Creating an atmosphere...

Whenever I spend a long period of time on a piece of writing over the course of a few months, I always find myself listening to certain songs and pieces of music over and over again. They create a soundtrack not necessarily to the work itself but to my writing of it. When I was at university and making my third and debatably most successful attempt at a novel (last time I checked it, it was forty or so pages and some of it wasn't that bad) the soundtrack was Interpol's first album "Turn On The Bright Lights". I don't know what came first, the writing or the music, but soon enough both were inseperable. The content of my novel seemed to fit perfectly the atmosphere of the album.

I've been working on this soulmates-themed film now for seven months or so. As I was sitting down to write this evening I thought I'd take a look at the playlist I've gradually accrued over the last half a year. Some of them seemed strange choices and when played seemed to be sounds from another era, when the film was something else entirely. Those were swiftly deleted. Others appeared to have cemented their place in my mind and in the film. The LCD Soundsystem track "All My Friends" seems now a classic evocation of parts of the script, and when I hear Som Tres' jolly "Homenagem A Mongo" it conjures up a crystal-clear image in my head of one of the club scenes. I can even see the characters dancing to it, each one dancing differently, for all the world as if they were actual, living people.

I've read about this before. A writer, a famous one (I can't remember her name, but I seem to remember it was a woman), wrote of similar feelings. In her case, it was a particular album that seeped into the writing of her novel (I think it was a novel) and its tempo, the rythmn, the way the singer delivered the words all found their way into the novel in the guise of style and even word choice. Something completely unintended and apparently unrealised until the final drafting. I suppose it's unremarkable in the sense that the music you listen to forms part of the fabric of your life, and that is all writers have to put into their work. But on the other hand, its an incredibly mysterious thing, perhaps unexplainable.