Reviewed by Kritika Narula
Deep Cuts
by Holly Brickley
Penguin Random House
February 2025, Paperback, 400 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8217070435
Joey (Joe) Morrow and Eileen Percy Marks (Percy) meet during college and bond over their shared love for music. Joe is an aspiring musician with his eyes set on the prize, aka a band and a tour, the pinnacle of musical glory in the early 2000s. What Percy thinks she lacks in musical skills, she more than makes up for in her sonic judgement. The result? When Joe wrote a lacklustre song, Percy helped him punch it up and elevated it to an earworm. Her suggestions, as shown, make songs better in a single tectonic shift.
Those scenes — Percy and Joe becoming friends over their musical tastes, riffing and jamming — are a delight to read. Brickley captures the high that comes with generating creative output so well. Fans of singers and songwriters yearn for behind-the-scenes glimpses of their craft. What’s your process like, they wonder. Did you write the lyrics and then the melody, or did you struggle with either? Brickley gives us generous dollops of the process. It’s almost surreal. We feel the adrenaline rush Percy feels as the song falls into place, as their clamour about hooks, bridges, verses becomes coherent. “Songs were always between us like a balloon we’ve been asked to keep afloat,” she says of her collaboration with Joe.
Soon enough, we also feel the hollowness that accompanies this creative fulfilment. Disconcertingly, Percy’s game-changing role as his musical sidekick existed in the shadows, where she received creative satisfaction sans accountability. A young Percy thought, naively, that she was okay with it. The creative satisfaction is enough, so she deludes herself out of a co-writing credit. The dark shadows are where envy and misunderstandings breed.
Percy is a multi-faceted person: we see her dabble in music journalism, we see her walk the music critic tightrope with her witticisms, we see her as a collaborator with incisive insights that “punch up” the songs, among a bunch of other professional roles that don’t even exist anymore. But most importantly, she was wildly ambitious about putting her musical sensibilities to good use, even if she couldn’t be the one performing. Music was her one true love, her escape, her safe space, her comfort… so was there space for another?
Deep Cuts is as much about Percy’s talent as it is about her emotional choices. It’s also a breezy introspection on a favourite question of the noughties: can you sustain a creative collaboration once romantic attraction enters the equation? Can Percy be Joe’s musical soulmate and simultaneously have a fulfilling life outside him? Is Joe prioritising their working relationship over a potential romance, ominous of what awaits her?
The brief flashes we receive into Joe’s life (and his POV) are so endearing we cannot help but root for him, “I want my music to be good. I don’t have any other options. I suck at everything else.” He does the grunt work of building the band. He takes on the risk. He deals with a sour, former band member. We know he’s worked hard to reach that stage, but he could not have done this without Percy. Both of these things can be true at once. Joe could have so easily become the tortured musician archetype, but Brickley gave a multi-dimensional character, and it made me love these characters individually as much as I relished their dynamic with each other.
There’s also Zoe, Joe’s former girlfriend (a confusing relationship, since she’s a lesbian), who grows closer to Percy and fades in and out of the duo’s lives over the years. Percy values her friendship, and Zoe becomes the connecting link between her and Joe in the more uncommunicative years of their lives.
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Deep Cuts are the more obscure titles in a musician’s biography. They constitute the sweet spot of a musician’s oeuvre where only superfans and music aficionados take shelter. Holly Brickley’s protagonist, Percy, accords this term her own definition, “I personally like to pretend the phrase “deep cut” has a totally different meaning, one that has nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. How deep does it cut? How close to the bone? How long do you feel it?”
It’s an easter egg for how the reader should devour this book, too. For all this talk about depth, the story operates on tangible surfaces. How much you want to feel is up to you, which is a good thing, for the book isn’t bogged down by the pretension of being something it’s not. It’s a breezy read, but not a single scene exists without purpose, and not a single editorial call is made without a callback. How strongly do you want to feel the highs and the lows (despite what the overall context of the book suggests, there are some unpalatable experiences woven in, once again, in the manner of the era: character-defining, but unacknowledged beyond the event)?
The novel’s emotional depth matches its cultural resonance. The book is a cultural time capsule: Percy’s career choices scream the early 2000s, each chapter title is a nostalgic nod, and the deep dives into music cement the era’s atmosphere. There’s lots of nostalgia for the music of the noughties: Beach Boys, Green Day, Bowie, Neutral Milk Hotel…you get the drift.
There’s a certain simplicity to the book’s core: you cannot extricate the art you create from the love you feel, your creative output into the world is defined by what the world gives you. The joy of reading this story is also the pain: in an era devoid of smartphones and damning attention spans, we perhaps got second chances and valued them, a fading feeling in the age of swiping and scrolling.
Some excellent one-liners and zingers made it a lovely, memorable, quick read. Think, “Memories are vague on context” or “Joe saw me clearly the way some people can look at an abstract painting and instantly discern a figure.” Or, my favourite, “How do you tell people you’ve only known a few months that they are your best friends without sounding pathetic?” Some vulnerabilities travel through the time-space continuum.
Deep Cuts is the kind of story meant to be adapted to the screen, and I can already envisage a comfort watch coming our way. The book has all the soft parts of some recent favourite books: the musical landscape similar to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, the coming-of-age sentiment of Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, the second chance trope like Elissa Sussman’s Funny You Should Ask, the complicated dynamic of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and Zoe’s existence in the trio reminiscent of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Deep Cuts is more than just a love letter to the early 2000s music scene. It’s about the songs and the production as much as it is about the subcultures spawned by that music, the obsessions and coming-of-age experiences of those who found solace in music while living through world-changing events, from 9/11 to the recession. The only constant? Music as a means of self-expression, an escape that envelopes you even as you stand at the edge of the world.
About the reviewer: Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, and content marketer from Delhi, India. She holds a master’s in Media Management from the University of Glasgow and runs a little content agency, KN Content. Her writing has appeared in The Hooghly Review, Usawa Literary Review, Lobster Salad and Champagne Magazine, The AuVert Magazine, Sanity by Tanmoy, among others. You can find her kritika.narula on Instagram and Threads, on BlueSky, on Twitter, and on her website!