Jeri Smith-Ready

Logan Keeley's St. Patrick's Day playlist

Like every other holiday, it's not the parades or the decorations or even the food that I love most (okay, food is a close second). It's the music.

St. Patrick's Day is no exception. As you can probably tell from my photo, I have a bit of Irish in me. (Side story: Once when I was in college I went to the emergency room because the infirmary nurse thought I might have appendicitis. When the doctor walked in, he said, "Aw, you've got the map of Ireland on your face." Insert joke about the real source of my pain here.)

Logan Keeley, Aura's boyfriend in Shade, is the frontman for an Irish-flavored punk/rock band called the Keeley Brothers, which he shares with his older brother Mickey and sister Siobhan and a couple of friends. Logan's life is music, whether it's creating it or listening to it, and like many Irish-Americans, he's fairly obsessed with his musical heritage.

A brief taste of Shade to elaborate, Aura's description of Logan's bedroom:

Logan’s room was spotless—at least as far as I could see in the warm, dim light from his desk lamp. The Irish flag hung on one wall, a smaller version of the one in the basement. (The Keeleys’ ancestors left Dublin in the 1840s, but they acted like they just hopped off the boat last week. Their wet bar had a slow-pour keg tap specially designed for Guinness, and Notre Dame football was a second religion.)

Another wall was all shelves—CDs and music books. There was no obvious order, but Logan could always find what he needed in two seconds. In the far corner, his battered skateboard sat abandoned. I thought I could see a layer of dust on it, but that might’ve just been the angle of the light.

On the wall above his bed hung posters of his two heroes—the entire lineup of the Baltimore Ravens, and The Pogues’ frontman Shane McGowan. His parents didn’t approve of the second—anybody who could get kicked out of an Irish punk band for drinking too much was a bad role model, they said.

(In case you're wondering, this is probably the single longest descriptive passage in the whole book. I'm usually allergic to such things, but a guy's room says so much about him.)

So I thought for St. Patrick's Day I'd share some of Logan's favorite songs. None of these will appear on the Shade playlist, which I'm working on now and can't wait to show you. It'll be a little different from my WVMP playlists, because it'll include some songs not mentioned in the text but that work really well with the scenes or characters.

Enjoy, and sláinte!

Labels: holidays, music, YA series

• posted by Jeri @ 9:53 AM
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