The Soundtrack to My Brain, Oliver’s Writing Edition
I have a novel coming out soon. For the length of time I have been developing and writing and editing the novel, I have been building a playlist of music.
The playlist started partly because of the couple-few song references I made in the first few pages, and partly because the story is about a sorcerer who uses rock and roll lyrics as incantations and I wanted to keep a centralized list of the right songs. It started with “The Devil Within” by the Digital Daggers. From there it grew.
It started like that. From there I would add songs that had meaning for the novel. Maybe I thought the characters would listen to this song, so I’d add that. Maybe I thought, “That would be perfect in the movie” — it goes in. Maybe there were lyrics or a guitar riff that perfectly captured some spot of bother in the prose I’d struggled with; that song falls in.
By the end, there was a unifying theme that most of the songs share: they surprised me somehow. They would not end how I expected.
I am a writer of fiction because I was looking the other way when I had the choice to become a writer of punk/metal songs. As I cottoned on to what my heart had to tell me, I realized that my stories are all rock and roll songs that overflowed. Like all the best rock and roll, mine exists in full awareness of the world it touches. I fill my stories with what I feel, and I feel a lot from music. Or music helps focus what I feel, at least.
That’s how my writing playlist began. It’s called City Song, and that’s the title of the novel where the playlist started.
Writing a novel, though, is a constant battle. It’s a battle with boredom, so the playlist grew. It’s a battle with balance between simpleness and strangeness, so the playlist grew varied. It’s a battle with whatever wall hides the good ideas, so the playlist followed my exploration.
And a novel is a battle to carry on, so the playlist grew and grew.
It meanders across genres, through twisted hip-hop with tracks like “Entity” by Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and “lunchbox” by the Japanese hip-hop collaboration Midicronica or the track “Il Conflitto” by Caparezza, on through pop ballads like “Kill of the Night” by Gin Wigmore and “Come Alive (War of the Roses)” by Janelle Monáe, and wanders into the roots of emo-punk with tracks like “How Soon is Now” by The Smiths and “Blindness” by The Fall.
The playlist wanders across the world, with tracks from Mongolian bands like “sodom i gomora” by Yat-Kha and Swedish tracks like “The Fox” by Graveyard and Italian ones like “Get Young” by Dope Stars Inc and Canadian ones like “The Tempest” by The Real McKenzies.
It stumbles back and forth across time between tracks by Domenico Scarlatti and brand new singles by The Heavy.
There’s tracks by huge acts, like “Ventilator Blues” by The Stones themselves, and tracks by acts no one’s heard of like “Jade Fire” by Mississippi Bones.
It’s now a mind it’s own. It reasons, because it has some of the voices and feelings of the characters and plots in the novel. I don’t believe in inspiration, but if I did I would say this playlist chases inspiration while blowing wind in the sails of inspiration.
Mine, anyway. Maybe you could find meaning in it too. I hope you might.
It’s a meandering hike through the wilds of my mind. If you had the time and wanted to do it, you could probably save yourself twenty bucks in a few months and just listen to the playlist instead of buying a copy of the novel when City Song comes out. It’s the same story.
Although the playlist is longer for some reason.
Cheers.
Here’s my website. It’s full of thresholds to adventures.
There’s also the facepalmspotsworldtweetverse places…
Follow me on Spotify…
