What Music Do Celebrated Authors Listen To While They Write?
A deep dive of the playlists in our favorite writers’ brains.
To skip the intro and jump to specific authors, click their names below! Otherwise, sit back, scroll on, and enjoy.
List of Authors
· 1. Neil Gaiman
· 2. Toni Morrison
· 3. Gabriel García Márquez
· 4. Susanna Clarke
· 5. Michael Chabon
· 6. Octavia Butler
· 7. Marlon James
· 8. Anne Rice
· 9. Stephen King
· 10. Ursula K. Le Guin
Wall yourself off from distractions with sound
95% of the time I’m trying to get some deep work done I’ll listen to white noise, usually this recording of a very windy field of grass.
All the recordings on that channel are better than they have any right to be for what they are, shout out to Pure Relaxing Vibes.
If I were to go on a walk toward the prairie trails near where I live, that’s what I would hear. When the chaos of life at home is sapping my attention too much (but doesn’t require it), turning this video up feels like I’m turning the volume knob on the world down.
Zadie Smith, award-winning English novelist/essayist best known for her explosive debut, White Teeth, voiced a similar preference in an interview with the New Yorker:
I never listen to any kind of music when writing. I listen to white noise throughout — sometimes six hours of white noise!
But what about those authors who like to tap their foot along to show tunes, or nod along to hip hop while untangling a snarled plot, or mulling which character is going to die? Music excites emotions, elicits flashes of memory the same as a whiff of perfume, and the lyrical content, when present, subconsciously transports you into a story as you listen.
For some writers, music acts as the film score to the movie-in-progress in their heads. There was a time where I’d listen to the Lord of the Rings movie soundtrack on repeat as I wrote derivative fantasy trash, and it certainly helped immerse me in the right mindset for that kind of proto-worldbuilding. It was a valuable experience.
My criteria for the 10 authors I chose to profile here were pretty simple: I’d heard of the author, read or admired their work, and they’ve stated publicly whether they listen to music when they write.
Each section includes a quick primer of the author’s life and work for the uninitiated, facts about their connections to the world of music and its influence on their work, and links to the music they listen to.
Let’s get into some famous heads.
1. Neil Gaiman
Neil is a dark fantasy and sci-fi icon, creator of The Sandman comics, author of American Gods, Anansi Boys, Coraline, Good Omens with Sir Terry Pratchett, and many other modern classics. He’s also my personal hero, so that’s why I’m getting him out of the way first.
Not to be too effusive, but like many writers of my generation his stories were instrumental in developing my tastes. I discovered them at a time when I was first becoming serious about exploring my love of good stories, fiction that blurred the lines of genre, and the art of writing.
Neil has a number of musical connections
Neil himself has mentioned being in a punk band in his teen years, and is famously married to musician Amanda Palmer. He modeled the eponymous Sandman’s appearance on David Bowie. He maintains friendships and collaborates with musicians like Tori Amos and Jason Webley.
Music is woven into both his personal and professional lives.
So what does he listen to when he’s writing a fresh short story, longhand, in that neat gazebo in the woods?
The emotionally potent film scores of Michael Nyman, on repeat. Gaiman said so during a 2017 interview with PBS NewsHour:
“I can play those over and over again.”
Nyman is known for his melding of old and new, leveraging expansive knowledge of music history with the kinetic energy of rock and roll, in a way that seems complementary to Gaiman’s own literary style.
Gaiman is also a longtime fan of indie pop band The Magnetic Fields, and discussed his appreciation for 50 Song Memoir, the group’s autobiographical concept album featuring one song for every year of frontman Stephin Merritt’s life.
“Merritt is one of our great songwriters. Until now he’s made a point of saying: these songs are not about me. And suddenly, having done that, he writes one song for each year of his life,” Gaiman said, “The first 25 years are funny, and the second 25 years keep breaking your heart, over and over again.”
Next time I read one of his novels, I’m going to have Michael Nyman going in the background to see what effect it has.
2. Toni Morrison
A pillar of American and African American literature, Morrison is the winner of countless awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She wrote many groundbreaking novels including The Bluest Eye, composed piecemeal at 4 am every morning while raising two children; Song of Solomon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved, considered by many to be her opus.
Toni described childhood memories of her mother singing jazz and opera
Her house growing up was a place where music was always playing joyfully in the background. Morrison likened the ubiquitous singing to meditation, a musical way of talking to oneself and working things out of the subconscious. About jazz in particular, Morrison said:
“Jazz has no final chord. As a result, it keeps listeners on the edge of their chairs always anticipating more. There is always something else that you want from the music. I want my books to be like that — because I want that feeling of something held in reserve and the sense that there is more — that you can’t have it all right now.”
Jazz had a crucial influence on Morrison’s work
The second novel in the Beloved trilogy, entitled Jazz, tells the story of a Harlem Renaissance love triangle, expressed in jazz-like rhythmic language that results in rich, sinuous imagery unlike anything else at the time. Her marriage of musicality and language turned out to be a successful experiment.
In a conversation with scholar Paul Gilroy, she said it was important for her writing to reflect “all of the intricacy, all of the discipline” associated with black musicianship. Later in life she collaborated with musicians she admired, producing several well-received operas that touched on themes introduced first in her fiction.
Toni Morrison had a soul sister
Morrison was a noted fan of soul singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Nina Simone, who was born just two years after her in 1933. There are many similarities to the structure, rhythm, and tone of Simone’s music and Morrison’s writing. Saying of Simone after her death in 2003, “She saved our lives.” The author greatly admired Nina not only for her technical virtuosity and inventiveness, but for her refusal to be suppressed and swept aside.
Nina Simone’s original aspiration was to become a concert pianist, and after studying for a year at Juilliard she auditioned for a scholarship to attend Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.
Her stellar performance couldn’t outweigh racial bias against her, so she abandoned her previously narrow focus in favor of an experimental synthesis of classical, blues, soul, gospel, and other quintessentially black genres of American music, turning convention on its head while celebrating the rich culture that made her unique.
3. Gabriel García Márquez
Márquez is arguably the central figure of the “magic realism” literary movement, popularizing stories that seamlessly blend the fantastic and impossible with intricately rendered scenes of realistic, sometimes mundane, everyday life. He is known affectionately as “Gabo” or “Gabito” in his native Colombia and across Latin America, where he’s treasured as a literary homegrown hero.
Although he had some renown as a journalist and writer of short fiction, his true rise to prominence came with the publication of his novels, which are now considered seminal works of Spanish language literature, including the slim but powerful One Hundred Years of Solitude; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a novella based on true events; and the acclaimed Love in the Time of Cholera.
He was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
This distinction cemented his legacy as a defining voice in the modern world of letters.
Reviewing Love in the Time of Cholera for the New York Times, reclusive legend Thomas Pynchon, himself the author of many groundbreaking and mind twisting novels, used musical language to describe the effect achieved by Gabo’s prose in the final chapter:
“There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too … at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.”
The rhythm of Vallenato was Gabito’s vibe
Gabriel had a deep connection with the native Colombian folk music known as Vallenato, Spanish for “born in the valley,” referring to its origins in the Northeast of the country. The style was developed from the tradition of Spanish minstrels, and served as a song-based method of transmitting messages between remote towns. Truncated epics full of lyrical and musical flourish, the songs are unique cultural relics.
Many instruments are employed skillfully in Vallenato, including European standards like guitars, pianos, and accordions, as well as traditional Colombian gaita flutes, rasping guacharacas, and cajas vallenatas drums held between the knees.
Gabo felt a kinship with these rural troubadours, and reveled in the mournful sound of their accordions. He said in 1948, “I don’t know what communicative secret the accordion hides but when we hear it we become sentimental.” Describing his first major success, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez called it “A Vallenato of 400 pages.”
In his 2002 memoir “Living to Tell the Tale,” Gabo summarizes his admiration for Vallenato’s art of storytelling, and how it enriched his life:
“I had dreamed about the good life,” he wrote, “going from fair to fair and singing with an accordion and a good voice, which always seemed to me to be the oldest and happiest way to tell a story.”
In an interview in 1983, the Nobel laureate proclaimed La Gota Fria, specifically as performed in 1938 by Emiliano Zuleta, as the perfect song. I like to think it was a staple of his writing playlist.
Close your eyes, give it a listen, and smile.
4. Susanna Clarke
Clarke is the English author of the fantastical alternate history novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, for which she is best known. The book uses its two principle characters to investigate the very concept of “Englishness,” and treads the boundary between reason and madness.
It won numerous fantasy and literature awards, and was adapted into a miniseries for the BBC. Described by some as Harry Potter for adults, Neil Gaiman declared the book unquestionably the finest English fantasy novel of the last 70 years. His quote is on the dust jacket.
Susanna had a busy life outside her writing, teaching English as a foreign language in Italy and Spain for several years, and editing cookbooks for publisher Simon & Schuster.
A scarcely understood medical condition changed Susanna’s life
A scant six months after the publication of her celebrated novel, she collapsed at a dinner party, and never fully recovered. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating lifelong condition which sapped her energy and motivation, leaving her stranded at home and often depressed.
Through sheer determination, force of will, and slow incremental progress using the pomodoro technique to work and focus for short bursts of time, Clarke worked through her chronic fatigue to produce a new novel in 2020, the first in over 16 years.
Piranesi, a fresh work unrelated to her previous universe, was well received and earned her the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
In her emotional acceptance speech, Clarke recalled the feelings of hopelessness she had grappled with:
“Having written about a woman with a 19th-century illness I then seemed to fall prey to a 19th-century illness myself…I’d really ceased to think of myself as a writer. It all seemed so long ago and far away, like something that happened to somebody else.”
Music and white noise have been a part of her process since before she grappled with illness
Susanna Clarke told British retail book giant Waterstones in a piece on their blog that she loves to work in cafes when its raining.
“Working in a café when it’s raining outside is my ideal. I also have apps of café sounds and rain sounds on my laptop. These are useful when I’m at home, but sometimes when I’m in a café and it is actually raining, I’ll still play extra café sounds and extra rain sounds through my headphones. Because you can never have enough.”
She also discusses the specific music she listens to while writing, sharing three songs that played together “mean” Piranesi to her, and were played repeatedly during its creation. Those songs, and the imagery they evoke in her mind, are:
- O Beata Infantia Alio Modo by Hildegard of Bingen, interpreted and performed by Stevie Wishart and Sinfonye and Guy Sigsworth. “I just have to hear the opening note (it is a bell-like sound) and the Halls of the House rise up around me.”
- Zuuenz also by Hildegarde of Bingen, also interpreted and performed by Stevie Wishart and Sinfonye and Guy Sigsworth. “Zuuenz is a word which means ‘saint’ in a language that Hildegard made up, for what purpose no one knows.”
- Wave by David Sylvian. “Piranesi is the second novel I have written to Wave (the first was never finished and don’t ask me what it was about because I don’t think I could say). I called one of the sections of Piranesi ‘Wave’ after this track. The song describes an emotion I cannot name.”
What kind of stories would you produce to the unofficial “Piranesi soundtrack?”
5. Michael Chabon
Best known as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Kavalier & Clay, Chabon (“Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Bon Jovi" according to the author) is an ardent defender of plot-driven genre fiction, to be enjoyed without shame alongside more “literary” fare. His own work often defiantly straddles the two.
His many novels like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonderboys, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Moonglow find the characters grappling with recurring themes related to abandonment, Jewish identity, homosexuality and bisexuality, pop culture, fatherhood, and nostalgia for a bygone golden age.
A Newsweek article published after the successful publication of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh mistakenly outed Michael as an “up and coming gay writer.” (Chabon has been married to female author Ayelet Waldman since 1993).
However, he was pleased by the unintended consequences of the error . The New York Times reported him saying “I feel very lucky about all of that. It really opened up a new readership to me, and a very loyal one.”
In 2005 he wrote an essay for The New York Review of Books in which he clarified his own sexual ambiguity, which he has occasionally drawn from for the purposes of his fiction:
“I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him.”
Being a consistent night owl is his key to success
Michael told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2012 about his nocturnal writing schedule, in which he aims to write approximately 1000 words from 10 p.m. until 3 a.m. each night, taking Fridays and Saturdays off. He hammered home the importance of consistency and routine:
“There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they’re big, and they have a lot of words in them…. The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.”
A vinyl symphony of the night steers Chabon’s craft
The best example of the fusion of Chabon’s music tastes and his work can be found in 2012’s Telegraph Avenue, his novel concerning the proprietors of a north Oakland record shop. He told The Jewish Chronicle how the music he listened to while writing heavily shaped the story. Dusting off an old vinyl player he had, Michael started playing records when he wrote, which made getting up to turn it over and switch to the next one necessary.
“If you listen to a record when you’re working, every 20 minutes or so you get up, go over to the turntable and turn the record over. That is exactly what ergonomics experts say you should do. I always listen to music when I work. I find that I’ll be listening to something for years, then I change project and it doesn’t work anymore. On Telegraph Avenue, I was listening to 1960s and 1970s soul jazz and jazz funk — I call it backbeat jazz. I discovered this music in the process of writing the book. I listened to it and it even became incorporated in the prose in some way.”
Michael Chabon is a fellow of the Peterborough, New Hampshire MacDowell artist and writer’s retreat, and he provided their organization’s website with his personal writing playlist for both Spotify and Apple Music. He laid out the optimal way to listen to this eclectic selection of favorites:
“My current work go-tos, some old standbys, and some new faves. Conveniently divisible into eight one-hour work sessions, four two-hour work sessions, two four-hour work sessions, or one eight-hour work session. Or put on repeat and just don’t stop. Shuffle for a shorter vibe-wavelength, play through to sustain the vibe in album-length arcs.”
6. Octavia Butler
Octavia is the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author who popularized the black speculative fiction subgenre later known as Afrofuturism, melding the worlds of science fiction and the experience of African diaspora in an imagined future. This subgenre is experiencing a renaissance, with such properties as Black Panther, and Jordan Peele’s sci fi horror films.
Her writing rose to prominence amidst the publication of her Patternist series, a collection of 6 science fantasy novels written over 8 years chronicling a fictional timeline spanning from ancient Africa to the modern day. Her Africa, and later parts of America, is populated by shapeshifting demi goddesses, vampiric ghosts of stillborn children, incestuous eugenically-bred psychics, and eventually laser-toting sphinx people and drug-addled cannibals.
Don’t worry, you’ll get to see the adaptation soon on Amazon Prime. It’ll all make sense then.
Octavia was an outcast among outcasts
All this imagery came from the mind of a quiet girl, much taller than the other girls in her classes growing up, with a deeper voice that people leaned in to discern clearly. Described by some as a gentle giant, her height and awkwardness were a source of isolation and low self esteem growing up, causing her to turn to reading as a refuge, despite having a form of dyslexia. She would read for hours while accompanying her mother, her sole parent, to work.
An awful movie gave her a surge of confidence
After scribbling for years in her big pink notebook at the library, Butler begged her mom and upgraded to a Remington typewriter at age 10. After a couple years of practice, she happened to catch a sci fi movie on television that acted as a major catalyst for her development.
The 1954 B movie Devil Girl From Mars is a great example of the low effort, melodramatic, smooth-brained, white sci fi trash that was common at the time. It was so terrifically bad that when 12 year old Octavia Butler saw it on tv, she concluded she could write something better, and became determined to do so.
Her aunt, trying to dissuade a naive young Butler from getting hurt in her earnest pursuits, told her “Honey…negroes can’t be writers.”
Despite this warning, Octavia continued to draft what would become the basis for her Patternist series, and later published many additional works such as Kindred, and the Parable series, becoming contemporaries with well-known science fiction authors like Harlan Ellison, who helped her early in her career.
Butler was famously shy, but a fellow author once recorded a glimpse of her writing routine
In 2000, 6 years prior to Butler’s death, fellow novelist and educator Tananarive Due traveled to her friend Octavia’s house to record her in conversation for an article.
When she arrived, Motown was blasting through the closed windows at considerable volume, and Due had to knock loudly before the author answered the door, apologizing before saying simply,
“I listen to music while I write.”
It seems Butler’s routine was to wake at 5:30 or 6 and write into the late morning to her favorite music, blasting it loudly. Of the importance of her morning work, she explained:
“Later in the day I might have another writing period, but my morning writing period is essential. About four hours, maybe a little more. It’s a kind of habit. If I’m not there, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. A good habit is as hard to break as a bad one.”
I feel like Motown would have me moving around and snapping my fingers too much to get anything done, but it worked out great for her.
7. Marlon James
Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 2015 for his book A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James is a Jamaican novelist and teacher of literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Both his parents worked with the Jamaican police. His mother, a detective, gifted him a volume of O. Henry short stories at a young age, sparking his interest in prose. A love of Shakespeare followed soon after, introduced to him by his father, a lawyer for the police.
His earlier works, including Book of Night Women, and John Crow’s Devil dealt with the struggles of downtrodden characters in post colonial Jamaica. His Tarantino-esque penchant for depictions of unrestrained physical and sexual violence, along with the complex language and “stylistic excess” of his works made for some divided opinions, and many more rabidly devoted fans.
Some time after graduating from the University of the West Indies in 1991, despite his great love for Jamaica, he left the country to escape the threat of homophobic violence, and to broaden career opportunities that had stagnated there. He stated when asked about his exodus, “”Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.”
His recent work features a brutal fantasy mythos full of uniquely African monsters
In 2019 he surprised some of his longtime readers by switching gears, writing a fantasy epic rivaling the scope of classics like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, one that pushed back against the longstanding medieval Eurocentric conventions of the genre. 2019’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf saw the author reinventing fantasy itself to suit his tastes, representing characters and settings sorely missing from the greater oeuvre he admired.
A small media company called Warner Bros, along with Michael B. Jordan’s production company snatched up the film rights almost immediately. The sequel for this planned trilogy, Moon Witch, Spider King was just released in 2022.
“Maybe it’s a Jamaican thing, but so much of what we do is music.”
James told Twin Cities PBS that music was an integral part of the creative process for him. He frequents Cheapo Records at least once a week, and aside from his love for Reggae he has a surprisingly eclectic collection on rotation.
While working on A Brief History of Seven Killings, a novel partly inspired by an assassination attempt on Bob Marley, he had the following artists on his playlist:
When Marlon James accepted the Booker Prize for this book, he shone a light on other Jamaican artists who had made it possible for his own voice to be heard:
“The reggae singers Bob Marley and Peter Tosh were the first to recognize that the voice coming out our mouths was a legitimate voice for fiction and for poetry.”
8. Anne Rice
The recently departed Anne Rice was among the best-selling novelists of all time, surpassing 100 million copies of her books in the hands of insatiable readers. She’s best known for her many novels featuring vampires, werewolves, and other horror fantasy creatures.
Born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in New Orleans, the daughter of eccentrically devout Irish Catholic parents, she became agnostic as a young adult after becoming disillusioned with the organized church.
On Anne’s website she reflected on the subject of her unusual birth name, explaining :
“Well, my birth name is Howard Allen because apparently my mother thought it was a good idea to name me Howard. My father’s name was Howard, she wanted to name me after Howard, and she thought it was a very interesting thing to do. She was a bit of a Bohemian, a bit of mad woman, a bit of a genius, and a great deal of a great teacher. And she had the idea that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world.”
Anne Rice is a woman of many names, including pen names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure for her erotic fiction. When she was confirmed in the Catholic church as a young girl, she took the full name Howard Allen Frances Alphonsus Liguori O’Brien, incorporating the name of a saint as well as her aunt who was a nun.
It was Anne herself who chose the name Anne when asked for her name by a nun on her first day of school. She thought ‘Anne’ was pretty, told the nun that was her name, and her mother who was present took it as a sign that her daughter was self conscious about her name, electing to address her as Anne from then on.
From darkness to light, then back again
Her long career had an arc that mirrored the evolution of her personal beliefs, starting with dark gothic fiction relishing in the lascivious exploits of immortal vampires written as a young agnostic woman, followed by many sequels further exploring the universe established in her Interview With The Vampire and Lestat.
In the mid-2000’s, Rice returned to her Catholic roots in both her personal life and in her work. Moving from Louisiana to sunny La Jolla California, she published two novels featuring fictionalized accounts of the life of Jesus. After initially declaring the weather in La Jolla to be heaven, she changed her mind less than a year later, declaring it too cold and moving to Rancho Mirage.
In 2010 she distanced herself from the church once again, saying on her Facebook:
“My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”
She returned in 2014 to the shadows she’d cloaked herself in as a young writer, releasing a long awaited sequel to Queen of the Damned from from her vampire chronicles, titled Prince Lestat.
With the publication of Prince Lestat, Anne Rice celebrated by sharing her writing playlist
- Bon Jovi (Living on a Prayer, It’s My Life)
- Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (I Hate Myself for Loving You, Do You Wanna Touch Me)
- The Doors (L.A. Woman)
- Sammi Smith (Help Me Make it Through The Night)
- Simon & Garfunkel (Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Barbara Allen)
- Frank Patterson (Irish Tenor version of My Heart Will Go On. Frank Patterson’s specific version isn’t available in my country, but I’ve linked a version by The Irish Tenors for reference.)
9. Stephen King
Listen, if you aren’t familiar with the work of Stephen King, I suggest you open almost any movie streaming app, go to the drugstore, go to the grocery store checkout aisle, hell, just go outside. Turn on the Simpsons. Open a magazine. He’s everywhere, and for good reason as many of us fine folk on Medium are aware.
Stephen King is some good shit. His work isn’t invariably golden or without flaw, but even so its always a raucous good time. Read everything you can from him, voraciously, regardless of your own genre. The man is a living legend and a walking portal to other worlds. It, Pet Sematary, The Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Dark Tower…yeah, don’t sit there and act like you haven’t heard of him.
I’ll spare you his sometimes tragic biography too, since I already wrote about it in middle school for my English project. If you’re curious though, definitely check out his memoir and exploration of the craft, On Writing.
Stephen is crazy about music: he played in a rock and roll supergroup, had the Ramones write a song for him, collaborated with Michael Jackson, wrote a musical, and owns a local radio station
Formed by author Kathi Kamen Goldmark in 1992, The Rock Bottom Remainders, also known just as The Remainders, were what Stephen King describes in his book On Writing as a sloppy but energetic group of amateur musicians who happen to also be famous authors, with a smattering of actual working musicians to give it some legitimacy.
Stephen served the rotating roster as a guitarist for years. The bar band quality of the group was described as such by the author:
“…we sounded pretty good. You’d pay to hear us. Not a lot, not U2 or E Street Band prices, but maybe what the oldtimers call ‘roadhouse money.’”
The group included many well known names such as guitarist Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, saxophonist Erasmo Paulo, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, columnist Dave Barry, authors Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, and honorary member Maya Angelou.
They played some legit gigs, buoyed of course by a bit of name recognition, like the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. After having a lot of fun, and raising 2 million dollars for charity, they disbanded in 2012, following the death of the band’s founder Kathi Kamen Goldmark.
As a huge fan of The Ramones, King frequently references them in his stories. He actually gave legendary punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone a copy of Pet Sematary, asking him if he’d write a song to accompany a potential film adaptation. Ramone enthusiastically penned the song in 40 minutes.
King collaborated with the King of Pop in 1996 for a 40 minute epic music video, Ghosts. The idea of writing a “minimusical” appealed to King, who wanted to challenge himself with something new. He followed this up in 2012 with another musical, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a collaboration with John Mellencamp.
As for the radio station he owns, its Bangor Maine’s #1 Rock n Roll station WKIT 100.3, who proudly and simply proclaim that they’re “Stephen King’s Rock n Roll Station.”
King’s writing playlist is an ever-evolving beast
As a true music fan, King has given numerous answers over the years when asked in interviews about what music he listens to while he works. Here’s one of the most notable collections, his self selected songs he can’t live without, provided to Desert Island Discs for the BBC (thanks to Far Out Magazine for curating the list from the audio and making a Spotify Playlist):
- Stiff Upper Lip- AC/DC
- At The Hop- Danny and the Juniors
- Pink Houses- John Mellencamp
- The New Girl in School- Jan and Dean
- Dance Little Sister- Rolling Stones
- That’s the Way I Like It- KC & The Sunshine Band
- Dirty Water- The Standells
- Louie Louie- The Kingsmen
- It Came Out of the Sky- Credence Clearwater Revival
- Secret Agent Man- Johnny Rivers
- Anarchy in the UK- Sex Pistols
- Needles and Pins- The Searchers
- S.O.B.- Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats
- My Sharona- The Knack
10. Ursula K. Le Guin
Finally we come to Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, a true pioneer of literature, one of the most universally acclaimed science fiction and fantasy authors of all time. In her rich descriptions of invented worlds and alien cultures, she employed three dimensional characters to explore moral dilemmas, gender identity, anthropology, social and political systems, philosophy, and race.
Le Guin left the world twenty novels and more than 100 short stories, most categorized by bookstores into science fiction, but the author herself eschewed the trappings of genre, preferring to think of herself as an “American Novelist.”
She had every writer’s dream library at her fingertips growing up
The daughter of an anthropologist and a psychologist, her family is full of gifted and hard working intellectuals. Her family’s huge book collection engulfed her in childhood, shaping her mind and setting her on an inevitable creative path. The house was a destination for many academics, including the father of the atom bomb himself, Robert Oppenheimer.
By age 11, she had submitted her first story for publication. It was rejected, causing her anguish, so she didn’t submit anything else for another decade.
She later went on to write immortal works like The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea, said by critic Harold Bloom to be her seminal classics. Subverting every trope she came across, she introduced dark skinned protagonists, androgynous characters, and explored feminist concepts through sci fi. Her work is enormously influential, being cited by Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon as formative for them.
No Earthly music could match Ursula’s visions of a distant alien future, so she made up her own.
In 1985 Le Guin published what she called her “great experiment” a book called Always Coming Home. It’s unusual in a number of ways; it features Earth’s distant future, eons after our civilization’s long forgotten, probably self inflicted, apocalypse.
The exploits of a woman called Stone Telling are discussed, but her story only comprises about a third of the book. The rest is essentially an ethnological study of the Kesh people, illuminated by a contemporary fictional scholar named Pandora. Through Pandora, Le Guin embodied the work of her anthropologist mother, unearthing poetry, rough sketches of plants and animals, plays, a chapter of a Kesh novel, and the complexities of their sparse matriarchal society.
The box set edition of the book included 100 illustrations by Margaret Chodos, and an audio casette made in collaboration with Buchla synthesist Todd Barton called Music and Poetry of the Kesh.
Le Guin made the recording out of necessity, saying that after exploring every other aspect of the culture of her fictional Kesh, she needed to hear the music too. Give it a listen, its delightfully strange. Like so much of Ursula’s work, there simply isn’t anything else like it on Earth.