The Undercover Soundtrack – Stephen Weinstock

October 7, 2015October 9, 2015 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris6 Comments

The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is theatre composer and fantasy novelist Stephen Weinstock @s_weinstock

Soundtrack by Fela Kuti, Beach Boys, Alice Coltrane, Benny Goodman, Brian Eno, the Doors, Jack Bruce, George Harrison, Beethoven, David Lang, Adam Guettel

Having marveled each week at how writers use music to flesh out a character or bring emotional life to their work, I feel like a fraud. These authors put on a particular piece to evoke what they write, but that feels like a magical act of synesthesia to me. So why does this poor fraud need music to write? In 2003, Apple introduced iTunes and the computer playlist, and I began my series, 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles. For each of its 1001 chapters a character recounts a past life story, creating a karmic puzzle for the ten linked souls, the qaraq. The playlist became a writing tool to give me courage for this daunting task.

Concentration

For Book One of the series, The Qaraq, I had to hold a lot in my head as I wrote: introducing ten characters in their present lives in suburban New Jersey, and fitting together the first puzzle pieces of their history. That they all lived as different body parts of a single prehistoric dragonfly is proof enough of the Qaraq’s reincarnations, but when reveal this epiphany?

I need concentration to manage this material. To minimize distracting shifts within my eclectic playlists, I often select long cuts, like Fela Kuti’s half-hour jam Look and Laugh.

My favorite listening process is a ‘contest,’ where I intersperse a playlist with ten recent downloads, then narrow them down to a ‘winner.’ A current winner: The Beach Boys’ gorgeous, new That’s Why God Made the Radio.

But assessing winners while writing requires concentration on the music. I realized one function of my listening is procrastination, re-organizing the next half-hour of songs, or mixing in every Andante from Mozart’s first fifteen symphonies. Perhaps I need distraction from the heady multiple structures. On the other hand, often I don’t notice the music and get on a roll. Deeply meditative pieces help this flow, like Alice Coltrane’s incomparable Journey in Satchidananda.

Energy

The energy of a composition provides another clue to why I listen while creating 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles. Sometimes I need a perky track for stimulation, like One O’Clock Jump from the famous Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert.

By contrast, in the morning on the train, or after work, I need peace, like the gentle repetition of Brian Eno’s ambient Music for Airports. For my latest book, The Qaraq and the Maya Factor, I contemplated the effect of Maya, the Hindu concept of worldly illusion. Blocked by the trivial details of everyday life, the Qaraq loses its power of memory, the higher awareness of reincarnation. I did not seek music to evoke a meditative mood, but in developing the theme of how Maya hinders and helps, I heard a lot of ragas and minimalist music. An unconscious influence?

Imagination

So I examined if music had an unconscious effect on my work. The Qaraq’s past life tales are full of wild imagination and experimental writing styles. My brain conjures up atomic particles having a love spat, an alien performing arts school where dancers train their nerves rather than their muscles, or an Ice Age tribe that copes by re-configuring the calendar to include three seasons, excluding winter.

I hope music triggers my imagination, and I make quirky selections for my playlists: a rarely heard track from a familiar artist, like Indian Summer by The Doors; a song off the beaten path, like Jack Bruce’s He the Richmond, from his masterful Songs for a Tailor; or hard-to-find gems, like George Harrison’s first film soundtrack, Wonderwall, the Indian collaboration he did during The Beatles.

But if an unconscious process, I may never know if music is the spark.

Comfort

It pains me to think I cannot access music’s emotional depths to deepen my writing. The writing process is painful enough. When I stare into space wondering how the next word will appear, it’s comforting to have music in my ears, like a virtuosic arpeggio from Glenn Gould’s brilliant reading of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #1 making me think, You can do this!

Despite its fanciful whimsy, The Qaraq and the Maya Factor has emotional moments, which were difficult to write. The Egyptian stories start humorously, with a pyramid tomb salesman, but lead to a terrifying vision of immortality, the dread of living endlessly with no relief from conflict. Can I access the pain of this emotion through music? I sobbed inconsolably when I heard David Lang’s ethereal The Little Match Girl Passion last winter, after seeing homeless people freezing on the sidewalks of New York City.
The beauty of it is a balm while writing, but it can’t make me write better.

A final test

For me, music and text exist on separate levels. The final chapter of The Qaraq and the Maya Factor is like a novella, where all the characters’ present-day dénouements thread through an epic past life tale. The first European translator of The Thousand and One Nights faces a moral crisis whether to fabricate tales to complete all 1001 sections of the collection. A mysterious ally lures him to a secluded chateau, full of cats costumed as fairy tale characters, and guides him to an emotional epiphany.

Playing a tune that always give me shivers, like Come to Jesus, by Richard Rodgers’s grandson, Adam Guettel, might inspire the struggle, the mystery, or the passion of this scene. But I only experience the duet on its own terms; it doesn’t bring the words alive. Am I a lost cause?

Looking back on this chapter, I am pleased with it: the way the Qaraq’s issues reflect the tale (complexity); the misty locale of the magical chateau (energy); the translator’s fantastical epic discovering the Nights (imagination). I feel moved by the impassioned encounter between the translator and his ally. Maybe music did have some psychic influence on the writing when all is said and done.

Stephen Weinstock is the author of 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles. You can find more information on the series and the upcoming ebook giveaway here . Find Stephen on Facebook. 1001 will be an 11-book series, contain 1001 chapters and past lives, and take the rest of Stephen’s life to complete. Book 2 is here. Musically speaking, Stephen worked for years as a composer in the theatre. He won his 15 minutes of fame for the experimental sound-theatre work Mt. Quad at San Francisco’s Magic Theater, developed and team taught the first curriculum for opera/musical theatre writing at New York University, and created music for dancers at the Martha Graham School of Dance, Juilliard, and LaGuardia Arts HS (the ‘Fame’ School), where he continues to bring young dancers to physical, emotional, and spiritual ecstasy every day. Find him on Twitter as @S_Weinstock.

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Concentration, energy, imagination, comfort’ – Stephen Weinstock

October 5, 2015 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week is another returner to the series, which is rather appropriate as the concern of his book series is reincarnation. He is a composer, pianist and dance accompanist for musical theatre with the UC Berkeley, Princeton, Juilliard, and the ‘Fame’ school. Last time he guested here he wrote about the hidden structures that tell stories. This time, nearly a year has passed and he finds himself questioning the role music is now playing in his writing life. So this is a slightly unusual Undercover Soundtrack, one of questions rather than statements. Nevertheless, you can expect some stirring musical choices. He is Stephen Weinstock and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Gwendolyn Womack

June 3, 2015 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris4 Comments

‘Somewhere in time’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by supernatural historical thriller writer Gwendolyn Womack @Gwen_Womack

Soundtrack by Arvo Part, Paul Horn, Philip Glass, Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors, Reiki Tribe, John Barry

I’ve always found music to be a wonderful tool while writing. Sometimes I will search for hours to find the perfect song to write a particular scene before I can begin. After I find the right music, I will loop it for days, sometimes weeks. And I’ve found I cannot write while listening to any lyrics. It must be instrumental or else it is distracting.

When I first began writing The Memory Painter years ago I did not think to make note of all the music I was listening to, so this is only a list of the highlights. For readers who are not familiar with the book, The Memory Painter is a supernatural historical thriller about a group of neuroscientists who have unlocked the secret to reincarnation and a love story about a two lovers who have traveled through time to remember an ancient legacy. The novel spans a lot of history and many of the chapters are devoted to specific lifetimes. Here are a few of the time periods and the music that inspired the writing…

Cremona Italy, 1700s

There is a special lifetime that deals with the famous violinmaker Guarneri ‘del Gesù’, and for this I played one song repeatedly: Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror) by Arvo Pärt. I would actually loop the YouTube video of Anne Akiko Meyers playing del Gesù’s Vieuxtemps violin. The song is incredibly poignant and it was just perfect for writing those scenes. Hearing Guarneri’s violin being played while I was trying to imagine his life was invaluable.

China 6TH century AD

Another album is 80 minutes of Reiki Music by Reiki Tribe and it’s filled with Asian flutes and Tibetan bells. I listened to it primarily while writing the Bodhidharma lifetime, the Zen master who trained the Shaolin monks. I literally plugged the search term ‘Tibetan bell music’ into iTunes and spent hours listening to sample tracks before deciding on this particular collection. Many of the songs felt very transportive and helped create the mental space to write the lifetime of a Zen Buddhist monk.

Ancient Egypt 10,000BC

Just listening to Inside The Great Pyramid by Paul Horn was the time capsule I needed to get my imagination in ancient Egypt where the climax of the novel takes place, and I wrote all of the chapters listening to it. This special album came out in the 1970s. Paul Horn went to the Great Pyramid and recorded the music inside the King’s Chamber. There have been acoustical studies on the King’s Chamber because of its incredible reverberation capability. This music really is quite something.

Present day and 1980s

Philip Glass’s album Glassworks was perfect music to write to, particularly track 1, and I played this album a lot throughout writing the entire novel. The mathematical harmonies within the songs and the heartrending melodies were a perfect backdrop.

Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors’ album Totem was another go-to album that I looped repeatedly, particularly tracks 1-3. Totem has a driving rhythm and mystical feel and in general simply helped me to focus and write. I actually went to write a letter to Ms. Roth to tell her what I fan I was of the album because I was listening to it so much, but I found she had passed away in 2012. So instead I ended up spending the afternoon reading about her life and the legacy she left behind with 5Rhythms and I bought one of her books, Maps to Ecstasy, which is a fascinating read about her journey and the power of meditative dance. So that was a surprise veer one afternoon, researching the artist I was listening to and becoming inspired in other ways.

I also played several tracks from the soundtrack to Somewhere In Time, music by John Barry. It’s a favorite movie of mine and I’ve had the soundtrack well over 20 years. Several of the songs are so lovely and again poignant (a running theme perhaps in some of the music I chose). Many scenes in the book were written with this music.

Those are the main songs behind The Memory Painter that easily come to mind. For the current novel that I’m working on, I am keeping a more detailed account because it is fun to look back at what inspired you along the way. My current playlist is numbered with some incredible music that is filling my ears at the keyboard and helping the story come to life.

Gwendolyn Womack grew up in Houston, Texas. She studied theatre at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and then moved to California to pursue an MFA in Directing Theatre, Video, and Cinema at California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. The Memory Painter is her first novel. Find her on Twitter as @Gwen_Womack, on Facebook and on her website.

Undercover Soundtrack

Somewhere in time – Gwendolyn Womack

June 2, 2015 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week has a novel that spans several lifetimes and puts a new spin on reincarnation stories – she blends thriller with romance and the supernatural with her story of neuroscientists who have unlocked the secret of reincarnation. She used music to conjure her kaleidoscope of time periods, from ancient China to the modern day, and some of her selections are astoundingly haunting – I’m astonished to discover the 1970s album recorded in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Those among you who are reincarnation aficionados will have spotted the reference in the title of this post to the 1980s movie Somewhere In Time, and that was on her Soundtrack too. She is Gwendolyn Womack and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Stephen Weinstock

November 19, 2014November 19, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

Hidden forms that tell a story

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is theatre composer and debut fantasy novelist Stephen Weinstock @s_weinstock

Soundtrack by Frank Zappa, Igor Stravinsky, Stephen Sondheim, Alban Berg

I greatly admire Roz Morris’s wonderful combining of writers and their musical minds. I am excited to contribute because I am a composer, pianist, and dance accompanist who crossed over to write a fantasy series called 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles. Before writing every day, I devise a playlist that is an eclectic mix of styles, and I wanted to explore how this music affects my writing. But no song expresses a character; no instrumental sets a scene in my book. So why listen to music when I write?

From scene to song

Of course music plays a part in Book One of 1001: The Qaraq – a group of souls who travel together from lifetime to lifetime. In each chapter, one of the qaraq members recalls a past life story; the present day action acts as a mainframe to enter into the memory, like the Scheherazade framing tale device in The Thousand and One Nights. Having worked in musical theater, I channel the techniques used for moving from a spoken scene in and out of a song to accomplish this shift. And some of the tales involve music: one character remembers his incarnation as Vaalat, an East African mallet instrument called a xalafon, which transfixes its audience.

On reflection, I realize the main influence music has on my writing is through the idea of hidden forms. As a composer, I love complex structural devices that we don’t hear in the music, but which shape the score. This love inspired me to construct 11 hidden structures that unify the 1001 series. Here are four examples, along with musical samples of corresponding hidden forms.

Past in the present

1. Embedding a past life story into each chapter is not so hidden, but it’s not obvious reading the first book that there will be 1001 chapters and 1001 lifetimes in the series, God help me! Frank Zappa, master musical parodist, loved to embed famous pieces of music into otherwise pop sounding tunes. In Status Back Baby, a bubble-headed high school kid’s lament is interrupted (at 1:27) by an electric quotation of the opening of Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka, then, with a cheerleader’s whistle, the jaunty song returns, mocked by the juxtaposition of kitsch and class.

Zappa, an incredible guitar virtuoso, could also be lyrical and breathtaking, with hidden rhythmic complexity, such as the beautiful Watermelon in Easter Hay.

Motifs

2. In a score, motifs or longer melodies can recur in obvious or subtle ways. In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Passion, a motif is varied incessantly, to represent the character Fosca’s obsessive, neurotic nature. In Fosca scene, we first hear it at 2:13, and it then snakes its way throughout the scene. Similarly, for each of my central characters, I reiterate a set of traits, a gesture, and a literary voice in all their incarnations. Ooma, the sexy, troubled present day incarnation of the orgy-driven Queen of the Scheherazade tale, recalls her lifetimes in a haunted stream of consciousness. Sometimes I want these tropes to help identify the central character in the incarnation; sometimes they are hidden and just help me create the character. Sahara, the main character, likes to play with her hair: in 17th Century France, we recognize her as she curls a lock of hair around her finger; but in the Ediacaran Era, she is disguised as a two-inch organism with filaments that wave in the waters on the sea floor.

Hidden forms

3. The great master of the hidden form was Alban Berg, the Viennese composer whose opera Wozzeck rejected conventional structures like arias and duets. Berg composed each scene of this story, about an oppressed soldier who descends into madness, around a particular structure supporting the dramatic action, some old forms like fugue or march, others more abstract, like the inventions of the last act. In Wozzeck, III, 2, when Wozzeck murders his wife Marie, the hidden form of Invention on a Single Tone reveals itself (at 4:45) with a chilling crescendo. In Wozzeck, III, 4, the Invention on a Hexachord accompanies Wozzeck’s drowning (circa 3:00) as the chord washes up and down in the orchestra. Creepy brilliance.

Influenced by Berg’s superimposition of forms onto a narrative, I placed in each past life story a hidden reference to one Arabian Night. The Thousand and One Nights contains parts of stories; remember that Scheherazade interrupts her storytelling every morning to save her head, so each night she tells only part of a tale. In my writing process, I use the Nights references to add local color or suggest a character’s inner thoughts. At times I lift a whole plot line to guide a past life tale: the magical roukh from Sinbad flies in and out of the qaraq’s mythic memories of their lives on the Red Isle.

Backwards

4. Despite Stravinsky’s revolutionary status, he also followed Berg’s lead and used hidden techniques like retrograde, where you take a sequence and use it backwards, or the palindrome, where a sequence is the same forwards and backwards (Madam I’m Adam, or, qaraq!). In his opera The Flood, Stravinsky depicts the deluge structurally as a palindrome (at 2:33): the seas rise with orchestral tremolos for the storm, then the music retrogrades with the receding of the waters. In 1001, the chronological order of the past lives presented in the series is a karmic palindrome. The first 500 lifetimes create issues among the characters, and the last 500 are the karmic consequences, resolved in retrograde order. If the incarnation in lifetime #251 murders incarnation #252, then in lifetime #750, the victim forgives the murderer’s incarnation #751. That’s a hidden form!

If you haven’t stopped reading and called my local asylum to come fetch me immediately, I hope you might be excited to go hunting for hidden forms, or even use them in your work. They help generate ideas you’d never think of otherwise, and at the very least they have a subconscious effect on the reader. Maybe that’s how my daily playlist influences my writing; it’s a hidden form working on a subconscious level. An Undercover Soundtrack!
Stephen Weinstock is the author of 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles. You can find more information on the series, more articles on writing, music, and reincarnation, and links to online tales here . Find Stephen on Facebook and email: drstephenw@comcast.net. 1001 will be an 11 book series, contain 1001 chapters and past lives, and take the rest of Stephen’s life to complete. Musically speaking, Stephen worked for years as a composer in the theatre. He won his 15 minutes of fame for the experimental sound-theatre work Mt. Quad at San Francisco’s Magic Theater, developed and team taught the first curriculum for opera/musical theatre writing at New York University, and created music for dancers at the Martha Graham School of Dance, Juilliard, and LaGuardia Arts HS (the ‘Fame’ School), where he continues to bring young dancers to physical, emotional, and spiritual ecstasy every day. Find him on Twitter as @S_Weinstock.

SHORT BREAK The Undercover Soundtrack will take a short break but will be back in a couple of weeks.

Undercover Soundtrack

Hidden forms that tell a story – Stephen Weinstock

November 18, 2014November 18, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

You can’t read much about writing advice before you trip over an essay about story structure, and how it works invisible magic on the reader. My guest this week has used sophisticated musical structures as the skeleton of his fantasy series, a series of nested reincarnation tales inspired by The Thousand and One Nights – and his influences range from Alban Berg to Frank Zappa. For him, music does not so much conjure up a scene or a character as an entire shape, of how an idea moves into a story and where it eventually goes. He is uniquely qualified to do so, as he is a composer, pianist and dance accompanist for musical theatre with the dance faculties of UC Berkeley, Princeton, Juilliard, and the ‘Fame’ school (though he has not yet said if he is reincarnated). Stephen Weinstock will be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Pete Lockett

April 23, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris5 Comments

‘The moment of making the first sound or writing the first word is special’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is award-winning percussionist Pete Lockett @petelockett

Soundtrack by Pete Lockett with Björk, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Dido, Bill Bruford, Jeff Beck, Ustad Zakir Hussain, The Verve, Texas, Trans-Global Underground, Nelly Furtado, Lee Scratch Perry, Primal Scream, Damien Rice, Dave Weckl, Thomas Lang, Jarvis Cocker, Craig Armstrong, Nicko McBrain, Iron Maiden, U Shrinivas, Ronan Keating, Vanessa-Mae, Errol Brown, Rory Gallagher, Pet Shop Boys, Hari Haran, Kodo, Amy Winehouse, Mel C, A R Rahman, Sinead O’Connor

This music is just incredible; I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

I doubt if anyone outside of this community ever has. This is what you get when Brahms and Bach have been living next door to one another for hundreds of years.They don’t even use notation any more.They’ve just devised a way to conduct the whole group with nods, looks and head shakes.Look, can you see them there at either side? Bach is doing all the spiky staccato stuff and Brahms is doing the smooth legato.It’s all totally improvised and will never happen again. Every rendition is completely different.They both claim that it is the highest level of composition one can reach.Instantaneous composition, conducting and performance.”

When Ed Trew wakes up with a killer hangover, little does he realise that it is the beginning of a mind-boggling journey of revelations and surprises that completely reshapes his view of the world. In the midst of chaos and confusion he becomes completely seduced by music.

Music showed a path

It’s no surprise that music and the arts so often act as a liberating influence, giving some lucky individuals the chance a world of creativity and hope. I am grateful to fate to have been propelled out of an ordinary, functional and less than satisfying existence. Music came and lifted me away and showed me a path towards self fulfilment where my mind could become a canvas for fresh ideas. Everything about music fascinated me and as I grew, I slowly started absorbing influences from every corner of the globe, from India to Africa and Nepal to New York – the systems and techniques, sounds, colours and moods. It also led me to a much deeper understanding of people, their motivations, formalities and habits. The way people make music reveals a lot about the culture from which they have flourished.

This ‘open plan’ consumption and integration of varied influences naturally became a cornerstone of my writing when I finally got around to penning a novel. Having had a great degree of freedom in my interpretation and mixing of musical styles, it was natural that this approach got carried over into ideas and stories.

When I sit down and compose music, I start with nothing. That moment of making the first sound or writing the first note is always special, all the more so because I have no idea where it is going to lead. This influenced me directly to try the same thing with words, to take a simple starting point and embark on a journey, not knowing where or how I would get between the various points along the way.

Creative dialogue

I knew I wanted to have the same freedom that I find in music, able to bring together seemingly disparate concepts and make a new sense out of it all. To be unbound by all that is ‘normal’ but convincing enough to create a dialogue that stands up under scrutiny. As I wrote more and more, I was amazed about how similar the creative buzz was between both of them. I never thought I would find anything that gave me the spiritual lift that music making did but was convinced otherwise during the writing of A Survivor’s Guide to Eternity.

Just as I would embark on so many journeys with my work as a musician, so the character in my book is thrown headlong into an incredible journey, except his is through life, death, reincarnation and the afterlife. Little does he realise that it’s the beginning of a mind-boggling journey of revelations and surprises that completely reshapes his view of the world.

Structure and suspense

Once I really started to get into it, the writing and music began to feed one another even more in quite an inspiring way. A good gig would send me straight back to the hotel with my laptop to get writing and vice versa. I began to think through certain pieces of music and see how the suspense built up over a set time frame, keeping the listener engaged and waiting for the next development. Indian classical music is perfect for that, especially over long periods of time. I began to experiment to see how I could mirror that in my storytelling, sowing seeds and planting suggestions, but all the while keeping the reader impatient for the detail of the next development. As I thought about it, more and more parallels became apparent between literature and music.

Before I knew it I was unconsciously taking on board the broad shapes of pieces of music, flowing like a river around bends and over rocks, sometimes calm and sometimes ferocious. It gave me a great insight into how to approach the timeline within the novel, sometimes going slowly and patiently before propelling it through rapids and over rocks down towards a calming resolution.

There’s so much in common between the two disciplines. One tells a story with words and the other with sound. We need to keep the listener/reader interested with suggestions but not in a way that paints an obvious picture. We need to create suspense, excitement, anticipation and resolution. I never thought they would be quite so interlinked.

Pete Lockett has recorded and/or performed with Björk, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Dido, Bill Bruford, Jeff Beck, Ustad Zakir Hussain, The Verve, Texas, Trans-Global Underground, Nelly Furtado, Lee Scratch Perry, Primal Scream, Damien Rice, Dave Weckl, Thomas Lang, Jarvis Cocker, Craig Armstrong, Nicko McBrain (Iron Maiden), U Shrinivas, Ronan Keating, Vanessa-Mae, Errol Brown, Rory Gallagher, Pet Shop Boys, Hari Haran, Kodo, Amy Winehouse, Mel C, A R Rahman, Sinead O’Connor and many more. He arranged and recorded ethnic percussion for five Bond films and other Hollywood blockbusters and has taught and lectured worldwide, including The Royal College, Berklee School of Music Boston, and The Royal Academy of Music in London. He is the author of Indian Rhythms for the Drum Set (Hudson). A Survivor’s Guide To Eternity is his first novel. Here he is on a mountain with percussionist Benny Greb. Find him on Twitter @PeteLockett

Undercover Soundtrack

‘The moment of making the first sound or writing the first word is special’ – Pete Lockett

April 22, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris3 Comments

My guest this week is a percussionist who has worked with an astonishing list of world-class musicians – Bjork, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Dido, Bill Bruford, Jeff Beck, Ustad Zakir Hussain, The Verve, Texas, Trans-Global Underground, Nelly Furtado, Lee Scratch Perry, Primal Scream, Damien Rice, Dave Weckl, Thomas Lang, Jarvis Cocker, Craig Armstrong – and more. He found that his music fuelled a desire to write a novel, and after a good gig he would rush back to his hotel room, eager to pour out the next chapter. He says he wanted to take a simple starting point and construct an epic journey that ventured outside the normal – bringing together birth, death, the afterlife, reincarnation and immortality into new coherence, and echoing the journey he takes when working with musicians. The result is A Survivor’s Guide to Eternity; he is Pete Lockett and he’ll be here with his Undercover Soundtrack on Wednesday.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Roz Morris

January 8, 2014July 24, 2015 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris11 Comments

‘First he hears sounds; urgent and deep, like a heartbeat in the ground’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week it’s my turn on the decks – with the Undercover Soundtrack for Lifeform Three

Soundtrack by Boards of Canada, Peter Gabriel, Enya, Vangelis, Gabor Presser, Ralph Vaughan Williams

Lifeform Three is a fable in the tradition of Ray Bradbury, set in the near future, where global warming has shrunk the landmass and the countryside has been sacrificed for buildings and roads. One valley remains, of woods, trees and meadows, and is now kept as a theme park – The Lost Lands of Harkaway Hall. My main character, Paftoo, is a groundsman there. He’s the odd one out; the only soul who’s uneasy in a world that everyone else accepts. You could say he lives in a utopia – but to him it’s a dystopia.

Music became the story

I knew the emotional beats of Lifeform Three before I knew the story. They came to me as pieces of music, a chain of albums and tracks that suggested the landmarks of the novel. I would load them into my MP3 player and take them running, puzzling over them as I pounded out the miles.

Paftoo is a bod – an artificial human who’s programmed to do menial tasks. To keep him efficient, his memory is regularly wiped, but he has inklings of other memories. We meet him after such an event (known as a ‘sharing’). My first beat was that state of newness, a world shining and fresh where you go out and do your tasks, content with simple instructions. In the beginning, Paftoo doesn’t even know his own name until he realises the sole of his boot has a number – 2 (his name is an alphanumeric, short for Park Asset Field Redo Bod 2).

Boards of Canada’s album Music Has The Right To Children told me the innocence of new, eager eyes, especially this track, An Eagle In Your Mind.

The novelty doesn’t last long. There’s a wildness in Paftoo and by the end of his first day, he’s made the others wary of him. He’s also frustrated. But worse is to come when night falls. While his companions go dormant and lifeless, Paftoo starts to dream.

Again, the idea came as a feeling from music – Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ suggested a tingling in the nerves, a meaning that must be grasped.

First he hears sounds; urgent and deep, like a heartbeat in the ground

The dream sequence was choreographed to that album. It starts with a sense of unease, then that beat gallops in like the thing you knew was coming.

Horses, flashing across the green hills in glorious gallop. Necks reaching, tails streaming. Riders on their backs, urging them faster.

Paftoo opens his eyes, shocked. He knows he’s not supposed to dream. He also knows that nobody rides horses now. They’re untamed animals in the fields (and known as Lifeform Three). But at the same time it makes perfect sense in his restless soul. From that moment, Paftoo has a mission. Every night, he goes looking for clues that might explain why he has these dreams and what happened to him before his mind was wiped. By day, he struggles to hide his true nature in case he’s wiped again.

Old memories

In a small way the story is autobiographical. In winter 1995 I acquired a horse, which had been an ambition since I was a kid. Like the horse Paftoo later befriends, my horse was enormous, black and alarmingly excited to be alive – especially with the frost nipping his clipped skin. I was laughably incompetent on his back, especially when trying to stop him. While sceptical (and wise) folk waited for me to give up and sell him, I was determined to persevere. If I couldn’t handle my dream, what did that make me? That first winter, Enya’s Anywhere Is was in the charts. I wasn’t a fan of her music, but when I came to write Paftoo’s attempts to tame a horse I listened to Enya to capture that time. For some reason Caribbean Blue with its waltz rhythm brought back the sense of a wondrous adventure, the tentative courtship of a wild creature and the sense of being alone on a dumb-headed quest for something inexplicable and ideal.

A song called Caribbean Blue that takes me back to an English winter, riding horses? Like dreams, Undercover Soundtracks have a logic of their own. Or I take no notice of lyrics.

During the writing, my soundtracks had to become a time machine. Those first days with my oversized horse were, as you can probably see, long ago. Reader, I kept him, and he was now reaping the arthritic rewards of a vigorous life. I was having ghastly conversations with the vet because if her treatments didn’t work it was time for the gun. I clung to those music tracks to help me give his glory days to Paftoo while the real situation seemed so hopeless. Thankfully, he rallied and we gallop on (on a good day).

Lost humanity

The horse awakens Paftoo’s sense of the natural world, which humanity seems to have lost. Again, music already contained what I needed to say. Vangelis’s Pulsar was the thrill of galloping feet

‘gathering up the miles and throwing them out behind’.

Electromantic La Baletta No 2 – by the Hungarian composer Gabor Presser had feisty, fertile joy, like a primitive spring ritual. It smells of untamed hair and corduroy. And whoever said electronic music lacked a soul? Both these tracks are entirely electronic, made from circuits and wave generators, yet they bound and leap like wild animals.

Past, people and a vanished time

But there’s a lot more to Paftoo’s quest than riding and nature. They are merely the beginning; the gateway to a profound discovery of his own past and the people and creatures he loves. Now I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but I can say that the more he recovers, the more he stands to lose and the more desperate his day life becomes. This impossibility was exquisitely insisted in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.

The piece was written in 1914 and 1920, in an England changed forever by the first World War. That period would also be the heyday of Harkaway Hall, the mansion that used to stand at the heart of the Lost Lands, where Paftoo now struggles to keep his memories. The Lark Ascending seems to say that what will be lost is more than just the loves of a few souls in a little story; it speaks for the loss of time, grace, of fallen walls in overgrown woods, bumps under the turf in an empty field. That violin seems to be shrilling from the skies: it won’t last. We won’t last. And how can Paftoo save it?

Roz Morris is, of course, your host on The Undercover Soundtrack. Find out more here, connect on Twitter as @Roz_Morris and on the writing advice blog Nail Your Novel. Her first novel was My Memories of a Future Life (Soundtrack here) and Lifeform Three is now available in all formats, including print.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Candace Austin

December 18, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris1 Comment

‘The perfect song to help my characters flourish’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by magical realist suspense novelist Candace Austin @caustinauthor

Soundtrack by Brandi Carlile, Jamie Cullum, Michael Johns and Brooke White, The Beatles, John Lennon

There are two things from which I abstain while writing—music and wine. I write better in silence while sober. Maybe this is why I work through a first draft fairly quickly?

I can reduce the bustling of my busy family to a low murmur with my thoughtful plotting, but music, I cannot. It’s captivating to me. Music does, however, play a huge role in the growth of my novels. Once my protagonists and their stories germinate in my brain, I set out in search of a song that will help them flourish. It never fails. I find a perfect song that speaks to their stories and tells me their secrets. It’s as if the song was created just for my characters—for me.

Past lives

My debut novel, The Layers, is the story of David Kiplinger, a 19-year-old living in a post-Unveiling age in which most everyone remembers past lives. When TheLayers.b4u website (think Facebook meets Ancestry.com for millennia past and present) reveals that David has lived exponentially more lives than anyone else on earth, he’s lifted to a level of fame reserved for the divine. To answer questions and diffuse the onslaught of attention, David agrees to an autobiography, but when he meets his ghostwriter, Holly Stone, he can’t help but wonder if she’s the woman who has lived alongside him, the one he has loved unconditionally, the one who killed him.

Regardless of David’s suspicions about Holly, theirs is a sweet and humorous story of unconditional, eternal love … and irony, there is irony. When I heard Brandi Carlile’s The Story, I knew it was their song. Ms. Carlile sings about the layers, the depth of our individual life stories and how immensely satisfying it is to find that one person who knows your story like the back of their hand and appreciates it for all that it is, and all that it’s not. It’s messy. It’s glorious. Life’s elation and misery are there in her lyrics. I often listened to it before I began my daily writing. The intensity with which she sings the song inspired me to elevate the emotions as I wrote, and I think The Layers turned out better for it. How this song was not a chart topper, I’ll never know.

Whimsical and inspiring

One song does not fit all, however. Much of The Layers is humorous, and I found that I needed to shift into another gear when writing the lighthearted scenes. Jamie Cullum’s remake of Ruby and the Romantic’s classic Our Day Will Come struck the perfect chord. The tune is whimsical and inspiring, hopeful and innocent, much like David.

David handles his complicated relationship, newfound fame, and status as the most reincarnated of men with a cheerful optimism. He likes to think that living is a gift, not a punishment. Life is Okay by Michael Johns and Brooke White embodies the guarded optimism that defines him.

Rounding out my playlist is In My Life by The Beatles and Imagine by John Lennon. Obviously, there’s a theme here—life. Music helps me contemplate life. Just imagine what life would be like if we remembered being someone else, somewhere else? (insert Twilight Zone theme). Would we launch into a new life knowing what to savor? Would the world improve because we understood without a doubt what is important?

Ooh. I will now listen to music with a glass of wine in-hand!

Candace Austin is the author of The Layers and In Her Sleep. Her fast-paced, suspenseful novels use magical realism to explore love, life, and the humorous and heart-wrenching oddities in both. Originally from the Chicago suburbs, Candace resides in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband of 20 years, two kids (one heading for college, the other kindergarten), a hefty Golden Retriever, and a Maine Coon Cat that comes and goes as he dang well pleases. When not writing, she enjoys NC State football games (particularly the tailgating), and traveling to Maine to spend time with her parents and family. Find her on her website and on Twitter as @caustinauthor

That’s the last Undercover Soundtrack for 2013! The series will return on 8 January.