Musical influences: Eight writers on the songs that have inspired them

 

Anne Emery, author of Children in the Morning:

 

I would never have written a word, let alone six novels, if not for music. The main characters in my series are musicians: Monty Collins is a bluesman (and lawyer); Brennan Burke is a choirmaster (and priest). The soundtracks to my books can be found on my website.

Although many kinds of music can set a mood for me, two musicians have a prominent place in my work: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Readers will find elements of Fr. Burke and his circumstances in Dylan's Man in the Long Black Coat, and in Shooting Star, with its references to the last temptation and the last time you might hear the Sermon on the Mount. The idea for Children in the Morning came directly from three songs, Cohen's Suzanne, and Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.

Cohen's and Dylan's brilliance with words could inspire or reflect a lifetime of plots, scenes and characters.

The following quotation is attributed to Leonard Bernstein: "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable."

 

Matthew Hooton, author of Dehoume Road:

 

When I was a kid, my dad and I took the train through the Rockies from Vancouver to Calgary and drove back to the coast in an aging maroon Pacer, which my father had inherited from his dad. It barely ran, but it had a tape deck, and dad picked up Stan Rogers' Fogarty's Cove. I remember the black and white of Stan on the cover: hands in pockets, huge smile. "Already dead," my dad had said. "So damn young." Then he'd gone all quiet before putting in the cassette.

Until then, I'd been subjected to a near steady stream of Evangelical Christian worship music — catchy through repetition, but less than lyrically inspiring on a narrative level. I mean, how many times can you rhyme "lamb" with "man" and still call it fresh? But Rogers sang stories — stories that took hold, baptized my imagination. I started to dream about miners in Rawdon, about Fingal, and Barrett's Privateers.

I can't sing worth a damn, but there isn't a thing I've written that doesn't have its genesis in that album, in the first time I heard Stan's massive baritone belting out stories as my father and I headed west on Highway One.

 

Ian Orti, author of L (and things fall apart):

 

 

Writing for me has always been extremely difficult. To make a story work I have to find a way into its internal organs, and music is the vessel I used to get there.

My novel L (Invisible Publishing) was heavily influenced by the minimalist Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The music is angular and mathematic, if that makes sense. I think arpeggetic is the actual description. Pärt felt alienated by more complex compositions and I sympathize with that — but there was something about his music that resonated, something about the idea of finding a deeper meaning in the isolation of a single note. The music has a cinematic quality without being melodramatic and served as a sonic metronome for the novel.

The Olive and the Dawn (Snare Books) is a novel dressed as a book of short stories. It's full of very short stories so for me it was kind of a like a record. For these stories I stuck to mostly, though not exclusively, Canadian composers — Mark Berube, Emily Haines, Jeff Johnson of OK Vancouver OK, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson (US), L'embuscade and any band featuring cellist Kristina Koropecki. Each story had a tone or resonance to it and I searched out compositions whose sound matched the tone of the story I was trying to write.

 

Alison Pick, author of Far to Go:

 

It was the summer of 2007; I'd just moved to Toronto. I was depressed. The city was enormous, and sweltering, and my life was falling apart. Another writer told me about Jim Bryson — Where the Bungalows Roam had just been released, but it was The North Side Benches I went out and bought. (I didn't want to download, or upload, or borrow. I needed something solid in my hand). I pressed play ("pressed play!") and that was that. Jim was singing what I was living: he was tiredof sleeping in Toronto, dammit. The lyrics were smart and catchy. They were full of existential angst, but the beautiful kind, the kind that make a breakdown sound poetic and, paradoxically, redemptive. I was writing Far to Go then, and Bryson, whose album had nothing at all to do with my material, nevertheless nailed my hopelessness with the project and with life. I got tired of never really knowing what I should do, he sang. And yet, I thought, he'd made something perfect. It was the kind of art that made me want not only to do better as an artist, but to be better as a person.

Which is to say, it helped.

Thanks, Jim.

 

Iain Reid, author of One Bird's Choice:

 

Essentially the only time I'm not listen to music is when I'm writing. That's not to say it doesn't significantly impact my writing. It does. I take frequent breaks by lying down on the floor or my bed and playing a CD or vinyl record. It helps to simultaneously re-focus and clear my mind. Recently I've been listening exclusively to jazz. It's fluent with what I'm working on. Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington — these are my comrades. That might change by tomorrow. I've got some Tommy Dorsey and Lionel Hampton waiting in the wings.

 

Sarah Selecky, author of This Cake Is for the Party:

 

I wrote This Cake Is for the Party while listening faithfully to one album: Sakura by Susumu Yokota. It's ambient music, so it's dreamy, atmospheric and repetitive. And the lyrics are in Japanese, so I can't understand them. I don't even know if I could tell you where one song ends and another begins. The whole point of listening to Sakura was so I could zone out and write.

I know nothing about the artist. My friend, author Heather Jessup, gave the album to me in 2002, and told me that the word sakura meant blossoming cherry trees. I was living in Victoria at the time, and just happened to be writing a story that featured cherry blossoms. But as the years went by, I just kept listening to the album. The music cast a weird and creative spell on me: to this day, whenever I hear it, I immediately want to sit down and work on my book.

 

Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Bats or Swallows:

 

 

Fifteen years after I first listened to it, I still find myself turning to Love Tara by Eric's Trip, Maritime Canada's '90s indie darlings. From the beginning I was inspired by their scrappy, do-it-yourself attitude and their intensely personal lyrics. The songs on Love Tara are short — quiet and wistful tunes followed by the loudest, sludgiest blasts — but they stick to you. Rick White and Julie Doiron were singing about the everyday: love, heartbreak, secrets, ennui. There was no fancy wordplay in their lyrics; maybe those kinds of earnest sentiments are best coated in a decent layer of lo-fi fuzz and melody. As a writer, Love Tara reminds me of the importance of plain truths, how difficult they are to convey, but how piercing it can be for a reader when you manage to capture them in whatever it is you've created.

 

What music inspires you? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook or in our Words and Music discussion group!