Music Notes

Music and Writing

This was inspired by a post by Dawn Embers in the forum hosted by my good friend hammer48… "Music and Writing"   He wrote an essay about the music he enjoys, as well:

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I love music, no question about that. From when I was a toddler I could identify songs from those "call in what song we just sampled" radio contests, and I knew many songs without any idea of who or what they actually were. I remember identifying myself with the lady Billy Joel sings about in The Longest Time; that is perhaps one of the earliest songs I have a specific memory attached to.

These days, I have a bit of an Asperger's approach to music: I know every single detail about two bands in particular, love em both to pieces, and for the most part not so much about anyone else out there. That's not to say I can't identify a couple dozen singers by their voices or I'm not wasting brain power obsessively analyzing and categorizing and criticizing every single song that reaches my ears, but my mainstays, the two artists I count on to be consistently decent and feel like I know their lead singers personally and measure time by the tracks and albums they release, are two: OneRepublic and Imagine Dragons.

As any of this relates to writing, I prefer to write in silence because I take the music so seriously. I don't like having my "most precious" songs on when I'm doing something else, and if I had my way about ambient background music I'd probably have instrumentals only. For me, music with voices is like having a bunch of random people shouting at me, vying for my attention and pulling me aside to tell me stories like old acquaintances at a high school reunion. I get vibes of each artist's personality and style and level of class, besides each individual song's era, style and whether it sounds like they produced it with GarageBand on their laptop, and generally the sensory overload drives me crazy.

This isn't to say music doesn't inspire me: much the opposite. As an adult, I self-regulate my cultural and sensory input by avoiding most movies and novels for a multitude of psychosocial reasons. So music becomes my window into the feelings and adventures of humanity; the lyrics are bite-sized stories, and the sounds are atmosphere, and I spin off from there. (It's related to my tendency to find the descriptions on the backs of novels to be more interesting than the novel itself.) I have so much going on in my head as it is, that the music helps channel, control and sort it out. Music, particularly Imagine Dragons, taught me I am not alone in what I feel, and that understanding has facilitated my confidence in the stories I can dream up and write down.

As many of you know - I frequently reminded y'all by way of self-motivation! - during May and June (2024) I dived headfirst into a project, also hosted by Jeff, called "Musicology Anthology" , where we choose an album and write a song for each track. My decision to take on this project was probably the most fun I've had on WdC so far. I chose an underrated album from one of my two favorite artists; it had eighteen tracks, and I seriously doubted I would complete it in time to qualify, but I rode a massive wave of creativity, finished in time, and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it.

So for me, music and writing are in many ways inseparable. Not only do I journal obsessively about the music I hear and listen to, but I use it as a springboard and spark for the stories I write, either subconsciously or actively, usually in fairly subtle and unexpected ways.

Word count: 627

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