Kelly has a huge “working” playlist (and also: huge headphones) and she wrote about part of it for David Gutowski’s Largehearted Boy Book Notes series:

I wrote the nine stories in Get in Trouble over not quite a decade. I wrote them, usually, with headphones on; usually listening to to the same songs over and over again. When no one else is around I sing out loud — embarrassingly, terribly, out of tune — mangling lyrics and harmonies. Does anyone else do this? Type out your own sentences while singing someone else’s lyrics? Anyway. I need to be distracted from the work that I’m doing while I’m doing it.

The songs below are culled from the very much larger playlist that I listen to when I work. There are significantly more than nine songs on it, but I couldn’t whittle it down any further. They’re the songs that I wore out the hardest while writing these stories. I’ve ordered them according to how long they’ve been stuck on that playlist, and for each story I’ve attached the song (or songs) that seemed to have particular resonances with it, and for me. [read on]