Category Archives: Music

My Secret Love Affair With Jazz

I could argue that Jazz is the most important musical style out there. The most groundbreaking, the most influential, the most responsible for shaping modern musical expression. I may not be able to prove it (though I’m happy to debate it), but I can say one thing definitively: it’s the biggest musical influence on my life.

And I don’t know why. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to yet.

I don’t listen to it every day. But I don’t have to. The music that I do listen to, and that I like, when it’s not Jazz, is probably created by musicians who were raised up on Jazz, taught it, loved it, and built something new out of it. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about foundations, about influence, about where our tastes come from. Just as I’ve been going back and re-reading (and reviewing) classic works of science fiction, so too have I been going back to my musical roots. I’ve been rereading some old music texts, listening to songs, studying where lines of style intersect and veer off. Did you know that Jazz in the Philippines, for example, didn’t start with the influx of American soldiers in the 40s, but most likely began earlier, with a group of Filipinos who’d fled the Spanish-ruled islands decades before and settled in New Orleans? (Before I left Penn I was writing a paper on it for my World Music class.)

Jazz is so interesting to me partly because I don’t remember why I like it. I grew up listening to rock with my mom. She woke up almost every morning, opened the doors to the deck, and turned on her sound system loud enough to wake the neighbors. Most days, this was on purpose. From her I get AC/DC, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Leon Russell, Jethro Tull. From a close family friend I get Bluegrass, and from a couple of years when I was about 6 or 8, I think, I got my mom’s brief country influence – Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson – and a vague memory of how to 2-step. This led to an understanding of the fundamentals of Heavy Metal when I got into high school in 1991, mixed with some hard rock: Metallica, Iron Maiden, Pantera, Guns N Roses. I spent some time with Foreigner, Def Leppard, Journey, Night Ranger, Aerosmith, and Chicago cassette tapes in my Walkman. By the end of high school I was into Nirvana and the Cure, got into Bauhaus and Psychedelic Furs in my first bout of college, did some time in the goth scene, got into chick/indie rock and 70s glam rock (hello Indigo Girls, Iggy Pop, David Bowie) …

But where does my love of Jazz come from? The thing I didn’t mention above is that at the same time I knew the words to every song on Iron Maiden’s Powerslave album, and GnR’s debut, I was hanging out with the jazz band at school. I was in band, too (yes, there was marching, and an outfit), going from flute in middle school to French horn, trumpet, and percussion in high school. I could sit and listen to the trumpet line for hours, I dated a few drummers, I befriended the jazz choir kids – I loved it all. I’ve asked my mom and she has no idea where I’d have heard Jazz outside of school. She says I just liked it because I liked it.

Maybe that’s it.

But like my spotty ability to play a musical instrument, my musical history knowledge has some gaps in it. I took a class in American Musical History in Sacramento, when I was finishing up my AA degrees, and like I said, I’ve read some books, but I don’t know as much as I’d like to. Music matters to me, and always has, and though I’ll never work in it, it’s like my art history studies – it helps me to understand the world and to understand myself. So this is me, educating myself. I am going back to the beginning and I am going to teach myself what I don’t know. It’s never too late to learn, after all.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Musical Interlude

I listen to music every day. Some of it is part of getting myself in a certain mood to do a particular kind of writing, some of it is to lift me up while I bounce around getting things done, and some of it is to wrap myself externally in the way I feel inside. I make playlists for certain stories in progress, and listen to them on repeat, and other times I pick an album I like and play it all the way through.

This is some of what I’ve been listening to this week:

The Walkmen, “I Lost You”, from 2008. Video is old tornado footage.

Esperanza Spaulding, performing Lauryn Hill’s “Tell Him” at the White House, 2009

Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars”

Counting Crows with a live version of “Anna Begins”

There’s Music in Everything I Do

My hands shake, my knees quake – it’s everyday, the same way, ’cause then came you …

I listen to music when I write, which has never surprised me, because I listen to music when I live too. There’s always music in my life – playing through the laptop I’m writing this blog post on, on my cellphone so I can listen to it in the gym, in my head when I wake up in the morning, and playing through my memories of the most important things in my life. The people I care about all have music associated with them, though I mostly don’t share which songs, exactly, remind me of them. For me, I might be drawn to the lyrics, the song as a whole, or just pieces of the instrumental track. I’ve loved a song for its bass line, or its horn section, and nothing else, so when I tell my secret soundtracks to others, I have to try to explain something which might not fit comfortably into words.

I am currently writing, and rewriting, a 5,000 word short story for an anthology I was invited to*. I agreed because I know (slightly) the editor, I know the publisher a bit better, but the genre is just outside of my comfort zone, which makes it good practice but not so easy to actually bring to life. Of course I have a soundtrack for this project, which I’ve played on repeat and shuffle and just one song over and over, getting the feel of the words right. Finding the right music helps me to write faster as well, I think because as I’m putting the playlist together in my head I’m feeling out the emotional component of the words I want to put down. I know I do a lot of work in my head before I sit down to write, which inevitably makes writing smoother.

My current work-in-progress sountrack:

Steady As She Goes – The Raconteurs

Don’t Stand So Close to Me - The Police

Never There - Cake

Pictures Of You - Cure

Into the Ocean - Blue October

Don’t Push - The Exit

Round Here - Counting Crows

Heartbeats - Jose Gonzalez

Someone Else’s Life - Joshua Radin

The story’s about clockwork robots and lost magic, but it’s also about finding your place and wanting something you can’t have. There’s a bittersweet quality I want to make sure I keep in the edited version. In between stacks of books on the top floor of a besieged library on a dying world, I want the human element to shine through.

I may change the songs around before the story’s done, but the music will help me remember what I’m trying to say.

My favorite song off this list right now is:

Someone Else’s Life (.mp3)

It might not mean anything to you, but some other song out there does. What songs are fueling your writing this week?

* Sure I am. Just not right this minute, exactly.

History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man

Godzilla!

But of course, you knew that was a line from Blue Oyster Cult’s classic rock masterpiece – “Godzilla” – which was playing when I started this post. You, of course, know a great deal about what’s good in music, and for that I love you.

I can’t write without music on. I have to make soundtracks that correspond the the mood that I’m trying to invoke when I write, so that they can inspire in a me a sense memory of the emotions I associate with those songs. I have several soundtracks lined up and ready to go at the moment, all connected to a different work in progress.  When I started writing again this summer, the first anthology I ran across was Rigor Amortis, which celebrates its launch today. An open athology, it was looking for zombie erotica, a horror-filled subset of a genre I’d never written before. I was up for the challenge, and my finished product, “Mitch’s Girl” was my first sale this summer, but it took a serious shift in listening tastes to get into the mindset of a Midwesterner with dead-girl tastes.

Laura Veirs’ “July Flame” invoked those last summer evenings, when the corn is ripe and the sky is darkening to a deeper shade of blue. It’s a song for sitting quietly on the porch with a cool drink and a cotton dress.

“Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd has that long slow sound which reminds me that nothing needs to be rushed. Lyrically, it’s a song about being a good person with simple, down home, values, but musically it has a melodic tension in the bass line which stretches out over a faster guitar track, like pulling molasses out of a jar.

The Me First and the Gimmie Gimmie’s cover of “Country Roads” reminds me of being in the passenger seat of a truck driven by a boy I didn’t know well enough to be driving with, one of my feet up on the dashboard, singing loudly to the original of this song while take the curves of a winding mountain road just a little too fast. It reminds me of high summer, yellowing grasses, and a dry heat in the afternoons.

“Cross-Eyed Mary” by Jethro Tull brings me the creepy factor I needed for the this story. The lyrics are dark and wanting, and the singer lends his dirty secrets to the song when he sings. I needed all of that, and a bit more, to write about longing for a response from a woman who only exists from the navel down.