on novel playlists

why do i make playlists for each novel, series, character, couple, etc…For starters, I’m a libra (can we believe I made it to the third post without mentioning it?) and vibes are everything (said with the conviction of Fleabag’s line delivery of hair is everything). I like a mood, one where words match beat match motivations. And while sometimes I know exactly the vibe (this melancholy exposition needs Taylor Swift’s Folklore, this fingering scene needs Halsey’s Badlands, etc.), sometimes I don’t. And, because I’m a gremlin who requires blinders, I cannot focus if the music and vibes are right, and I’m messing with my phone until I find a good album.

So I take the excuse away from myself, and spend an hour clicking through suggested songs and then skipping halfway through them to make sure the lyrics match. Maybe diverging down an unfamiliar album to see what I can do with correlations. More often than not, I switch them to shuffle, so I try to make sure there’s a variation in theme, but again it really is just atmospheric. Which, oddly enough, does actually help with the writing bit.

It’s quite meta to make yourself name themes for a book that’s currently a 300 word blurb in my notes app. But doing so distills me to the elements, the underlying themes of the project, and helps me call out the characters’ inner monologue. There’s a few songs that I can picture characters singing, but more often than not, the songs give voice to inner joy or turmoil, and identifying that helps me keep my hand on the pulse of where characters are at.

Of course, there are some recurring songs—a lot of my playlists feature Dermot Kennedy or Lianna La Havas or Jake Scott—and I think that’s interesting too because I see that as the omniscent voice. That’s me, not in terms of lyrical capability, but in terms of who I want to be to my audience. I want them to be gutted by my prose, surprised by the recognition of emotions and carried along with the tone.

At the end of a project, a playlist can ground me in that writing world, can weave around me and remind me of the last time I heard these lyrics and wrote for this characters, and it’s almost Pavlovian how I can get into a writing groove that easily. Is it a placebo, and more distracting/less technically helpful than some agnostic Mozart? Probably. But it’s effective for now, so I’ll keep humoring myself.

and now, it is time for a shameless plug: y’all should follow me on spotify.