July has been up and down; I’ve tried to write and in a way I’ve suc­ceeded — in oth­ers failed. But I don’t want to talk about that this time, I would like to actu­ally write about some­thing more inter­est­ing to me than my own nar­cis­sism and writ­ing success.

I have always lis­tened to music when I write, as I believe many of us have. The one thing that I find help­ful about lis­ten­ing to some­thing is the sense of pace and/or emo­tion dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar writ­ing ses­sion. I have, in the past, lis­tened to an entire album just because I liked the band, but recently I have noticed I have to pick and choose the spe­cific tune for the moment I am try­ing to accom­plish. Is this me rely­ing on the emo­tion of a song too much? Not nec­es­sar­ily. I know where I want to go — I feel it — and I just want an exte­rior influ­ence to bring that out of me a bit more.

The meat of my obser­va­tion though, is that when you hear a par­tic­u­lar song, does it make you think of a spe­cific scene, char­ac­ter or emo­tion, or a story alto­gether? I have a few songs logged in my mind that are syn­ony­mous with vary­ing degrees of these choices and some­times, when I hear them ran­domly it pulls me right into that place.

One of these songs is Map of the Prob­lema­tique by one of my favourites, Muse. When­ever I hear it it casts me into the cli­mac­tic scene of some far off space saga… per­haps a war has been lost, per­haps a brother has fallen — you get the drift.

Another song that stirs me is Gor­toz A Ran — J’Attends by Danez Pri­gent & Lisa Ger­rard. Wow, this is a tune, melody… emo­tion per­son­i­fied or some­thing I don’t even know. It’s haunt­ing and deeply intro­spec­tive (to me). When­ever I hear this favourite, it just makes me think of loss, but also hope.

A new addi­tion to my mental-music library is Bet­ter Than Heaven by one of my top five bands, Bloc Party and although I love the band, I only really began lis­ten­ing to this song this last week. There is some­thing about the build up in the cho­rus that moves me and makes me think of space… I’m not sure how to describe it, but it just feels futur­is­tic; like a build-up and the brink of some­thing new.

These are only a few exam­ples of tunes that move me, or help gen­er­ate a more cre­ative process when I need it. Music is not the case for every­one, but I wanted to share and get it out there. I sup­pose I’m won­der­ing if it is the same for any­one else? Or if my attach­ment to spe­cific pieces of music (mod­ern espe­cially) is some­thing alto­gether intrin­sic to me as a writer.