Music to Write By

First published 1/6/2005; last edited 1/6/2005

Adapted from an article previously published on Epinions.com

These days, I mostly listen to music while I'm sitting at my computer all day writing. I need the music to do two things for me: inspire my creativity, and make me work. For inspirational music I need "mood music," something that seems a little magical, weird, or unusual. To make me work I need something with a driving beat, something that'll keep me awake and get my fingers moving fast. In that spirit, here are several albums that I've used over and over to help me, in no particular order:

Fish: Sunsets on Empire

This album has a great rhythm, but it's also a bit unusual and weird. Fish's voice is strong and conveys emotion wonderfully well. "What Colour is God?" is defiant and strong. "Goldfish & Clowns" is quirky and inspiring: "Between sunsets and dawn, kings, queens and pawns, goldfish and clowns..." "Tara," on the other hand, is sweet and sad, yet still with that touch of magic: "I'll bring you dragon's teeth from silver beaches, shells from Africa..." Some of the songs have a distinct urban jungle feel to them. Others make me think of faraway worlds and mystical creatures

Oingo Boingo: Best O' Boingo

There are other Boingo albums that have a larger concentration of their truly great songs on them. But this album has a higher rhythm, a consistently faster pace. Danny Elfman as always has a feel for the truly bizarre, mixed with way-too-catchy rhythms. There's "Dead Man's Party" and "Weird Science" for the fun & bizarre, or "Who Do You Want to Be." Even the songs that don't particularly inspire me have a rhythm that can't fail to get me moving. Most importantly, this is one of the few Boingo albums that has "Skin" on it. "Skin" is a slower, darker song that has inspired some of my more horrific writing. I wrote half of a 10,000-word contract to this one song on infinite repeat.

Soundtrack: Mortal Kombat

Okay, this one probably seems a little silly. But it's amazing! It has lots of high-energy high-mood pieces that make you feel like you can go all night. Whenever I have to stay up late, this is the album I choose. Mind you, this is the one album in this grouping that I don't use as a whole. I usually program out a handful of tracks that start to annoy me if I hear them too often. In general, soundtracks can be wonderful albums for writing to. They're usually engineered to create a certain mood, and if it's a soundtrack for an action movie then it's definitely meant to get your heart racing! Pick a soundtrack from a movie in the same genre that you're writing in, if you're writing fiction.

Tom Waits: Bone Machine

Not everyone likes Tom Waits' raspy voice, but I find it's great inspirational stuff for dark, jarring writing. In particular, the songs "Murder in the Red Barn," "Black Wings," and my favorite, "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me" are enough to inspire all sorts of frightening plots. "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me" is best to listen to before I get started, however. I find I always need to lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and soak in the almost-whispered creepy atmosphere of it, which can really break the tempo if I'm in the middle of some high-energy writing.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Murder Ballads

If you haven't figured it out by now, I often write horror. And if you're writing about the horror of human nature, you can't do much better for inspiration than the dark, twisted murder-stories found in Murder Ballads. The style would probably appeal to fans of Tom Waits; the voice is less raspy, but I find there's something of a similar jarring feel and twisted sensibility. Many of these are slower songs, but they can make a nice break between high-energy albums like Mortal Kombat and Meli Meli so you don't wear yourself out by lunchtime!

Another good Nick Cave album is Tender Prey, which starts out strong with a song about a man sentenced to the electric chair ("The Mercy Seat,") and also contains one of my favorite lines: "My blood was blacker than the chambers of a dead nun's heart" ("Up Jumped the Devil").

Cheb Mami: Meli Meli

This is not American music, and if you only know English you won't understand a word of the lyrics. That's okay - it doesn't matter. This is really neat stuff. It's catchy and unusual, partly in French, mostly in Arabic, making use of modern rhythms and styles mixed beautifully and seamlessly with "traditional Algerian beats." Cheb Mami has the most exquisite control over his voice, and it's hard not to be amazed by his skill. If you aren't into horror this is probably a much better choice for you - it's light and airy (but not air-headed), both happy and sad.

Delerium: Karma

This is the epitome of light, beautiful female voices singing magical, otherworldly music. There's still a reasonable rhythm to some of them, so you won't lose your momentum. But this is stuff that could have been sung by faeries. This is made all the more clear through some of the song titles: "enchanted," "forgotten worlds," "lamentation," "window to your soul." If you're already familiar with Delerium, this is a bit different. They pulled in female vocalists Sarah McLachlan, Kristy Thirsk, Camille Henderson, Jacqui Hunt. Delerium wrote the music, and the women wrote the lyrics and sang the songs. The result is truly enchanting. If you write fantasy, you'd be hard-pressed to find better inspiration than this album.

Ayreon: The Dream Sequencer (The Universal Migrator Part I)

It's a concept album on the science fiction end of the scale, that mixes the occasional somewhat martial rhythm with magical melodies and upbeat, optimistic tempos. It's hard to do better than the second piece, "My House on Mars," for both energetic rhythm and inspiring mood, or track 7, "Temple of the Cat," for sheer magic. I find that concept albums can be very inspiring, as they were designed in the first place to evoke certain moods and play to certain stories.

I hope this gives you one or two ideas of where to start when choosing music to write to. The trick is usually to balance the mood and rhythm pieces. If you're already having a high-energy day, go for more mood pieces. If you're already feeling inspired, go for more rhythm pieces. When you need to, you can burn a CD or create a playlist with a decent mix of mood and inspiration songs from various sources. This makes up for the fact that there are a lot of albums out there that only have a couple of appropriate songs on them.