"Your Early 20s Are the Demo Tape": An Interview with Liz Riggs About "Lo‑Fi"

By Rowan Beaird on July 15, 2024

In the spring of 2020, music venues around the world went dark, and Nashville—a city where live music greets you in the airport—felt particularly quiet to Liz Riggs. She'd just submitted her MFA thesis and was thinking back to when she first moved to the city a decade before, and a girl she'd once seen stamping hands at a local venue. To a time that felt even more distant in the eerie silence of the pandemic; a sardine-tight audience, a thumping bass. She opened her notebook and wrote the first line of what would become her potent, simmering debut novel Lo-Fi.

Lo-Fi follows Al, a floundering songwriter in her early 20s. She spends her evenings working the door of a fictional Nashville mainstay known only as The Venue, listening to music, and trying not to think about her ex, who's on the cusp of fame as she struggles to find a melody. Al is a perfect protagonist, earnest and complicated. She makes mistakes and learns from half of them, making Lo-Fi a deeply relatable novel about life in your early 20s. It's also a love story in several forms: there's the romantic love between Al and her coworker Julien, the love inherent in friendship, and the love we all feel for the music that's shaped us.

Riggs is particularly well suited to write about this sort of love. She grew up wanting to be a music journalist and her work has been featured in American Songwriter Magazine and MTV. Playlists are interspersed throughout the novel, the prose has a pulsing rhythm, and like a favorite song, Lo-Fi stays with you long after its close.

The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Rowan Beaird

Given the book's subject matter and the precision of the descriptions of music and songwriting, I'm curious if you've ever played music or aspired to be a musician?

Liz Riggs

I would consider myself a hobbyist musician—I've played guitar since I was 15. In my very early 20s, as kind of a joke, my roommate and I and our friend Sam would write songs, and we told everyone that we were in a band for many years. And we still say that we're on hiatus. I do not consider myself a musician like Al is, but I've always just been a huge fan of music. I think that's one of the things that I gave to Al in the book. I'm a fan girl. When I love something, I really love it.

Rowan Beaird

This book, set in the 2000s, feels very nostalgic for me. One of the many lines in the book I highlighted was, "Our brains are wired to connect more deeply with the music of our youth," which felt very appropriate for the novel as a whole. Could you talk about your relationship to nostalgia while writing?

Liz Riggs

It's so funny, because I didn't realize that I was doing that when I was writing it. It wasn't until people started reading it, when everyone started telling me that it's so nostalgic. I've realized this about myself, that I write very close to experience. I have found that my observed real life has always been more interesting than anything that I could completely make up. So I think that when I was writing it, it was COVID in Nashville, and I was writing about a city that I missed and the sound that I missed. And that time, I mean, who doesn't miss the freedom of being in your early 20s? I have really fond memories of the scene that I had come up in, and I just found myself trying to remember it, so the book ended up being really nostalgic.

And then that quote is so interesting, because that's real. I was rereading this book while I was working on Lo-Fi called This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, and your brain is wired to connect more intensely to music that you listen to when you're young. There's an actual chemical in your brain that does that.

Rowan Beaird

What was difficult about writing about your early 20s?

Liz Riggs

We often see that time through rose-colored glasses. I remember being 22 and it was nothing but fun! You didn't know your skin was perfect cause you weren't paying attention to it, you didn't have to! But really, I was a high school teacher when I moved here, and it was the hardest thing I've ever done. I was and still am a deeply anxious person, and I had not figured that out. My early 20s were so tumultuous. You're having the time of your life and then you are sobbing on the bathroom floor. It's day to day. The intensity of those emotions was hard to revisit, that anxiety and depression, but I just wanted to be as honest about it as possible.

Rowan Beaird

That comes across, and something that I love is that Al loses herself in music, but also in sex and booze and drugs, and although she can be critical of herself for some of these decisions, you as the writer never felt critical of her.

Liz Riggs

Someone asked me about this recently. I said that I like to write about things that I love, and they asked, what about the things that you hate? And I was like, well, then it would just be angry and mean, and that's just not a desire that I have to write toward. I'm writing love letters to memories. I'm thinking about a relationship and fictionalizing it and thinking about how much it meant to me. The same for a song or a band or a moment. I think the same goes for Al because there is a lot of me in Al, and I got to hug my younger self a little bit when writing this book. I got to tell her, you're gonna be alright. It's important to me to love the character I'm writing. Don't get me started on Julien.

Rowan Beaird

Okay, I want to jump into that because Al and Julien's love story is so incredibly well done. How much editing did it take to shape the arc of their relationship?

Liz Riggs

That relationship is truly the book. It's the part of the book I think I'm the most proud of. And when people ask me what it's about, I'm like, yeah, it's a music book, but to me, at its core, it's a love story.

I love writing relationships. Chemistry between people is the thing that I'm absolutely the most interested in. Romantically, yes, but platonically as well. Why do people click? Why do you meet some people and think, oh my god, I've known you my whole life? What's super interesting is that the Julien arc, yes, there was obviously a lot of editing and rewriting, but it was actually one of the things that was there from the very first draft. Their love story didn't change that much. It was always the core and center of the book.

Rowan Beaird

That makes sense, it's such a driving force. But friendship between women is also really central to the story—I feel like Jessika and Al are their own parallel love story. Why was it also important for you to depict these relationships between women?

Liz Riggs

When I applied to grad school, that's what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about a story of two friends. I had just read, this is still an all-time favorite book of mine, Marlena by Julie Buntin. It's a really great female friendship book and I was really inspired by that. Those relationships when you're in your early 20s, especially if you live with people, your best girlfriend is your partner. Your ride-or-die, your plus-one. I still miss being one of my best friend's plus-ones. I also think it's really interesting—the feeling of women meeting other women and like not liking them at first, which is what happens with Jessika. Two strong personalities in the same room. I wanted to capture that, how as you mature, you can start to have those relationships. It's a real evolution, when you think someone is your nemesis, when it's actually someone waiting to become a friend if you could just grow the fuck up.

Rowan Beaird

Nashville feels like so much more than a setting for the novel. I'd love to know a little bit more about your relationship with the city and what you wanted to capture about it.

Liz Riggs

It's a little more complicated after 15 years, but I fell in love with Nashville at first sight. I was actually born outside of Nashville, but raised almost completely in Cincinnati. I had been once in high school and I walked down Broadway and I was like, oh my God, this exists?

When I moved, I went to a show probably the first week I got here, and I just could not believe that I was in a place where you could, on a Sunday night for $10, go hear musicians whose record you'd listened to the week before. So I went to as many shows as I could, and the city was so tight-knit, it was so easy to meet people and make friends. There was just so much creativity, and a lot of magic here that you can witness on a daily basis. I could be at a house show where Mumford and Sons was playing in someone's basement. That doesn't really happen in other places. Now it's a little more complicated with the city's growth, but it's still really magical.

Rowan Beaird

Well, speaking of musicians, what musicians influenced this book?

Liz Riggs

I listen to music with lyrics while I write, which I know is kind of unusual. And so I've been reflecting a lot on what I was listening to when I was working on the book. In terms of the bands that are Lo-Fi–coded, The Format is a huge band for me. They're literally the epigraph. The first Fun album, Aim and Ignite. I was listening to a lot of Nashville artists like Apache Relay. I was listening to Bright Eyes, Margot and the Nuclear So-and-So's, Death Cab, Local Natives. It was the pandemic, so a lot of folklore. I should stop myself, because I can talk about this forever. I mean, that's why I wrote a book about music.

Rowan Beaird

I love the line near the end that says, "I wanted to hear it the way it was written, in all its lo-fi glory, before anyone was ever meant to hear it at all." So, why call the book Lo-Fi?

Liz Riggs

I usually have a very strong sense of title, but as you know, a title has to be more than just great sounding, it has to work thematically. Obviously, as a music writer and person who's writing a music novel, High Fidelity was very influential for me, so this title felt like a nod to one of my favorite books, but I knew I had to finish the book to see if it held, and it ended up working really well as a metaphor. Your early 20s are the demo tape. You do not know who you are or what you're creating, you're throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. It's a lot like trying to write a song, figuring out who you are when you peel back the layers to just the demo, just the guitar, just the lo-fi production, unvarnished. So it worked out, even though I had to write the book to fully know.