GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #624: TIN EAR

 I'm always impressed when I meet someone who has more than one talent. I meet a lot of authors, and I'm glad to call many of them friends, but when I learn they can do creative things other than writing? That's pretty fucking cool. Especially if it's music. I'm a little jealous of people who can play instruments because I have a tin ear. I just don't know how they do it.

If I'm listening to music, for example, I can't tell the instruments apart. I can't tell the drums from the lead from the rhythm from the bass. Sometimes I can't tell if it's a piano or not unless I know ahead of time there's a piano being played. An instrument has to be off the beaten path for me to recognize it as separate from the others. Like when Ensiferum uses a pipe organ. Or when Korpiklaani uses an accordion. Or when Alestorm uses bagpipes. Or when the Dead Kennedys use a French horn. Which happened once, by the way.

I come from a fairly musical family. Mom tried to teach me to play the piano when I was a kid. I can mangle the Star Wars theme pretty well, and I can do a really terrible job of "Fur Elise." Like, really really bad. My stepfather, for all the rotten shit he did to me, tried to teach me to play guitar. He gave up on that pretty quickly. Besides, he had a son that was fucking phenomenal at it. My brother, Alex, can work a guitar like a pro. He's been doing it since he was, what, four?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For some reason or another, I never could get my head around music. I took a guitar class during my freshman year of high school, and I'm pretty sure I made the teacher doubt her own existence many times, or at least made her think that perhaps she shouldn't have gone into teaching a beginners class with me in it.

Also, for a minute, I played drums in junior high. I use the word "played" very loosely, mostly because I can't keep a beat.

I'm fascinated when watching live performances. Most people just kind of rock out, or they get into the show in whatever way they need to. I watch musicians' fingers kind of like a dog watching a card trick. It's kind of like magic to me. I don't know how they do it, and I wonder if maybe I could figure it out if I watched their hands.

Nope.

I can't draw or paint or sculpt or anything, either. But I'm busy enough with writing, anyway. I take solace in that.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #348: MUSIC AND WRITING

 I can write under any conditions and have over the last few decades. I'm fond of saying that I'm sure I could write in a war zone. I've never tested it and don't really want to, but I'm sure I could do it. But writing with music is very helpful. I try to tailor said music for each project.

The first for-real novel I wrote (not just something I threw together in high school) had a protagonist obsessed with old time rock songs. His father was an abusive Elvis impersonator, and the character never put two and two together as to why he loved that kind of music so much. While writing this book--which will never see the light of day, in case you're wondering--I listened to a lot of Elvis. Chuck Berry. Buddy Holly. Roy Orbison.

When I wrote STRIP I listened to the kind of rock you might hear in a strip club. AC/DC. GNR. Whitesnake. I also listened to the kind of rock you might hear in a honky tonk. George Thorogood in particular.

POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS needed wall to wall punk music. From Sex Pistols to Dead Kennedys. Anyone who read that book is probably thinking, yeah, no shit. Those influences came right through.

While writing the short bizarro novel I just finished, I listened to the score for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It gave me the exact feeling I wanted for the story to go. And while rewriting my splatter western, I listened to the score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (and if I was still writing when it ended, I'd go over to A Few Dollars More).

For the splatter SF I'm currently editing, I listened to weird spacy music. Shit that wouldn't make a lot of sense unless you were thinking with the distant future in mind.

So yeah. I believe that the music you listen to while writing not only helps, but it gets into your mind and inspires. I highly recommend the process.