The Write Music

I generally like to write to a soundtrack. With five kids puttering around the house, it usually helps to kill the background yammer and arguing over the 2.347 seconds longer that they got to play on the PlayStation and how he always gets to play forever and I never get to and the stomping off mad and the "he hit me for no reason".

But what to listen to?

I use iTunes on my Mac, but I don't have an iTunes account. I'm afraid to. Between me and the kids, I would be broke in two months. "But there's all this cool music and TV shows you can download and the songs only cost $1.00!" Yeah, they only cost $1.00 (well, $0.99 to be precise, but how many people does that actually fool? We always round it up anyway)...EACH.

So I listen to online radio. And if my handy little MP3 stream ripper happens to be running so I can catch those bits of the show that I missed because I had to be away from my desk, well… Current tracks in iTunes: 2,690.

So for those who just can't seem to find the right music to fit the mood for writing, here's my suggestions:

1) Don't listen to music you can easily understand the lyrics to. For me, it's distracting and breaks my already fragile creative concentration.

2) The mood of the music can affect the mood of the writing if you let it. Unless you're willing to stave off this effect, listen to music that somehow connects with the mood you're trying to convey. How you interpret that statement will have a lot to do with your own musical tastes.

3) Don't think that just listening to music that you "enjoy" right now is the same thing as listening to music that will help you write. You should be willing to expand your musical horizons anyway, because there's a lot of great music out there that you've yet to discover, just like there's a lot of great books out there you haven't read yet. Picking the right music to create art with is a much taller order than simply figuring out what your preferences are.

4) Assimilating a new musical style will affect your creative output in much the same way that assimilating new artistic styles (whether high art like painting or sculpture, or literary) will influence what and how you write. Don't ask me to explain it because I can't. I just know it does.

5) It seems like music that is creatively complex is more conducive to writing than other forms of music. That's not a rule, of course, just an observation. The most complex music I listen to is probably jazz and the most basic is primitive delta blues. But just because blues music is not musically complex like jazz is, it's still creatively complex because of the sound and the subject matter. You know this already because you probably don't choose to listen to kid's music when you write. It's not creatively complex enough to serve Music's intended purpose (topic for another day). Classical music of the 16th and 17th centuries is exaulted for reasons that have virtually nothing to do with tuxedoes and Rolls Royces, despite what your redneck sensibilities tell you (and before you go off all mad, remember: I'm from Missouri—I am a redneck).

I listen to Big Band, jazz, and blues quite a bit. In fact, I listen to the 1920's Radio Network probably more than others. KMHD (check iTunes Radio listings for both these stations) is also a great place to plug into for several hours and let the music drift into the background while the words on the screen take over. The Midnight Blues stations are also great.

Until I started getting into old movies, I didn't really listen to Big Band that much. But as the current musical trends toward nihilistic songs about lost sex (not love…apparently, post-modernists don't believe in love and define sexual intercourse as the highest expression of the "L" word) have passed me by (good riddance, glad to see them go), I've gravitated toward music with a richer experience. Big Band is musically rich, uplifting, and very soothing for someone who lives on the outer edge of the stress zone. It's also nostalgic, of course, which is probably why I turned to it in the first place (like I have all things early 20th century…literature, art, clothes), but it's an interest that continues to grow and mature instead of wan due to lack of depth, like post-modern music.