Music that shaped your writing

[yowser]

I just finished reading “Long Players: Writers on the Albums that Shaped Them” (ed. Tom Gatti) wherein various authors and other artists and creative types describe the music that affected their work, sometimes profoundly.

An example: Novelist Deborah Levy says “when i first got my hands on 'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust'... its effect was nothing less than throwing petrol at the naked flame of teenage longing and desire for another sort of life.”

Later, “...in my view Bowie was a great writer. He has influenced me more than Tolstoy ever will do.”

I know there is a music ‘listening’ thread, but this is a more specific question for the crew:

Is there a song or piece of music that has informed or shaped your writing? Taught you something? Who and how?

 

[rescatooor]

I only get inspired. Maybe i imagine a specific setting to a song. Sometimes I like the story in it. I've been playing with the idea of one day writing a story inspired by the myth and energy of Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre. Obviously, there is no text to that piece. Still it very clearly has a story.

There are storytelling musical artists that utilize lyrics but I have personally never been too into them. They tend to be a little too superficial to inspire me. Now if it's an entire album though... Maybe.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

Well, not in the sense you're asking. No music 'inspired' my stories, but inspired music makes its way into my stories on a regular basis. I often use music and lyrics to set a scene and establish establish a pace. And my readers seem to respond well to it, so that's a happy thing.

Classical, rock, metal, jazz, doo-wop, even cheesy disco or pop. I've used them and it works well, according to my readers. Awesome.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

That's a great anecdote, particularly since I'm a huge Bowie fan

I'm a very impressionable writer, so the sort of music I listen to while writing weasels their way into the aesthetics of my story. Even into the structure of my prose, which is why, I suppose, my prose tends to be inconsistent.

A better writer than me once told me I ought to try writing in silence.
I have so far, completely ignored that advice. I've even went so far as listed out the music that most influenced me in my latest published story...

 

[KeithD]

Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade." I was ten, my parents had a symphony conductor over for dinner, and, a complete stranger to me, he brought me a present, a recording of "Scheherazade," and said it should give me inspiration for some form of creative expression--that it was just the music to do that and I was just the age to get started with such expression. I took my art and piano lessons more seriously after that and eventually found writing as well, never forgetting that a stranger had brought me an unbidden present of culture and encouraged me to be open to creativity. I still have the record and I have a story around here somewhere inspired by this encounter--although it, of course, takes an erotic takeoff (but "Scheherazade" will do that to a person and I think it's a great inspiration for erotica).

 

[SamScribble]

My grandfather was a semi-professional pianist, my mother was a singer, and my mother’s younger brother was a drummer. So I grew up with music all around me.

I started playing clarinet when I was still at primary school and sat in with a couple of local dance bands. Later, I moved on to alto and baritone saxes and played in the house band at a local nightclub.

For three or four years, music was my main source of income. I wrote during the day and played – mainly jazz – at night. Writing was writing; music was music. But the first ‘song’ to influence my writing was probably Miles Davis’s 1958 recording of Summertime. It seemed to me to be constructed like a short story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FAYe2N4yRI

Enjoy …

 

[litfan10]

Much like Sam, my college years and then post college years were write like a maniac all day then play either jazz or rock at night in one of the many bars in the college town where I lived. Writing paid off my copious school loans quickly while gigging paid my rent/bills and gave me food.

Like Jackie, I can write in silence but hate it. I love music while I write. I try not to play new stuff as it can distract me, but stuff I know well? Bring it on! I love fast rock (ala Dream Theater) or uptempo classical when I write.

I did it so often and so much that my kids were amazed how I could be typing away while humming the bass line or singing to whatever I was listening to with no idea I was doing that.

 

[Handley_Page]

.
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Is there a song or piece of music that has informed or shaped your writing? Taught you something? Who and how?

Beethoven: Leonora 3.

 

[PetroniusJackson]

Power metal!

In particular, my fantasy work "The Saga of Tallia the Unwilling" was heavily influenced by Visigoth's Warrior Queen.

Petronius Jackson
"It is a great thing to know your vices." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

[rjordan]

Music has never had much impact on my life. I do like songs by women that are stories, though.

I did a story roughly based on the lyric "All I Wanna Do" from the "Tuesday Night Music Club" album by Sheryl Crow. Mostly based on her crisp imagery.

I wrote one based on "Every Day is a Winding Road", but never got around to posting it.

rj

 

[TxRad]

I write best to the sounds of silence. Quiet makes the story flow better.

 

[lovecraft68]

I like writing to music, usually hard and heavy, but other than an odd lyric here and there that stuck with me, I don't think any of it directly inspired a story or character, its usually what I use to keep the muse churning because I can't write in quiet or to anything slow

There is one exception. The first ever horror themed album that told a start to finish story in a way I can only describe as opera meets metal

So basically this alum which came out in 1987 affected and stayed with me for decades and once I started writing gave birth to this novel.

 

[KeithD]

I write best to the sounds of silence. Quiet makes the story flow better.

I don't have music on when I write either.

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't know about specific songs that have shaped my writing, but there are definitely some that hit me on a personal level and inspire me to write out the emotions they pull to the surface.

I listen to everything from Johnny Horton to Cannibal Corpse, so inspiration is varied and plentiful. Generally the inspiration isn't a specific line or story from a song. It also doesn't especially influence my style of writing. What it does is help me identify specific moods and tones I want to convey in a scene. I'm not good at identifying or expressing my own emotions but I'm good at reading the emotions of others.

I have written scenes with certain songs intended to be the background accompaniment. I have a brutal scene for one character written with Call Me Call Me by The Seatbelts in mind. It's a super somber scene where a romance was building between two characters and instead of seeing it through, they part ways for the night. One character gets into a brutal fight in their house with someone from their past. The other character goes looking for a fight and finds one that is equally brutal but with that character being the victor rather than victim, only to come back to pursue the romance and instead finds the first character almost dead and gets them to a hospital. It ends with the second character going to find the person that caused the damage. (It's a paranormal story, so there's a lot more going on but that's the basis with that song as the background track.)

There are three songs that have been my main inspiration for my most recent project, though. (Not a lit project.) They are: All Beauty Destroyed by Aesthetic Perfection, Agoraphobic by Corpse Husband, and Test of Time by Beth Crowley.

When I wrote My siblings series which was dark depressing and dealt with addiction among other things, the songs on a loop in my head were Seether's Love Her, Springsteens the Rive just for its depressing tone of dreams turned to shit, and Slipknots Snuff...a cheery piece it was.

 

[lovecraft68]

I write best to the sounds of silence. Quiet makes the story flow better.

Silence makes me nervous. I need noise, I thrive in chaos which is why the music has to be heavy and loud, always been that way and I'd eventually discover that's a result from early trauma and dysfunction, you learn to equate chaos with peace and peace means...okay, what's about to happen?

 

[PennameWombat]

Silence makes me nervous. I need noise, I thrive in chaos which is why the music has to be heavy and loud, always been that way and I'd eventually discover that's a result from early trauma and dysfunction, you learn to equate chaos with peace and peace means...okay, what's about to happen?

Not so much nervous, but the tinnitus can drive me to distraction if I don't have external noise when it flares up. If nothing else, I'll just put the television on something anodyne and let it blather.

I don't write to music, I don't do much to music. There are two things I incorporate into my stories because I know they affect other people. Music and aromas. I've essentially no sense of smell and music is mostly just another sort of noise to me. I like lyrics if I've read them, so I do incorporate specific songs into stories because of the lyrics. Which can make it difficult for songs not public domain...

 

[TadOverdon]

I feel like I should have an answer to this one. I'm not sure I do.

But...

The question sent me off digging around to try to find an old CD, Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Album.

A lot of my first writing was BTVS fanfic. And they put out this album with a lot of the music that was featured on the show. Not the series score, but tracks like The Sundays' cover of "Wild Horses:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i-0FB68LoQ

Which could bring me to tears back then (and, okay, just did). And a version of "Goodbye To You" that Michelle Branch recorded for the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O22YHDDAys

I used to just play the CD while I wrote, evening after evening.

ETA: And, oh look, the entire album is on Youtube because Of Course It Is...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL480957597A290DAF

 

[Candy_Kane54]

My last three stories - 'If I Never Knew Your Name'; 'And The Grass Won't Pay No Mind'; and 'Done Too Soon' are all Neil Diamond songs and inspired the storylines for the three stories.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

I often am listening to the specific music that is involved with the scene I'm writing. I am finishing a chapter where someone is playing Handel's 'The Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba' on a harp. And I was listening to the Rachel Ann Morgan version of that song.

I'm having two newly wealthy young women going on a night-long spending spree and enjoying themselves. In a club downtown on jam night, a friend of theirs is playing bass and singing while his band cranks out the ACDC anthem 'Moneytalks'. I've timed that one pretty exquisitely, I believe.

I think the very first song I did that with (here on Lit) was Meatloaf's 'You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth'. That was five years ago, roughly, so I don't exactly remember.

 

[CyranoJ]

Is there a song or piece of music that has informed or shaped your writing? Taught you something? Who and how?

There are a lot of my stories where music shapes and inspires the erotic action. Often, it's skinhead reggae or adjacent genres (a lot of my stories are about "rude" girls, meaning skinhead girls).

The title track to the story "Heart Like a Lion" would be an example. A "classic" Oi! song by Pressure Point and a soundtrack to a story about a couple of skinhead girls from the story's equivalent of the Hammerskins.

It's not always so obviously skinhead. The heroines of Strange Hunger are a mixed couple who are just straight up into classic Trojan Records reggae like Derrick Morgan or Tony Tribe or Pat Kelly, and sometimes the musical influence is meta-textual in the form of chapter titles that reference songs by people like Fela Kuti.

In general, I'd say music is usually important to my stories, but those are some fo the most prominent examples.

 

[TadOverdon]

I have also found some inspiration in that CD and genuinely thought I was alone in that, lol.

They played some great music at The Bronze.

"That is the dance of a brave little toaster."

 

[jsmiam]

Kenny Rogers, from the perspective of telling a story in not a lot of words

If I wrote Lucille, by the time I got finished going to a bar, meeting a pretty girl, seeing that in spite of other factors not discussed, that she ditched her kids, and then deciding not to do her, after paying for a room(!), I’d be at 4 lit pages. Other songs also, particularly from that era also told a long tale efficiently. Gambler. Coward of the county. (I say that even though I don’t condone music that normalizes spurned men being/wanting to be violent (A line in Ruby). Nonetheless the writing tutorial prevails.

It reminds me to seek out brevity. Even when I fail.

 

[TadOverdon]

That's a description of Rogers' invoking violence in that song that I would not have thought of: "normalizing." My recollection is that upon first hearing it I was shocked and chilled, which I think is probably what he intended.

 

[jsmiam]

There are also many songs out there with double meanings. A lot of love songs we instantly label as romance could easily be about a parents love for their children. Quite a few “they left me” breakup songs could also be about a death or a suicide. ‘Pictures of you’ by The Cure. I heard it a million times, never gave it a second thought. Then someone I knew went and killed themselves. Now I can’t even listen to it.

Again, a writing tutorial.

 

[jsmiam]

That's a description of Rogers' invoking violence in that song that I would not have thought of: "normalizing." My recollection is that upon first hearing it I was shocked and chilled, which I think is probably what he intended.

Far too common in country music. “Hey joe” by Jimi Hendrix too.

When it’s used so casually, that’s what I call normalizing. What about “hey joe, why you being so insecure?”