colleague and longtime pal Roxy Stone is out now. ApocryFUN takes a look at different Christian books that shaped our lives and the country in the late 90s and early ‘00s. This has been something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, so it’s fun to have it out there. In our debut episode, we re-read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Check it out here! And like, review, share, etc. You know the drill.