“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.” —Hunter S. Thompson
Writing and music are deeply entwined for me.
Since childhood, I've connected songs—their lyrics, their moods, the feelings they evoke—with stories and daydreams. Something about listening to music puts my mind in an especially associative state. An only child who populated her lonely world with characters from books, movies, and TV, I wrote myself into their stories, joining them on their adventures but also finding my self and my place in the world through my relationships to them. So much of this was expressed through the soundtracks I created for the stories in my head: the songs I'd sing and that would be sung to me; the ones that would be playing on the radio at important moments.
When I got a little bit older and started watching music videos—MTV is sixteen days my elder, but I don't believe I began watching videos prior to Vh1's arrival in 1985 at the very earliest—the associations among songs and stories only grew stronger. Early music videos were a mixed bag of live concert footage, random and chaotic concepts and images, and occasionally mini-movies that told either the story of the song or a totally unrelated story. A vast store of images and tropes emerged from this (my favorite) art form, all made more essential and poignant by being delivered hand in hand with music.
Sound is the first sense I rely on. I have terrible vision and even with the benefit of corrective lenses, I am almost alarmingly visually unobservant. The tiniest noise, however, can hijack my entire awareness. I hear the first two thuds of a bass line in a noisy restaurant where no one else is even aware that music is playing, and I have to—and almost always immediately can— identify the song. So it makes sense that sound is the first inspiration for much of my writing. (I am intermittently working on a novel that was entirely inspired by a solo Robert Plant song from 1988. It's strange and slightly embarrassing music, but the first time I heard the song (“Ship of Fools”), it triggered a host of feelings and landscapes that felt so lovely to dwell in that I had to make up a story just to have an excuse to dwell in them. I've ended up creating an entire playlist of songs for the different scenes I've written for the book, and they all share that strange and nearly inexplicable feeling that keeps me trying to scratch the itch of articulating it. And, of course, the hope springs eternal that there's anyone out there with whom this would click.
Click. That's a word I use a lot. I find that pseudo-synesthetic sound descriptions crop up frequently in my writing, often to describe psychological 'sensations'—like with click—that intuitive feeling of rightness, truth, or clarity. I also find myself returning frequently to the idea of a tuning fork to express the same idea...
Whenever I'm feeling stuck or bored or uninspired, not only as a writer but generally as a person, music is the best recourse. It gives me life. It opens my worldview; it opens my mind and my heart. It allows me to categorize feelings, ideas, and moods by nonverbal means, and that is the key to the creativity that ensues: I may not be able to describe exactly what something means to me, but I can associate it with other sensations, other feelings, and other thoughts and build a world of analogy. In the heart of every feature of this world beats the same rhythm of likeness, and what I want to happen is the equivalent of standing next to a reader in the middle of it all and gently touching their arm with my hand to draw their awareness. Standing so still, so quietly that we are holding our breath, we listen. My eyes ask, "Do you hear it?" and maybe at first they don't. But we wait a minute more, and slowly a smile replaces the look of confusion, and I know that they Get It.
Not so much to ask for, right? Sometimes I'm concerned that these ambitions are too high; that I stymy myself with the need for that level of connection. Sometimes I tell myself to just shut up and write a good story and not worry about if anyone knows what the hell I'm talking about on that level. But what pushes us to express ourselves if not the desire to be known and understood? To have the validation that someone else out there senses things or processes them in a similar way that you do? That you're both able to point to a common signifier (since that's all we've got) and say, "Yes, that! That's how I feel!"
Music is most often that signifier for me, making it extremely important to my writing. Music is the gateway to my imagination...