It's interesting the way music can affect one.
A little background — one of the great things about a writing project for me is finding out what music is going to accompany it. Before I Wake was written largely to traditionals and ballads (from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music), American Beauty and Workingman's Dead, by the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.
For me, the music helps set a tone that the project then mirrors, to whatever extent. I wrote a short story last fall — The Small Rain Down — in an intense three-day writing binge that owes much to the playing and re-playing of Nick Drake's Way to Blue. The dark, morose, fall-hued and tragic tones of the music lent themselves perfectly to the story, and I don't think it would have been the same without it.
Just what music will work often takes me by surprise. Which brings me to this morning.
I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks e-conversing with a friend about The Band's first two albums, Music from Big Pink and their self-titled second album (aka The Brown Album). These are among my favourite records, but its the sort of fondness observed in absentia – I don't actually need to listen to albums I know as well as these. But the conversation prompted me to put them on, and within seconds of sitting down with the pen and notebook I realized that I had found the perfect accompaniment to the story I'm currently working on (tentatively titled "Lost Boys"). Rural, mysterious, timeless — perfect.
So I was writing a few minutes ago and The Weight came on. If there's a list of songs that've been played to death in the Classic Rock era, The Weight would have to be pretty near the top. It's been so abused, it's become wallpaper — listening to it, one doesn't even really HEAR it anymore. "Oh, The Weight." Then back to whatever you were doing.
But good music will out, in the end, and within seconds of the song starting I had put the pen down and was utterly transfixed with the song. It grabbed me and held me for its full duration. No more wallpaper — this was passionate, vital, enigmatic…
All by way of not having much of a point, I suppose. Except I wanted to get it down.
"I don’t actually need to listen to albums I know as well as these."
So odd in appearance, but so very true. This became a little less true for me once I got my iPod four years ago, when I loaded what I considered to be my core library onto the iPod, and was suddenly hearing deep tracks from, say, "Sandinista" that I probably hadn't heard in 20 years, and the albums I kept hearing that I didn't need to hear (if that makes sense) so I finally took them off the iPod.
And now the iPod is primarily about new music and stuff I feel like I have to have with me at any given time, which changes and shifts. But I don't need to have "Who's Next" or "No Code" or "Horses" on the iPod, always, because I don't need to hear them.
There are albums that one gets to know anew, and more deeply, through the new technology. And songs.
It's funny you should mention Horses. A couple of months ago, we each bought a 1g IRiver to share time with the 20g. For my (bright orange) 1g, I went through the collection and pulled essential tracks – tracks such that I could have on shuffle and listen to while walking to work or waiting for the bus or whatever and never have to shuffle past something. It's been a long process of trial and tweaking, but I think I've got it down.
One of the tracks that has ended up being part of that walkin' jukebox is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the Land triptych (horses/land…/la mer). I don't know why I drop it on there, but I can't express the power that track has over me, the intense surge I get from it. Maybe you can relate (a quick check of the dates shows me some 30 years late arriving to this particular party).