Music and the Muse

or "Dude, why?"

This is Intern Steve, but I’m taking off the Intern Steve hat for a minute and putting on my author and editor Chris hat for just a bit.

I’m glad many of you are enjoying the WRAC playlist. The Raconteur Press staff and I had a lot of fun making it. You may have noticed it’s 23 hours long, and even fully sequenced in a recommended straight-through listening order.

Why in the heck would anyone put that much time and effort into that?

Well, for one thing, Jonna asked, and I don’t turn her down.

Alternatively, you can view it as a cynical corporate move, deliberate branding, sure. I like to think of it as showing off our collective personality.

The honest answer: it’s a labor of love. It’s a giant mixtape. Good mixtapes are deliberate. Case in point: Guardians of the Galaxy.¹ Poor mixtapes are random crap thrown together and hoping something sticks. I can’t go for that.²

On the one hand, there’s nothing special about this. There’s no shortage of writers who include soundtracks to go along with their works, John Ringo featuring prominently in this crew. Music is a major element of the plot and feel of Stephen King’s The Stand, which featured a fictional rock star as one of the main characters, one with a minor chart hit whose title is borrowed from a Blue Oyster Cult lyric. Putting on my “dad hat” for a brief second, Teen Titans Go! did an excellent job with a similar idea. Both The Warriors, and Streets of Fire integrated music as story points, integral to the films.

It’s done in videogames, where Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon³ showed us how to do a deconstruction that takes its inspiration up a notch. That’s slightly obscure, so we’ll mention the more familiar GTA franchise and its excellent integration of in-game radio stations into its world, as well as solid, thematic music, both commercially released and specifically scored for the games. I’m not a fan of the game itself, but the Vice City soundtrack collection is still one of my favorites, and it’s been an inspiration in how I work.⁴

I think most of us do this to one extent or another, so I’ll explain how I do it for the sake of discussion.

I was a musician before I was a writer, and I still play off and on. I even got paid to be a musician before I got paid to be a writer.⁵

That experience left a few marks on me.⁶

The old “Bruni’s,” fabled hooch of the Juvats, at Kunsan AB, Republic of Korea…sometime in late 2002.

Musical talent isn’t hard to come by in my family. I even touched on this a little bit in a story I wrote.⁷ My father’s massive record collection is the result of his love for rock and roll, his own skill as a musician, and him never quite getting the chance to be the radio DJ he always wanted to be at heart.⁸

I don’t think it’s a stretch for anyone reading this to understand that the two forms overlap a great deal. For me personally, it’s never been an either/or proposition so much as it’s been both. It’s not that I’m never playing again, it’s only a question of when.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t write while listening to music.

I don’t write along to the Spotify monster that several of you have graciously saved and are hopefully enjoying even as I write this.

I “score” my stories before I write them. It’s a habit for the sake of mnemonics.

How did that start? It’s been a busy 25+ years in the service, with a lot of moves, a lot of late nights, weekends, shifts, hard work, hard play (sometimes harder play than the work). Not a lot of time for writing, at least not in a sit-still, concentrated, creative-conducive kind of way. While I was usually a good cadet and officer, who always had a notepad or notebook with me, it wasn’t always possible, nor did I always have the luxury to jot down notes or ideas for writing to go back to later. Or those notes were in my classified working papers, which had to be destroyed when no longer needed.

Whenever I deployed or went TDY somewhere, I brought my music collection. In the early years, a Discman and lots of Case Logics full of CDs. I’d say that while I was a baby lieutenant and a young captain, those were near the top of the list of my few valued possessions. Then came Zunes, and iPods, which made packing for those trips a lot easier.⁹

The point is, somewhere I started a habit of using songs as mnemonic stand-ins for ideas, characters, dialogue, plots, settings, events, scenes, etc. I started doing this because I’m not always able to sit down and deliberately write out ideas, or I’m caught without a notepad, or someplace doing something that doesn’t lend itself to breaking away for thirty seconds of solitude with my thoughts, let alone for five minutes.

Stringing certain pieces of music together is how I build out an entire story before I start anything else, whether it’s just going for it, writing an actual outline, snippets, character studies (“screen tests”), or just notes to come back to later. This is how I build a story and remember it, so it doesn’t get lost. I’ve got playlists dedicated to planned future works that are on the 2025-2026 agenda. Is everything I write composed this way? No, you have different tools for different uses, different projects. I don’t even know if this is a good technique, let alone something I’d recommend for others, but it’s how I do things, right or wrong.

Of course I can’t prove it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Guardians of the Galaxy was storyboarded from start to finish. I’ve tried using story bibles in the past, and I dislike them. I think you can run the risk of putting so much effort into those you lose enthusiasm for the actual work. At least, I do.

Now getting it out of my head, onto paper, that’s a different challenge.

Just a reminder for everyone…

1. I’m referring to the first movie’s Awesome Mix Vol. 1. I can’t beat that one. The sequels, on the other hand, I think I could have done better.

2. No can do.

3. I am only talking about the game, not the current year hot garbage mess of a cartoon. You shouldn’t try to deconstruct a deconstruction, especially if you don’t “get” the original, which clearly the cartoon’s creators didn’t.

4. Do you see how ridiculous this is? I bought this boxed set in 2008 or 2009, and I still have it. I promise you it wasn’t that much when I bought it.

5. Okay, it wasn’t a lot, but it sure wasn’t a “Blues Brothers at Bob’s Country Bunker” situation, either.

6. No, really, I have scars. It hurts when you get hit in the face with a guitar.

7. Buy somethin’, why don’cha?

8. Just don’t get him started on Jerry Blavat. God rest their souls.

9. No joke, when I deployed to XYZ base for OEF in 2004, and to Iraq in 2009, I had an A3 bag full of nothing but Case Logics. It had a padlock on it, too.