Ever since I can remember, music has been the most effective, reliable medicine I could reach for. It didn’t matter whether it was pouring out of my toy record player or the crappy cassette recorder I carried everywhere, the fancy stereo I had in my twenties, or my currently dying green mini-iPod. The medicine of music has been an immediate and often universal recognition of hurts and loves and truths that sometimes got lost in the fog of day-to-day living. I find that it meets me where I am in the moment, accepts me as I am, and brings the truth up and out of me.
So this month I have introduced Music Medicine Saturdays, where I share some tunes with you that have carried me in the dark, and lifted me out into the light.
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NaNoWriMo Edition
The irony of this week’s NaNoWriMo Edition is that I gave up on NaNoWriMo this year on Day 5 (or was it 4?) because it conflicted with my ability to participate in and enjoy Art Every Day Month. That said, I still do completely adore the concept of NaNoWriMo and have many great memories of NaNos past, and more than a few tricks to getting through it, such as a silly little tool called Write or Die. This year they also have a handy dandy Word Meter Widget since the one on the NaNo site is (not surprisingly) broken.
Back in 2005, I signed up for NaNo and dropped out when my story, Love Becomes the Angel, kept changing tenses on me, much to my dismay. I couldn’t flesh it out, and it was about the waiting room between life and death, what was I thinking anyway?! But in 2006 I must have discovered my magic wand (perhaps the writing buddy who read my stuff as I went along and never had anything but nice words to say about it?) because that month I wrote 50,000 words and most of my first novel, The Trees of Solar Field, an environmental fable which was also a post-apocalyptic love story. One song played in my iTunes almost non-stop during writing and during the completion of it last summer, and never fails to conjure up my story for me in such a beautiful, bittersweet and powerful way. The song is Hem’s “We’ll Meet Along the Way” from their Funnel Cloud album.
“Go easy now, go easy now.. later on the road I’m gonna lay my body down, we’ll meet along the way, I know..”
Back in the 90s I had a cassette copy of His Name Is Alive’s album Home Is In Your Head; I wore out two copies before I finally upgraded to cd and that I nearly wore out, too. Their music is very hard to explain; extremely ethereal which is what I am sure appealed to me the most, especially their version of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’s “Man on the Silver Mountain”. Whenever I want to write something that has a higher meaning, that might take place on a spiritual plane, I listen to this a few times.. gorgeous.
“I’m the night, I’m the dark and the light, with eyes that see inside you..”
The story inside Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” has always evoked a bunch of mini-stories of my own, whenever I’d hear the song. So much so that last year my NaNo affair was Cloudbusting: Short Stories after my original children’s story, Astrid of the Stars, went off down a dark squeaky road and wouldn’t let me follow. Sure, I was breaking NaNo rules, and I never made it to 50,000 words but the point is the fun, right? It WAS fun, and it was good for sharpening my writing skills. Some of that will end up somewhere… maybe. So here’s the inspiration that launched a thousand short stories:
When Tori’s latest album Abnormally Attracted to Sin came out this year, I fell in love with much of the music but wasn’t so enthused that she included a video for each one. Don’t get me wrong; I love videos. I just love to invent them in my head when I listen to the song for the first time.. that’s MY imagination and I want it for myself. I put aside all the videos and all of Tori’s extraneous personas and listened to the songs alone, for weeks. This was the one that evoked the most imagery for me.. but I won’t impose that on you. See what it evokes for you (video below is a concert performance, shouldn’t interfere with your own imaginings!):
What music is your medicine? What music helps you write? Wishing you great daily doses of your very own music medicine!
