How The Heck Can I Listen to Music While I Write?
I’ve been so overjoyed by the response to Lessons in Magic and Disaster lately. People are getting ARCs or finding it on NetGalley/Edelweiss and sharing their reactions to my fantasy novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship. The other day, Kurt Busiek — one of my all-time writing heroes, whose work taught me so much — wrote on Bluesky that it was my best book yet, “hands down.”
Anyway, you can pre-order Lessons anywhere, or get a signed/personalized copy from Green Apple Books. (And please don’t forget to submit your receipt for a reward!) And if you’re in Los Angeles, I’ll be reading from Lessons in Magic and Disaster at an event called Bad Romance at North Figueroa Bookshop on March 27 — please come say hi!
How Music Helps Me Write, and What It Says About Writing
I really like sharing music recommendations at the end of my newsletters. Partly because it feels good to use whatever platform I have to promote other awesome creators who might need a little more love — same as with my monthly book reviews — but also because music is super important to me. I like geeking out about music, even if I'm not particularly adept at music-writing. I grew up singing in choirs, and music was something that I always had in common with my father.
Music is also super important to my writing process. I know a lot of people who say they can't write while listening to music, but for me it's almost the opposite. Whatever process I go through to get myself into a focused state of mind where I'm accessing my imagination and entering into the inner life of my characters — a trance, basically — listening to music really helps.
A big part of my writing practice has involved establishing good habits that help me to be in a writing space. Before covid, my writing habits revolved a lot around walking to a distant cafe, sitting with some coffee, and writing a lot. It was a huge struggle to change my behavior during the lockdown, and I haven't quite returned to cafe writing even now. Also, I have a “no internet during business hours“ rule. But I also listen to music all the time when I'm writing, and I feel like it helps in a few ways.
Music helps me tune out the outside world and focus just on what I'm doing on the screen or on the notebook page. It also activates some playful part of my brain that is good at coming up with random bullshit. And it helps me to create a mood, and access whatever emotion I’m trying to capture.
I think of it a little bit like a soundtrack: the same way music does a lot of work in movies and TV shows to convey feelings, but also pacing and mood. I’ll sometimes put together playlists for books and stories I'm working on, and in fact the acknowledgment section of Lessons in Magic and Disaster includes a list of albums I listen to while writing.
Sometimes I’ll pick the music I'm listening to based on the vibe of the project I'm working on. For a portal fantasy novel I wrote years ago and still kind of love, there was a lot of gospel music by Kirk Franklin and Deitrick Haddon among others. For All the Birds in the Sky, I remember there was a lot of Mountain Goats and Honest Bob and the Factory-To-Dealer Incentives. An urban fantasy novel I was writing back in the day seemed to call for a lot of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. The novel I finished recently, which I hope I'll be able to talk about sometime soon, was written while listening to a ton of bouncy love songs.
I don't want to exaggerate the extent to which I tailor my musical selections to the project I'm writing. The truth is, there's always going to be a lot of Parliament-Funkadelic playing, no matter what I'm writing. (Though even there, it could be more Funkadelic some days, and more Parliament on others.)
But it's true that if I'm writing something super introspective with a lot of messed-up internal monologue, I can come sometimes conjure that mood more easily by listening to Joni Mitchell rather than Wham!. Sometimes a particular piece of music is just an easy way to access a state of mind that I might otherwise have to work harder to get into.
Also, I like experimenting with different music for different writing days, but often I’ll just listen to whatever the latest thing is that I've gotten into — which will probably be mentioned in an edition of this newsletter.
I used to be somewhat fanatical about only being into old-school funk and R&B, with the occasional forays into hip-hop, jazz-funk or blues. Back in the day, I had a pretty funny conversation with my friend Kelly: I confessed that I was a total hypocrite about genres. On the one hand, I used to get annoyed when record stores would smush all newish music into one genre, so I had to paw through John Prine albums to get to Prince. On the other hand, I felt as though books should free themselves from the cage of genre labels, because it was all just stories. Basically, I didn’t want my writing to be trapped inside genre walls, but I wanted the music I listened to be one specific genre, with no adulteration. Even then, I knew this was kind of an absurd stance to take. (More recently, it's been driven home to me how much musical genre labels have been driven by racism and arbitrary hierarchies. Like Bobby Womack said, "Music is music.")
Anyway, I feel as though writing while listening to music is a little bit like dancing, in that the music makes my body do things that reflect what's happening inside my head — except that in this case, I'm typing or scribbling. But it's still basically dancing. And also, I take actual dance breaks as I write, which is very good for avoiding muscle cramps and burnout.
Some folks I know can’t listen to music that has lyrics when they’re writing, but I honestly don’t mind. I might not pay that much attention to the content of the lyrics most of the time, but sometimes I do, and that's okay. Even if I'm actually singing along for a moment, it's still just helping to create a mood for me. I don't, like, ever start typing the lyrics to a song instead of what's supposed to be happening in a particular scene.
If a piece of music has really dense lyrics that are more heavily featured, like certain hip-hop albums, I may find it a little more challenging to write while listening to it — at least until I've listened to the album a few times and kind of know the lyrics enough not to be too distracted by them so much.
Speaking of which, I don't have an easier time writing to music I already know than music that is brand new to me, at least most of the time. The only issue with music that's new to me is that sometimes I might hit a song I really don't like, and that will kill my writing progress until I skip ahead. But generally, listening to a brand new piece of music makes me feel excited, which feeds into my excitement about getting some writing done.
I'm not here to convince you to start listening to music while you write. My guess is that some people can do this, and others just can't. Or that it's a thing you get used to over time, which works better for some people than others. If you've had a hard time writing while listening to music that does have lyrics, you could try putting on instrumental music, especially some awesome jazz or classical stuff. But really, this isn't for everyone.
What I'd say is probably for everyone is coming up with your own habits and practices around writing, that help you section it off from the rest of your life and allow you to switch off the dealing-with-everyday-crap parts of your brain and switch on the urgent-daydreaming parts of your brain. It could be candles — don't burn everything down! — or incense, or a particular kind of tea. It could be your cat perched in your lap, something that has been increasingly helpful to me lately. Whatever. I think finding something really nice and friendly to do while you write can just have put you in a chill creative space. Just don't pressure yourself, and remember to have fun no matter what!
Music I Love Right Now
If I was gonna list my top ten favorite live albums of all time, at least four of them would be Go-go music: a musical style from Washington D.C. involving heavy percussion, call-and-response, and songs that just flow into each other without any pauses.
One of my favorite Go-go live albums is EU’s 2 Places at the Same Time, recorded half in NYC and half in D.C. I’m still pissed that the digital release of that album is so badly remastered that you can barely hear the groove — but luckily, I ripped my vinyl copy using a really good rig, so I can always listen to it anywhere I go. (If you can send me proof that you purchased the official digital release, I might be persuaded to send you my mp3s of my vinyl rip.)
Anyway, I have some excellent news.
Another great Go-go live album from 1986 was remastered for digital release, and it sounds amazing. Whoever remastered Live at Breeze’s Metro Club by Rare Essence knew what they were doing, and I thank them for their service. Just listen to the remastered version of “I Must Be Dreamin’":
Okay, so I mentioned call-and-response, right? Mostly that’s to do with the chants and other vocals, but listen to the first minute or so of the track above. The bass is doing a call-and-response thing with the horn solos. It’s incredible. My jaw hit the floor when I heard this for the first time last week. It’s just so freaking good. Oh also, the band’s original drummer was named Quentin “Footz” Davidson, and you can totally hear why he got that nickname: he’s got a relentless foot on the drum pedal that holds down the groove.
I’d never really listened to a live recording of Rare Essence before — I mostly know their later studio tracks like “Lock It” and “Overnight Scenario.” But this is a killer show as well as their earliest official release ever, and they sound very similar to other bands at the time like Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers. (In fact, Live at Breeze’s Metro Club contains a lot of little shout-outs to Chuck Brown, who worked with Rare Essence a lot over the years.)
Unlike the EU live album, where there are basically two live tracks where the band plays a ton of different songs and throws in various licks (plus one studio track), this Rare Essence album is actually broken into songs, and they’re pretty much all bangers. Even “Mickey’s Monkey,” a cover of an old 1960s Motown song, starts out kind of saccharine but very quickly turns into a nasty jam.
A lot of Go-go music was meant to be listened to live, rather than played in the studio. So if you wanna understand the roots of the genre, I’d highly recommend getting Live at Breeze’s Metro Club, along with the best version of that EU album that you can find. And also Chuck Brown’s Any Other Way To Go? and Put Your Hands Up!. Oh, and Trouble Funk’s album called simply Live — the one that’s divided into Side A, Side B, Side C and Side D. This is basically some of the best music ever committed to tape.