Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Literature and Music: Circular inspiration
For Bay Area songwriter, Jill Tracy, inspiration was born from pages damp with spilled alcohol.
JT1 - I was cleaning up the bar late at night I was the only person there the place was a mess and I noticed someone had left a book behind.
NJ2: It was Low Life ? by Luc Sante, a New York history written with all the flair of a crime novel.
JT2: you know it was 2:30 in the morning and I started reading through some of the pages and the next thing I knew the sun was coming up and I was still reading Low Life. And it has since inspired ?Evil Night Together.?
Post music (Lyrics ?Let?s spend and evil night together?)
NJ3: If you think about it, you can probably come up with a few dozen songs that come from books. White Rabbit, by Grace Slick, Bowie?s 1984, the entire band Steppenwolf. It works in the other direction too. San Francisco author Kaui Hart Hemmings says music inspires her writing. But not quite in the same way.
KH1: I actually go out with my iPod. And I certain songs that I assign to specific characters. Like my character Iz is ?Turncoat? by Anti-Flag. When I listen to that song I get her and it helps me move the plot forward.
Post music
KH2: I think the song comes into play in one scene when her father is coming down the stairs and he has a speech prepared because he just found out that she?s starting to have sex and he has this whole speech and he can hear this song playing in the background and it just, it shatters his whole speech because it?s impenetrable, and he realizes he?s gotten his daughter all wrong.
Music up
KH3: When I listen to music you wanna answer back but the only way I can answer back is through this little typing keyboard, you know I don?t have the guitar I cant just rip but I want to and I love the adrenalin when I listen to music and I want to somehow give readers that adrenaline through words and through ? words! That?s it. (30)
NJ4: Frank Portman doesn?t have that limitation. He?s both a musician and a writer, so inspiration can be circular: He wrote a song called King Dork, then a novel with the same name. When the main character started writing songs ? Portman started performing them. The character is Tom Henderson, a 14-year old dealing with all sorts of travails - including high school French.
FP1: even I found it shocking to think how little French I actually knew after 3 plus years. True I knew a lot about Jean and Claude and how they go to the movies and eat beefsteak and fruit and I could tell you all about their other fabulous adventures, though only in present tense.
NJ5: And French, is Henderson?s inspiration for a song.
FP2: This is a song that is written by the narrator of my book Tom Henderson and it was sparked by his discovery that the French verb remoner, which literally means to scrub out a chimney, can also be used as a sexual metaphor. And, well, if you?ve discovered something like that you?ve got to write a song about it. So this is his first love song entitled ?I wanna remone you.?
Post music
Bookish is probably the opposite of ?rockstarish.? Writing tends to be head centered. It deals exclusively in language, which we filter through our brains. Music can be more visceral, it engages the body. It makes you want to dance.
AND The cross fertilization of the two during Litquake creates a hybrid vigor that can be incendiary.
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