RIDING THE MUSIC WAVE VOL. 7: STAFF EDITION
For this month’s Riding the Music Wave, I asked each of our editors to create a playlist and write a short introduction about how music influences their writing. For the past few days I’ve been listening to everyone’s playlists, and in doing so I’ve discovered some overlap. Danielle and Matt and I like classical minimalism and film scores; Shreya and Lori dig Tracy Chapman; Claire and Abigail J. added folksy singer-songwriters; and I like every single song on Kaia’s playlist, and if I hadn’t chosen to go classical, many of the artists she chose would also be on my list.
We hope you enjoy these vignettes and playlists, and that they inspire you to think more deeply about the relationship of music to your own writing and creative process.
1 Lori Baker Martin, Editor
My grandmother was a music teacher and church organist, my father sang hymns on local radio stations when he was a little guy, I was a music major in my early college days. One of my earliest lucid memories is floating around in an innertube at the lake where we were vacationing—drowsily singing into the open sky.
My tastes in music are wide. I love the moment in a song, the break in the voice, the switch of tempo, the instrumentation that speaks, voices that braid and blend together into one, and that heartbreaking, throbbing, desperate high note. I love music that feels authentic, that explores emotion—I love it in the same way I love writing that does the same thing.
For this playlist, I wanted to platform women's voices primarily because of the mounting forces aiming to silence them. I wanted also to sweep together a plurality of women's voices—songs of joy, anger, love, desire, grief, growth, and protest—all of which have, for me, been significant.
2 Bryan Castille, Managing Editor
When I was a child, my grandmother owned a piano that she seldom played but sometimes would use to give lessons, and that my mother played when she didn’t have to work. One day my grandmother and mother decided to teach me, too. In those years, music surrounded me: the piano, the radio, the record player, my uncle’s guitar, my miniature cassette player, Looney Tunes, the brass and stained glass wind chimes hanging in the windows of the sun room, and so on. I loved all kinds of music, from Mozart to Bon Jovi, ragtime to jazz. The first record I ever owned (and played on my Fischer-Price record player) was some version of “Frére Jacques”; my first cassette was Madonna’s True Blue (played disturbingly in a Teddy Ruxpin). I could see music in my mind as colors and patterns, animated displays of light not unlike those in Disney’s Fantasia. (I was very dramatic.) The more vibrant the music, the richer the colors. I thought everyone experienced this, but now I know that’s not the case. I was an odd child who believed that objects had feelings and that the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony was dandelion yellow. I shared these insights at school and of course kids made fun of me. What bothered me was not that they teased me but that they seemed not to hear classical music in the same wondrous way that I did. Not that I was better than them, but that I knew a secret that they didn’t, and I was trying to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen.
Once I had learned to read music I didn’t want to play from the beginner books anymore. I could hear how those simplified versions of “Für Elise” and Schubert’s “Ständchen” serenade sounded nothing like the recordings I played on the stereo. I paged through my grandmother’s books of sheet music for the most difficult pieces, to see if I could play them. Usually I couldn’t. My mother believed I would be a concert pianist. I gave up music for art. I gave up art for writing. Now I work in the corporate sector and manage a literary magazine as a hobby. Disappointing my mother is my true passion.
The playlist I’ve constructed is one that I write to, and a collection of music that I’ve especially loved during different phases of my life. Some are newer, some are very old. A lot of people say they can’t write to music, but really anyone can learn with practice. And why wouldn’t you want to write to music? To write is to be lonely. Find a composer to keep you company. You’ll need a lengthy playlist or an opera or symphony so that you can write for a long time without interruption. Start with quiet music, like Max Richter’s “Sleep” or Brahms’s lullabies, and you’ll find that it sort of fades into you and the noise of the world disappears. The music will change the writing. This is one example of what I mean by “wondrous.”
Minimalism is good, too: Philip Glass, John Adams, Moondog, or even Brian Eno. Find the music that you love. Your writing will improve. So will your soul.
I thought for days about a proper quote to include, but I couldn’t think of one. Turns out that although I have a long and deep relationship to music, I’ve read relatively little about it. The quote that finally came to mind, totally by accident, is a strange one from a very strange book (and one of my favorites), The Changing Light at Sandover, by James Merrill:
“MAN PLAYS A TUNE IN COLORS THE VIBRATIONS OF MUSIC LIGHT UP MACHINES. SIMPLER YET, WRITE ‘AZURE’ & THE LANGUAGE- CONDUCTING BRAIN IS FLOODED WITH A TONE OF SUMMER SKIES. THE PAINTER’S PIGMENTS ARE BLANKLY SEEN THEY CONTAIN NO LIGHT. ARE NOT PAINTINGS BLANK IN A DARK ROOM? & EVEN THE LIVE WHITE LIGHT SHED UPON THEM APPEARS BUT TO DIM THEM FURTHER Vuillard, Piero, Goya, Blake, O’Keeffe, Who lit the mind? It blinks in disbelief.”
3 Claire Walla, Nonfiction Editor
Music used to come to me from the pillars of 90s monoculture: KROQ, Rolling Stone, MTV. Now, I find it everywhere: podcast interviews, TV soundtracks, Instagram posts, text messages, “best of” lists, year-end wrap ups, coffee shop speakers, concert listings, and conversations with friends. Like a magpie, I collect the songs I like and add them to a Spotify playlist. I don’t always listen to music when I write, but my writing often influences the music I listen to.
Here's a sampling of what I’ve liked recently: Vocals that howl, break, and bend to achieve emotional resonance. Percussion that skips a beat. A modulated key. A flirty bassline. A voice that plays a guitar solo better than the instrument itself and a slide guitar that conveys complexity better than its accompanying voice. Surprises. Whether it's in music or writing, I like surprises.
4 Kaia Lyons, Plays Editor
Making a playlist for your play can serve many purposes—it can become pre- or post-show music, it can function as a mood board for those you share the play with later, it can simply serve as a way to get you in the mood to write. For me specifically, I’ve noticed two things: first, I make the playlist when I get to a scene or scenes that are particularly emotionally intense. I’m simultaneously creating a buffer between me and the emotion (by abstracting it via a layer of music) and amplifying the emotion itself. I’m honestly not sure if it makes writing easier or harder…. Second, I’ve noticed that I create a playlist at some point during an early draft of the play; this means that when I go back to revise, I can use the playlist as a reference of the themes, emotions, moods, and tones that inspired the original draft. It helps me to interpret my own work.
This playlist was made over a year ago for a play called (to leave) when you go, which I’m about to start revising. I definitely remember openly weeping when I listened to the playlist while writing the last draft! Listening to it now helps me remember what I was trying to say and why, so—mission accomplished!
5 Danielle Wheeler, Poetry Editor
I write as if transcribing whatever cinematic vision I've cooked up in my head, so my soundtrack needs to be atmospheric and dramatic. Many of my songs are from films that have inspired my writing—Arrival, The Hours, Terrence Malick stuff, Luca Guadagnino films, etc. I've also found that going entirely lyric-free tends to encourage me to space out in an unproductive way, so to keep me tethered to the earth, I intersperse some Kishi Bashi, Sufjan, and The Cure. Beware: this playlist inevitably convinces me whatever I've worked on is genius; strings and dramatic tension have a way with doing that.
6 Matt Torralba Andrews, Assistant Editor
I often write to film scores, usually films that moved me in some way. This is perhaps because I write fiction, and there is often an implicit sense of narrative in film soundtracks. The two tracks on my playlist that are not from films are "saman" by Ólafur Arnalds, whose ambient-, classical-, and electronic-infused music could take up an entire writing playlist, and "Speak Low" by Sarah Vaughn, whose rendition of this song is one of my favorite vocal performances and inspired a story I wrote a few years back of the same name.
7 Abigail Jensen, Contributing Editor
As the season turns, I'm reminded of wintery nights in the pubs of Glasgow, my previous home, and listening to Celtic folk music played by local musicians. A mix of traditional Scottish/Irish songs and some new compositions in the style, this playlist focuses on rhythm and atmosphere. It's easy to be transported to Highland landscapes or community spaces with a roaring fire. Artists like Julie Fowlis and the Tom Campbell Trio, who I had the pleasure of seeing live, have written new songs that celebrate Gaelic language and culture, while The Corries's version of "The Skye Boat Song" and "Annie Laurie" are a revival of classic Scots ballads. As someone who writes about folklore, nature, and language, these songs get me in the spirit to consider those subjects, and ending with the infectious "Fingal's Cave" feels like a celebration of what I've managed to write that day!
8 Carla Crujido, Assistant Editor
It’s no secret that I absolutely adore disco. As a child, I worshiped at the wooden platforms of my Auntie Helen—in her early twenties at the height of the disco era—who was a self-professed Dancing Queen. Even when she lived with us in the then tiny town of Kennewick, Washington, she found places to dance the night away (Cosmo Angus after midnight, anyone?). Disco has been my default mood elevator for decades. Summertime blues? Disco! A bout of low self-esteem? Disco! Writer’s block? Disco. You get the idea. Consider this my blue mood ring (get it?) playlist that lifts me up and gets me ready to write. Don’t believe me? Give it a listen and see what happens?
9 Shreya Fadia, Copyeditor
Although I was born a little too late to make mixtapes of the cassette variety, I spent an inordinate amount of my free time in high school burning mix CDs for my friends or else listening to the CDs they made for me (of course with song lyrics written in Sharpie all over the top of the disc, in concentric rings of increasingly unreadable text). We made soundtracks for breakups, soundtracks for our shitty moods and good moods and birthdays, to listen to just because; on each disc, the songs arranged just so—a dash of Dashboard, a smattering of Bright Eyes, followed by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—forming, in a way, their own narrative arc. Through the lens of each mix, our own lives momentarily took on meaning, cohered into something legible.
These days, I don’t put much time into curating playlists. In fact, I’ve got just the one, songs that I’ve gathered over the years, a mix of new and new to me and reliable old standbys. I rarely listen to music when I’m writing, but I’ll hit shuffle or play some song on repeat while I think through a plot point or puzzle through a scene or, more often, when I need some space from my own words, need to escape into a different kind of language. Though I couldn't tell you why it works, somehow, this process of getting out of my head helps me, when I return to the page, to find direction, to make sense of the story.
These songs are a random sampling (well, the most recently played) from my ever-growing list of favorites, but across them there is a certain family resemblance, an internal logic—they’re moody, dark, a bit melancholic. The sort of thing that might play in the background as a film’s protagonist stares broodily off into the middle distance. I'm well past my mixtape days, but in these songs, I suppose my inner emo kid lives on, black eyeliner, beat-up Chucks, and all.