I write in silence. I need my writing space to be as clean and quiet and empty as possible. Empty of everything. I discovered a long time ago that when I write I go somewhere else, to a place in my head that is mysteriously indescribable, inaccessible, sometimes even to me. The texture of this place is silence, blankness. When I’m there everything else stops – sound, sensation, everything. I hear nothing that’s going on in the real world, feel nothing. I’m aware this might just be a complicated way of describing the act of concentration, but when I’m writing I can be cold or tired or in pain and not have a clue about it. When my kids were still at school, I had to set an alarm to jolt me from my trance at school pick up time.
For this reason, I can’t have music anywhere near me while I’m writing. Even if I wanted to, my brain would instantly block it out. However, Nonfiction – which I wrote over a handful of somewhat startling and challenging years – does have a kind of a playlist. The book was written through various illnesses and operations, the pandemic, lockdown and a house move. I did the final edits – literally – the night before a mastectomy. Throughout all this time I relied on a handful of songs – some unashamedly joyous, others more mournful and elegiac – to buoy me up, bring me back to the real world, find me courage, take my heart to places where it needed to go or, more often than not, just give me some much-needed energy.
Energy songs:
I struggled with many drafts of Nonfiction, more probably than I’ve ever written for any novel. I’d play these three songs while still lying in bed in the mornings with my coffee, getting ready to attack that blank, or sometimes not so blank, screen …
Macy Gray’s “She Don’t Write Songs About You” is so full of feisty lyric energy. I love her naughty scratchy voice, her intent, the mischief in the words. Listening to it I could feel my synapses springing to life. “Another Day of Sun” from the movie La La Land. An opening sequence so exquisitely and jaw-droppingly energetic…this song and the beat-perfect arrangement had my heart from the first moment I heard it. Lastly, Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.” So deeply original and upbeat and weirdly nonchalant. And the video with the coloured umbrellas – sublime!
Sad songs:
I have a complicated relationship with songs which make me cry. I used to cry a lot – especially when tough things were going on in my life – but these days I don’t always feel like crying. It seems to take an energy which perhaps I’d rather put into writing.
So…”Love Is a Losing Game” by Amy Winehouse touches a nerve for me, but it takes me somewhere I don’t always want to go. It’s fantastically powerful. Put it on in any room full of people and that room will fall silent. The phrase ‘five-storey fire as you came’ is one I would kill to have written. I adore this song and I am also slightly afraid of it. It plumbs an emotional depth – full of terror and passion and truth – that I suppose I aspire to in my work.
Nostalgic songs:
Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” – both so gorgeously, apparently upbeat and deliciously melodic but both of them also relentlessly nostalgic and backwards glancing. If you listen carefully, they’re both about loss, about the end of things, the passing of time. These songs have been with me most of my life and they mean everything to me.
A perfect song:
Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” is possibly the most complex and visceral song I’ve ever heard. It has everything – anger, joy, terror, you name it. Rhythmic, energetic, political, furious but also fantastically joyous. Of everything else on the playlist, this one’s my favourite. I’ve probably listened to it constantly through all my years of being a writer. Has it inspired me? Hard to say but if I could channel just the smallest fraction of its panache and honesty and verve I’d be very happy indeed.