Elliot Smith:
Music was once a ritual that helped signal to my brain, OK, NOW IT’S TIME TO THINK THOUGHTS IN LANGUAGE. Vocal music, specifically, used to play an important role in my process, especially when drafting. There’s something kind of magical that can happen when you can get really in the flow of your own language and let the music blur together into the background. As you work, little misheard lyrical fragments occasionally break off from the music and flit into the sphere of your attention. Using misheard lyrics in your own work becomes a highly personal form of allusion, because it’s not a direct quote–-it’s a direct quote of the way something sounded to you at a specific moment in time, a quasi-ekphrastic idea that is both yours and not yours at all.
A few years back, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Califone’s Roomsound were two albums I kept on repeat while working on a double crown of sonnets about Bob Dylan. Dylan’s lyrics didn’t really figure into the equation; I was trying to create a world adjacent to his songs. That’s where Van Morrison and Califone came in: parallel tracks on a similar lineage from traditional music through rock and R&B. (Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Odetta, and Nina Simone were in the mix, as well, but more peripherally so.) The deliberate use of misheard song lyrics became an integral part of the work after learning about “floating lyrics” from a lecture on Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” given by Greil Marcus at AWP in Minneapolis. (A great deal of which ended up in his fantastic book Three Songs, Three Singers, One Nation.)
Marcus describes how, since before recorded music, traditional lyrics floated around the country like bits of virus DNA, fragments drifting from region to region and singer to singer without clear antecedents or etymology. Floating lyrics appear, sometimes simultaneously, in songs that were being written and performed on opposite sides of the country among singers that never met. Many tropes and motifs in traditional lyrics are weirdly authorless and communal, a common vocabulary that performers could draw from without specific attribution or even without realizing it. My attempt in using misheard lyrics in the Dylan sonnets was to cultivate that sense of a shared, authorless vocabulary, the collective unconscious of the American blues.
Lately I find myself too sensitive to vocal music when I write. Partly as I’ve delved deeper into my own music-making, it’s become hard not to get distracted by the voice. Doubly so when listening to music on headphones versus speakers: when the music is piped directly into my mind-grapes, it’s nearly impossible for me to pay attention to anything else. In general, I find it very difficult to do more than one thing at a time, anymore. Walking and talking is a nightmare. Eating and singing is worse. Maybe this is what it means to grow up.
Brent Canle:
Music serves two functions for my writing. First: mood. Be it to match and accentuate what I am feeling in a particular moment, or to get to a rhythm that I need to achieve. Sometimes it’s Bill Evan when I want to be expressive. Other times it's This Will Destroy You or Caspian when I need to be large or deep. Cattle Decapitation when I need to destroy. LoFi hip hop radio when I want to put it all back together. The major aspect, regardless of genre, is that the music must be instrumental or have indiscernible lyrics. I am distracted easily from my own words.Second, and most importantly, the music functions to drown out the world outside so that I can concentrate on the noisy world inside. Headphones are needed, big over the ear headphones preferably, anything loud that exacerbates my tinnitus. Whether in a coffee shop, or at the park, or in my own apartment while Kat does whatever; I am instinctually intrigued by my environment. I’m nosey. And while that helps to generate ideas for content day to day, when I sit down to write, music helps me keep my mind on my own business.
Jeff Oloizia:
I try to make playlists to go along with whatever project I'm working on. Right now, that’s a novel set in Wisconsin, where I’m from, so it's a lot of bands from back home: Field Report, S. Carey, The Daredevil Christopher Wright, Phox. A little Bon Iver, but not so much that things get weepy. As the novel has evolved, so too has the playlist. At this stage, it’s more about trying to match some imagined emotional landscape rather than a physical one. There's a song by Manchester Orchestra called "The Maze" that’s just the right amount of meditative and melodramatic. If I'm at home, I'll throw it on the Sonos and let it follow me from room to room. If I'm in a coffee shop, I make do with whatever’s on the speakers, or if I want silence I have a pair of heavy-duty earplugs (purchased for $14 from Amazon, don’t judge) that usually do the trick. If I'm lucky, though, I get deep enough into the writing that whatever's on in the background just becomes white noise anyway. Isn't that the goal of every writer?