In reading everyone’s introduction posts, there was a theme that seemed to wiggle it’s way in every so often: Music. Though not everyone, it seems most of you have some kind of intense connection to music. Maybe it’s a direct response to being a group of creative individuals, but regardless of that reasons behind it, I’m really interested in the way it plays in to writing.
I’m sure I’m not the only one that listens to music while I’m writing. It’s part of my “creative process,” without a doubt. I generally write after reading something really great or seeing a movie that was fantastic--anything that inspired heightened emotion, really. I write best when surrounded by noise and activity (I’ve gotten over some of my most stubborn periods of writers block when sitting in a booth at the skating rink after I finish my shift). However, as much as I love having that commotion around me, I get distracted by people-noise, like talking or laughing, and so I use music to tune it out. Does any one else find it so easy to tune out a song you love even when it's blasting in your ears, when it’s so difficult to tune out your mother’s voice shouting about dinner?
Classical music is sometimes the best for me, maybe because of the lack of words. I can listen to pianos and violins and just instantly slip in to that zone (and I know you all know what zone I’m talking about). In the same fashion, I can listen to a great Three Days Grace song and be pumped to write something high-energy. David Cook, my personal emotional-savior, can inspire just about anything from me.
And then there are songs that I’ve come to associate with finished works--Ryan Star’s Last Train Home, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus’s Your Guardian Angel or the Foo Fighter’s My Hero. The same goes for Counting Crow’s Color Blind, or Bethany Joy Galeotti’s…anything. Listen to Bethany Joy’s Quicksand, at 2:20, and tell me the urgency in her tone isn’t beautiful? That it doesn’t make you want to write something that parallels it perfectly. These are all songs that inspired some piece of writing that I love and so listening to them either reminds me of that, or makes me want to write something else I love.
I mean, isn’t it great when I song just works and suddenly you realize you’re not the only person to have ever felt this way? Songs can be deciphered in a thousand different ways, just like poems.
How does that play out for all of you? What songs or bands inspire you? Or is there something else, some other component of your creative process that is an absolute must-have?
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