miTunes: the voices in my head can harmonize

I love music.

While it may sound a little cheesy to say music feeds the soul, I find music can help recharge my internal battery or calm my emotional storm. And not only do I love music on a deeply personal level, I find discovering a film score or collection of songs can take me and my writing to a whole other level.

All the way back to high school, I recall putting together “soundtracks”. While others simply referred to them as mixed tapes, I always seemed to wrap a theme around the songs. At first the tapes started out as “fast songs” and “slow songs” and, as an old friend simply called his tape, “good stuff” (for fear of getting in trouble with his parents, he refrained from originally wanting to name his mix “great shit”).

A few years after high school, I began working on my comic series, Chance, and I stumbled across a couple of songs that fit the theme of my series perfectly. Next thing I knew, I was digging through my collection of music, looking for the perfect songs to put together. My search soon spilled over into other’s music and, a few weeks later, I had completed my very first soundtrack.

Across the past 20 years I have assembled a soundtrack for every story I’ve written. From Nine Inch Nails and Sisters of Mercy to Enya and John Williams, each soundtrack has helped me find my voice and draw inspiration from. A good portion of my book, Jac And The City Of 1,000 Worlds, takes place in the fantastical and otherworldly city of Meridian. Looking through my collection, I found myself listening to a collection of Enigma, Loreena McKennitt, and Dead Can Dance, along with the score to Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone. Now that the story has moved to a setting in late 1800’s London, my musical choices are shifting more towards the latter Harry Potter films (darker, heavier) the steampunk group Abney Park and the ghost-trance Burial.

Music means a lot to me on many different levels. Not only can can music convey love and despair, but it can also invoke  the world in my mind and the cast of characters residing inside.

Cheers

-SJn