I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing

Welcome to the Music Extravaganza Weekend. I'm going to try and blog for four days in a row about music and writing.  

Last week, I carried on and on about Wagner's Ring Cycle and how it was moving me towards inspiration. Well, I started thinking really deeply about the influence of music on my writing and was preparing an entire blog post about a "soundtrack" mixtape I made many, many moons ago for a trunk novel I'd written...the one that I thought was my opus back in the day. I remember sharing it with my girlfriend at the time...we're talking close to 20 years ago, by the way. It was a mix of soundtrack stuff and modern songs even though the book was an epic fantasy. The funny thing was that the book wasn't even done. In a lot of ways that soundtrack was a very abstract outline of the story I wanted to tell. It's amusing and the only reason I thought of it was a conversation I had with a friend about Pink Floyd....I was really into Pink Floyd at the time and had included a lot of their music in the soundtrack. Oh, the halcyon days of the early 90s! Mixtapes were a romantic concept that has gone the way of the love letter.

Now a days, I know there are authors that post their writing playlists on their blogs so people know what helped put them in the mood for writing. I'd never done that, usually relying on Pandora radio to set me on my way or set my iTunes up for Shuffle and whatever comes up comes up. I've used You Tube as well, creating whole playlists heavy on Bear McCreary's Battlestar Galactica soundtrack. But recently I discovered Spotify and set up an entire writing playlist for me to listen to when I'm in the throes of writing. I've included all my favorite soundtracks and a lot of my favorite artists to get me in the mood. My playlist is made up of everything from Mumford and Sons to James Horner, the symphonic Pink Floyd and John Williams. I've shaken my curmudgeon-y shackles and moved into the modern era. Will I organize a WINTER'S DISCORD and SPRING'S TEMPEST soundtrack? Maybe, just for fun in the next couple of days. Who knows?