Delicate alchemy.
Besides the 1,129-song MP3 list I have on my computer, a random sampling of everything from early Bob Dylan to current Nine Inch Nails, my music-listening options at the moment are as follows:
– Run Lola Run, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
– Scarlet’s Walk, Tori Amos
– Renegades, Rage Against The Machine
– Night Song, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook
– OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail to the Thief, Radiohead
– Signals from my Childhood, various artists performing songs from the 1980s
The current unwritten projects milling about in my head right now are:
– Last Left Our Hero, a short story about two sisters visiting their uncle, a former television action-drama star, in the hospital
– Pandora Public, a full-length dark comedy dealing with the life and ambitions of Hope, the last remaining prisoner of Pandora’s Box
– Three additional scenes for In the Eye of Ivan, part of the workshopping process leading up to this month’s staged reading
Therein lies at least part of my problem. Muse and music aren’t quite paired up very well. There are some pieces that I could write with the current selection of music, but I’m not sure that any of these three things are it. Staring Contest was written with Radiohead’s help, The Accident God pulled a lot of atmosphere from the work of Grant Lee Buffalo and Beth Orton. King Swamp-Swallowed, which was set entirely in Cajun Louisiana, could not have been written without the moody jazz tones of Morphine.
I’m going to have trouble writing Russian middle-class characters in the late 1500s with Rage Against The Machine in my ears. I need something instrumental. Night Song could work, for its melancholy, but it’s also further into Asia than I want to tap into.
It’s entirely possible that I could work with what I have, but haven’t come across the correct combination yet. Must continue trying for now, but I think I need to seriously consider bringing different CDs in. Something’s clearly not working right here.
Current music: Run Lola Run, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Creative Control 