Musical Awakening was written in layers.
The story on the surface — June Snow, Richmond Adams, years of near-misses and music and longing — is the one you read. But underneath it, woven through every chapter and tweet and blog post, there's a whole other layer of detail that rewards the readers who are paying close attention.
Consider this your decoder ring. 🎶
Spoiler warning: this post discusses details from throughout the novel.
1. The Chapter Titles Are Real Indie Song Titles
Every single chapter in Musical Awakening is named after a real indie song from the 2013-2015 era. These aren't made-up song names — they're actual tracks from the indie music world that shaped June's life and mine.
Chapter 1 is called To Whom It May Concern. Chapter 6 is Skip The Charades. Chapter 15 is Cocoon — a Catfish and the Bottlemen song that captures everything about that chapter's emotional tone without saying a word.
If you read the chapter titles as a playlist, they tell their own story. #ListenForYourself here. 🎶
2. #ListenForYourself Is a Real Song
The hashtag that runs through every chapter of Musical Awakening — June's signature sign-off on every blog post, every tweet, every moment that matters — didn't come from nowhere.
#ListenForYourself is a real song by The Filthy Souls, performed by Dave Green. The song became the heartbeat of the novel before I even knew I was writing one. I am forever grateful for the music and friendship he gave me during our time together. Go #ListenForYourself 🎶
3. The Preface Is the Whole Book in Miniature
The preface of Musical Awakening contains the novel's most quoted line — "I told myself it was only music. Until it wasn't." — but it also contains the entire emotional arc of the story compressed into a few paragraphs.
"It started in fragments. Blog posts I wrote too late at night, concert photography I poured my life into, tweets singing my favorite songs. Then he walked onto my stage. That's where the record skips."
Everything that happens in the next 200 pages is already in those lines. The preface is a song. The novel is the album.
4. February 21, 2013 Is Not a Random Date
The first tweet in Chapter 1 is timestamped February 21, 2013. That date was chosen deliberately — it's the anchor date for the entire novel's timeline and holds personal significance to the story's origins. It was the very first time I saw A Silent Film live. Everything that follows in June's world radiates outward from that specific morning in a Los Angeles hotel room.
Other dates throughout the novel are also to honor special people and times in my life. IYKYK.
5. New Mexico & Oxford
June Snow is born British — but soon moves from Oxford to Albuquerque, New Mexico — but her Mum is British and from Oxford, the same city Richmond is from. This is why June has a complicated, layered relationship with England from the very beginning. It was never entirely foreign to her. Oxford always felt like a kind of home she hadn't fully claimed yet.
This also means June's obsession with British music isn't just cultural appropriation of cool — it's personal. It runs in her blood.
New Mexico holds a special place in my heart the moment I learned I had Native American family roots there. From the first visit and many more, I always say how magical it feels to be in New Mexico and so June had to know that as well.
6. The A Silent Film Easter Eggs
A Silent Film — the real British indie band that inspired the world of Musical Awakening — is hidden throughout the novel in ways that Lamplighters will catch.
The most obvious is June's name: June Snow. And if you know your A Silent Film, you'll recognize that Julie June and Where Snowbirds Have Flown are real A Silent Film song titles. June's entire identity is quietly named after two songs from the band that inspired me.
There are other Lamplighter-level easter eggs scattered throughout — specific venue references, lyrical echoes in June's thoughts, and moments that will make anyone who followed A Silent Film across cities feel like they're reading about their own memories.
7. Richmond's Handwritten Letter
In Chapter 4, June receives a piece of mail that changes everything — a handwritten thank you note from Richmond Adams, written on actual paper, sent through actual post. In 2013. From a musician who could have emailed.
A reader who is paying close attention will notice that this detail — the physical, deliberate, old-fashioned choice of a handwritten letter — tells you everything about Richmond's character before June has had a real conversation with him. He is someone who does things properly. Who takes time. Who means what he says.
It's the first clue that he is exactly who he turns out to be.
8. June's Twitter Is Its Own Slow Burn
The tweets that open each chapter aren't just mood-setting devices — they're a parallel narrative. If you read only June's tweets in order, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 16, you can track the entire emotional arc of her feelings for Richmond without reading a single line of prose.
Watch how the tweets change. Early chapters: music obsession, professional excitement, careful distance. Middle chapters: something shifting, something she won't name directly. Later chapters: the thing she's been trying not to say, finally starting to show at the edges.
June's Twitter feed is a slow burn inside a slow burn.
9. Diet Coke
In Chapter 1, June and her Mum order diet cokes at the venue — and June notes that she is "just under age" to drink. This is a small, easily missed detail that establishes June's exact age at the start of the story without ever stating it directly. She is twenty years old. Just barely not old enough to order a drink at a Los Angeles bar. Since it is my husband, besties and I favorite drink, I had to add in this detail.
Everything that follows — the years, the growth, the woman she becomes by Chapter 16 — starts with a diet coke and a camera in a sticky, dim venue on the Sunset Strip.
10. The Record Metaphor Runs Through Everything
The preface says: "I didn't mean to turn my life into a record. It just happened."
That metaphor never leaves. Musical Awakening is structured like an album — sixteen chapters, like sixteen tracks, each named after a song, building toward a final note that resolves everything that came before. The social media interludes between chapters are the spaces between tracks, the moments of silence that give each song room to breathe.
June's story doesn't just feature music. It is music. It was always meant to be listened to more than once.
#ListenForYourself 🎶
Have you read Musical Awakening? Drop a comment below with the detail that surprised you most — or the one you went back to check after finishing. I'd love to know what you caught that I didn't mention here. 💖
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