Sounds of Music
The Music Man...
One question writers often get asked is if they write with music, and for me it’s a two-fold answer.
When I’m writing a first draft, I can’t listen to any music with lyrics. The only thing I can handle is what my daughters affectionately call “whale music,” a blend of ambient and electronica (here’s a great BandCamp link to the sort of stuff I favor nowadays—Synphaera. However, when I’m revising later drafts, I often create a playlist of all kinds of music—pop, rock, whatever—that fits the theme and mood of either the characters I’m writing about or the book overall. These playlists can get quite long, and I can listen to them on repeat, hour after hour, as I revise and hone whatever novel or screenplay I’m working on. I don’t think I’m necessarily unique in this, since I know many authors who create playlists (and in fact, when I worked on Lawmen: Bass Reeves, the writer’s room compiled one as well), but I might be unique in that I also create music of my own.
Throughout various times in my life, I’ve been more musically inclined than others; all throughout grade school and high school, I was in both concert and marching band, playing clarinet and drums. I also took several years of piano, and then started fiddling around with guitar in college. For a while after that, I even had a home studio setup, one I was eventually forced to sell when I moved to Los Angeles and my tiny apartment there couldn’t hold all the gear I’d accumulated.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve returned to making music in fits and starts. I got a new guitar and a computer-based home studio rig, and I’ve been teaching myself all the new technology and tinkering around with some ambient and lo-fi tracks. It amazes me how far the tech has come, and the incredible sound quality you can achieve sitting (mostly) in front of your home computer. There’s a certain freedom in this because I can create without the need to be “good;” it’s an artistic endeavor I can enjoy without the added pressure of deadlines and notes and criticism. The music I’m making is just for me, no one else, and no one else has to hear it or like it (however, as an aside, I did receive a song royalty check from BMI this week for song lyrics I created for my episode of Bass Reeves, so I guess all my musical dithering hasn’t been for naught, lol.)
Again, it truly is incredible the amount of music you can produce from your laptop nowadays, which is a good thing, because I’m getting word (fingers crossed) that I’ll be heading back to LA in a few weeks to finally start working again on not one, but seemingly two different shows. While I can’t share those details yet, I’ll be excited to start talking about the day-to-day work of a putting a TV series together when I can, and I’ll hopefully still have some time left over to knock out new tracks for my next self-produced album!
On the writing front the last week or so, I’ve been neck deep in tearing down and rebuilding the novel I just sold, and have been progressing on two others.
Since next week is a holiday I won’t be sending out a Substack post, but I hope you and yours have a great Thanksgiving.
As always, feel free to—