Rules to Rock By is a story of a girl torn from her hometown of Brooklyn (as well as her successful band) only to move to the relative wasteland of Providence, Rhode Island and be forced to start a new band. Despite its tag as a Young Adult book, Rules to Rock By caters to older audiences as well. Younger readers will be able to commiserate with Annabelle and her experiences: Having to move against her will, feeling abandoned by her parents, and her experiences with bullying, among others. Older readers will find much to love about Rules to Rock By thanks to its numerous references to semi-obscure bands and other pop culture touchstones.

Josh Farrar, author of Rules to Rock By, recently promoted his book at a Girls Rock Camp Boston benefit show. Brooklyn band The NowhereNauts performed at the show as well, playing a set of original music as well as a set of covers and songs inspired by Rules to Rock By, performed under the name The Bungles (which is the name of Rules to Rock By protagonist Annabelle's fictional band). Inyourspeakers had a chance to sit down with Josh and the three members of The NowhereNauts about Rules to Rock By, the accompanying soundtrack, and the future of The NowhereNauts.

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Inyourspeakers: Rules to Rock By’s soundtrack is a mixture of covers and original songs based on the book. Did you guys [The NowhereNauts] write the original songs or did Josh?
Sofie Kapur: Josh wrote all the ones that are on the album being sold. We actually wrote one for the soundtrack but it wasn’t able to be on the record. We’re playing it today.
Josh Farrar: We can bootleg it and sell it. [laughter] Just to clarify, I co-wrote all the original songs, but Kevin March co-wrote one of the songs and the producer Chris Daddio co-wrote another one of them. So I have something to do with all of them but I can’t take all the credit.

IYS: Was [Rules to Rock By character] Don Daddio based on Chris Daddio?
Josh: Yeah, well, Chris is an old friend of mine and I’m real close with his family as well, and I’m just a fan of the name ‘Daddio.’ He’s just one of those guys who, when he introduces himself to people, they go, “Your name’s not really Daddio. That sounds like a cheesy 50s-era nickname.”

IYS: Did you guys [The NowhereNauts] choose the cover songs? There are some really awesome covers on the soundtrack.
Sofie: (to Josh) You did, right?
Josh: Basically, Chris and I co-produced the album and thought about which covers to do, and those are the compromises. I love those songs.

IYS: (to The NowhereNauts) Your whole set sounded really great. Have you three been playing together for awhile before this?
Sofie: We’ve been playing together for about two and a half years now. Josh, through Kevin, found out about us and asked us to help out with his project.
Josh: They were already a full-formed, pretty killer band by the time I met them. They’re even better now, but they already had their own sound. First, Kevin just said that he ‘had this great singer in mind’ that would be a good personification of the Annabelle character in the book, and I was looking for an Annabelle – not that it’s that type of thing, not like it’s a musical or anything. I wanted a girl who kind of sounded like her. In the book I think of Annabelle as not as good a singer as Sofie is in real life – that’s kind of a plot point, that Annabelle’s not that great of a singer.
So I started with Sofie, and Kevin said I should see the band and once I did –though we were already kind of underway with the record – we found Hunter in time to play on five or six songs and Anders only plays on one song (but if I had gotten it together earlier he would have been on more of them).

IYS: Do The NowhereNauts sound like The Bungles at all?
Hunter Lombard: I see them as two completely separate things.
IYS: How would you compare them?
Hunter: The Bungles have two singers –not today, though - and two guitarists. I guess it’s mostly the fact that The Bungles do cover songs and the original Bungles songs don’t sound like [The NowhereNauts], except for the song we wrote. We wrote it a year ago, but I guess when you’re our age a year is a huge amount of time to mature as a band.
Josh: Also, you know, The Bungles are not a real band. There’s a lot of live playing on the soundtrack, but also a lot of, you know: “Hunter, come in here and do a solo. Anders, can you play bass on this song?” It’s a producer-y record – it’s a hodgepodge. What you hear today will sound kind of like the record, but it’s our live version of that. They [the NowhereNauts] as a band sound like a full, big, organic band and you can tell they’ve been playing a long time together.

IYS: One plot point in the book is that Annabelle’s idol is Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki. Are you guys Deerhoof fans as well?
Hunter: I like Deerhoof. I saw them like four years ago in Nashville when I was twelve. I was with my mom who was like, “What is going on?,” and I just said, “Mom, this is great!” [laughter] It was really fun.
IYS: Yeah, the first time I heard Deerhoof I had that reaction too, but I got more into it after I listened for awhile.
Josh: I definitely am a big Deerhoof fan – I wouldn’t have put them in the book if I didn’t like them.


IYS: Was it just because she’s in Deerhoof, or were there other reasons for choosing her? Did she stand out to you as someone who could be a good role model in a different way?
Josh: Yeah, because first of all, she’s so rock and roll, but also not rock and roll at all. When I was thinking about who a twelve year old fictional bass player would idolize – and Annabelle in the book is like 5’ 1” – Satomi is very small in stature but also a total individual. Deerhoof is, love them or hate them, just the most individualistic band. There are no comparisons. So they struck me as people that a girl like Annabelle might admire. It was fun to make a fake version of them in the book.

IYS: One thing I really liked about the book is that even though it’s intended for young adults, there are references and themes that older audiences will enjoy too. There’s one part where Annabelle refers to herself as looking like Little Miss Sunshine and I’m not sure if many younger readers would pick up on that reference, but I laughed a lot when I read that.
Josh: I think entertainment today can please both audiences. You pick your primary audience and one or two secondary audiences and for me, I’m an adult, I’m a guy: it’s impossible for me to not write something where I’m at least trying to please myself or someone like me. It was a conscious attempt to try to introduce these tween and younger readers to the more adult world. I think that sort of thing is inevitable where I’m making references that some kids might get and some kids might not. Like, I might be the kind of guy who'd pick up this book at a bookstore, even though it's a YA book, and say, “Oh that looks like a fun read,” and I would enjoy the music references in it. So yeah, in a way the book is for older readers as well.

IYS: Unlike Annabelle in the book, when I was 12 years old, I wasn’t listening to much music I listen to now–I was still figuring stuff out. Did you guys have some sort of connections to learn about music when you were younger?
Hunter: I actually can relate a lot to Annabelle. [laughter] I've been trying to start a band since I was 12 and luckily this came along and it's really worked out. When I was that age, I was pulled out of New York and was forced to move to Connecticut, so I sort of instantly felt that connection with the character. Then I started to go to music camp and that's when things started to move along.
Josh: Part of the thing that's been fun is that I feel like Hunter is like a four years older version of Annabelle. There have been a lot of weird things about this project – especially the multimedia aspect – where I feel like I'm experiencing a modified altered version of the fictional world in the book. These guys are older and more sophisticated, but when they were 12 or 13, my guess is that they might have resembled what I was trying to go for with that character.

IYS: Throughout the book, Annabelle would make statements like “Rock stars don't do this,” “Rock stars don't blush,” or “Sometimes rock stars need to talk to their grandma.” What message were you trying to send to your audience about being a rock star?
Josh: To me, the whole notion of wanting to be a rock star is really ridiculous, but I'm 39 years old. When you're 12 years old, saying that sort of thing out loud is sort of allowed. The point of all those aphorisms is that she thinks that in order to be this cool rock star, this cool musician, this figment of her imagination, this person she wants to be, that she has to make herself invulnerable: “Rock stars don't blush.” She thinks she has to put this mask on. And of course, that's really antithetical to the creative process, in which whether you're writing confessional singer-songwriter type stuff or talking about armageddon, you do need to look within and make yourself vulnerable. That's why, by the end of the book, she's saying more that there are no rules, except to be true to yourself and try to speak honestly.
IYS: That makes sense. Back to how the book is very layered for a YA novel, when we first meet Annabelle's parents, they're too busy recording their new album to come over and say hi to her, even though it's her first day of school in a new city. What did you have in mind by including those kind of adult dynamics?
Josh: So I think that with this age reader (9 to 13), you can get pretty sophisticated. My biggest inspiration for this book was Harriet the Spy, and to me this is just like Harriet the Spy with guitars. In Harriet the Spy, Harriet's parents are never around and the maid is raising her. In this case, the drummer is sort of raising Annabelle, or her grandmother when she was in Brooklyn. She has these surrogate parents because her actual parents are complete assholes wrapped up in their artwork.
IYS: I enjoyed reading about the parents’ band Benny and Joon, however. From the description Annabelle's mom gives when she talks about how she met Annabelle's dad, it sounded like it was kind of a Damon and Naomi or Galaxie 500 type of band.
Josh: I was kind of thinking Dean and Britta more, but yeah, it could be any – your Thurston and Kim, just pick your rock couple. It's not based on anybody because I don't know those people, but I would imagine it would be really hard to raise a kid and do international touring of rock toilets in Europe. It's a hard lifestyle. So I was imagining that, but for the mom I was totally thinking of Britta Phillips, this really glamorous, beautiful rock and roll musician who was trying to figure out how to be a mom and also do what she wants to do in life.

IYS: The book compares Brooklyn to Providence and I grew up 20 minutes or so from Providence so I spent a lot of time there and definitely got a kick out of you writing about it.
Josh: Well I hope I didn't mess anything up.
IYS: Not at all. [laughter]
Josh: I was sort of winging most of that. I spent a lot of time in Providence in 1995, though I didn't actually live there. And just recently, my wife graduated from RISD's masters program, so I was up there again, but the book was done that was time. So I've spent some time in Providence but I wouldn't say I know it like the back of my hand.
IYS: The music scene there is pretty interesting. There's definitely a lot of harder music there, a lot of noise bands and whatnot.
Josh: I think RISD figures into that a lot – Les Savy Fav came out of RISD, and I don't know where Lightning Bolt came out of...
IYS: I think they came out of RISD too, yeah.
Josh: Right, it's great. RISD allows you to be a total freak, hence Lightning Bolt. Have you guys ever seen that band?
Hunter: Yeah. [laughter]
Josh: I love them, but I can't imagine listening to it at home. That's like an art-freak experience more than anything. They'll be a riot and you'll want to be in the riot.

IYS: So is there anything else you guys want to say about the project at all? It's been real?
Sofie: It's been real cool. [laughter]
Anders: It's been pretty real.
Josh: Why don't you talk about what your plans are coming up for The NowhereNauts?
Sofie: Do we have plans? Oh, we're recording again in August.
Anders: We've been doing a lot of songwriting lately.
Hunter: We've written an album's worth of material or so.

IYS: Do you guys mostly just play in New York City now, then? I'm guessing you're all still going to school...
Sofie: For now, yeah.
Anders: This is our first gig outside New York City as The NowhereNauts.
Hunter: It's our third gig as The NowhereNauts, though – we used to play under a different band name. We're gonna try and release a record soon, since our last one sort of got pushed aside. We've been playing together for awhile and sort of staring over again with a new name and less people in the band and we're hoping to release our record, go on tour, that whole thing.
Sofie: Even though we have to get out of high school – Anders is in college, though. Just two more years...

IYS: Yeah, you can just play a lot in New York City and hone your craft so when you tour everywhere else you'll be awesome.
Sofie: Sounds good to me.