Statistically, people interact the most with music during their adolescence. For many, the music of their youth becomes the soundtrack of their lives, according to Australian Catholic University professor Timothy McKenry in a 2023 essay on the Conversation. Not only do “adolescents use music as an identity marker,” he writes, but “the heightened emotions of puberty create strong and lasting bonds of memory.”
In other words, there’s a scientific reason why the music we listen to in high school is so entrenched in our hearts and minds. Everything feels a little more dramatic at that age; the songs attach to our memories, good and bad, and stay with us as we grow older.
That relationship between music and memory is the crux of Aaron Starmer‘s latest young adult novel, Night Swimming, which the Waterbury author will discuss on Friday, May 16, at Artistree Community Arts Center in Pomfret as part of the annual Bookstock literary festival.
California native Starmer is well versed in writing teenage characters, having crafted such previous young adult and middle-grade titles as The Riverman Trilogy and 2016’s Spontaneous. With his most recent offering, he turns the clock back to his own adolescence of the early ’90s and the music that made him.
Night Swimming tells the tale of a group of friends freshly graduated from high school and navigating their final summer together before going their separate ways into adulthood. Protagonist Trevor and his crush, Sarah, make a pact to try and swim in every pool in their town before summer ends, a mission in which their friends soon join them as a sort of last hurrah.
Things take a turn for the supernatural when the teens find a pool hidden in the woods where time seems to move more slowly than normal. They soon discover that leaving the pool is no simple proposition. Something strange is happening to them, and all of it is set to a killer score.
Named after a 1992 R.E.M. song, Night Swimming is structured like a mixtape, with a side A and side B. Each chapter title references a song that both informs the narrative and was influential in Starmer’s youth, ranging from ’90s alt-rock hits such as “Cannonball” by the Breeders and “Cure for Pain” by Morphine to the classic rock of Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young, which Gen X was discovering in the same era.
“The song choices were very deliberate,” Starmer told Seven Days. “I viewed it as a film composer, where you’re giving certain characters themes. I knew that if people revisit the songs, they’ll get a lot more out of what the characters are thinking and feeling.”
The songs and the events that unfold in each chapter have overlaps that vary from direct correlation to matching a vibe — not unlike the cohesion of a well-made mixtape. For instance, the chapter in which Trevor and his friends first encounter the mysterious natural pool is titled “Lithium,” after the Nirvana song of the same name. With lyrics such as “I’m so excited, I can’t wait to meet you there / and I don’t care / I’m so horny, that’s okay / My will is good,” the tune is an apt choice for a scene featuring teenagers splitting their time between getting drunk and stoned and contemplating their hazy futures.
“I remember being a teen and having a real problem picturing what my future would be,” Starmer said. “Unless you’re just brimming with confidence, you usually don’t know what you’re going to do next, not really.”
The summer after high school graduation felt to the author like the perfect setting to allow him to encapsulate the emotional state of being young and in flux while paying tribute to the music that defined it for him.
“So many things are crystallized in that particular moment,” he pointed out. “I wanted to capture that in the story for young people to read but also for people my age to reflect on it.”
Starmer, who has two preteen daughters, isn’t worried about the songs of his teen years putting off young readers. Just as he listened to the music of the ’60s and ’70s growing up, so he now hears Gen X tunes on social media.
“I hear Nirvana and Mazzy Star all over TikTok these days,” he said. “Teenagers might not know where it’s from, but they love it all the same. When we were young and listened to classic rock, it was a way to connect to our parents.” Now, he noted, “I watch music and listen to music from the ’90s with my kids all the time. The songs are just so evocative and timeless.”
But Starmer acknowledged that one aspect of ’90s music culture hasn’t endured: the art of the mixtape. The characters in Night Swimming routinely make tapes for each other, as any self-respecting ’90s kid recalls doing. While people still create playlists for each other on streaming sites such as Spotify, Starmer maintains that the modern version is a far cry from meticulously dubbing songs together, making a physical document of a sonic love letter and delivering it.
“Mixtapes were next level,” he asserted. “We would design the cover, maybe make some art on the cassette itself, trade them back and forth … the mixtape was an essential part of teenage romance. That’s how you impressed a girl or she impressed you — you traded songs that you felt represented who you were and what you wanted to tell someone else.”
As on any good record, the sequencing of Starmer’s playlist tells its own tale. The songs in the first half of the book, side A, are culled from the author’s high school memories, while side B draws from the more obscure and underground music he discovered in his twenties. Songs such as “I Am a Scientist” by Guided by Voices and Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” lead the chapters as Trevor and his friends, caught in the strange pull of the timeless pool, move further from their childhood selves.
The sense of youth captured in amber fascinated Starmer, inspiring him to work it into the metaphor of the pool and its hold over the teens.
“I wanted to create that sensation of a long summer night when you’re a teenager,” he said. “You’re on some substances, and the night just seems to last forever, and the future is this unnamed thing in front of you. What’s an interesting way to literalize that?”
While reimmersing himself in the music of his angsty teen years in preparation for writing Night Swimming, Starmer made an ironic discovery: The scientific research notwithstanding, he wasn’t so enamored with the music of his youth anymore. The grunge gods that Starmer adored in high school, such as Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam, don’t get much play in his house these days.
“I still love the music, but you hope that your tastes change with you as you experience more in life,” he said. “When you’re young, you experience these intense, emotional feelings in a way that you might not be able to recapture as you grow older.”
Writing the novel, he added, “I sort of loved reckoning with those sorts of feelings and those kinds of songs again.”
Starmer discusses the novel with two other authors at Bookstock on Friday, May 16, 7-8:30 p.m., at Artistree Community Arts Center in Pomfret. Sold out. bookstockvt.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “Message in a Mixtape | Aaron Starmer takes a supernatural trip back in time in his new novel, Night Swimming“
This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.
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