An (Extra)Ordinary World
Music Monday 12: Because no matter the state of the world, there is always room for Duran Duran
There’s something about Simon Le Bon’s voice that has always reached into the deepest part of me. I remember being 13, perched beside my parent’s boombox with a blank cassette in the deck, finger hovering over the record button, waiting for the opening notes of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” to play on the radio. The moment I heard those distinctive opening drums, I’d press down, sometimes catching the DJ’s voice trailing off, sometimes missing the first few seconds—an imperfect capture of a perfect song. No matter how many times I tried, I never got it quite right—but that never stopped me from enjoying each attempt.
I’d play that recording on my yellow Walkman until I knew every intake of breath, every subtle variation in Le Bon’s voice, every lyrical nuance that, at the time, I didn’t understand beyond the fact that it moved me deeply.
When I began working on When The Trees All Burned, that song kept finding its way back to me. It appears in the official soundtrack listing at the back of the novel for a reason—it became an emotional anchor for the story I was telling.
The song opens with someone coming in from the rain, turning on lights, a TV, a radio, trying to drown out absence with noise. This mirrors Aiya’s experience in the novel, surrounded by the expensive trappings of her Toronto loft but unable to escape the emotional void of her marriage. Like the singer, she is living with ghosts—the ghost of who she was, the ghost of what she thought her life would be.
“What has happened to it all?” Le Bon asks. “Where is the life that I recognize?”
These questions pulse through my novel. My characters exist in a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse, but many of them are already experiencing personal apocalypses long before the actual end of the world. Their ordinary worlds have already been stripped away—by abuse, by illness, by loneliness.
There’s a line in “Ordinary World” about papers in the roadside telling of suffering and greed, fear today, forgotten tomorrow. The song captures how we experience global tragedy as background noise, as something happening elsewhere to other people. It’s what allows my characters (and us, the readers) to dismiss Rajiv Montgomery Noah’s warnings. It’s easier to mock someone predicting the end than to face our own fragility.
But what struck me most powerfully as I wrote was the song’s insistence on survival, on finding a new normalcy after loss. The chorus doesn’t promise a return to what was—it speaks of finding an ordinary world, of learning to survive. This became the emotional heart of my story. In the face of extraordinary circumstances, what does it mean to survive? What new ordinary might emerge from catastrophe?
For some characters, like Aiya, the end of the world represents a twisted kind of salvation—an escape from the suffocation of her abusive marriage. For others, like Jude with her passion for documenting truth, or Maxine who desperately tries to hold onto her ordinary world as it’s literally torn away from her, the apocalypse forces a confrontation with what truly matters. Each character must decide what they’ll carry forward and what they must release.
While I never write with music playing, I often turned to “Ordinary World” outside of my writing sessions as a way to ground myself in the emotional landscape of my story. The song became a touchstone, helping me access the feeling I wanted to evoke in my words. It acknowledges profound loss but refuses to surrender to it. It whispers that survival is possible, that we can build something new from the ashes of what’s gone.
In my novel’s epilogue, when the world has been reduced to ash and silence, I wanted readers to feel that tension—between devastating loss and the persistent possibility of new life, new beginnings. I wanted them to understand that even after the most complete destruction, there can be an after. We can learn to survive.
When I was 13, I didn’t understand why this song affected me so deeply. Now, having woven it into the DNA of my novel, I think I do. It’s a song about the human capacity to endure, to find meaning after catastrophic loss. It’s about how we rebuild our ordinary worlds, again and again, because we must.
And perhaps that’s the truest thing I tried to capture in my novel—that the end of the world happens every day, in small and large ways, and somehow, we find ways to survive it.
p.s. If anyone knows where I can find an original pressing of the Wedding Album for less than a bazillion dollars, please let me know.
