Playlists

I'm not sure about everybody else, but I listen to music all the time, and particularly when I'm writing.  Sometimes I need to change what I'm listening to reflect my mood, or what I'm writing about, but there's almost always music on.  I'm currently listening to Tracey Ullman's classic "My Guy", for instance.  I'm a big fan of Spotify - though it sometimes means that I miss some of the great music I bought over the 20+ years before everything was on tap to be accessed whenever I thought of it.

I was on the way back home from a work meeting in Germany earlier this week with my trusty Moleskine (Star Wars special edition - sad, but true), and didn't feel like committing any actual writing to it, but with some music on my headphones.  It occurred to me that it might be interesting to create playlists for the two novels that I've completed - and to think about playlists for the writing that I'm planning.  I realised as I started committing some songs to paper that there were at least two different types of list per novel: songs that I'd listened to during the writing of the book, and songs which I thought might be interesting to readers and/or relevant to the book's subject matter, themes or atmosphere.

I decided to concentrate on the latter, partly because I listen to a lot of music, and partly because at least some of the music I have on my various personal playlists is either too weird or too explicit-of-lyrics for the intended readers of both novels.  As soon as I started, though, it became clear that it was a rather mannered enterprise.  Given my age, and the age of my readers, do they really want to be listening to the music I listened to in my youth - all those 80s hits?  What about the more self-indulgent electonika (yes, it's some if it's the German stuff) which I've been known to enjoy?  Would be it better to include some of the dubstep that I rather enjoy, to my lovely wife's considerable disgust: is that too much like an obvious attempt to down-wiv-da-kids?  It would be very easy to try to "educate" my projected readership, and I'm sure (well, I hope) that some of them would enjoy that. 

But how important is the author in all of this?  Coming back to the title of this blog, surely we should be deconstructed, and as little interested as possible in the text as possible?  What importance, if any, does what the author likes listening to - or feels his/her readership should be listening to - have to the text?  In fact, any playlist I might associate with the text changes the text, as it becomes part of the text.  Maybe I should have thought about the songs as I wrote the books themselves?  In fact, I did, a bit, but not in detail, and not to the extent that I wrote a list of tracks as I went along in a Nick Hornby "High Fidelity" kind of way.

In many ways, I'm more interested in what readers of the book would like to associate with the book, and if they do get published, I think one interesting exercise will be to help facilitate the sharing of associated media - playlists, photos, video clips, drawings, etc. - with the books.  J, my eldest, has already created a folder with a friend of hers (who's also read it) around the first novel, Hacking the Dragon, with drawings, blurbs and character sketches.

Lots to think about.  I'll leave it there, and settle back to listen to Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz".  Really.