“I can’t listen to music when I write, but I do listen to it a lot when I’m thinking of what to write or thinking about what I just wrote (or thinking generally).”
Category: Author Playlists
“Music has always been essential to my creative process. It’s my first love. When I was ten years old, I wrote my first ‘song’ and I made ‘albums’ on cassette tapes. Those words are in quotations because I didn’t understand much about being a musician; all I knew was that I wanted to be Prince and write, produce, arrange, and do the artwork for all my creations. I carry that spirit with me more than 30 years later.”
“In The Merry Dredgers, song and music courses through the narrative like arteries carrying nutrient-rich blood throughout the body.”
“There’s a particular lineage of Black music that runs through my debut novel, We Are A Haunting, artifacts of migration across regions and the resiliency of ever-expanding traditions. The book is an archive, a preservation of the journey of Black music…”
“My life would be nothing without music and writing. Not because listening to music inspires my writing, but because writing music inspires my writing.”
“My book is like a love letter to my dead best friend, and an examination of grief as well as a glimpse into the worlds of two Black alt girls.
A mixtape is also a love letter.”
“My life has always been flooded with music.”
“The Distance from Slaughter County has one essay especially devoted to music. Its an exploration of the country music I grew up listening to; that essay is already a playlist, more or less. I hope the tunes below will give a sense for what the rest of the book is about, and what it was like to write.”
“I was jilted and I was stoned and I listened over and over to Bob Dylan. It was my drug of choice. The music felt like the simultaneous anticipation and afterglow of sex, coursing through me like the continuous caudal I had been promised in childbirth, like my mother’s blessing.”
“Usually when I write, I listen to songs by very sad people mumbling, and while I love that genre and this playlist includes some songs like that, I knew this novel needed broader kinds of sound.”