Music and Books. Writers and Musicians.
Writers have been listening to music while working on a book for a long time, and the same happens to musicians that get inspired by a great story and end up writing a song. The connection between the two arts create a unique way of expression and in most cases depending on what you’re listening to will create a certain mood you’ll eventually be writing with it, or the other way around.
Once I saw an interview of the late writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens saying he could not write fiction because he didn’t care that much about music like his great friends Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. His confession made me think about this interchangeable relation of the two arts. How one relate with the other is not that hard to understand. Art in general keep generations inspired to create something new every day, and especially music and writing/reading go great with each other.
How many times have we watched our favorite writer talk about their passion for music? Or that song’s meaning that you always loved had a book associated with? Too many times, actually.
Stephen King is a perfect example. He mentioned a lot of times about how much he loves AC/DC, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Bob Dylan, The Ramones and so many rock bands and artists. If you connect his passion for rock with what he write, you will find a line that crosses the two worlds. I should say a line of blood, in Mr. King’s case, but they go hand in hand together. He said that creating a “Wall of Sound” sets the mood for his writings or while reading the first draft of what he wrote. I can imagine Mr. King bouncing his head listening to “Sad but True” by Metallica, and writing a vicious murder scene of a betrayed husband killing his wife with an axe right in the head.
That kind of inspiration comes with the type or style of music you’re listening to, and often is a powerful tool to use. So many times I sit with an empty page in front of me, and music start go through my ears, entering my brain, warming up my imagination, and suddenly the process gets more easy and enjoyable. Usually the music gets to the fringe of our imagination, where we can’t access without some help to loose things up a bit.
I remember very clearly when I listened to the song Map of Problematique by the British band Muse, and immediately a story popped up in my mind. It was that simple, and so exciting to create something out of nowhere like that.
As a musician too many times a book inspired me to create something for my band, even though it’s an instrumental one, I think about how the stories will create a certain mood on me, and those moods will need soundtracks; it is thinking in those that I create my songs. It’s a very effective method that works perfectly for me.
The day I found the story in the Muse song, it made me think that maybe there’s a story hidden within not one song, but in every one. Maybe there’s a song within each great book too, and art will always be created in that sphere of unlikely inspiration from these things, where there’s always new and exciting bits of innovative seeds no one saw before, different perceptions we always need to look after; those sparks of creation hidden from the world we live in, and our job as artists is to bring them to life each time we see it.
