Drumming up music for my books
One of the upsides of reading other writers' blogs: realizing you're not crazy. Or at least, you're not alone. On reflection I suppose "not crazy" does not follow.
A case in point: many, many writers seem to have playlists for their books. I was so glad to learn this: I didn't know anyone else did it! I always have, for fiction. I'm fairly literal about it, too. For my abandoned World War Two book (which eventually became Ghost Maps, my first book of poetry), I listened to scratchy old Glen Miller recordings -- the "lost records" they recorded in German and broadcast into Germany in a "Radio Free Europe" sort of way. Ever hear someone try to cover "Is You Or Is You Ain't My Baby" in German? The clash of civilizations has rarely been so audible.
For Plain Kate, I listened to a single album over and over again: Burkene Bruse's Stone Chair. This, for instance, is Kate's "main theme," the song that instantly transports me to the foggy wood and the river, the rough-hewn granduer and the soft sadness of the Russian and Northern European tales from which KATE borrowed its flavour.
The books I'm drafting -- Children of Peace, and its sequel The Swan Riders -- take place in a far future, in a depopulated Saskatchewan. In the Children of Peace world, they've lost the car, the suburbs, the principle that collective punishment is wrong, and (apparently) the electric guitar. I want a to evoke a world where AIs ride horses: modern bluegrass is obviously the way to go. Or, actually, I started out listening to Basia Bulat, and Pandora took me to modern bluegrass from there. This, for instance, is the love theme (GUYS! I wrote a book that needed a love theme!) for book one, where the hero realizes that a) quietly preparing all one's life to be ritually murdered in a good cause may not in fact be a good thing and b) she may be in big scary love.
But the book I'm editing, Sorrow's Knot, is so far mostly music-less. I do have a playlist, but I've never found the music, the music that takes me right into the story. This may, in fact, have been part of the problem when it came to getting the book out of the box. (See this blog entry, in which my book is STUCK.) LIke Plain Kate, it's a high fantasy, so the usual moody rock (Van Morrison, Cowboy Junkies) and gospel soul that populates my iPod seem like obvious nos.
It might make sense to go geographically near, but that has proven problematic. The Sorrow's Knot setting got its start from ancient North America. That is, the same way the people in Plain Kate are NOT Polish, the people in Sorrow's Knot are NOT Mandan. They may build the same houses and live in the same landscape and grow the same food, but the whole bit about the disembodied zombies is not, to say the least, historically accurate. But the traditional music of the Great Plains is hard to come by, and most modern interpretations of it that I've found have a faint whiff of recreational ethnicity -- you know, white people hanging dream catchers from their rearview mirrors and visiting sweat lodges on vacation. To idealize and romanticize (and steal parts of) a culture like that is nearly as problematic as demonizing it: both treat the culture as something less than human. That's something I'm acutely aware of, as a white chick writing about not-white people, and maybe that's why I haven't been able to sink into that music.
I think drumming might be the way to go. One of the characters in the book is a drummer, and I love drum music. (I bought my first djembe this year; my bodhran sadly needs reskinning.) I could listen to this guy below forever, but he doesn't seem to have an album. I don't know that my blog readers constitute a crowd, but I'm tempted to crowd source here. Anyone want to recommend some music? Something world-beat -- not necessarily North American. (Taiko, for instance, would be fine.) Something with some force and energy, though slow is okay. Not too crystal-healing-dolphin. No orchestral windchimes tinklers need apply.
