The Undercover Soundtrack – Tim McDonald

February 24, 2016March 10, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris5 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 singer-songwriter Tim McDonald

Soundtrack by Player, Al Stewart, Kansas, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Carole King, Karla Bonoff, Tim McDonald, Broken Poets, Stephen Bishop

I use to love cheesy pop music when I was a kid. The kind of songs that make you cringe when you get older. Until a close friend of mine died and my taste in everything changed. Music’s what saved me, though. Even the pop stuff, eventually.

For the Death of Dustin Essary: a music novel is a tribute to my childhood best friend, whose unfortunate death from cancer at the age of 13 is what would lead me to over 30 years of songwriting. And some songs I wrote got me started on the book, but it was the music from my past that would help me finish it.

My story covers the six-month period leading up to Dustin’s death in 1978. Those last immortal days we might have enjoyed more had we known better. The hard part was trying to remember it all. Which is where my embarrassing nostalgia for 70s soft rock comes in. Sorry, but in order to find my way back I had to admit it. I was never one of the cool kids.

Case in point, one of my old favorites at age 13, Player’s Baby Come Back. Yes, this ridiculous dreamy pop rock ballad (a song my adult ego still denies it ever heard before) is what served as a portal back to those simple childhood moments. The lyrics for this song helped me to remember a frustrated crush I had around that time also. Or I’d listen to Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat on auto repeat and be sure to find some more lost scenes.

(I’m not ashamed of this one, though, it’s just a beautiful song)

I found it best to narrate the story from the perspective of just a few years after Dustin died, since looking back from my adult high-horse wasn’t very interesting. But these songs, and many more like it, not only brought back the time and place, but helped to reanimate that well-meaning, naïve, 13-year-old self I used to be.

I look back on a lot of these future classics at the end of part one, recalling a day of radio airplay in 1977.

Back then it was On And On into Night Moves and One Is the Loneliest Number and Baker Street …

It was obvious I had to revisit those days, musically or otherwise, in order to write this story. But how my own music would bring me to write the book in the first place is a bit of a mystery. The origin of which came from the music that first influenced me to become a songwriter.

Music as a refuge

After Dustin died the light pop stuff just didn’t make sense any more. I’d walk around the old neighborhood alone for hours, singing that amazing new rock song I heard by Kansas Carry on Wayward Son (jump to 1:05 for the amazing part)

Because everything the guy was singing was exactly how I was feeling…

But besides my new obsession with prog-rock at the time, all the great songwriters from that era just spoke to me after that. Like Jackson Browne’s Doctor My Eyes and James Tylor’s Fire and Rain sounded different all of a sudden. And songs I hadn’t paid much attention to before, like Carole King’s, You’ve got a Friend and Karla Bonoff’s Home called out to me also.

So these songs became my new best friends in a way.

And then my sister gave me her old acoustic guitar and I’ve been writing my own music ever since. Here’s a live performance of one of my songs from the book So Be It.

A music novel

So then cut to five years ago when a group of songs came to me unexpectedly, one of which was about Dustin. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about him in years, but that’s when it struck me that my whole musical journey had started over 30 years before as a direct response to his death. So I started the book as a memoir at first, with the idea to include my music somehow.

But when I struggled to remember some dreams Dustin shared with me, the other songs in the group seemed to be waiting there to use for Dustin’s dream content. There was one song about a scientist, the second about a psychic, and another about a spiritual leader. The whole thing was strange how it came together, but it’s what gave me the idea to embed my music as a part of the story and to call it a music novel. Here’s a live version of me performing one of Dustin’s dream songs The Clairvoyant.

There are eight songs in the book all together, and for each song you come to in the story you can play, and or, download as you read along with the lyrics, which I hope will lead you poetically and sonically back to the next part of the story. For this reason the book is only available through my membership website.

And besides the songs that became Dustin’s dreams for the book, there were more songs I had written through the years that seem to retrofit perfectly into the storyline as well. Here’s a live version of the opening song To Dream of Another Life. And this song Idle Thought with my band Broken Poets, worked to help describe a daydream I have in part IV.

Looking back, it’s hard not to imagine some mysterious redeeming force behind it all. Maybe to help us grow at certain points. A force strong enough to bring back our childhood, or save us if we need it, or remind us how we got here to start anew.

Tim McDonald is the author of For the Death of Dustin Essary: a music novel. The first chapter is free as an excerpt, including the first three songs. You can find Tim’s complete music catalogue and more of his writing available at brokenpoets.com. His music is also available through iTunes and Pandora. Tim is the founder, songwriter, singer and guitarist for the modern indie rock band Broken Poets. Find him on Facebook.

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Those last immortal days we might have enjoyed if we’d known better’ – Tim McDonald

February 22, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week is a true hybrid of the two Undercover Soundtrack disciplines – music and writing. He’s primarily a musician with the indie rock band Broken Poets, but he traces his songwriting to a profound childhood loss – the death of his best friend at age 13. He decided he had to write about this in prose as well as music, and the result is a multimedia work which he calls a ‘music novel’. He is Tim McDonald and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Timothy Hallinan

May 1, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris7 Comments

‘A lyric I misheard…’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to tap into a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s post is by award-winning mystery and thriller novelist (and musician) Timothy Hallinan @TimHallinan

Soundtrack by Jack’s Mannequin, Ravel, Tegan and Sara, Fun. , Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Jon Fratelli, Emmylou Harris, Mindy Smith, Lindi Ortega, Over the Rhine

I could not write without music.

With more than 7,000 tracks on my hard drive and the best pair of earbuds money can buy, I can create a distraction-free workspace anywhere in the world. That’s necessary because I like to write in public, usually in coffee-shops, where there’s already caffeine in the air and I can look up and steal a face whenever I need one.

I work to playlists with different qualities, most of them 400-1,000 songs long. (My current all-purpose playlist has 1,356 songs on it, heavy on Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Jon Fratelli, Emmylou Harris, Mindy Smith, Lindi Ortega, Over the Rhine, etc.) Generally, music seals me off from distraction, provides a source of energy, and, depending on what I’m writing and the playlist I’ve chosen, an actual entry point to certain emotions and even imagery.

I virtually never write without those earphones plugged in. (I’m listening to Jack’s Mannequin right now.) About half the time I work to the all-purpose playlist, which changes all the time as I add new stuff and yank the old. But occasionally a piece of music will emerge and take over the writing of a book.

In my fourth Poke Rafferty novel, The Queen of Patpong, a young woman has leapt from a boat into the dark Andaman Sea near three large rocks called The Sisters. It’s the middle of the night, rain is pouring down, and the water bristles with sea-wasps, a particularly lethal jellyfish. The man in the boat has brought her there specifically to kill her. This is the turning point of the book, and it became the longest action scene I’ve ever written. A few pages in, Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand kicked in, and I immediately put it on a loop. I wrote to it for several days. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, I wrote:

the chapter when Rose is in the water was written mostly to Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, a piece of music that’s got dark water running all the way through it.

I mention the music I use most at the close of practically every book, and many, many people have emailed me to suggest new artistes. I get a lot of good music that way.

The forthcoming Rafferty book, For The Dead, is largely about a 13-year-old girl having her carefully constructed and entirely fictional identity ripped from her, revealing her to the kids in her exclusive school as a former street child who’s befriended them under false pretences. Much of it was written to Tegan and Sara, who create great, hooky, irresistible rock about girls and young women. They were the primary soundtrack for Miaow’s sections of the story.

But early in the writing process, I began to listen to Fun., and their music crystallized certain aspects of Miaow’s story. At the beginning of the book a phrase from a Fun. song called Benson Hedges, We all float until we sink, keeps running through her mind, and that also song provided the titles of the first two sections of the book: We All Float . . . and . . . Until We Sink. The third section is Drowning Girls, which is a lyric I actually misheard, but there was no way to drop it because it worked so well, and the fourth section is Aim and Ignite, which is the title of a Fun. album.

Finally, in the new Junior Bender book (due out July 2), The Fame Thief, Junior is hired to find out who destroyed the career (and the life) of a young actress in 1950. The central section of the book departs from Junior’s first-person to take us back to the 40s and the early 50s, and for this section I listened to pop music from the day, which had a real impact on both the dialogue and the visual landscape.

If anyone who reads this has some recommendations for me, please comment below or email me at thallinan@gmail.com And thanks in advance.

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of two current series, the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers and the Junior Bender mysteries. His musical roots run deep: back in the 1970s he was in a band that recorded an album for Universal and which ultimately, minus him, morphed into the gazillion-selling group Bread. Songs Hallinan wrote were recorded by a number of top artists in several genres. The most recent Poke Rafferty book, The Fear Artist, was named in several ‘ten best’ lists in 2012, and the third Junior Bender, The Fame Thief, will be released this July. The Bender series has been bought for film by Lionsgate. Hallinan also wrote six Simeon Grist private eye mysteries in the 1990s and edited Shaken: Stories for Japan, an ebook collection of Japan-themed short stories that raises money for Japanese tsunami relief. He’s also the editor of the Twenty-One Writers project, a series of books in which writers talk about their craft. He lives in Bangkok and Los Angeles. Find him on his blog and Twitter @timhallinan.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack from the underside – SJ Tucker

September 9, 2012September 9, 2012 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris3 Comments

‘Passages from the novel have a song waiting between the lines’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music in their creative process. This weekend, to celebrate a year since the release of My Memories of a Future Life, I’m turning The Undercover Soundtrack inside out and talking to two musicians who have been inspired by novels featured on this series.

Today I’m talking to SJ Tucker, @s00j, who has composed entire albums to novels by Catherynne M Valente, and most recently for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making.

Sooj, how did you write September’s Rhyme, the song for Catherynne M Valente’s book trailer?
September’s Rhyme was inspired by chapter one, where September has to figure out how to get herself into Fairyland. The Green Wind gives her lots of advice, but most of it she finds confusing rather than helpful. To her credit, she finds a way to make it work for herself rather quickly. September’s Rhyme is a teaching song, to help September and other potential heroines remember the formula for the riddle that must be solved to pass the border into Fairyland. I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room when I wrote it, reading the manuscript on my laptop.

Catherynne says you’ve written several albums based on her stories. How do you condense a novel into a set of songs? How do you do justice to a novel’s world and characters in a different medium?
Cat’s work is so descriptive and inherently musical to me that the songs fall into my lap as I read. I get ideas left and right. She keeps me pretty busy. My creative process is straightforward where Cat is concerned: start reading and get my butterfly net ready, ’cause the ideas are coming!

So far, I’ve written songs inspired by The Orphan’s Tales duology: In the Night Garden, In the Cities of Coin & Spice, Palimpsest, The Habitation of the Blessed, Deathless, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Cat’s novels strike me as being like a family – in the characters, stories and scenes there are aunts and uncles and cousins and parents and grandparents. Some of those family members, you don’t see but once a year at Thanksgiving. Some of them are part of you from the very beginning. Others can surprise you and become vital later on. That’s how I’ve approached writing the songs and albums to accompany Cat’s work.

I write songs about the characters and scenes that strike me on first view. Then I look for anyone I might have left out who needs time in the spotlight. Then I make time for the surprises – the things I never expected to write a song about. Sometimes Cat has written a song into a book for me to find and set to music, as in the case of Go To Sleep Little Skylark, a lullaby in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland.

Do you compose to other writers’ novels or for other writers’ book trailers?

I have songs inspired by Lewis Carroll, Seanan McGuire, Terri Windling and one collaboration with CSE Cooney. Lots of other collaborations and inspirations are in the works. So far, Cat is the only contemporary author who has gotten my song engine to bear fruit more than once. It doesn’t hurt that we pretty much agreed to be good friends the moment we first met. That was back in 2006, when she was on the cusp of releasing The Orphan’s Tales.

How long does it take you to write an album? Do you redraft much? Do you write first, then take it to the studio, or does the song evolve in the recording?
I take a terrifying number of notes. Thank goodness for laptops – specifically for voice memo recording and document catching software.

Every novel I decide to write songs for gets its own master file on my laptop, where all of the ideas for songs go. I’ll often include passages from the novel, the sections that I know have a song waiting between the lines.

sooj — From the video for SJ Tucker’s song ‘Neptune’

Sometimes, getting all of the songs out, or even coaxing just one along, can take months.
Sometimes I’m intensely self-critical, as I’m sure most writers are. Fortunately, redrafting for me usually involves moving stanzas around, catching new verse ideas as they fall, and singing different versions into my laptop or iPhone. It’s a very satisfying process, especially when I feel ready to share. There’s nothing like playing a new creation for its first audience, watching expressions and getting first opinions.

Again, it all started with Cat’s duology The Orphan’s Tales. She mentioned that someone had done an instrumental album for her first novel, The Labyrinth. And ‘wouldn’t it be cool if somebody did an album for The Orphan’s Tales?’ I had devoured The Orphan’s Tales, but it didn’t occur to me until that day that Cat and I would eventually go on tour together and present many an odd multimedia book-and-song circus all over the country. But I went down into her basement for a couple of hours and came back with a song called The Girl in the Garden, and we all wept.

I play a song for an audience several times before I take it to the studio. Part of the reason is that I am constantly touring and performing. I have to slow down in order to get recording done. Also, songs evolve when I play them live. Verses shift, entire new sections present themselves, which I didn’t even know were missing. I’ve learned to let a song have time to bloom before I put it in front of the machines to be captured.

Some authors might be wondering about approaching a songwriter for a trailer. How much does it cost? Are there any rights issues? Do you release the music on your own album too?
I have a flat rate for song commissions, but each time I’ve had a song already written that the author and trailer director were specifically requesting. Paying mechanical rights to the songwriter is an option, but as anything that officially involves my music on Youtube is free advertising for me, I usually only require a link to my download page and proper songwriting credit in the video description, or in the video itself. And yes, I release just about every song I write that I feel is good.

I love that my songs are used in book trailers. The more we all cross-pollinate and cross-promote our work, the more people will find out about us. I urge other indie musicians to say yes to opportunities like providing music for book trailers, because you could find a whole new audience. Cat’s and my mutual fans are some of my favourite people on earth, and they are legion.

Let’s face it: there are millions of us, writers and songwriters alike. If we form alliances and create memorable shared works, the world is a lot more likely to pick us out of the crowd and join our little circus. The more we help each other out, the more we retweet and link for each other, the more beauty we can create, the more fuel we will have for our creative fires, all of us. That’s what I want for all of the creative folk I know – to be our own renaissance.

SJ Tucker is everywhere. On Twitter and Facebook. Her website is here.You can find out about her latest album here.

The Undercover Soundtrack will be back in conventional authorly form on Wednesday – and as it’s anniversary week there will be a chance for commenters to win a very special prize… To make sure you don’t miss it, subscribe now!